Eaters of the Dead: Myths and Realities of Cannibal Monsters 1789144442, 9781789144444

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e ate r s of the de ad

E ATER S of the DE A D Myths and Realities of Cannibal Monsters Kevin J. Wetmore Jr

RE AKTION BOOKS

Dedicated to Ian McDonald and Julia Gelb-Zimmerman. May you always know what you’re eating.

Published by Reaktion Books Ltd Unit 32, Waterside 44–48 Wharf Road London n1 7ux, uk www.reaktionbooks.co.uk First published 2021 Copyright © Kevin J. Wetmore Jr 2021 All rights reserved No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers. Printed and bound in Great Britain by TJ Books Ltd, Padstow, Cornwall A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library isbn 978 1 78914 444 4

Contents

Introduction: The Fear of Being Eaten  7

one Sky Burial, Cyclops and the Conqueror Worm  20

t wo Eating the Gods, Gods Eating Men  35 three Grendel and the Ogres  55 four Ghūls and Ghouls  79

five Asian and Oceanian Flesh-eaters and Corpse-devourers  111 six Wendigo  137

seven Human Cannibals  173 eight Flesh-eating in Popular Culture and Contemporary Reality  199

Conclusion: We Can’t Stop Eating  239 R eference s  241 Bibliogr aph y  261 Acknow ledgements  265 Photo Acknow ledgements  266 Inde x  267

Gustave Doré, illustration for Little Red Riding Hood, in Charles Perrault, Les contes de Perrault (1862).

introduction

The Fear of Being Eaten

W

e have an atavistic memory of being prey, a fear of being eaten alive. From Jonah and the whale to ‘Little Red Riding Hood’ to Jaws, every culture tells stories about being devoured alive. As scholar David Quammen reminds us, ‘Among the earliest forms of human self-awareness was the awareness of being meat.’1 Yet there is another fear of being eaten, one that occurs after death. Similar to our fear of being eaten alive, every culture has stories about corpse-eating monsters, historical tales of cannibalism or chronicles of bodies being consumed. Vampires, werewolves and other shapeshifters, ghosts and zombies are the cool monsters. They are popular, both in myth and in popular culture. Corpse-eaters? Far less so. Yet the cultural history of monsters is replete with eaters of the dead, from Cyclops and ogres to ghouls and wendigos.

Death the Devourer Philip Henslowe, the Elizabethan theatre entrepreneur whose diary provides much information about English Renaissance theatre, furnishes a list of the props owned by the Lord Admiral’s Men, one of the pre-eminent theatre companies of the day, in 7

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storage at Henslowe’s Rose Theatre in March 1598, including ‘one hell mouth’.2 A leftover from medieval theatre, the hellmouth is a mechanical prop symbolizing the entrance to hell in the form of a giant demon’s mouth. Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus is dragged into a hellmouth at the end of the play that bears his name. Many medieval mystery plays end with the Last Judgement, in which the sinning souls damned for eternity are heaved into a hellmouth on stage. The image of an enormous mouth eating the dead became common in medieval iconography as well. It neither bites nor chews, but swallows the dead whole, taking them to hell. The hellmouth remained a potent image in European art for half a millennium.3 Death itself is a devourer. We are eaten by death. When not being consumed by death itself, we are consumed by a number of things after death. In his fascinating book Images of Man and Death, Philippe Ariès observed that from the fourteenth to the sixteenth century the iconography of death was frequently ‘a decomposing corpse inhabited and gnawed by worms’.4 The literal embodiment of death is a mobile corpse being eaten. That is because we are, in fact, eaten after death. The only question is, by what? Even with embalming, the body is consumed by mould, bacteria and insects. Even sealed in an airtight metal casket, a corpse is devoured by anaerobic or ‘putrefactive’ bacteria.5 Indeed, before the bacteria show up, our corpses begin to eat themselves. ‘The hallmark of fresh-stage decay is a process called autolysis, or self-digestion.’6 When you die, the enzymes in your cells begin to consume the cells that contain them; then insects lay eggs on the corpse, preferring the soft parts of the body – the entry points: eyes, mouth, open wounds, anus, genitals. They do this because the maggots that hatch cannot eat through human skin.7 8

Hans Wechtlin, ‘Hellmouth,’ woodcut from Johann Schott, Das leben Jesu Christi gezogen auß den vier Evangelisten (1508).

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Simon Marmion, The Beast Acheron, 1475, miniature illumination depicting the entrance to hell as the mouth of the beast Acheron, its mouth gaping threateningly wide, with two devils impaled on its sharp teeth holding its mouth open; inside, souls endure brutal torment in a fiery furnace.

Simultaneously the bacteria in the human digestive system (and elsewhere in the body), no longer inhibited by an immune system, are free to eat and breed throughout the entire body. In other words, within a few hours of death, bacteria, the body itself within and insects without are already eating the body. Putrefaction, the final stage of decay, is ‘the breaking down and gradual liquification of tissue by bacteria’.8 The lungs and digestive organs, which have the greatest amount of bacteria to begin with, are devoured first, 10

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then the brain, and then the other organs. Insects (and possibly other animals) will eat from the outside in. In short, all corpses, even those embalmed and buried, are eaten. The dead are consumed by insects and bacteria, by flame, by animals and, in some cases, by people. Even the word ‘sarcophagus’, which describes a box-like funeral receptacle for a corpse, literally means ‘flesh-eater’ (sarx plus phagos). When we place someone in a sarcophagus, the implication is that the casket itself is eating the dead body. The end result of death is to be eaten by, well, something. By extension, we have a history of imagining and creating beasts that eat the dead. People who witness corpses being scavenged by dogs, vultures, hyenas and other animals can imagine monstrous beings that do the same. Through recorded human history we hear tales of survival cannibalism: sometimes during periods of famine or food scarcity the only available food is the people who died of starvation before you. Whether sailors stranded in a lifeboat for months, populations undergoing famine during war or winter, or people trapped in the mountains awaiting rescue, history is full of tales of people forced to eat the dead to survive. From the Donner Party, to the ‘Great Hunger’ of Ireland, to the plane crash that stranded the Uruguayan rugby team in the Andes in 1972, we know the names of those who had to eat and those who were eaten. We also know tales of criminal cannibals – those who choose to eat the dead for a number of reasons. There is a reason the world knows of Jeffrey Dahmer and that Ed Gein inspired not one, not two, but half a dozen films, including The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, The Silence of the Lambs and Psycho, not to mention the lesser-known Ed Gein and Ed Gein: The Butcher of Plainfield. We are drawn to tales of depraved cannibals. 11

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Death, both our own and that of others, causes anxiety and fear. Death is not the end, however. How the body is regarded and treated (especially symbolically and mythically within that culture) reveals how a society understands death and the body. Is my body myself ? How should my body be disposed of after my death? What should I fear happening to my corpse after my death? Why are Westerners, as a culture, appalled by the idea of their bodies being eaten? The reason is the universal fear of being eaten. Indeed, some psychologists believe that our fear of the dark is less to do with the unknown and more to do with our memory of being prey. The things that lurk in the dark are what scare us, primarily because we might be eaten. While being bitten by a venomous snake is horrible, we react so much more strongly to someone being bitten (and perhaps partly devoured) by a shark. In both cases an animal’s bite causes an injury, but the idea of our bodies being consumed strikes us as so much worse. As Val Plumwood, who survived being bitten and chewed by a crocodile, observes, ‘If ordinary death is a horror, death in the jaws of a crocodile is the ultimate horror.’9 I think there is a source to be found in that experience for many man-eating myths, not to mention the more recent anthropological theory that our species survived because we ate the Neanderthals. They were our closest genetic relatives and we considered them a food source. There is both a taboo here and a memory of some eating being okay, perhaps tied to the idea that it is better to be the eater than the eaten. The idea that consumption is a form of incorporation also plays big in cultures that involve ritual cannibalism. When we defeat and eat something, we gain its essence, its strength, for ourselves. This is perhaps linked with an infantile or solipsistic 12

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desire to make everything ‘me’. Yet that desire to eat rather than be eaten also provokes fear, fear that we might become a monster. Eaters of the dead directly violate two taboos: one, interactions with the dead (for example, from Hindu, Buddhist and Jewish cultures perceiving dead bodies as ‘unclean’ to the biblical injunction against communicating with the dead); and two, eating human flesh, which is taboo in most, but not all, cultures. Many societies have food taboos – what we may or may not eat – yet these taboos are neither universal nor monolithic. Both are fluid and complicated and are confronted by concern about the proper disposal of the dead, especially considering that we will all be eaten by something in the end. Indeed, there is a cascade of fears related to eating the dead: fear of corpses, fear of being eaten, fear of eating (that we might become cannibals, either knowingly or unknowingly), fear of starvation and fear that after death one can still somehow be victimized. No place in the world is immune to famine, and the experience of famine and survival cannibalism gives rise to tales of monstrous corpse-eaters. Famine in Arabia in the seventh century might have promoted ghouls; harsh winters in Canada, where game is scarce, reinforced the story of the ‘wendigo’ – the spirit of starvation among the First Nations peoples explored in Chapter Six. Such famine produces monsters in the forms of those who feel compelled to eat the dead to survive, or even, in extreme cases, kill other people for food. What Margaret Atwood says of wendigos could apply to all creatures in this book: ‘Fear of the Wendigo is twofold: fear of being eaten by one, and fear of becoming one.’10 Lastly, the idea of both eating corpses and being eaten oneself fills us with disgust, a feeling that psychologists describe as ‘survival by aversion’: we develop a primal repulsion to harmful 13

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things that drives us to detest and avoid them.11 From the 1940s, psychologists saw the mouth as crucial to disgust, which starts with food and the fear of putting ‘wrong food’ in the mouth, and then moves on to sex and other fears about the mouth. Disgust is ‘mainly an oral defense’. We embrace the idea of dead animal flesh in our mouths, at least in the form of a burger with bacon, a turkey sandwich or chicken nuggets, but we are disgusted by the idea of dead human flesh entering the mouth.12 Dr Paul Rozin of the University of Pennsylvania, the leading expert on the topic, argues that this disgust is a reminder of our animal nature, a reminder that we, too, are meat and meat-eaters.13 This reaction extends beyond the biological into what Rozin calls ‘sociomoral disgust’. We are not merely disgusted by consuming the dead from a biological point of view – most societies posit any interactions with corpses as morally wrong too.14 The disgust factor complicates our approach to the subject of this book. This book explores eaters of the dead – mythological, historical and contemporary – as well as their representation in art, literature, theatre and cinema. Monsters such as ghouls, wendigos, zombies and aswangs are fluid, changing with time and generations, perceived as myth yet fervently believed in, even today. While all cultures have myths about flesh-eaters, the dominant ones in this volume (ghouls, wendigos and so on) come from those that exist in areas where the possibility of famine is high. The deserts of the Middle East and the tundra of the Arctic are locales marked by frequent food scarcity. Thus their monsters are in some ways the embodiment of the fear of famine, the fear of being driven to cannibalism. A caveat before we begin. Terms are important and we must distinguish between the anthropophagus and the cannibal, terms 14

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that overlap but are not synonymous. Cannibals are creatures that eat the same species as themselves. Thus we can only talk of cannibals eating humans if the eaters are human. Anthropophagi are creatures that eat humans, regardless of the eater’s species. When consuming a human corpse, the wendigo, ghouls and aswang are anthropophagi; humans are cannibals; Cyclops, giants and even Grendel are complicated because of their quasihuman status. Grendel is descended from Cain, but is not fully human – he is identified in Beowulf as a monster more than a man, but is still part man. Giants and ogres are just large human beings in folk stories, but are they a separate species? The Cyclops are sons of Poseidon but also very human-like, and Homer refers to their eating of Odysseus’ men as ‘cannibalism’, implying that they are the same species. I shall identify creatures as cannibals if they eat their own species (for the purposes of this book, that limits it to humans) and monsters as either anthropophagi or cannibalistic (‘cannibal-like’, in that they eat humans as cannibals do). The terms can be complex. ‘Wendigo’, for example, refers to both the spirit creature of famine among First Nations in Canada and also to people that develop a taste for human flesh because they were once possessed by a/the wendigo. This volume is organized thematically and examines literal monsters as well as the monster-as-metaphor (eaters of the dead can be both simultaneously). Chapter One, entitled ‘Sky Burial, Cyclops and the Conqueror Worm’, examines the tension between the Tibetan and Persian practices of feeding the dead to carrion birds for religious and practical reasons, which is seen as completely natural and a part of the cosmology of those respective peoples, and the horror of being eaten found in the Odyssey and 15

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Euripides’ play Cyclops. We are all eaten, but context is everything, as is the question of who is doing the eating. The second chapter, ‘Eating the Gods, Gods Eating Men’, starts by considering Greek and Roman mythology and the stories of both gods and men being consumed, intentionally and unintentionally, before turning to other religious faiths in which bodies are eaten, including the concept of transubstantiation within Christianity and corpse-eating among the Hindu Aghori. The third chapter, ‘Grendel and the Ogres’, places Beowulf and fairy tales side by side, as cautionary tales of eaters of the dead, to see the shaping influence of Christianity on the medieval monsters that emerged out of a pagan pre-Christian Europe into the popular culture of later societies. The three chapters that follow focus on specific corpseeating monsters. Chapter Four, ‘Ghūls and Ghouls’, considers the evolution of the ghoul from its pre-Islamic origins in the Middle East to modern popular incarnations of a monster whose name is synonymous with both corpse-eating and a disturbing preoccupation with the morbid and the macabre – to be called ‘ghoulish’ is rarely considered a compliment. Chapter Five looks at corpse-devourers from Asia and Australia, with a particular focus on the Filipino aswang. The sixth chapter then turns to the indigenous peoples of North America and the wendigo, the spirit of famine and cannibalism that has also evolved through time and has been appropriated to become a staple of popular culture. The final two chapters focus on cannibals – humans as eaters of dead humans – from the historical (Sawney Bean, the Donner Party, Jeffrey Dahmer), to pop culture (Hannibal the Cannibal, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre and so on), to entire societies 16

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in which cannibalism is practised for a variety of reasons. We consider ‘man corn’ and ‘long pigs’, which are terms – from the American Southwest and the Pacific Islands, respectively – for humans that one might eat. This book is not a comprehensive survey of all corpse-eaters, but rather a cultural history of corpse-eating and how that ­activity and those who practise it generate meaning within cultures. The reader should be aware that many of the monsters, spirits and concepts described here are still part of the belief systems of many people. The wendigo is still an important part of many First Nations cultures, just as the ghūl remains a presence in many Arab cultures. The Catholic Church holds to the doctrine of transubstantiation, just as sky burial is still actively performed in Tibet. Their representation in this volume is in no way intended to trivialize, sensationalize or disrespect these cultures. Every attempt has been made to represent these cultures accurately. The Reza Aslan controversy over depicting Aghori eating c­ remated bodies, discussed in Chapter Two, clearly demonstrates both the potential for shock value and the concern regarding mis­ representation. Similarly, the Donner Party were real people, as were the victims of Jeffrey Dahmer, Andrei Chikatilo, Alfred/ Alferd Packer, Ed Gein and the others discussed in Chapter Eight, and this volume in no way intends to demean or disrespect those individuals or their experiences. This book exists to explore the variety of corpse-eaters, whether human, monster or otherwise, and how and why stories about them appear in virtually every human society, but especially those that deal regularly with food scarcity. No one explanation fits all as to why corpses might be eaten. Often we are given psychological reasons for phenomena such 17

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as Jeffrey Dahmer or the wendigo. There are also cultural or anthropological reasons why people might consume the dead. These may simply be material reasons: food scarcity mandates eating whatever is at hand, including the bodies of the deceased – for example, in the 1800s, in the cases of the stranded members of the American Donner Party and the survivors of the sinking of the Essex and the Medusa, and also individuals enduring the siege of Leningrad in the Second World War. Similarly, in Tibet, burial and cremation are both impractical when there is little topsoil and little wood for burning. Feeding corpses to animals makes sense under those conditions. What is missing from all of these explanations is a question from the pop-culture angle: why are we fascinated with eaters of the dead? Why do we tell stories about them to our children, even today? Consider, for example, the tale of Hansel and Gretel, which begins with food scarcity and progresses to children being fattened to be eaten and an old woman being shoved in an oven. The film portrayal of ‘Hannibal the Cannibal’ in Silence of the Lambs won numerous Academy Awards and has become a motif in popular culture. The Texas Chain Saw Massacre can still sell out midnight screenings, and one of the most popular shows on television involves the dead reanimating and attempting to consume the living. This volume represents just another link in the chain of our fascination with the taboo. Devouring, consuming and eating are all metaphors. But they are also real fears and the source of genuine horror. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen reminds us that we can ‘read cultures from the monsters they engender’.15 This book is a buffet of corpse-eaters from all over the world, each one telling us about the cultures that created them. We shall examine how stories, myths and histories 18

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explore these fears, taboos and metaphors. We shall consider what monsters emerge from them, how popular culture, particularly in the West, has used those monsters to create new and scary stories, and what they all mean. Let’s dig in. Bon appétit!

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one

Sky Burial, Cyclops and the Conqueror Worm

Out – out are the lights – out all! And, over each quivering form, The curtain, a funeral pall, Comes down with the rush of a storm, While the angels, all pallid and wan, Uprising, unveiling, affirm That the play is the tragedy, ‘Man,’ And its hero, the Conqueror Worm. Final stanza of Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘The Conqueror Worm’1

Now, then – you go and sharpen my cleaver, my knives and pile up a great bundle of fire-wood and set it alight, and get a move on, will you? Since, once they’re slaughtered they’ll soon fill my belly . . . I have had enough of feasting on lions and deer, and I’ve been too long deprived of eating a man’s flesh. From Euripides’ Cyclops2 20

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nless one’s body is completely burned or otherwise destroyed, we are all eaten in the end. Poe’s poem implies, by its very title, that in the end we are all, as Shakespeare’s Prince Hal puts it, ‘food for worms’.3 No matter how remarkable our achievements, no matter what we accomplish, ultimately the conqueror worm devours us all. We are all eaten one way or another in the end. This fact is both completely natural and completely terrifying. We begin this book by considering sky burial, found in Tibet and Mongolia, and the similar rituals of the Towers of Silence in Zoroastrianism, found from Persia to India, in which corpses are left to be consumed by animals, most often birds, and the bones then ground down to powder and fed to other animals. The converse of much of the subject matter of this book are these cultures in which being consumed is considered the natural end of life. This chapter then looks at ancient proscriptions against cannibalism as witnessed in the monstrosity of the Cyclops of Greek mythology, specifically Polyphemus, the man-eater of Homer’s Odyssey. These two contrasting ideas – the naturalness of being consumed and the horror at being consumed – are juxtaposed in this chapter. Poe’s ‘Conqueror Worm’ takes a natural process and views it with horror. One of the fears driving the mythologies of monsters found in this book is the idea that one’s body might be consumed, either before or after death. How are Westerners to properly deal with a dead body within the belief system of their culture? David Quammen observes: ‘Respectful, decorous disposal of the mortal remains has been important across virtually all times and cultures.’4 In every society, what to do with the dead is a major religious issue as well as a health and social issue. We want to respectfully and safely treat dead bodies in such a manner that they are both still part of the community and yet removed from the immediate 21

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sphere of the living. Hence, for example, cemeteries, which gather the dead together in one place and are easily accessible but not a part of one’s own dwelling. Quammen reminds us that soldiers on the battlefield feel obligated to remove dead bodies as well as the still-living wounded, in order to ensure that the remains are buried safely and not desecrated by the enemy.5 Indeed, the great atrocity in the Iliad is not the death of Hector, the champion of Troy, but that Achilles, after killing him on the battlefield, drags his corpse behind his chariot as a sign of disrespect for a fallen enemy. Yet the eating of bodies is sometimes an answer to the problem of respectful corpse disposal: either by animals, or, in some cases, by people practising mortuary cannibalism.

Eating Carrion In Stephen King’s Gerald’s Game, an abandoned, feral dog wanders into the bedroom where Jessie Burlingame has been handcuffed to the bed by her husband, the eponymous Gerald, right before he dies of a heart attack.6 While she begins to imagine voices in her head and repeatedly attempts to escape, the dog begins to feed on Gerald’s corpse, tearing pieces off it over the duration of the rest of her ordeal. Dogs can and do eat corpses. If you die somewhere, alone, with dogs, they will begin to eat your body. In his famous funeral oration for Julius Caesar found in Shakespeare’s play, Mark Antony incites the crowd and cries out: Cry ‘Havoc’ and let slip the dogs of war, That this foul deed shall smell above the earth With carrion men, groaning for burial. (Julius Caesar, Act 3, Scene 1, ll. 273–5) 22

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The dogs of war are animals trained to fight, when read in a literal sense, and in a metaphorical sense Antony calls for soldiers to be set free to attack in response to the assassination of Caesar. He then notes that the assassination shall result in ‘carrion men’ – corpses, stinking while waiting to be buried. In a sense we are all carrion men, but Mark Antony’s oration specifically links the idea of dogs, ‘carrion men’ and the consumption of bodies, whether by hounds, war or the earth when buried. Similarly, in 177 ce the corpses of Christians of Lyon who were martyred in the arena were subsequently fed to dogs as a further insult after death. In addition to dogs, we might identify a number of carrioneating animals and scavengers. Being eaten alive is scary, but equally disturbing is the idea that animals might consume one’s corpse. Carrion comes from the Latin word caro, meaning ‘meat’, but refers specifically to decaying flesh. Scavengers and opportunists find dead bodies or steal them from other hunters in order to consume the dead flesh. Such carrion-eaters include vultures, condors, hawks, eagles, hyenas, Tasmanian devils, coyotes and the aptly named carrion beetles. Insects and bacteria begin feeding on carrion as soon as bodily death occurs. Historically, in many places around the world, we see cultures that dispose of the dead by building cairns: placing large slabs over the corpse or covering a body with rocks to protect the corpse from being dug up and eaten by animals. From prehistoric sites to the American West, rocks and stones were used to prevent bodies of loved ones from becoming food for carrion-eaters.

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Towers of Silence Herodotus, writing in The Persian Wars, c. 440 bce, noted of Persians: ‘the dead bodies of Persians are not buried before they have been mangled by bird or dog.’7 This description is not quite accurate, but does display the widespread knowledge of Zoroastrian corpse disposal in the ancient world. Classical Zoroastrianism rejects burial, burial at sea and cremation, as earth, water and fire are all sacred elements and dead bodies are regarded as extremely impure. ‘It is an abominable sin to bring carrion into contact with any of Ahura Mazda’s creations, especially water or fire,’ as Jamsheed K. Choksy reports.8 Rock, however, is impenetrable and thus ‘not susceptible to serious pollution’, therefore bodies are placed in round, roofless buildings constructed entirely of stone.9 These structures are known in Farsi as dakhma, or ‘Towers of Silence’. The body is washed with unconsecrated cow urine in a ritual accompanied by chanting by nasealars, professionals who handle corpses. The body is then carried by khandiyas (corpse-bearers) to the Tower of Silence, where it is laid out and consumed by vultures. Bodies are then placed on the roof of the tower in three concentric rings. Men are in the outermost ring and children are in the innermost, with women forming the ring in between. The bodies are left to be eaten by vultures; then the bones remain for up to a year in order to be completely stripped clean and bleached by the sun and the wind. Lastly, the bones are gathered in an ossuary in the centre of the tower where they are covered in lime and slowly disintegrate over time. The body is completely broken down, with nothing touching earth, water or fire. 24

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The decline in the number of vultures in urban areas forms a challenge for modern Zoroastrians, as it has rendered this type of corpse disposal less feasible. There have been no vultures in Karachi, for example, since the early 1990s.10 Further challenges come from governments that have forbidden the use of dakhma. Iran, for example, outlawed them in the 1970s as urban areas expanded to include the formerly rural areas where dakhma stood. Some Zoroastrians now encase the body directly in cement before placing it in a burial vault. More recent practice has been to place bodies in coffins within concrete-lined shafts to keep them from the sacred elements. Experiments have also been carried out on dissolving bodies with acid or lasers.11 While vultures no longer eat the dead, Zoroastrians continue to look for something that will.

Sky Burial When William of Rubruck, a Flemish Franciscan missionary, returned from his travels throughout the Mongol Empire around 1253, he presented the king of France with a record of his travels entitled Itinerarium fratris Willielmi de Rubruquis de ordine fratrum Minorum, Galli, Anno gratiae 1253 ad partes Orientales (The Guidebook of Friar William of Rubruck, of the order of the Friars Minor, to France in our Year of Grace 1253 regarding the Parts of the Orient). He reports having heard from a Mongol about a practice in the Himalayas: ‘Beyond them, there are Tebec [Tibetans], men which were wont to eat their own deceased ­parents . . . making their tomb out of their own bowels. They keep and tend the skulls of their parents . . . This he told me he had seen himself.’12 William of Rubruck confuses two practices from Tibet: kapala and sky burial. Kapala are cups or bowls made from 25

Thangka of Vajrayogini (Buddhist deity) drinking blood from a kapala (Tibetan skull bowl), 19th century.

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human skulls used as ritual implements in both Hinduism and Buddhism. They are typically used to hold offerings for wrathful deities. The skulls often come from the charnel grounds used for sky burial. In sky burial, the bodies of Tibetans are not eaten by their parents, but by birds, just as they are in Zoroastrianism. Indeed, the Tibetans do not call the practice ‘sky burial’, which is a term Westerners invented to describe the process, but rather refer to it as jhator or byagtor (‘giving alms to the birds’) or rirkyel (‘to carry to the mountain’). Dr Margaret Gouin, an expert on Tibetan Buddhism, offers another explanation for the latter term: ‘when the vultures fly off, they spread the body to all the corners of Tibet by casting their droppings on the high mountain peaks.’13 The language used by Tibetans reflects their understanding of this ritual as a natural and good process. One’s body is returned to nature, from which it was borrowed. One’s spirit lives on through the cycle of death and rebirth. The Western term reflects the Western understanding of the dead: they must be buried somehow, even if it is in the sky via the stomachs of vultures. Ever since the first Western encounters with Tibet, the practice has been sensationalized and embellished. Sky burial finds its roots in both the practical aspect of not being able to bury bodies in the mountains of Tibet (there are only a few centimetres of soil covering solid rock) or not having enough wood to cremate (most of Tibet is above the tree line), and Buddhist ideas about reincarnation, and having compassion for all living things.14 If one’s body is merely a receptacle for your spirit, which will be reincarnated upon your death, why not use the corpse to nourish other living things? Sky burial, in fact, is not a burial at all. It is, at its simplest, exposing the corpse to the elements and animals at an elevated 27

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location, although, as we have seen, in Tibet a more complicated ritual is practised in which the body is taken apart and completely fed to birds, specifically vultures (although the Tibetans refer to them as ‘eagles’). Special body-breakers called rogyapas remove the flesh from the bones and distribute it to the birds, which gather at specific sites where the ritual is practised. The bones are then crushed, mixed with roasted barley flour and fed to the birds after all the flesh has been consumed, ensuring that the entire corpse, bones and all, is eaten. This ensures the ascent of the soul. It is considered a bad omen if the bird will not eat the corpse, or if any of it is left after the ceremony. Some witnesses report birds unable to fly immediately after eating; so much food is available to them through the ritual that they stuff themselves. While historically in parts of Mongolia the traditional practice is to bury the dead (and the geography of Mongolia lends itself far more than Tibet to the practice of ground burial), they have also practised sky burial, most notably during the reign of Altan Khan at the time of the Ming Dynasty in China, due in part to his establishing relations with the Tibetans and Dalai Lama at the time.15 In the twentieth century the communist government of China banned the practice. It still survives in Tibet, however, protected by government legislation in 2005, and in Mongolia, although it is vanishing in the latter due to rapid urbanization and modernization. Even at present, Tibetans prefer sky burial over all other forms of corpse disposal. Despite the Chinese government building a state-run modern crematorium in 2000, as recently as 2005, 80 per cent of Tibetans chose sky burial.16 Tibet currently has 1,075 sky burial sites and more than a hundred rogyapas.17 The practice has been recorded in a number of documentaries, 28

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most notably Frederique Darragon’s The Secret Towers of the Himalayas.

Cyclops In contrast to the naturalness of the disposal of bodies in Tibetan and Zoroastrian culture is the fear of one’s corpse being eaten, as evinced in many cultures around the world. Many mythologies and folk stories outlined in this book examine the fear of one’s dead body becoming food for someone or something else. Greek mythology, for example, features a number of corpse-eating monsters, and they are indeed monstrous, as the next chapter demonstrates. None is presented more horrifically, however, than the Cyclops. The Cyclops were originally Titans, the beings before the gods that were the children of earth and sky, and they were smiths – they forged Zeus’ lightning bolts. Those Cyclops were eventually slain by Apollo. In the Odyssey, however, Homer records a new kind of Cyclops in the form of Polyphemus, who is not a Titan but the child of Poseidon and the nymph Thoösa. Apollodorus refers to him as ‘a huge, wild cannibal’.18 Heraclitus, also writing in the first century, states that the Cyclops is a ‘savage spirit’ and that the word ‘Cyclops’ comes from ‘that which steals away our rationality’.19 Heraclitus sought to read the Odyssey as an allegory for human existence – Polyphemus represents irrational urges and violent tendencies. Polyphemus is technically not a cannibal. He eats the bodies of dead humans, yes, but he himself is not human, and thus when he consumes the dead he is not a cannibal. It is worth noting that the Cyclops does not eat the satyrs who surround him, or other 29

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Cyclops, but only dead humans (and, of course, sheep – the two dietary sources conflating the human with an animal the ancient Greeks saw as a primary source of food).20 He is one who treats human bodies as humans treat sheep. Two key classical texts tell the story of Polyphemus: Homer’s Odyssey and Euripides’ play Cyclops, which dramatizes the events told in Homer. The former is one of two epic oral narratives attributed to the blind poet Homer (the other being the Iliad), recorded in writing sometime in the eighth century bce. It narrates the tale of the brave and clever Odysseus, who, with his men, attempts to return to Ithaca in Greece after the Trojan War. Because he has offended the gods, Odysseus’ journey lasts ten years and takes him all over the ancient world, encountering monsters, witches and other challenges. Landing on what they think is an uninhabited island, Odysseus and his men discover the cave of Polyphemus and begin to eat the provisions they find there. Polyphemus returns and places a boulder in front of the cave entrance so Odysseus and his men cannot escape. Homer describes the Cyclops as ‘a monster of a man’ – not intelligent, but all-consuming – with a single eye and a giant mouth.21 The language here also seems to indicate that Cyclops is both a man and a monster; in other words, he is like humans, but different enough so that when he consumes them it is not cannibalism. But to be captured by him is to be consumed. To the horror of Odysseus and his men, Polyphemus kills two men of their party, butchers them and eats them, as one would a sheep. As Odysseus describes the events after the fact, he narrates: 30

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. . . he clutched at my companions and caught two in his hands like squirming puppies to beat their brains out, spattering the floor. Then he dismembered them and made his meal, gaping and crunching like a mountain lion – everything: innards, flesh, and marrow bones.22 Three lines later Odysseus describes the Cyclops as ‘filling up his belly / with manflesh’.23 The Cyclops then gets drunk and passes out, sated from eating the corpses of two of Odysseus’ men. These activities separate Polyphemus from the Greeks, who may kill and treat others violently, but do not consume the flesh of those they kill. Mark Buchan argues that Achilles in the Iliad had a choice over whether to cannibalize Hector and did not, but Polyphemus chooses to eat, making him a monster (in a manner that Achilles is not) but not a cannibal, as Polyphemus is not human. It is, as Buchan observes, ‘an eating of human flesh without the taboo of cannibalism’.24 This aspect is true of sky burial as well, and yet the former is horrific, whereas the Tibetan practice is not. The ­question therefore becomes, who is eating the corpse and for what reason? The horror of the Cyclops is not that he is a ­cannibal, but rather that he is a monster that eats human flesh. Being c­ onsumed by birds in the Himalayas is natural; being consumed by a ­monster in the Mediterranean is unnatural, and therefore a source of horror. The Cyclops eats two men at a time until Odysseus gets him drunk, tells the Cyclops that his name is ‘Nobody’, blinds him and then instructs his men to hide under the Cyclops’ sheep to escape the cave, resulting in the famous scene of 31

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Pellegrino Tibaldi, Ulysses Blinding Polyphemus, 1549–51, ceiling fresco in Palazzo Poggi, Bologna.

Polyphemus yelling to the other Cyclops, ‘Nobody blinded me!’ The horror in the Homeric text is palpable. At least the dead at Troy perished heroically in battle. Odysseus’ men are food for a monster. The horror is brought further to the fore in the play Cyclops, written by Euripides c. 428 bce in Athens as part of the City Dionysia, a drama festival. Homer’s Odysseus recounts the horrors of Polyphemus’ cave, whereas Euripides’ characters experience them immediately and directly in front of an audience. Warned by a satyr of Polyphemus’ cruelty and diet preferences, Odysseus makes to escape the cave, but is trapped with his men when the Cyclops enters. Polyphemus announces his intention to eat the men, while Odysseus throws himself upon the rules of hospitality: ‘Do not bring yourself to kill friends who have arrived at your 32

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cave, and make an unholy meal for your jaws.’25 He cautions the Cyclops that the men have arrived from victory in the Trojan War and will be difficult to defeat. The Cyclops drives the men into the cave and Odysseus emerges to report to the audience what has transpired. Polyphemus lit a huge fire, placed a giant cauldron in the fire and then, When everything was ready for that butcher from hell, so hateful to the gods, snatching up two men among my companions he cut their throats, and in one movement . . . [threw] one of them into the bronze hollow of the cauldron. As for the other, he seized him by his ankle, dashed him against the sharp edge of a rocky stone and spattered his brains out. And seizing down their flesh with a savage blade he roasted them over the fire and threw their limbs into the cauldron to boil. In my misery, pouring forth tears from my eyes, I myself stood nearby and was servant to the Cyclops.26 The horror found in Euripides is that not only does the Cyclops kill, cook and eat the flesh of men, but Odysseus (and we) must watch as he does it. He (and we) are powerless to stop the killing and the corpse-eating. Indeed, part of the horror is that we watch, knowing full well what is happening, and are powerless to stop it. This is much of the horror to be found in tales of ghouls, wendigos, aswangs and especially survival cannibalism.

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Being Eaten: A Natural or Unnatural Experience? Examined side-by-side, the myth of the Cyclops and the ritual of sky burial have much in common. A human body is consumed by something not human. The latter, however, is natural and a part of life, the former is unnatural and horrifying. One reason for the different reactions is the difference in who is doing the eating and under what circumstances. The Cyclops kills those he eats. His food is an unwilling participant in the ritual. The Cyclops is a monster. Being devoured by him is an unnatural end. Most importantly, however, in Greek culture, bodies must be buried in order for the spirit to enter the underworld and be with family and friends. In the Odyssey, Odysseus ventures to the underworld and discovers it is not that pleasant. He also learns that most of his friends are dead through violence, even if they survived the Trojan War. But at least dying in battle is an honourable death. There is nothing honourable or good about being killed and eaten by a monster. Sky burial, on the other hand, is a rational and spiritual way to dispose of corpses safely, effectively and in a manner that links to Tibetan Buddhist belief. Similarly, to be eaten on a Tower of Silence is part of an important process that developed out of and respects Zoroastrian belief. Vultures are not monsters; they are part of the natural world and they help prevent one’s body from contaminating sacred substances. Eating the dead in this case is a sacred duty and part of keeping the world safe. In the next chapter we will examine a number of religious beliefs and practices that focus on men eating gods and gods eating men.

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Eating the Gods, Gods Eating Men

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he ancient Greeks’ religion is full of tales of the eating of people, and even of gods. In the Bacchae of Euripides, the chorus sings of how the young god ‘Delights in the raw flesh, in the eating of raw flesh’, but also that he himself will be caught by his followers, torn apart and consumed. Pentheus, his cousin, the king of Thebes, will be torn apart by his own mother while she is in a Dionysian frenzy; she will eat his flesh and drink his blood, as will the women with her. Flash-forward to a growing religion based on the teachings of a first-century Palestinian prophet, and his Roman biographer’s theological assertions, and we find Christianity rooted in the idea that we must eat his flesh and drink his blood. Catholics have a very interesting take on this ritual, as during the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215 the Church declared the reality of transubstantiation – the bread and wine literally become the body and blood of Christ, which must then be consumed.

Eating Bodies in Ancient Greek and Roman Myth Marina Warner reminds us that the ‘founding myth of the Greek pantheon’ is infanticide through patrilineal cannibalism: Kronos 35

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(known as Saturn in Roman mythology) eats his children as they are born, until a stone is substituted by Rhea for Zeus, who will kill his father.1 Once Zeus kills Kronos, all the other children he has eaten are pulled from his stomach and become the Olympian gods. The start of the gods is also the start of cannibalism, the start of eating men and the start of eating gods. One of the myths set in the period right after the gods made men concerns the House of Tantalus, which is a house plagued by cannibalism. In addition to Greek and Roman drama narrating the tales of Tantalus, we get his story and that of his son Pelops from Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Tantalus invites the gods to a banquet. In order to test their powers, he slays his son Pelops and feeds the corpse to the gods. The gods immediately recognize what they had been served, but Demeter, distracted by grief over her daughter Persephone being in the underworld, bites and swallows part of Pelops’ shoulder.2 The gods restore Pelops (with an ivory shoulder that Demeter made for him), and punish Tantalus, suggesting that the eating of human flesh is wrong. Tantalus spends eternity in Hades up to his neck in water with fruit hanging over his head. Whenever he leans down to drink, the water drains away. Whenever he reaches for the fruit, it is pulled out of reach. The punishment for feeding the gods human flesh is to be unable to consume anything ever again. The story also gives us the word ‘tantalize’. Pelops continued the family history of poor life choices. He tricked the king Oenomaus in order to win his daughter’s hand in marriage. Pelops offered Myrtilus, Oenomaus’ charioteer, a bribe to sabotage his chariot so Pelops would win a race whose victor would claim the bride. Oenomaus died in the subsequent accident and Pelops then killed Myrtilus to prevent him from claiming 36

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his bribe (a night with the daughter, now Pelops’ wife). Myrtilus cursed Pelops and his family, resulting in more cannibalism. Atreus and Thyestes, the sons of Pelops, fell into an argument over who would rule after Pelops died. Atreus won the right to be king, but Thyestes seduced Atreus’ wife and was driven from the kingdom. The Roman dramatist Seneca details what happened next in the play Thyestes. Determined to revenge himself on his brother, Atreus invites Thyestes to return with his sons and have a reconciliation dinner. When he does, Atreus invites his brother to rest and offers to bring the sons to their chambers. Instead, he brings them to the kitchen. A messenger tells the chorus how Atreus killed Thyestes’ sons, stabbing one in the throat, decapitating the next and then running the youngest through the chest with the sacrificial knife. Seneca then goes into great detail about how Atreus butchered his nephews, literally, and cooked the meat: ‘Some of the flesh he stuck on spits to drip over slow burning fires, some he boiled in cauldrons set over flame.’3 After a full meal, Thyestes wishes his children could have been with him to enjoy it. Atreus says, ‘Believe me when I say your children are in their father’s embrace. They are here and always will be.’4 Thyestes then begins to experience stomach pains. He notes that his digestive system is very noisy. Atreus reveals the heads and hands of Thyestes’ sons. ‘Devoured by monstrous beasts or wild animals?’ Thyestes asks. ‘No,’ comes Atreus’ response; ‘You dined on your sons at this unholy table.’5 In Seneca’s play the purpose of all this butchery is to show Thyestes’ reaction to learning he has eaten his dead children, which is stoicism. Thyestes, while heartsick his sons have been killed and he has eaten them, vows no revenge, seeks no retribution and instead wishes only to bury what remains of his children. 37

‘Atreus feeds Thyestes his three children’, miniature illumination from Giovanni Boccaccio, Des cas des nobles hommes et femmes, c. 1410.

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In the myth, however, the story continued. Thyestes flees, and on leaving Delphi he rapes a young girl, not recognizing her as his own daughter, whom Atreus then unknowingly takes to wife. The girl, Pelopia, gives birth to Thyestes’ son Aegisthus, whom Atreus raises as his own, along with his sons Agamemnon and Menelaus from his first wife. Atreus sends Agamemnon and Menelaus to find and capture Uncle Thyestes, which they do, and bring him back to be killed. Aegisthus is tasked with beheading Thyestes, but Thyestes recognizes his own sword and realizes Aegisthus is his son and Pelopia his daughter. Learning that her son is the product of incest, she kills herself with the sword and Aegisthus brings the sword back to the man he now knows is his stepfather (and uncle) and tells him the blood is that of Thyestes. Aegisthus then kills Atreus and Thyestes seizes the throne. Agamemnon and Menelaus flee, swearing revenge. The brothers take refuge in Sparta with King Tyndareus, whose wife Leda was also having an affair – with Zeus, in the form of a swan. She gives birth to four children, including Helen (later ‘of Troy’) and Clytemnestra. Many men compete for Helen’s hand, but Menelaus wins her as his wife and Agamemnon marries Clytemnestra. When Helen runs off with Paris of Troy, her suitors all gather to bring her back, resulting in the Trojan War. While Agamemnon, chosen as general of the Greek forces, is away for ten years, Clytemnestra has an affair with Aegisthus. When the war is over and the men return, Clytemnestra kills Agamemnon, only to be killed years later by her own son Orestes, whose trial in Athens finally ends Myrtilus’ curse. The history of the House of Tantalus is full of murder, incest, rape and involuntary cannibalism, all caused by the first act of feeding a corpse to the gods. 39

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Pelops was not the only person to be fed to the gods. Zeus, disguised as a mortal, walked the earth, visiting with humanity as he often did. Lycaon, the king of Arcadia, welcomed him and offered to serve him dinner. Ovid’s Metamorphoses tells the story from Zeus’ point of view: He [Lycaon] slit the throat of a Molossian hostage, Boiled some of his half-dead flesh and roasted the rest. As soon as he set this delicate dish before me My avenging lightning brought down the house On its master and his all-too-deserving household.6 Zeus is offended for three reasons. First, Lycaon slayed a hostage, violating the rules of warfare and hostages. Second, he violated the rules of hospitality by inviting Zeus in and serving him a dish that is taboo. Third, as we learned from the story of Tantalus, one should not feed human flesh to the gods (or anyone else). Zeus destroys Lycaon, his family, his servants and everyone else present. Yet again a myth reinforces the idea that the eating of human flesh is wrong and will be punished by the gods. Greek mythology repeatedly tells of people feeding the corpses of loved ones not just to the gods but to their enemies. Atreus and Thyestes are the exemplary myth of feeding corpses to their relatives. Yet another example: in revenge for her husband, Tereus, raping her sister Philomela, Procne kills her own son Itys and serves him to her husband. When Tereus asks that their son join them, Procne states the boy has been there all along inside his rapist father and shows his head to him. The foundational myth of eating the gods is found with the god of theatre himself. Dionysus is the son of Zeus and Semele, a 40

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mortal. Hera, jealous of yet another of her husband’s paramours, tricks Semele into asking Zeus to reveal his true form, something mortal eyes cannot bear. Semele is reduced to a pile of ash, but Zeus plucks a glowing foetus from the smoking remains and places it in his thigh until it springs out fully formed as the god Dionysus. Told primarily in Euripides’ play Bacchae, Dionysus returns to Thebes to be worshipped. The current king (and Dionysus’ cousin) Pentheus refuses to join in and forbids the worship of this new god. Dionysus drives him mad, convinces him to dress in the ceremonial costume of a Bacchant, a worshipper of Dionysus, and sends him into a crowd of maddened worshippers. They tear him to pieces and begin to feast on his flesh. Eventually the same fate will befall Dionysus. Each year the Bacchants chase Dionysus through the woods and eat his corpse. Seminal modern-theatre critic Jan Kott indicates that ‘In such myths and sparagmos rites, women are the priestesses. They tear bodies to pieces and partake of the raw flesh. Their sacrificial victim is always male.’7 Gender matters in this case. Kott sees the devouring of Pentheus by Agave, his mother, as both ‘sacral cannibalism’ and ‘sacral incest . . . a reversal of giving birth’.8 Although the gods do not approve of eating men (except for monsters like Cyclops – and they are allowed because they are monsters), men from time to time must eat the gods. The story of Dionysus is the story of the death and resurrection of a god who must or should be eaten. This pattern, the dying and rising god who must be eaten, emerges again half a millennia later in Rome and the Levant as part of a growing movement behind a messiah.

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Pentheus being torn by maenads, Roman fresco from the northern wall of the triclinium in Casa dei Vettii, Pompeii.

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Eating Bodies in Judaism and Christianity Oddly, the Bible does not have any proscriptions against cannibalism. There is no ‘Thou shalt not eat the flesh of other human beings’ in either the Christian or Hebrew scriptures. One can infer, however, that it is not recommended, because when depicted in the Old Testament cannibalism is always portrayed negatively. It is either a curse on the next generation for the sins of the last (as with the children of Pelops), or a necessary degradation for survival (so-called survival cannibalism), or something that is practised by enemies of God, barbarians and evildoers. Multiple times in the Hebrew Bible it becomes necessary for God’s people to eat the bodies of the dead. Survival cannibalism is first recorded in the Torah, in the book of Deuteronomy, and is repeated again in Leviticus. In Deuteronomy 28 the Lord promises Israel blessings for obedience and a long list of horrible curses for disobedience. In addition to plague, extreme heat, defeat and enslavement by enemies, rape, exile and locusts, God promises that for the disobedient familial cannibalism awaits: Because of the suffering that your enemy will inflict on you during the siege, you will eat the fruit of the womb, the flesh of the sons and daughters the Lord your God has given you. Even the most gentle and sensitive man among you will have no compassion on his own brother or the wife he loves or his surviving children, and he will not give to one of them any of the flesh of his children that he is eating. It will be all he has left because of the suffering your enemy will inflict on you during the siege of all your cities. The most gentle and sensitive woman among you – so sensitive and gentle that she 43

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would not venture to touch the ground with the sole of her foot – will begrudge the husband she loves and her own son or daughter the afterbirth from her womb and the children she bears. For she intends to eat them secretly during the siege and in the distress that your enemy will inflict on you in your cities. (Deuteronomy 28:53–7)9 During the promised siege, mothers will eat their children in secret: parents will eat their own children and not share with anyone. Cannibalism is offensive to the Greek gods; it is a threat from the Hebrew one. Deuteronomy proves prophetic for later in the Hebrew Bible. After the Torah in the Hebrew Bible comes the Nevi’im, the prophets and the chronicles of Israel. In the second Book of Kings, King Ben-Hadad of Aram laid siege to Samaria, resulting in famine and starvation. The king of Israel walks past the wall of the besieged city: As the king of Israel was passing by on the wall a woman cried out to him, saying, ‘Help, my lord, O king!’ . . . And the king said to her, ‘What is the matter with you?’ And she answered, ‘This woman said to me, “Give your son that we may eat him today, and we will eat my son tomorrow.” So we boiled my son and ate him; and I said to her on the next day, “Give your son, that we may eat him”; but she has hidden her son.’ (2 Kings 6:26–9) This theme, of a siege causing people to eat their own children or attempt to eat the children of others without sharing, becomes a recurring motif. The prophet Jeremiah tells the nation: ‘I will 44

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make them eat the flesh of their sons and daughters, and they will eat one another’s flesh during the stress of the siege imposed on them by the enemies who seek their lives’ (Jeremiah 19:9).10 As part of the Ketuvim, the final group of books in the Hebrew Bible after the Torah and the Nevi’im, Lamentations is a series of poetic expressions of grief following the destruction of the first temple. Again, the motif of people being punished by being forced to eat their own children presents itself: With their own hands compassionate women have cooked their own children, who became their food when my people were destroyed. (Lamentations 4:10) Repeatedly throughout all sections of the Old Testament, people are punished for disobeying God by, among other things, being forced to consume the bodies of their own children in a form of survival cannibalism. While no God-caused survival cannibalism, or indeed any ­cannibalism, appears in the New Testament, there appears a fascinat­ing new idea, similar to that of Dionysus but presented in a radically different way. In the gospel of John, Jesus tells his followers: Very truly I tell you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you. Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise them up at the last day. (John 6:53–4) At the heart of Christianity is the idea that one must eat Christ’s flesh and drink his blood to achieve salvation. So much so, in 45

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fact, that in 1264 Pope Urban iv, in response to a proposal from St Thomas Aquinas and petitioning from St Juliana of Liège, a Norbertine canoness and long devotee of the Eucharist, promulgated the Feast of Corpus Christi – the Body of Christ. This was the first Church holiday to commemorate not an event (such as Christmas or Easter, or a person, such as saints’ feast days) but a theological concept – that Christ’s body is present in the bread of the Eucharist. This devotion to the ‘body of Christ’ in the form of the Eucharist has historically led many people, on first contact with them, to believe that Christians are actually cannibals. Interestingly, in ancient Rome Christians were the subject of a classical version of an urban legend: that they ate dead babies.11 Sometime in the second or third century, Minucius Felix, a lawyer, wrote a dialogue in the form of a debate between Caecilius, a pagan, and Octavius, a Christian apologist. Caecilius lays a number of depravities and debaucheries at the feet of the Christians, and then relates this story: Details of the initiation of neophytes are as revolting as they are notorious. An infant, cased in dough to deceive the unsuspecting, is placed beside the person to be initiated. The novice is thereupon induced to inflict what seems to be harmless blows upon the dough, and unintentionally the infant is killed by his unsuspecting blows; the blood – oh, horrible – they lap up greedily; the limbs they tear to pieces eagerly; and over the victim they make league and covenant, and by complicity in guilt pledge themselves to mutual silence. Such sacred rites are more foul than any sacrilege. Their form of feasting is notorious; it is in everyone’s mouth.12 46

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This pre-modern urban legend carries many elements that we will encounter in various points of this book. Upon meeting a new and different culture, most people are willing to believe they are cannibals. Rather than eating bread and drinking wine over which prayers have been said, commemorating the Last Supper and the sacrifice of Jesus, the Christians in the Roman mind were baby-eating monsters. As we have learned from the Greeks, all gods abhor the eating of human flesh, so eaters of flesh, especially young and innocent flesh, must be monsters. The early theologian Tertullian complained about the baby-eating rumours; Pliny the Elder had heard of it. Christianity survived this period, but the misperception of the cannibal Christian would continue through much of history. This legend would be flipped in the medieval period, with Christians accusing Jews of eating dead Christian babies, or meat taken from the bodies of Christians in a blasphemous parody of the Eucharist. An excuse for pogroms, and going beyond the usual rumour that Jews used the blood of Christians in their Passover Seders, the belief that Jews ate corpses persisted in Europe throughout the Middle Ages, even into the Enlightenment. Voltaire observes that ‘the Jews must be in the habit of eating human flesh.’13 The accusation of cannibalism, whether against early Christian, medieval Jew or colonial subject, was often used to assert the savagery of the other, justifying ‘our’ treatment of them. Similarly, accusations that Judas was a cannibal also began in the Middle Ages, linked to the idea of the Jewish cannibal of medieval prejudice. In a stained-glass window in the chapel at King’s College, Cambridge, crafted around 1500, Judas is depicted biting down on the Eucharist at the Last Supper.14 Judas does not merely receive the Eucharist on his tongue, he chews it with his 47

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teeth, purposefully attempting to harm the body of Christ, present in the Eucharist. Judas, the apostle who betrayed his saviour for thirty pieces of silver (which was actually not a great deal of money), became a greedy, consuming, monstrous destroyer that eats human flesh. Jesus’ flesh saves; Judas’ grows corrupt, demonically feeding on the flesh of others. In his 2007 Sigma Force-series novel The Judas Strain, techno-thriller author James Rollins named the eponymous virus, which causes uncontrollable cannibalism in the infected, after the twelfth apostle.15 The bread and wine of Christianity have ‘archetypal symbolism: they embody the opposites of nature and culture, death and life, and their own coming.’16 Nature makes grain and grape, stalk and vine, which then must die – be cut, dried, crushed, baked, fermented and processed: ‘Dead matter are transformed into food and drink.’17 We eat the dead, no matter what we eat. Further, within Christianity, Christ has taught us to do the same with him: Saint John Chrysostom argues that ‘Christ drinks his own blood.’18 Can we do any less for salvation? But what, exactly, is the body and blood of Christ within Christian communion? The answer is that it depends on the denomination you ask.

Transubstantiation According to scripture, at the Last Supper, ‘While they were eating, Jesus took bread, and when he had given thanks, he broke it and gave it to his disciples, saying, “Take and eat; this is my body”’ (Matthew 26:26). He then took the cup of wine, and, rather than saying it was simply his blood, he refers to it as ‘my blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many for the forgiveness of sins’ (Matthew 26:28).19 This same motif is repeated in the first 48

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letter of Paul to the Corinthians: ‘And when he had given thanks, he broke it, and said, “Take, eat: this is my body, which is broken for you: this do in remembrance of me.” After the same manner also he took the cup, when he had supped, saying, “This cup is the new testament in my blood: this do you in remembrance of me”’ (11:24–5), which then served as the theological justification both for the institution of the Mass as well as the doctrine of Transubstantiation. The Catechism of the Catholic Church observes that Christ is present in the Eucharist, ‘truly, really and substantially contained’.20 The Council of Trent proclaimed that by the consecration of the bread and wine there takes place a change of the whole substance of the bread into the substance of the body of Christ our Lord and of the whole substance of the wine into the substance of his blood. This change the holy Catholic Church has fittingly and properly called transubstantiation.21 Transubstantiation as a theological concept stands in opposition to Consubstantiation, which states that the bread and wine are metaphorically one with the body and blood of Christ. Transubstantiation is the doctrine that the bread becomes actual flesh and the wine becomes actual blood. Catholics are, however, not actually eating the dead, as in Catholic belief Christ has died and risen. Yet the belief that the Eucharist becomes the actual flesh of Christ and the wine his blood led to charges of cannibalism against Christian missionaries, the doctrine of Transubstantiation regarded as ‘a form of Christian magic’ and ‘transcendent cannibalism’.22 Communion 49

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within Christianity is at the very least a form of metaphoric ­consumption of the body of Christ, as a symbol of one’s a­ cceptance of his sacrifice as a means to salvation. Both the Huron, who torture, kill and eat the heart and body parts of an Iroquois warrior or Jesuit priest, and the priest himself who elevates the host, says the prayers and then places the body of Christ on the tongues of his converts, engage in the same type of ritual. They are ‘ceremonies of communion, designed to bring communities together and exclude outsiders through the ritual processing of real or imagined human flesh’.23 What is remarkable about these parallel faith traditions, however, is that in both cases, ‘they feared becoming cannibals even though they were cannibals’ (emphasis in original).24 One person’s religious ritual, perceived as divorced from cannibalism due to intent and efficacy, is another person’s actual cannibalism. The communal experience around the pot is what separates ‘us’ from ‘them’, the eater from those who may not eat because they are not of the body. It also distinguishes between those who eat and those who are eaten. Interestingly, historically one of these ceremonies was used to combat the other: ‘The Catholic Church typically incorporated windigos [another spelling of wendigo] back into their community through public spectacles that involved rituals and rites, such as the mass and baptism’, and the public acceptance of the Eucharist.25 In other words, indigenous peoples who had consumed human flesh or ‘gone wendigo’ would overcome their ritual cannibalism by another act of ritual cannibalism, the consumption of the Eucharist at a Catholic Mass.

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Aghori Emerging out of the resistance to pervasive oppression and inequality during the British Raj in northern India, mostly around the city of Varanasi, the Aghori are ascetic Hindu holy men, devotees of Shiva manifesting as Bhairava, who engage in post-mortem rituals. Whereas typically in Hinduism corpses and bodies are unclean and impure, Aghoris deliberately seek them out, dwelling in charnel grounds and engaging directly with dead bodies. They smear ashes from cremation on themselves and make implements and jewellery from bones and skulls. Aghori seek moksha (liberation) from the cycle of samsara (death and rebirth in this existence), and in order to do so embrace the idea that all opposites are illusory: ‘The Aghori actively embrace pollution and death in order to achieve a state of spiritual non-discrimination.’26 They embrace pollution and impurity in order to transcend artificial social boundaries and break down reality, seeing past illusion into liberation. Aghori eat the remains of the dead, in addition to rotten food, faeces and other unclean, repulsive foodstuffs, in order to demonstrate that eating carrion or rubbish is the same as eating any other food. They eat human flesh either raw or cooked, even if putrefied. They believe the greatest fear is the fear of death, and ‘consequently, they developed spiritual exercises for confronting death’ that involve ingestion of cremains and raw and cooked human flesh, as well as the aforementioned smearing of the ashes of the cremated, called mahaprasād, all over their bodies.27 In order to further demonstrate their commitment to moksha, confronting death and overpowering aversion, Aghori will eat out of a kapal, a bowl made from the top of a human skull, or another 51

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dish made from human bones. They have been reported to use corpses as tables or altars. The human remains used in these rituals come from unclaimed corpses, mostly gathered from the Ganges. In Hinduism bodies are cremated unless they are impure due to gender or social position (unmarried or pregnant women, holy men and so on), or perished through leprosy, suicide or snakebite. These bodies are placed in the Ganges in order to wash away the impurities. Aghori pull the corpses from the water in order to expose themselves directly to those impurities as part of their ritual practice, including eating parts of said corpse. In March 2017 scholar, author and tv presenter Reza Aslan, the host of a programme called Believer on cnn, ate a small amount of cremated human brains with the Aghori during an episode of the show about their faith, stirring a controversy. A number of scholars, activists and community representatives in both India and the United States felt that the episode and the event were sensationalist, lurid and designed to foster an environment of anti-Hinduism. They claimed Aslan, by presenting the most extreme, shocking and scandalous aspects of an obscure sect, mischaracterized the Hindu faith and promoted misunderstanding and prejudice.28 The Washington Post referred to the Aghori as ‘religious cannibals’ in a story about the controversy, an interesting approach in an article that also quoted the u.s. India Political Action Committee as complaining that cnn ‘characterizes Hinduism as cannibalistic, which is a bizarre way of looking at the third largest religion in the world’.29 Further fuelling the controversy was a post by Aslan on Facebook stating, ‘Want to know what a dead guy’s brain tastes like? Charcoal. It was burnt to a crisp!’30 Critics thought the focus on the corpse-eating Aghori 52

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was done for shock value and ratings, rather than an attempt to genuinely portray this aspect of a very small sect: only a few thousand Aghori exist among the billion Hindus.

The Drive to Eat God and Be Eaten by Gods Still other faith traditions have gods that consume men and men that attempt to eat the gods. Certain Aztec divinities, for example, eat the dead. In doing fieldwork among contemporary Aztecs in Mexico, anthropologist Timothy Knab discovered corpse-eating in their cosmology. His informants described miquitalan, the land of the dead: ‘The Lords and Ladies of death live there and rule with their minions, the talocana and the mictiani. They eat the flesh of the dead, and the living, too, if they can find them.’31 Just as medieval Christianity imagined hellmouths devouring the dead, Aztecs imagined their gods of death being devourers. Just as the Greeks imagined the gods eating human flesh, so too did the Aztecs, although for the Aztecs it was part of a sacred cycle that endowed humanity with the gods’ powers: ‘To keep the mystical forces of the universe in balance and to uphold social equilibrium, the Aztecs fed their gods human flesh . . . Through eating the victim’s flesh, men entered into communion with their gods, and divine power was imported to men,’ writes Peggy Sanday.32 Gods eat men, men eat gods, and we all are part of a divine feast, whether Christian communion or Aztec sacrifice. Religion in general is thus a place of tension between the desire to consume the divine, to somehow take the god within oneself in order to achieve transcendence, and the fear that one might be eaten by the gods or be caused by the god to be eaten or to eat our loved ones. From Tantalus, killing his own child 53

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and serving him up to the gods, to the God of the Hebrew Bible, threatening survival cannibalism to those who will not obey, and following through when He is not obeyed, to the Aztec divinities, we fear that the god(s) we worship might eat us, or bring about cannibalism among us. Conversely, Dionysus, Jesus and the Aghori show a tension within religion as well, that it is only by consuming, only by eating the flesh, sometimes of the god himself, that we can be saved. Growing out of the spread of the early Church and the rise of the medieval Church, myth was replaced by Christian doctrine in Europe. But the monsters and darkness did not disappear. Instead, the drive to eat the dead was placed directly in the bodies of folk monsters and in myths transformed for Christian purposes. Similarly, fairy tales and folk stories evolved as cautionary tales to warn against stranger danger and attempted to contain the fear of famine and the cannibalism it might bring. The next chapter looks at this evolution from cannibalistic or anthropophagic mythic monster into Christian villain and fairy-tale bogeyman.

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Grendel and the Ogres

Fe, Fi, Fo, Fum, I smell the blood of an Englishman, Be he living, or be he dead, I’ll grind his bones to make my bread. From ‘Jack and the Beanstalk’, traditional English fairy tale

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uropean history is fraught with examples of man-eaters that live out their existence outside of society: Grendel, Norse monsters (such as draugr and trolls), ogres and cynocephali, to name but a few. Many of these monsters live on the lines of tension between pagan beliefs and Christianity, and were later transformed into cautionary tales for children. The threat is that one will die, and one’s corpse will be consumed. As always, the tales often develop out of places or periods of food scarcity. Grendel, ogres and trolls never starve, but they exist on the margin of societies that fear famine, and fear what kind of monsters famine might turn us into. Hansel and Gretel are in no danger from a witch until driven into the forest by their own father and stepmother due to a lack of food for them all. It is the parents who 55

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drive the children into the path of a corpse-eating monster and it is the monster that also sublimates and substitutes for the parents. Ogres, as noted below, are often married and keep a household in which children are merely a provision. At heart, these stories are about consuming or being consumed.

Grendel: Eater of Pagan and Christian Dead The bane of secondary-school students throughout Englishspeaking lands, Beowulf is possibly the oldest surviving long poem in Old English and is often cited as one of the most important works of Old English literature. Grendel, its first and only named villain,1 is thus the first eater of the dead in English literature, although not the first eater of the dead in the British Isles. That honour most likely goes to the Cheddar Man, found in 1903 in Gough’s Cave in Somerset. The Cheddar Man lived 10,250 years ago during the Mesolithic Period and dna from another human was found in his teeth. Other human remains in Gough’s Cave from the same period have human chew marks on the bones, indicating some form of cannibalism was happening, although whether it was for ritual purposes or nutrition is not known.2 In fairness, Geoffrey of Monmouth in his Historia regum Britanniae (The History of the Kings of Britain, 1136) states that before humans came to the British Isles, the original inhabitants were cannibalistic giants who had to be defeated by Brutus, grandson of Aeneus of Troy, so the idea that in ancient times Britain was inhabited by those who might have eaten the dead has both literary and scientific precedent.3 Grendel would have been in good company. Beowulf is unique, however, in that it is an amalgam of both pagan and Christian sources and it shows monsters that eat the 56

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dead being defeated by a noble warrior hero. The ‘original’ poem is one of five narratives in the twelfth-century Nowell Codex, the second of two manuscripts in the Cotton Vitellius a.xv in the British Library. Four of the five contain monsters. The narratives are The Passion of St Christopher, The Wonders of the East, The Letter of Alexander to Aristotle, Beowulf and the incomplete Judith.4 The other four texts are Christian stories, while Beowulf is a pagan story given a Christian overlay. (The Passion of St Christopher, we should note, contains the story of his conversion from cynocephalus, a dog-headed cannibal that was frequently mentioned in early saints’ lives, to Christian saint. In a unique inversion in these stories, following from the previous chapter, those who eat the body of Christ stop eating other human flesh. We shall explore cynocephali and St Christopher in more depth in this chapter.) The original story was most likely an oral narrative shared among the pagans of Britain and Scandinavia. As one scholar observes, ‘the poem itself was a mongrel offspring, written by a Northern pagan, steeped in Norse legend, but copied and interpolated by a Christian monk who baptized the text with minor Christian additions’, and it is ‘a pastiche of Christian revisionism mixed with Norse paganism’.5 The characters pay lip service to Christianity, but the most Christian element of the poem is its adversary and how the hero regards him. Beowulf, king of the Geats, is the poem’s protagonist. He is a mighty warrior, the greatest in the land, who seeks out supernatural monsters against which to test his strength. Beowulf leads his men first to Denmark, to aid King Hrothgar against Grendel and then Grendel’s mother, and later in the poem will battle and kill a fierce dragon, although he will die from his wounds in this last contest. While in the original 57

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Beowulf was a pagan warrior, the Christian monk put Christ’s name on Beowulf ’s lips, so to speak. He also stated that Grendel is a descendant of Cain, and the foes of Beowulf are thus the foes of God.6 In other words, Grendel’s very nature makes him the evil enemy, not just of the Danes and the Geats, but of God himself. His man-eating shows him to be of the devil. Indeed, the description of Grendel is vague, and there are numerous scholarly debates about what exactly he is. He is described in the poem as sceadugenga – a ‘shadow walker’, meaning someone who hides in the dark. Grendel and his mother are referred to as giants, demons, hell spirits and wolves at ­various points in the poem, but no physical description or species identification is given. As with many of the creatures in this volume, Grendel is ambiguous, and his eating of those he kills may be a form of cannibalism (if he is a kind of human) or simply anthropophagy (if he is a monstrous, inhuman spawn of hell). The poem indicates that Grendel is related to humans by descent from Adam but is separate from them by descent from Cain.7 This signifies that at the very least his behaviour is quasi-cannibalistic, due to his split heritage. We know from the poem that he is envious of the men in Heorot, the hall of Hrothgar, and that fuels his rage, which in turn makes him kill and then eat those he has killed. When we first encounter Grendel he has entered Heorot as Hrothgar’s men sleep, terrifying them as they wake to his rage and violence: They were sound asleep, sated and carefree after the banquet, a band of warriors 58

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slumbering softly without sorrow or dread, He attacked them at once with terrible swiftness, grimly, greedily grabbing from their beds thirty unlucky thanes of the king, gloating, glorying, in the grisly deed, then shambling home with his shameful spoil. (235–50)8 Grendel kills thirty of Hrothgar’s men and takes them home to eat, his ‘shameful spoil’. What horrifies the Danes (and the reader or listener) is that the thirty unlucky thanes died, had their bodies taken and were then consumed. They got neither a Christian burial nor a Viking funeral. An honourable death in battle would be no horror – but to be consumed by a descendant of Cain is a fate worse than death. Beowulf is therefore summoned to Heorot because Grendel is eating warriors and seems unstoppable. Indeed, soon after Beowulf arrives, Grendel falls into his trap, but still manages to eat someone before the hero can act: The monster was not minded to dawdle but swooped suddenly on a sleeping man; 59

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slobbering with greed he slit him open guzzled the blood gushing from his veins and gulped down great gobbets of flesh; he polished him off completely, hands and feet included. (1477–89)9 The anonymous author acknowledges that Grendel even eats the warrior’s hands and feet, which signifies several things. First, Grendel is more beast than human, as he eats the parts that in an animal are ordinarily considered inedible. Beowulf, who is the next man Grendel grabs and attempts to eat, tears off Grendel’s arm, thus the previous devouring presages Grendel’s own loss.10 Second, in Norse culture, a wound to the arms or hands indicates a victim ‘of martial power’.11 This would imply that Grendel is a fearsome opponent, as he can devour even the arms of his adversaries, arms that ordinarily wield weapons. Grendel’s power and fearsomeness are built up, obviously, in order to show the power and might of Beowulf, who can overthrow and kill such a being. Grendel is thus presented as one who may eat the dead with impunity, until he encounters Beowulf. In Robert Zemeckis’s 2007 film Beowulf this moment shows Grendel turning away as he begins to chomp on the dead thane, then fully biting off the head in a moment suggestive of Francisco Goya’s c. 1823 painting Saturn Devouring His Son. Contemporary Western society is not so concerned with the arms and feet of warriors, but biting a head 60

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Grendel eating a corpse, from Beowulf (2007, dir. Robert Zemeckis).

off stands out as being truly horrific. Grendel is presented as a bloody, cannibalistic monster. Grendel’s monstrousness, of which his eating of the dead is a marker, is simply part of who and what he is. Grendel is, in Andy Orchard’s words, ‘a monstrous exile, a man-shaped creature exciting a degree of pity’ who lives in remote isolation.12 Like the ghouls of the next chapter, Grendel lives in seclusion, distant from human settlements but close enough to hear their merriment and haunt their graveyards. Beowulf is a pagan chieftain in Christian clothes, so to speak, and it is within this context of isolated pagan 61

Francisco Goya, Saturn Devouring His Child, 1820–23, oil on mural (transferred to canvas).

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monster and Christian community that Grendel’s eating of the thanes he kills makes the most sense. Ben Reinhard argues that Beowulf is ‘deliberately calculated to provide the greatest possible shock to the Christian sensibilities of the audience’: If we assume a Christian context for Beowulf, it is not difficult to view Grendel’s cannibalistic feast – eating flesh, drinking blood – as a sort of grotesque anti-Eucharist. The penitent refuses to keep his penance, and he partakes in a hideous parody of the communion he would be cut off from. In so doing, he attains a kind of diabolical perfection. Not for nothing is Grendel Godes feond [God’s Adversary].13 Grendel is not just pagan, he is virtually anti-Christ, a being that lives only to be destroyed, as his cannibalism is the opposite of Eucharistic practice. Interestingly, J.R.R. Tolkien, while best known for his Middle Earth narratives, was also a Beowulf expert, whose knowledge of the poem profoundly influenced his own writing. There are echoes of both Beowulf and Grendel the corpse-eater in The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit. Medieval expert Ruth Johnston Staver sees Tolkien’s approach to monsters as similar to Beowulf: they are unredeemable, ‘only capable of immoral action. They cannot choose between right and wrong but appear only capable of choosing wrong. Monsters live to attack and must be killed at all opportunities.’14 Killing those who eat the dead is always right in this worldview. In Tolkien, orcs, trolls and goblins are eaters of dead human, elf, dwarf and hobbit flesh (indeed, Staver calls orcs ‘mini-Grendels’15). 63

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Another twentieth-century author to engage with Beowulf was Michael Crichton, whose Eaters of the Dead (1976), set in 922 ce (a century and a half after Beowulf was probably originally composed), retells the story of Beowulf and does so through a fictional rewriting of yet another ancient manuscript. Ibn Fadlan, a tenth-century Arab, travelled from Baghdad to Russia and was in contact with Vikings. He wrote of his travels, Viking life and culture, and his perceptions of their mythology. His manuscript still exists. Crichton wanted to retell the story of Beowulf from the point of view of an outsider, and thus imagined that the journey of Ibn Fadlan took him to Heorot. Grendel, Grendel’s mother and the dragon were all manifestations of a tribe of Neanderthals that had survived into the tenth century. They would raid from their caverns under a nearby mountain and take their dead with them, so as to keep their mystique, alongside the bodies of those they had killed, for later consumption. They were ruled by a priestess of a fertility goddess (Grendel’s mother) and their large group coming down the mountain with torches lit resembled a fire serpent (the dragon). Crichton’s Buliwyf (the original name of Beowulf ) first kills the raiding Neanderthals in Heorot, showing his thanes that they face men, not ghosts or monsters. He then leads the fight to the Neanderthals in the caves beneath the mountains where they live, thus killing the ‘mother’ – actually the high priestess – and the ‘dragon’, so to speak, after killing ‘Grendel’16 If, as noted above, the poem was ‘written by a Northern pagan, steeped in Norse legend, but copied and interpolated by a Christian monk who baptized the text with minor Christian additions’, we can also look to Grendel’s mother and father, metaphorically speaking, to see how he is related to other Norse eaters of the dead and the eaters of the dead defeated or converted by 64

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Christians (including ones found in the Nowell Codex alongside Beowulf).

Northern Eaters of the Dead Norse legend contains two creatures in particular that are related to Grendel and who also are known to eat the dead: draugr and trolls. The former are animated corpses in Norse mythology. They have been reported to attack, kill and eat raw human flesh. They are the walking dead: they live in a barrow, then come out at night and eat human flesh.17 Medieval Scandinavian literature often preserved ideas from a pre-Christian past in which the malevolent dead threatened the living and a heroic figure would defeat the walking corpses. In the early thirteenth century Saxo Grammaticus, a Danish Monk (who, tangentially, tells the story of Prince Amleth, who feigned madness in order to seek revenge against the uncle who usurped the throne at Elsinore and whose story is best known as Shakespeare’s Hamlet), wrote a history of the Danish people. One of his tales concerns Asmund Berserkers-Slayer, a warrior who had sworn an oath of friendship with a man named Asvith: when Asvith perished, Asmund would be buried alive with his friend. When a group of Swedes broke into the tomb by accident, they were greeted by the still-living Asmund, who looked as if he were a corpse. He explained that Asvith had returned from the dead and attacked him, also eating the horse and dog with which they had been buried. Only decapitation ended Asvith’s attempt to eat Asmund. Similarly, when Asmund’s friend Aran died, Asmund waited by the tomb for him to return from the dead. Once returned, Aran proceeded to consume dead animals 65

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and people until Asmund cut off his head (but not before he tore off Asmund’s ears).18 Similarly, in Grettir’s Saga, a draugr named Glámr, similar in behaviour to Grendel, is an animated corpse.19 Glámr kills warriors and eats those he kills until defeated by Grettir. Analogous to Grendel and his mother, trolls represent a very real danger in Norse lore. Trolls in the Norse sagas are occasionally eaters of humans, living and dead.20 Traditionally, however, trolls cook human flesh before they eat it, whereas Grendel eats his victims raw, before their bodies have even cooled in death. In a sense Grendel is worse than trolls, as, animal-like, he simply tears bodies apart and eats them, hands and feet and all. The eating of the dead by draugr and trolls and the fear it engenders make sense in northern climes. Survival cannibalism is not unknown in the Scandinavian lands (see, for example, the Völsunga saga, Yngvars saga víðförla and Hálfdanar saga, which all present scenes of giants and trolls eating human flesh as a kind of survival cannibalism and heroes eating human flesh in order to gain the magical attributes the organs give), as is famine. Infant abandonment and cannibalism were but two solutions during periods of famine and thus also real dangers during the harshest, longest winters. In pagan tales, cannibalism is a marker of someone or something reduced to less-than-human status attempting to survive. In contrast, Cannibalism with a capital C is a marker of evil and of spiritual pollution in the emerging Christian era. Warriors do not defeat monsters that eat human flesh; the flesh of Christ does.

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Christians and Cynocephali The ancient Greeks and Romans, Pliny among them, describe the cynocephali, a group of dog-headed people who were known for their cannibalism. They appear frequently in lists of the monstrous people who live on the margins of Europe. To the Greeks and the Romans, such beings were simply another foreign people who did not live at the centre of the world as they themselves did; merely another strange ethnicity, alongside those whose heads and faces were in their chests and the monopods – those who only had a single leg. For Christians, however, cynocephali represented a special group – beings whose conversion was sought because they were monstrous cannibals. In the apocryphal Ethiopic Christian text The Contendings of the Apostles, saints Andrew and Bartholomew seek out dog-headed cannibals to convert. The author goes out of his way to assure the reader of the monstrous, terrifying nature of the cynocephalus: Now his appearance was exceedingly terrible. He was four cubits in height, and his face was like unto the face of a great dog, and his eyes were like unto lamps of fire which burn brightly, and his teeth were like unto the tusks of a wild boar, or the teeth of a lion, and the nails of his hands were like unto carved reaping hooks, and the nails of his toes were like unto the claws of a lion, and the hair of his head came down over his arms like unto the mane of a lion, and his whole appearance was awful and terrifying.21 In The Contendings the creature has named itself ‘Abominable’, but wants to be a Christian. Although a man-eater, his conversion 67

‘Alexander the Great fighting the dog-headed Cynocephali’, miniature illumination from The Battles of Alexander the Great, late 15th century.

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changes him: he no longer craves the flesh of dead humans, and he changes his name to ‘Christianus’. Attempted conversion of such creatures was appealing to missionaries at the time The Contendings were promulgated: it marks a triumph for Christ’s followers if such a grotesque beast converts, and glorious martyr­ dom if the cynocephali eat the missionaries.22 Certainly there is a parallel drawn by the early Christian authors of the cannibal/ anthropophagus who gives up human flesh for the body of Christ. Counter to those who accuse Christians of being cannibals, this text seems to suggest the Eucharist is a cure for cannibalism. The Passion of St Christopher, another story in the Nowell Codex, also features monsters being converted to Christianity, most notably Christopher himself. Christopher was born a giant with a dog’s head and the name ‘Reprobus’. He was a cannibal as well, and sought to serve the most powerful king there was. Upon seeing kings afraid of the Devil and learning that Christ defeats the Devil, Reprobus sought to serve Christ. When converted, he took the name Christopher, which means ‘Christ-bearer’, and was eventually beheaded for his faith. Rebrobus has much in common with Abominable, above: ‘Both are cannibals of great stature, both have dog’s heads, both change their names from pejorative pagan ones to favorable Christian ones,’ names which, we might note, specifically reference Christ.23 Grendel, on the other hand, is given no such opportunity to convert. He does not meet a Christian saint; he is not baptized; he does not change his name to ‘Christdel’ or the like. He meets a pagan warrior instead, has his arm torn off and dies. Grendel pays the pagan price for being a cannibal in a text that moves towards Christianity, but never quite reaches it. 69

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Ogres Like so much pop culture, while Shrek has made ogres fun, it has completely obscured the medieval perception of them, which was anything but. In Kornhausplatz (Granary Place) in Bern, Switzerland, in the middle of the square sits Kindlifressenbrunnen – ‘Child-eating Fountain’ – created in 1545 by Hans Gieng. An ogre eats a naked child while sitting upon a sack full of more children. What made ogres especially terrifying is their preference for child flesh, which would carry over into folklore in the form of witches, wolves and giants – remember ‘be he alive or be he dead, I’ll grind his bones to make my bread’? Like Grendel, ogres live outside society. They are eaters of humans, especially children. They often live with a woman, ­notably a mother or wife. Like Grendel, they are pagan holdovers into a Christian era. And also like Grendel, their alleged fearsome­ ness is undercut by the ease of their defeat. At least a warrior tore off Grendel’s arm. Ogres are defeated by children and cats. Let us begin by remembering three important facts about ogres. First, ‘ogre’ derives from the Latin Orcus, another name for Hades, the god of the underworld.24 In other words, ogres are an embodiment of hell. Second, ogres are eaters of dead children by choice and their chief adversaries are living, hungry children (why those children are hungry is particularly relevant). This relationship extends in fairy tales to witches, giants and other monsters. Third, ogres are grotesque, monstrous figures who are ultimately defeated by those they would eat.25 Marina Warner sees a direct line from the Cyclops Polyphemus to ogres and giants, which means Hansel and Gretel are the great, great, great-grandchildren of Odysseus.26 Like Grendel, they thus also 70

Kindlifresserbrunnen (child-eating fountain) sculpture by Hans Gieng in Kornhausplatz, Bern, 1545.

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have pagan and Christian origins. Ogres have become the comic villains of cautionary tales for children, but let us not forget that they and their ilk represented a real threat to the people of late medieval Europe. The fairy tales now told to children began life as medieval folk tales that were then collected by individuals in the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. And, like all stories, they were created by specific people for specific purposes and have changed over time for each new audience. Ogres are part of a larger body of eaters of the dead in general and children in particular in fairy tales. A major theme in the works of the Brothers Grimm, Charles Perrault and others is the combat between abandoned children and ‘ogres, giants, witches, demons and magicians’ who desire to eat children.27 At least nineteen of the fairy tales by the Grimms and Perrault feature ogres, with another two-dozen featuring child-eating witches, giants and wolves. Wolves, tangentially, like dogs, are historically linked with corpse-eating, and not just in fairy tales. Abbé NoëllAntoine Pluche wrote in Le Spectacle de la nature ou Entretiens sur les particularités de l’histoire natuelle (1752) that we might regard corpse-eating wolves as ‘a living cloaca, animal graves which seek out and swallow’.28 Pluche imagines the digestive tract of the wolf itself is an actual grave – a place where dead bodies end up. That image and analogy might apply to most of the beasts in this book. As Warner observes, ‘female witches have been researched, analyzed, and debated with far more perception and interest than ogres.’29 In fairness, one of the dominant reasons for this is that, in a sense, witches are historic and ogres are mythic. Academics have analysed historic witch narratives as much if not more than the fairy-tale versions. Thousands of women (and men) were tried and executed for witchcraft – no ogres were ever put on trial. In other 72

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words, witches were perceived as real, with real-world consequences (especially for women, which makes them a primary subject for feminist analysis and critique); ogres were not. The rise of feminist readings of culture in the 1960s focused on women’s power and victimization by society. Ogres, by gender, are male, part of the patriarchy and part of the problem, so to speak, as is amply demonstrated in fairy tales. Ogres embody the danger represented by larger males, from one’s own father on. Ogres, Warner notes, ‘dramatize the complexity of the issue: they variously represent abominations against society, civilization and family, yet are vehicles for expressing ideas of proper behavior and due order.’30 Witches represent the dangerous female other, ogres the dangerous male other. They embody medieval fears. Yet ogres are metaphors; thousands of women actually were tortured and killed due to belief in witchcraft. What unites the two in culture is their perceived threat to children. Adults and especially parents are afraid of the deaths of children. Children are afraid of what harm may come to them. Fairy tales use that fear to keep children in line, but they also represent adult anxieties for said children. When one examines the stories of ogres and their cannibalistic kin, one finds fear of famine, fear of the monstrous other and fear of being devoured, all juxtaposed with the virtues of cooperation and being quick-witted. Tables can be turned easily with ogres. There is, we might note, an element of identification by the hearer of the tale both with the heroic child who defeats the ogre, and with the ogre itself. Ogres are children writ large – all id and consumption.31 Children behave like ogres – making demands, irrational and violent. That is one of the reasons children can defeat them. Thus these stories also serve as a cautionary tale of the dangers of ogreish behaviour – you just might find yourself 73

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falling a great distance, or eaten by a cat. The ambiguity and tension between children and adults is made manifest in these tales. Ogres also represent the memory of a world in which childhood mortality is a regular reality. They represent a memory of a medieval world prone to famine. After all, through the example of the Donner Party, as will be discussed later, survival cannibalism is a threat to children most of all. The very young (and very old) are the first to die and the first to be eaten. Famine lives on in fairy tales. It is important to remember that Hansel and Gretel were brought into the woods in the first place because the land was experiencing food scarcity. Their stepmother insists their father abandon them, otherwise ‘we shall all have to starve to death.’32 Oddly, in a time of survival cannibalism, the stepmother’s suggestion could be viewed as a kindness: at least she does not propose eating the children, only abandoning them. In spite of this, however, the parents in fairy tales such as this are the original ogres – they are the very first to intend the children ill. In ‘Hansel and Gretel’, after being abandoned in the woods by their father, the children find the home of a witch that is itself made of food. When the witch finds them gnawing on the house, she takes them prisoner and begins to fatten the children up. They survive by their wits; and by killing the woman holding them as future foodstuffs. Every element of the tale concerns scarcity of food as opposed to abundance of food. The witch has a house made of food but prefers to eat children. The children are starving and would prefer not to be eaten. After Gretel shoves the witch in the oven, the two are able to escape with wealth and food and find their father again. The other evil woman who would hoard foodstuffs for herself has also perished, but the children now rescue the father from starvation and they live happily ever after. 74

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Charles Perrault gathered the stories now associated with Mother Goose in his 1697 collection Histoires ou contes du temps passé (Stories from Times Past), including Le Maître chat ou Le Chat botté, an adaptation of Il gatto con gli stivali, recorded initially by Giovanni Francesco Straparola and known in English as ‘Puss in Boots’.33 Puss, a cat who is both the sole inheritance of the third son of a dead miller and a mastermind who brings the young man to become the son-in-law of the king, demonstrates skill at manipulating situations to benefit his master. Puss persuades his master to remove his clothes and fall into a river as the king goes by, after which he is presented to the king as the fictional Marquis of Carabas. Puss rides ahead, finding an ogre in a palace, and challenges him to change shape. The ogre first becomes a lion, but then, when prodded to show he can also transform into small creatures, becomes a mouse, which is immediately pounced upon and consumed by Puss (the eater becomes the eaten!). Puss then tells the king that the ogre’s palace and grounds are the property of the Marquis of Carabas, to whom the king immediately grants his daughter’s hand in marriage. Interestingly, the ogre is clearly an aristocrat, as witnessed by his surroundings and possessions, but he is also easily defeated by Puss. ‘Eat the rich’ takes a new form in Perrault’s tale. In Der Menschenfresser (literally ‘The Man-eater’, but translated as ‘The Ogre’, 1854), written by Ignaz and Josef Zingerle, a young boy picking strawberries stays out too late and finds an ogre’s house in which to spend the night.34 The ogre’s wife, presumably human, hides him in a barrel. The ogre returns home and smells ‘human flesh’, demanding the boy stick his finger out through a hole in the barrel. The boy, like Hansel, holds out a twig and the ogre decides he is too thin to eat immediately and must 75

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Gustave Doré, ‘Puss in Boots before the Ogre’, illustration in Charles Perrault, Les contes de Perrault (1862).

be fattened up, buying the boy time to escape the next morning. The boy escapes with some of the ogre’s wealth too. Although comparatively rare, there are female ogres, mostly associated with the Krampus and yuletide celebrations, who eat naughty children. Ogresses are particularly terrifying in northern cultures. The same cultures and climes that produced Grendel produced ogresses. In parts of Germany, Perchta, originally a pagan alpine goddess, is a female variant on Krampus; a witch who arrives on the feast of the Epiphany to threaten (and eat) naughty children. She goes from house to house crying out: 76

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Gustave Doré, illustration for Hop-o’-My-Thumb, in Charles Perrault, Les contes de Perrault (1862).

Kinder oder Speck Derweil gehe ich nicht weg. Children or bacon or I won’t go away.35 She and her masked followers, called Perchten, give confectionery or pieces of silver to good children. As her cry suggests, she equates children with bacon and must be given one or the other to eat. If children have been naughty, she and her followers 77

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slit open their bellies, replace their organs with straw and pebbles and then take the entrails to eat. Similarly, in Iceland, Gryla is an ogress associated with Christmas. She captures children who have been naughty and carries them back to her cave to eat.36 The female ogres cannot be tricked like stupid male ogres can. Female ogres can only be appeased by alternative foods and good behaviour. As with Shrek, modern incarnations of folk traditions have removed much of the terror and visceral experience of their predecessors, making safe for children what was once the horrific possibility of being devoured. Both Grendel and the ogres represent the dangers of famine in northern European cultures. Both are pagan monsters that have been filtered through a later, superimposed Christian culture. Both show that they can be defeated by the brave, the clever and the strong, but not before the monsters wreak havoc across the land. Their eating of children or warriors proves to be a marker of their unfitness to live in human society, hence the need to defeat them. And in the end, Grendel and the ogres are indeed vanquished. With them dies their cannibalism, and a new period of prosperity may begin. Also defeating these pagan monsters is the advent of Christianity, which has offered a different body to eat: that of Christ. In European culture, those who eat the body of Christ convert and become fit to live in human society, even if they have a dog’s head. Those who do not (looking at you, Grendel, ogres and draugr) are simply killed and their possessions taken (yet another form of consumption).

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Four

Ghūls and Ghouls

For a ghoul is a ghoul, and at best an unpleasant companion for man.1 From H. P. Lovecraft’s The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath

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t the heart of this volume, the embodiment of a being that only eats corpses, is the ghoul – an Arabic myth that travelled to Europe during the Enlightenment and blossomed in gothic and Lovecraftian fiction. From William Beckford’s late eighteenthcentury Vathek and Lovecraft’s ‘Pickman’s Model’ to a recent spate of B-movies, the ghoul gets no credit for being a strong presence in the imagination of horror, but it always lurks in the shadows. So synonymous with horror has the ‘ghoul’ become that we speak of someone or something being ‘ghoulish’ if they take too much pleasure in things dead or horrific or are morbidly interested in death or disaster. And yet the ghūl is different from the ‘ghoul’. The corpse-­ eating monster of gothic fiction is a development out of Arabic folk c­ ulture that does not always bear a strong resemblance to its Eastern version. The name in Arabic ‫( لوغ‬ghūl) means ‘to 79

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seize’, according to many sources, but other etymologies have also been offered. Thirteenth-century Arab scholar Abū al-Fadil Ibn Manzū argues the root term ghāl (to kill) is the origin of ‘ghoul’. Other sources argue for ‘death’ or ‘murder’. Ahmed K. Al-Rawi concludes that the origin is closest to words that mean ‘kill’ and ‘death’ and that the ghūl is seen as a monster that kills, not that seizes or takes.2 Known in the West as the original corpse-eater, the ghoul’s presence in Arabic and Middle Eastern culture goes back millennia. Dwelling in deserts, tombs, burial grounds and other uninhabited places, as well as shapeshifting in some stories and originating as a female demon in others, the ghoul is a dog-like carrion eater. Indeed, according to legend they exist in places that give them access to fresh carrion – such as graveyards and charnel grounds. The ghoul takes many forms, and yet remains the number one corpse-eater. Ghouls are brought into existence in a variety of manners according to myth and fiction.3 One might be born a ghoul – they are, after all, seemingly their own species. The ghouls were created by Allah. In other legends, they are former humans who transform into ghouls because of their wickedness or because they have eaten human flesh. Indeed, as with the wendigo, it is often the eating of human flesh that brings about the transformation into a monster. Some legends also present ghoulism as a form of disease, not unlike vampirism; one becomes a ghoul by being bitten by a ghoul. But the actual origin of the ghoul begins with the ghūl in pre-Islamic Arabia.

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The Original Ghūl Accounts of the historic Arabic ghūl come to us from both folk tales and historical accounts. Both present the ghūl as a monstrous ravager of humanity to be defeated and killed by heroic warriors or clever children. Numerous folk tales concerning ghouls circulated throughout the Middle East before the coming of Islam.4 While, as noted below, the Western ghoul bears little resemblance to the original Arabic ghūl, some elements of the contemporary ghoul can be traced back to this period. For example, pre-Islamic Arabic mythology saw dogs, and black dogs in particular, as evil, or even as embodiments of devils in animal form.5 This cultural bias against dogs continued into the Islamic era, with dogs being seen as ritually unclean. Kaled Abou El Fadl argues that this belief grew out of concern regarding dogs being infected with rabies (wild dogs especially can be carriers of disease and will feast on human garbage).6 Dogs would even be buried with the bodies of criminals, rebels and other undesirables as ‘an expression of contempt’ for the deceased.7 Tangentially, dogs are eaters of the dead as well. A Canadian couple died in their rural Saskatchewan home in 2011 and their seven dogs consumed their remains before they were finally discovered a week later.8 Many societies regard dogs as unclean precisely because of their tendency to scavenge our remains.9 The Iliad alone makes nine references to dogs eating bodies. In the Bible, Jezebel is thrown from a window and ‘dogs will devour her on the plot of ground at Jezreel, and no one will bury her.’10 Last, some Muslim communities in East Africa despise dogs due to their belief that dogs ate the body of the Prophet Muhammad.11 (Oddly, in Japan, dogs’ penchant for eating corpses and carrion was 81

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viewed in the medieval period as a positive, with such b ­ ehaviour regarded as ‘a form of public hygiene’.12) Overall, however, one can perceive a fairly universal belief (and experience) that dogs are eaters of the dead, which may explain why ghouls are described as ‘dog-like’. The ‘original’ ghoul in Arabia was ‘an ugly female devil who can transform herself into an attractive woman, in order to set travellers astray in the wilderness, and thus lead them to their death’.13 This version of the ghoul is fairly distant from the modern conception in a number of ways. The ghoul in fiction and later folk tales is almost, but not always, presented as male. The original ghūl is a shapeshifter who, rather than appearing hideous and dog-like, is a beautiful woman. The ghūl’s main technique is to use this illusion to distract travellers from the correct path in order to consume them. As the cultural concept of the ghoul expanded, they came to be perceived as monsters of either gender with fangs, cloven feet and claws who could appear in different forms. In other words, the ghoul remained a shapeshifter through much of its early cultural existence. This reputation carries over into the fifteenth century. Arab poet Ka’ab bin Zuhayr writes ‘No condition lasts forever, for it changes like the changing shape of ghouls.’14 Last, the ghoul was thought to be able to possess people. Dogs that ate tainted meat (or that had rabies) were believed to become possessed by a ghūl. If a man were bitten by such a dog he would be locked up, and if he also displayed signs of madness, it was believed he, too, was possessed by the ghūl.15 Not only is this another link between dogs and ghūls, but it demonstrates the belief that ghūls can possess humans and drive them mad. 82

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The Muslim Ghūl Ghouls are not mentioned in the Quran, but contested references appear in the Hadith (a collection of stories about the Prophet Muhammad). Al-Rawi reports some Islamic theologians claiming that ghouls existed before Islam, but Allah no longer permitted them to exist once Muhammad had introduced Islam.16 Other scholars claim that Muhammad not only confirmed the c­ ontinuing existence of ghouls, but offered advice on how to combat them. For Muhammad, ghouls were female demons that spoiled or destroyed food (note again the link between a monster that will eventually be associated with carrion-eating and the challenge of humans to find and keep food in an area known for food scarcity).17 Muhammad told his followers that ghouls could be driven away by reciting verses from the Holy Quran.18 By the ninth century the ghoul was firmly established as a reality in Islam. Arab historian Abu al-Hasan Ali al-Mas’udi (896–956) wrote in Meadows of Gold that Allah created two demons who then laid thirty eggs, one of which ‘produced the ghouls, which chose for their refuge ruins and desert’.19 Medieval Yemeni historian al-Hasan al-Hamdani (c. 893–945) also reports that the ghouls preferred lost cities and desert ruins.20 These creatures were demons and enemies of Allah, cursed by Him. Their existence was not to be doubted: ‘Arabs in general have had a strong conviction in the reality of ghouls.’21 Ghouls continued to manifest in Arabic literature in the tenth century. Poet Abū ‘I-Faraj al-Is.fāhānī wrote: I saw two eyes in an ugly face like the head of a cat, Having a cloven mouth and Two deformed legs and a dog’s scalp.22 83

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The hero of that story kills the ghoul with a sword. Indeed, many ghouls in Arab literature, folk literature and poetry seem to exist to be fought and killed by heroic Muslim warriors. Arab Bedouins tell many stories of fighting ghouls. Heroes use swords and intelligence to battle these demonic creatures. Yet as the ghoul continued to evolve, its role in Arabic culture also changed, though always remained a presence. By the fifteenth century the ghūl was popular in both literature and folk tales. The ghoul is present in every Arab nation’s culture, but there exist local variations. In Iraq, for example, they tell of a creature called the si’lah, which ‘is the most wicked and most dangerous type of ghoul’.23 A medieval legend from Egypt speaks of a race of ghouls found in Yemen ‘which are the result of the joining together of a wolf ’s seed, smoke from a fire, and a human seed in the body of a human woman’, the offspring of which inhabited a place in Yemen called ‘The Valley of the Ghouls’, until they were wiped out by King Sayf.24 Egypt also offers the qutrub, a person who at night transforms into a beast that feeds upon corpses. In Egypt ghūls are said to be found in the Sinai Peninsula. In his exploration of the supernatural world of Islam, Legends of the Fire Spirits, Robert Lebling reports that on Mount Barka, in the Sinai Desert between Nuweiba and Suez, the Cave of the Ghouls is located. Allegedly a family of ghouls lived in the cave, kidnapping, killing and devouring travellers. Lebling further reports that the cave is real and until recently could be reached by climbing the mountain, but after severe weather, the cave is now inaccessible.25 A unique female ghoul is found in Sirat Sayf Ben Dhi Yazan (The Adventure of Sayf Ben Dhi Yazan), a 2,000-page Arab folk 84

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epic from the fifteenth or sixteenth century. Though the historic Sayf Ben Dhi Yazan was a sixth-century Jewish Arabic king who, with Persian backing, fought the Ethiopians, the epic transforms him into a mighty Muslim warrior who fights monsters and giants. King Sayf, as the epic calls him, ventures to the Valley of the Ghouls and climbs to the top of a tree to sleep safely. First discovered by a male ghoul who wishes to devour him, he then finds himself confronted by a group of ghouls who summon an old woman, ‘her hair white as milk and her body like plucked cotton’.26 She invites him to come down and he refuses: ‘I cannot come down, for any man who goes down to a ghoul perishes, either slain or devoured.’27 She reveals that she is Ghaylouna, the queen of the ghouls, though not a ghoul herself, and pledges his safety. He descends the tree and is offered half a dead deer to eat, and he declines but instead eats lotus fruit. She narrates the history of this particular group of ghouls, who were descended from an exiled wizard king whose wife was raped by a wolf and subsequently impregnated by her husband. The mix of wolf and human seed resulted in ghouls, yet another link between monster and canine. They have bred and filled the valley until it is now known as the Valley of the Ghouls. She also reports, however, that the father, who was also her father, prophesied the coming of King Sayf, who would cleanse the valley. With her advice, the father’s spells and the power of Allah, King Sayf kills all the ghouls and converts Ghaylouna to Islam. We can note from this story that even ghouls can convert to Islam, and that Allah maintains power over them. We might compare this to the story mentioned in Chapter Two about Christians using communion to defeat wendigos – God has the power to stop cannibal monsters, if a willing servant of God is able to use the 85

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Hyena eating a corpse, miniature illustration from a medieval bestiary, c. 1200–1210.

faith to convert the monster. In that sense, man-eating monsters can become men through the power of conversion. Religion, a source of flesh-eating, can also be a power against it. Yet there are others who argue the corpse-eating aspect of ghouls is actually a Western invention, not inherent to the Arabic monster. Al-Rawi contends the only link between the ghūl and the ghoul is found in the hyena.28 Arab scholars tell stories of hyenas as corpse-eaters that dig up graves and can be found prowling in 86

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burial areas. In Mecca in 1667 a hyena was preying upon animals and eventually attacked a woman. It was killed and the people referred to it as a ‘ghūl’, either because they did not know what it was or because it displayed the tendencies of the folkloric ghūl. As Al-Rawi plainly states, ‘This tale suggests the proximity with which people viewed the two creatures.’29 Certainly the hyena is known as a corpse-eater throughout the Middle East and Africa. In Ethiopia, blacksmiths were believed to be able to transform into hyenas. Called boudas, werehyenas robbed graves at midnight and consumed corpse meat. A s­ imilar creature is found in western Sudan: a cannibal monster that takes on a human form, usually as a blacksmith or woodcutter, and transforms into a hairy, hyena-like entity. It may be that the ghoul became associated with corpse-eating through its affiliation with the hyena. It may also be that the ghūl was simply made more horrific for Western audiences through orientalist literature.

The Ghoul Goes West Ghouls are prominently featured in several stories in The Thousand and One Nights, known in the West as The Arabian Nights and first translated into French in twelve volumes by Antoine Galland between 1704 and 1717. Galland took considerable liberties with the source material, and is the one who represented ghouls as ‘fearful creatures feasting on corpses in cemeteries’ in his version of ‘The Story of Sidi Nouman’.30 Ahmed K. Al-Rawi argues that it is solely in the work of Galland that the ghoul is perceived as a carrion-eater: 87

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In fact, ghouls depicted as male creatures residing in graveyards and eating corpses do not appear to be mentioned anywhere in the Arabic language, literature, culture or folktales, which seems to indicate that Galland added this detail himself in order to give a more horrific and exaggerated description of the ghoul.31 It is Galland who takes the predominantly female, shapeshifting monster of Arabic folk tales and transforms it into a male monster that seeks out corpses to eat. He made the ghūl into the ghoul. In doing so, he set the model of the ghoul for all Westerners who followed. With William Beckford’s Vathek: An Arabian Tale (1786), the ghoul goes gothic – Beckford’s volume is how the Arabic ghūl transformed into the European idea of the ghoul. Vathek is based upon a real person – al-Wāthiq bin Mu’tasim, the ninth Abbasid caliph, who is heavily fictionalized in Beckford’s novel and whose fall the novel chronicles. Vathek builds an observation tower of 11,000 steps to satisfy his thirst for knowledge of astronomy. Carathis, Vathek’s Greek mother, sacrifices and burns bodies in the tower Vathek has built. She encourages him to sacrifice children, maintain his drive for power and kill to get what he wants. She later visits a cemetery to make a pact with the ghouls that dwell there. Beckford’s ghouls are malevolent, terrible, cruel fiends, not unlike Carathis herself. She brings fresh corpses to the cemetery, additionally killing her guides, and has her servants knock on the doors of tombs to invite the ghouls to feast in exchange for information and directions.32 Samuel Henley translated Beckford from the French and published an English edition under the title An Arabian Tale a 88

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James Neagle, after Robert Smirke, ‘Amine Discovered with the Goule’, illustration from The History of Sidi Nouman, in Edward Forster, trans., The Arabian Nights (1802).

year before the French original was released, concealing Beckford’s authorship and claiming he had translated an ‘Arabick’ source.33 Eventually Beckford received credit for the tale when it was subsequently translated under its own title. The cemetery sequence 89

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Hyena robbing a tomb, miniature illustration from a medieval bestiary, late 12th century to early 13th century.

stood out in a tale of exotic and depraved actions, and thus the figure (and concept) of the ghoul became a staple of gothic literature in English. Vathek and The Arabian Nights had a profound (and orientalizing) influence on fantastic fiction. For example, H. P. Lovecraft read Henley’s notes to Vathek, which shaped his own take on ghouls, discussed below. Lord Byron’s poem ‘The Giaour: A Fragment of a Turkish Tale’ (1813), which takes its title from one of the key villains of Vathek and the Arabic word for ‘blasphemer’ or ‘infidel’, references ghouls, along with afrits – the angry spirits of murdered people – in an 90

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orientalist narrative that at this point in the poem suggests the woman being described is actually a vampire: Wet with thine own best blood shall drip Thy gnashing tooth and haggard lip; Then stalking to thy sullen grave, Go – and with Gouls and Afrits rave; Till these in horror shrink away From spectre more accursed than they!34 Byron seems to suggest that the lady in question, despite being beautiful, is more cursed and terrifying than ghouls and the spirits of the murdered. In doing so he links the gothic ghoul with the original ghūl, who one might recall transforms into a beautiful woman to lead men astray and destroy and consume them. Hans Christian Andersen jumped onto the ghoul train with ‘The Wild Swans’ (1838), in which the wicked stepmother and queen attempts to bewitch her stepdaughter, Princess Elisa, causing her to flee. Elisa encounters a pack of ghouls gorging on a corpse when she visits a cemetery to gather nettles. Believing her to be in league with the ghouls, a local archbishop accuses her of witchcraft. So interested was Europe in what was then termed ‘the Orient’ that ghouls appeared in a Danish story for children. Even Edgar Allan Poe, who has no ghouls appear in his stories, still refers to ghouls in his poems and stories to create a sense of the horrific and monstrous lurking about. In his poem ‘Ulalume’ Poe describes ‘a night in the lonesome October’ on which, reflecting upon a lost love, he finds himself in ‘the ghoulhaunted woodland of Weir’.35 Ghouls might not be at the centre of the early gothic, but they can always be found in the outskirts, 91

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margins and ghoul-haunted forests that one must pass through. By the middle of the nineteenth century the ghoul was firmly ensconced in gothic literature, and when he appeared he was inevitably digging up corpses to mangle and devour. Victorian folklorist Sabine Baring-Gould noted in 1865: Of a moonlight night weird forms are seen stealing among the tombs, and burrowing into them with their long nails, desiring to reach the bodies of the dead ere the first streak of dawn compels them to retire. These ghouls, as they are called, are supposed generally to require the flesh of the dead for incantations or magical compositions, but very often they are actuated by the sole desire of rending the sleeping corpse, and disturbing its repose.36 By means of an example she relates the tale of Foruari, a merchant of Baghdad, whose son married a beautiful girl without his consent. Each night the young bride would wait until her husband fell asleep and would leave the house. One night, he followed his wife, witnessed her enter first a cemetery and then a tomb and at last discovered her among a party of ghouls, feasting on the bodies of the long-dead. When he confronts her at home, she attacks him, and he kills her and buries her in the same cemetery where she feasted.37 The ghoul is a necessary part of any narrative that deals with Arabia, thanks especially to the ongoing influence of Vathek and The Arabian Nights. Nineteenth-century British poet William Ernest Henley wrote about ghouls in the poem ‘Arabian Night’s Entertainments’: 92

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Haply a Ghoul Sat in the churchyard under a frightened moon, A thighbone in his fist, and glared At supper with a Lady: she who took Her rice with tweezers grain by grain.38 Even in a comic setting, the ghoul’s props include bones, carrion and bodies, set in a churchyard, cemetery or charnel ground. Even in comic poems, the identifier of the ghoul is that he or she is a corpse-eater.

Ghouls in Modern Literature and Film The poor ghoul finishes far behind other monsters in Englishlanguage literature in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Vampires, zombies, mad scientists, shapeshifters, witches, ghosts and even slasher killers rate higher than the poor medieval Muslim monster. Yet the ghoul found a home, first in the writings of Lovecraft and his circle and literary descendants, and then in late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century fiction and film. The antecedent for this modern ghoul is found in Edgar Allan Poe, who referenced ghouls in his work, albeit in a much more limited fashion than those echoing Vathek or those who came after him. Poe’s other big contribution to ghoul-lore after ‘Ulalume’ is in the poem ‘The Bells’, in which he describes the people ‘that dwell up in the steeple’ ringing the bells as so: They are neither man nor woman – They are neither brute nor human – They are Ghouls: And their king it is who tolls 93

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The ghouls ringing the bells that haunt the narrator take pleasure in the disheartening and gloomy effect they have on those who hear them. The ghouls of Poe are actually ghoulish, perhaps even the grandparents of ec Comics’ Crypt-keeper or Vault-keeper, ghoulish-looking beings that take pleasure in being ghoulish, morbid and grim. Less well known today, but important for pulling the ghoul into American literature, is Edward Lucas White (1866–1934). In 1897 he wrote a poem called ‘The Ghoula’, a first-person narrative related by a female ghoul who tracks a human male hunting a doe. Set in Persia, the ghoul follows ‘An Englishman who strayed alone, / Careless of nomads, ghouls, or spells.’39 She watches him hesitate to shoot the doe and identifies with his sensitivity towards his prey. She makes herself known to him, and the reader might infer she is not a hideous monster as he embraces her and kisses her. She then ‘bit his wind pipe through and through’, bringing his corpse back to her children. Her only regret is that if he had succeeded in shooting the doe she would have taken that meat and left him alive, but she is still happy to have ‘firm flesh to eat’.40 This poem clearly serves as an antecedent to White’s betterknown short story ‘Amina’ (1906), another tale of a female ghoul and an English hunter. Waldo hunts ghouls in a tomb in Persia with his servant Hassan. He has seen nearly twenty ghoul cubs and has been told that the male is not in the tomb. He finds himself lost outside when a woman approaches. She looks unusual, but human: She wore no anklets, he observed, no bracelets, no necklace or earrings. Her bare arms he thought the most muscular he had ever seen on a human being. Her nails were pointed 94

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and long, both on her hands and feet. Her hair was black, short and tousled, yet she did not look wild or uncomely. Her eyes smiled and her lips had the effect of smiling, though they did not part ever so little, not showing at all the teeth behind them.41 She does not look like the ghouls of gothic literature; she passes for an abnormal-looking human woman. Waldo is surprised when she speaks English. She offers to guide him back to his camp. She explains that her name is Amina and she is one of the ‘Free-folk’, who are neither Muslim nor Christian but their own people. Amina brings Waldo to her Free-folk family, where there are eighteen naked children running about. He asks her for water and she begins to move towards him threateningly when shots ring out and she drops dead. The children all vanish through holes in the walls. The local consul, who fired the shots at Amina, enters with Hassan. Waldo is outraged and asks why they murdered the woman. The consul responds by showing Waldo her teeth, ‘a fierce, deadly, carnivorous dentition, menacing and combative’, and removing her robe to show that her torso looked ‘like the underside of an old fox-terrier . . . from collar-bone to groin ten lolloping udders, two rows, mauled, stringy and flaccid’.42 Waldo, sickened by the sight, asks what she is and is told she is a ghoul. When he states that he thought they were mythical, the consul answers that ‘there are none in Rhode Island . . . This is Persia, and Persia is in Asia.’43 White offers dog-like monsters, closer to the original female ghouls posited by Ahmed K. Al-Rawi. White also represents the orientalizing trend that began in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries with texts such as Vathek, and grew in the twentieth-century: the association of Persia and indeed all of 95

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Asia with mystery and horror. The consul got one thing wrong, however. There are ghouls in Rhode Island. H. P. Lovecraft, in his youth, had a period of obsession with ‘Araby’, after having read The Arabian Nights. Calling himself Abdul Alhazred (the name he later assigned to the author of the Necronomicon), he dressed in robes, pretended to be an Arab prince and studied all elements of Arab culture (or at least what was available to him in turn-of-the-century Providence). So it should come as no surprise that Lovecraft featured ghouls in several of his stories, most notably ‘Pickman’s Model’ and The Dream-quest of Unknown Kadath, the latter having been profoundly influenced and shaped by Vathek, according to S. T. Joshi and David E. Schultz.44 The former was written in 1926 and published in the October 1927 issue of Weird Tales. Thurber, the narrator, relates his experiences with his friend, the Bostonian painter Richard Upton Pickman, whose reputation is scandalous due to the graphic and horrifying monsters he paints, to Eliot, another friend. No one will exhibit or buy Pickman’s painting Ghoul Feeding. Thurber divulges that he visited first Pickman’s studio and then Pickman’s underground workshop where he saw a hideous painting of a canine-like monster devouring a corpse. In the former he sees paintings such as The Lesson, depicting ‘a squatting circle of nameless dog-like things in a churchyard teaching a small child to feed like themselves’.45 Also in the studio, Subway Accident features ‘a flock of the vile things . . . clambering up from some unknown catacomb through a crack in the floor of the Boylston Street subway and attacking a crowd of people on the platform’.46 The painting’s title indicates that the attack will be covered up and called an ‘accident’, so as to hide the truth about ghouls from the public. Lastly, Thurber sees a 96

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painting of a group of ghouls holding ‘a well-known Boston guidebook’ and laughing. The painting is entitled Holmes, Lowell, and Long fellow Lie Buried in Mount Auburn and is a rare example of Lovecraftian humour.47 Pickman then leads Thurber down, through the cellar, to his underground workshop where he does most of his painting. Pickman shows Thurber a hideous painting of a ghoul: It was a colossal and nameless blasphemy with glaring red eyes, and it held in bony claws a thing that had been a man, gnawing at the head as a child nibbles at a stick of candy. Its position was a kind of crouch, and as one looked one felt that at any moment it might drop its present prey and seek a juicier morsel. But damn it all, it wasn’t even the fiendish subject that made it such an immortal fountain-head of all panic – not that, nor the dog face with its pointed ears, bloodshot eyes, flat nose, and drooling lips. It wasn’t the scaly claws nor the mould-caked body nor the half-hooved feet – none of these, though any one of them might well have driven an excitable man to madness.48 Pickman hears a noise and runs out of the underground studio with a gun. Thurber grabs a piece of paper attached to the hideous painting and Pickman returns, claiming he shot at rats. Pickman mysteriously disappears, and Thurber discovers the piece of paper he picked up is actually a photograph taken from life of the eponymous model – a real ghoul. Lovecraft’s The Dream-quest of Unknown Kadath (1926–7) concerns the journey of Randolph Carter through the dreamlands.49 Carter has dreamt of a city for several nights in a row, 97

H. P. Lovecraft’s drawing of a ghoul for ‘Pickman’s Model’, 21 June 1934.

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and then decides while asleep to walk the seven hundred steps into deeper sleep that lead him to the dreamlands, a real place humans can primarily access through dreaming. Captured by creatures called night-gaunts, Carter is brought to the Vale of Pnoth, which is full of bones thrown down from the underworld home of the ghouls above. Carter, however, has learned the language of the ghouls from Richard Upton Pickman, and calls for rescue: ‘he felt he could persuade a ghoul to guide him out of Pnoth.’50 Hauled up by three helpful ghouls, he meets Pickman, now fully transformed into a ghoul himself, who asks three ghouls to guide Carter safely to the upper dreamlands. After continuing his journey through a series of adventures, Carter goes underground, and in the ruined city of Sarkomand finds moon beasts torturing the three ghouls who guided him. Grateful for the earlier help, Carter summons more ghouls and night-gaunts to fight the moon beasts. After rescuing the three ghouls, the ghoulish army, Pickman and Carter ride a black galleon to the island that is the moon beasts’ stronghold and defeat them. As Anthony Pearsall argues, Lovecraft’s ghouls are ‘dynamic corpse-eaters, sturdy, resourceful, and even versatile in their way’.51 The ghouls agree to send an honour guard with Carter as he petitions to be admitted to the city he has seen in his dreams, but they disappear once he arrives at the mysterious throne room at the heart of Kadath. Lovecraft features ghoul-like creatures in other stories such as ‘The Picture in the House’, ‘The Rats in the Walls’ and ‘The Lurking Fear’. The eponymous ‘Outsider’ is not a ghoul, but he now rides ‘with the mocking and friendly ghouls on the nightwind’, ghouls the Outsider refers to as fiendish.52 In short, while Lovecraft presents ghouls as hideous, dangerous, corpse-devouring 99

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dog-like monsters, he just as often demonstrates happy, friendly, helpful ghouls in a ghoul society. It is this portrait that influences those who follow Lovecraft into the ghoul warrens and dreamlands. Lovecraft’s conception would echo to later weird and eerie writers. Robert Bloch, of Psycho fame, and part of the ‘Lovecraft Circle’ as a teenager, wrote several stories featuring ghouls, including ‘The Laughter of a Young Ghoul’ (while in high school, unpublished), ‘The Secret in the Tomb’ (published in Weird Tales in May 1935), ‘The Grinning Ghoul’, which introduced the mysterious volume Cultes des goules by the Comte d’Erlette (a play on August Derleth’s name, to whom the volume’s invention is sometimes erroneously attributed) and ‘The Creeper in the Crypt’. Bloch’s ghouls are very much in the Lovecraftian mode – an entire society of corpse-eaters living under the cemeteries of New England and other locales. He describes their world in ‘The Grinning Ghoul’: These were the dwellers that laired beneath; the ghastly spawn that ravened on the dead. They dwelt in knighted caverns lined with human bones and adored the primal gods before alters shaped of skulls. They had tunnels leading to the graves, and burrows still further below in which they stalked a living prey. These were the grisly night-gaunts that he beheld in dreams; these were ghouls.53 Bloch’s narrator (and hence Bloch) refuses to describe their appearance, ‘save to say that they were very horrible to look upon’.54 As Bloch left Lovecraftian writing behind, so too did he leave ghouls behind, although one could argue he continued 100

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writing ghoulish characters – after all, Norman Bates lives with the corpse of his mother. Clark Ashton Smith is another of the Lovecraft Circle to embrace the ghoul as a figure of horror literature. In ‘The Ghoul’ he recounts the trial of Noureddin Hassan. ‘He was accused of having slain seven people one by one, on seven successive nights, and of having left the corpses in a cemetery near Bussorah, where they were found lying with their bodies and members devoured in a fearsome manner, as if by jackals.’55 He admits to the judge that he killed the people because on the day of his beloved wife’s burial, he encounters a ghoul that explains it is going to eat her corpse, but will spare her body if Hassan brings eight corpses over eight nights to the cemetery for the ghoul to eat. He must kill these people because those who die of natural causes the ghoul will get anyway. Hassan deposits seven corpses before his arrest. The judge, sympathetic to his story, allows Hassan to go free and kill himself in the cemetery on the eighth night, thus keeping his promise to the ghoul, which is described as ‘a hideous demon of gigantic frame and stature, with eyes of scarlet fire beneath brows that were coarse as tangled rootlets, and fangs that overhung a cavernous mouth, and earth-black teeth longer and sharper than those of the hyena’.56 Smith would return to the ghoul several more times in stories such as ‘The Nameless Offspring’ and ‘The Charnel God’. The ghoul was a mainstay of early twentieth-century gothic and weird fiction. Henry S. Whitehead’s story ‘The Chadbourne Episode’ presents a pack of Persian ghouls, in the spirit of Edward Lucas White, who have emigrated to London. His tale, like ‘Pickman’s Model’, inverts the colonialist construction of ghouls. Unlike White’s ghouls, who are encountered by Englishmen in 101

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Persia, Whitehead and Lovecraft bring the ghouls to the United Kingdom and the United States, respectively. One need not travel to encounter this Arabian monster – they already walk under us. While Lovecraft and his generation were formulating modern stories of the ghoul, a new wave of explorers and colonizers were encountering the ghoul anew in the Middle East. Czech explorer Alois Musil travelled to the Jordanian desert and encountered an eighth-century Umayyad castle that ‘was said to be inhabited by a ghula or female ghoul’.57 He wrote, ‘The castle stood as gloomy as if it were forsaken by heaven itself. No wonder the Arabs attributed such a place to none but the ghoul.’58 This statement is clearly the produce of a feedback loop. Musil knows only the Western version of the ghoul, and thus when in Arabia associates the ghoul with landscapes claimed for the ghoul in Western literature. Brian McNaughton also created a world of ghouls in his 1997 collection of related stories The Throne of Bones, an anthology containing the eponymous novella and nine other tales set in a world like Lovecraft’s (although also significantly different in many other ways), in which ghouls and humans inhabit the same geographies, or, more accurately, ghouls inhabit the spaces below the burial grounds and occasionally intrude into the human world. His ghouls are animalistic, ‘gorging on carrion, burrowing through graves, haunting the night and fleeing the sun in dank tunnels’, with ‘lank and distorted limbs’, ‘brutish heads with . . . fanged muzzles’ and ‘hound-like ears’.59 McNaughton imagines an entire ghoul society, a monarchy (loosely ruled by King Vomikron Noxis, until he is killed) with laws and customs (these as often honoured in the breach as in the observance): they eat their own dead, and ‘are neither solitary, nor chaste by nature’.60 While they 102

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eschew the company of humans as a rule, they can mate with them to produce offspring that will become ghouls. Like Lovecraft, McNaughton imagines some are born ghouls and some ghouls are humans transformed. ‘The skull undergoes a drastic transformation,’ explains one character, ‘making it fit to butt aside rocks, and to support the muscles of the lower jaw’, so that they may snap bones with their mouths.61 Indeed, ‘traditional wisdom holds that ghouls bring about their condition themselves by indulging in morbid interests in adolescence. Gluttriel, god of Death, takes note of such youngsters and offers them the knowledge of the corpses they will eat in return for their lives.’62 One becomes a ghoul, in other words, by being ghoulish. McNaughton’s twist on the mythology, however, following up on this idea of ghouls being given knowledge of corpses, is that ghouls see the memories of the people they eat, and should they eat enough of any one individual, will even briefly resemble the person, taking on aspects of their personality until digested. In other words, the ghoul absorbs the essence of its food and manifests it briefly after consuming it. No other writer of ghouls has embraced this idea. McNaughton has also imagined a world in which individuals can become experts on these creatures, such as the ‘ghoulogist’ Dr Porfat of the Anatomical Institute. The stories of The Throne of Bones form a tapestry concerning the interactions of humans and ghouls, especially humans that are death-obsessed, lonely or otherwise either on the margins of society or representatives of a useless, decaying, corrupt aristocracy, ghoulhood being a metaphor for what the latter are – creatures surviving on the corpse of a dead, decaying society. Another writer to embrace Lovecraft’s ghouls is Caitlin R. Kiernan, who, like McNaughton, has returned to them in several 103

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stories and novels. ‘So Runs the World Away’ and ‘The Dead and the Moonstruck’, originally published in The Mammoth Book of Vampire Stories by Women (2001) and Gothic! Ten Original Dark Tales (2004), respectively, and collected in To Charles Fort, with Love, both feature ghouls, which have ‘canine faces’, ‘crooked hind legs’ and other dog-like qualities.63 Ghouls are hinted at, although not directly present in, other stories and novels by Kiernan, such as The Red Tree, in which Sarah, the protagonist, has rented a house in rural Rhode Island near the eponymous oak, which has a large stone at its base, alleged to have stairs leading down into warrens below it, hinting at the ghoul presence found in her previous novels, Low Red Moon, Murder of Angels and Daughter of Hounds.64 Kiernan’s Daughter of Hounds, third in a trilogy that includes Low Red Moon and Threshold and detailing the history of the Silvey family, set in Providence and admittedly owing a debt to Lovecraft, is her most thorough development of ghoul literature, imagining a community of ghouls living under Rhode Island, consisting of different varieties of the species. Some are born as ghouls, some are changelings, whose ghoul nature manifests in adolescence, and some are ‘children of the cuckoo’, or ‘stolen ones’ – infants kidnapped from humans and raised as ghouls, yet able to pass in human society.65 The ghouls are also referred to as ‘hounds’, raising the original canine connection of ghouls, noted above, and hence the title of the book. The ghouls work with a small number of humans – including, interestingly, organized crime – in order to procure what they need from the above world. Like McNaughton, Kiernan constructs an entire ghoul society, with customs and laws (one, introduced early in the volume, being that ‘children of the cuckoo’ take a ghoul name from the 104

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tombstones in the cemetery under which they live).66 While her protagonists are children of the cuckoo, the ghouls are presented as both social creatures (the volume begins with Madame Tersichore and Master Shardlace, both full ghoul teachers, giving a lesson to the young ghouls, both cuckoos and stolen ones) and terrifying monsters (the volume climaxes with an underground battle of the protagonists, one of whom is a cuckoo, against the ghoul community). In the United Kingdom, R. Chetwynd-Hayes elevated ghouls to one of the three ‘primary monsters’ in The Monster Club (1975), the others being vampire and werewolf. An anthology masquerading as a novel, The Monster Club at heart concerns itself with hybrids in the monster world. What happens when a ghoul and a vampire breed, or a ghoul and a human? The answers being, respectively, a Vamgoo and a Humgoo, which can then breed with each other, and other hybrids, to create such things as ‘Shaddies’, ‘Shadmocks’ and ‘Mocks’, each interbreeding reducing the powers of the offspring in relation to their supernatural ancestry. ‘The Humgoo’, one of five stories in the book, posits an entire village of ghouls in Loughville, a rural community in Hampshire about 50 kilometres (30 mi.) north of Portsmouth.67 Gerald Mansfield, driving from London to Portsmouth, becomes lost, enters the dilapidated village and finds his car sabotaged when he stops to ask for directions. He meets Luna, a young woman different from the other villagers, but no less cryptic. When Gerald asks her why she is dressed in ‘nightclothes’, she explains that everything they use in the village ‘comes from boxes’, which he eventually realizes are coffins.68 He then realizes ‘Loughville’ is an anagram for ‘ghoulville’, and that all in the village are ghouls, except Luna, who had a human mother and is thus a ‘humgoo’.69 105

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He further realizes the ghouls will not, or cannot, enter the village church, so he hides there with Luna while making an escape plan, as she explains that ‘the elders’ who run Loughville are off getting supplies ‘from outside’, but will return shortly.70 They escape, but Luna is mortally wounded as they run. Gerald wanders through the woods until he finds a motorway and a Rolls-Royce parked by its side. He tells the man and woman in the car that he has just escaped from a village of ghouls and begs to be taken to the authorities. They take him in the car, driving back to Loughville, explaining that they are ‘the elders’ coming back from a supply run and they are delighted to return an escaped meal to the community. ‘The Humgoo’ is one of three stories dramatized in the film version of The Monster Club, with some minor changes, representing one of the few appearances of actual ghouls on film, though the name ‘ghoul’ gets borrowed a good deal. A number of other genre authors have ghouled it up as well. Jim Butcher, Laurel Hamilton, Edward Lee, Larry Niven, Harry Shannon,71 and Chelsea Quinn Yarbro have all written stories that feature ghouls. In 2007 Brian Keene published Ghoul, a novel concerning a ghoul in a small-town cemetery that only three tween boys are aware of – their warnings go unheeded.72 It was adapted by William M. Miller in 2012 as a low-budget television film (under the same name as the book) that changed the nature of the ghoul, making it a corrupted human instead of a true ghoul. As with Hans Christian Andersen’s ‘Wild Swans’, mentioned above, ghouls also appear in young people’s literature. C. S. Lewis made them foot soldiers of the White Witch in the Narnia series, fighting alongside giants, goblins, wolves and other evil creatures, and coming from the land of Calormen, dwelling among the Tombs of the Ancient Kings. In the Harry Potter books, 106

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the Weasley family keep a ghoul as a pet in the attic of their home, the Burrow. No flesh-eating is mentioned. They are presented in the Harry Potter series and in J. K. Rowling’s Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them as ‘not a particularly dangerous creature . . . It resembles a somewhat slimy, buck-toothed ogre’ and is not very bright.73 R. L. Stine’s Goosebumps series also featured ghouls in Attack of the Graveyard Ghouls, in which a young man knocks over a tombstone on a school field trip and releases a ghoul, which is then able to swap bodies with him.74 Last, Neil Gaiman’s award-winning The Graveyard Book, telling the story of young Bod (short for ‘Nobody’), the only living boy raised in a cemetery, features ghouls, described as ‘parasites, and scavengers and eaters of carrion’, who contribute nothing to graveyard society.75 Gaiman describes one grave in every cemetery as being the ‘ghoul gate’, which allows ghouls to enter our world.76 They then capture Bod and explain to him that they come from another dimension called Ghûlheim, and take the name of whatever corpse they first eat when they enter our world. They are vulgar and low; they sing ‘ghoul-song’, which is ‘filled with foul words and worse sentiments, the most popular of which were simply lists of which rotting body parts to eat, and in what order’.77 They offer to take Bod back to Ghûlheim. One might note that the name Ghûlheim blends Arabic with Nordic – ‘home of Ghouls’ – thus further universalizing the ghoul and further removing it from its Middle Eastern origins. Part of the challenge in presenting ghouls in media, text and imagery is the lack of an iconic appearance for popular culture to appropriate and absorb. Vampires, zombies, werewolves, mummies and other ‘classic’ monsters are visually indicative. But what does a ghoul look like to contemporary audiences? There is no 107

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definitive ghoul aspect equivalent to the teeth of the vampire, the wrappings of the mummy or the decaying flesh and shambling walk of the zombie. More often than not, however, the word ‘ghoul’ is employed to mean things other than actual ghouls. The eponymous character in The Ghoul (1933), in fact, is not one. Played by Boris Karloff, Professor Henry Morlant, an Egyptologist, dies of a mysterious wasting disease believing that if he presents Anubis with a jewel he will be granted eternal life. When the jewel is stolen from his tomb, Morlant returns from the dead to retrieve the jewel but not to eat human flesh. The film, as Phil Hardy observes, was ‘an obvious attempt to cash in on the success of The Mummy’ and used the name of another Arabic monster.78 Similarly, the film Lycanthropus (1962) was also released under the names Werewolf in a Girl’s Dormitory, The Ghoul in School and Ghoul in a Girl’s Dormitory, despite the fact that the film’s monster is clearly a werewolf. The Ghoul of 1974 (released in the United States as Night of the Ghoul), featuring Peter Cushing and devised by Hammer regulars Anthony Hinds and Freddie Francis, is also notable for its lack of an actual ghoul. The eponymous character is at least a monstrous cannibal – kept in the attic by his father, a former missionary priest (Cushing) – who has learned to eat human flesh while living with his father on a mission in India. While displaying ghoul-like tendencies, he is still not a ghoul. Last, there is Ghoulies (1984), in which a young man inherits an old mansion, moves in with his girlfriend and discovers a secret chamber under the home in which the previous owner practised black magic. The young man continues the occult practices, summoning small, ancient demons – the titular ghoulies, who are, it should be reiterated, demons, not ghouls. 108

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The 2015 found-footage film Ghoul invokes both the Ukrainian famine and Soviet serial killer Andrei Chikatilo. Title cards at the start of the film give the background of Stalin’s forced famine in the Ukraine in 1932–3, known as Holodomor (‘to kill by starvation’). Seven million Ukrainians died, the text informs, and thousands resorted to cannibalism. A group of documentary film-makers arrive in the Ukraine to make a film about the Holodomor only to discover cannibalism occurring at the present moment. Through investigation they discover that the spirit of Chikatilo possesses people, forcing them to become cannibals in the hope that he might be reborn. This cannibal spirit created by the Holodomor and guided by the ghost of Chikatilo might be perceived as a Slavic wendigo, but is here called a ghoul.

Ghoulish, but Still an Outsider Monster In the reference volume Icons of Horror and the Supernatural, Scott Connors argues that the reason why ghouls occupy a lower place in monsterology than, say, the vampire, shapeshifter, zombie or ghost is ‘the lack of any real cultural foundation or understanding for the underlying folk belief ’.79 In other words, the ghoul is an imported monster in the West – a recent visitor who has not been fully assimilated. As this chapter has hopefully demonstrated, however, the ghoul has burrowed its way into horror literature, and while it may have authors such as White and Lovecraft to thank for its inclusion in the canon, the ghoul’s presence is ongoing and widespread, if not as celebrated. If the ghoul is an emigrant to the West, it is a naturalized and assimilated one. The ghoul is now firmly detached from the ghūl. 109

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The ghoul does, however, demonstrate a pattern of the West appropriating monsters from other cultures and using them in new contexts to create horror. But each culture has its own corpseeating monsters that are scary within their original contexts. In the next chapter we shall turn to monsters that eat the dead in the societies of Asia and Oceania, finding much in common with the ghoul, and a good deal different. Interestingly, when anthropologists or scholars study the monsters of these cultures, the word they use to describe corpse-eating monsters is ‘ghoul’, showing the dominance of that monster in the world of corpse-eating. The ghoul is the original eater of the dead, even if the original ghūl was not.

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Asian and Oceanian Flesh-eaters and Corpse-devourers

I

n his records of his journey through Asia, Marco Polo recounted his encounter in 1292 with the Dagroian kingdom on the coast of Sumatra. Its people believed that the bodies of the sick were transformed into worms that would then die of starvation when the corpse was gone, and thus increase suffering in the world. In order to prevent this from happening, the residents of this kingdom, according to Marco Polo, would kill incurably sick relatives, then cook and eat the bodies immediately. This report is far from the only instance of corpse-eating in Asia and Oceania. The Komodo dragon is found on four islands in Indonesia, including the eponymous one, Komodo. The dragon has been known to burrow into a human grave in order to eat the corpse, like a reptilian hyena. In order to avoid this fate, locals cover their family burial places with heavy stones. Water monitors, relatives of the Komodo dragon, have been known to eat corpses as well. Gordon Grice reports that in parts of Bali, families leave deceased loved ones in places where water monitors will dispose of the corpse, much like Tibetan sky burial.1 A variety of cultures in Asia and Oceania demonstrate that the West does not have a monopoly on eaters of the dead, as this 111

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chapter explores. We will consider corpse-eating monsters from India, the Philippines, Japan, China and Australia’s Aboriginal people.

Rakshasa Rakshasa are present in the cultures of Sri Lanka, Indonesia, Malaysia, Cambodia and other South and Southeast Asian cultures, but being Hindu in origin they are predominantly found in the Indian culture. Three types of rakshasa are found in Hinduism: first, a benevolent spirit who fights on the side of the gods; second, an enemy of the gods who must be defeated; and third, nocturnal fiends that haunt cemeteries, disrupt sacrifices and rituals, and eat human flesh, especially corpses.2 It is the third that is of interest in this volume. Rakshasa appear in the Mahabharata and the Ramayana in a variety of forms, but in folk culture they are insatiable eaters of human flesh with a gift for smelling it out and a preference for women and children. Human in shape, they are huge and strong. They have red eyes, fangs and claws. They are unrighteous spirits, demons and often enemies of the gods. They are commonly shape-shifters and can create illusions to lead humans and gods astray. Significant ones are named in the texts, but ‘rakshasa’ is also a name for a group of monstrous beings. According to the Amarakośa, a ninth-century Hindu thesaurus and dictionary, other words for ‘rakshasa’ include kauņapa (which means ‘feeding upon corpses’), kravyāda (‘consuming corpses’) and asrapa (‘drinking blood’), descriptors of what the monsters are known for.3 Rakshasas desecrate graves and will often appear on a battlefield in order to feast on the dead.4 They inflict calamity and disease wherever they appear. 112

Shyam Sundar, ‘Kabandha (rakshasa in Hindu mythology) tells Rama and Laksmana how he came to have his hideous form’, 1597–1605, illustration from The Freer Ramayana.

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In the Mahabharata, some rakshasa are heroes and fight alongside the Pandavas and the gods; others are monstrous human-eating demons to be defeated and slain. For example, Hidimba is a rakshasa living in the banyan trees of a forest where the Pandava brothers decide to rest. The text refers to him as a ‘cruel cannibal’, although given that he is not human, perhaps ‘cruel anthropophagous monster’ would be more accurate.5 He plans to kill the Pandavas, drink their blood and eat their corpses. He sends his sister, Hiḍimbī, to slaughter the brothers and bring their bodies back. When she does not return he goes to confront the heroes himself, discovering she has fallen in love with Bhīma Pandava and warned the hero about her brother. Bhīma defeats and kills Hidimba in a duel and marries Hiḍimbī. Many of the man-eating rakshasa are defeated by Bhīma, who seems to excel at killing them. Another rakshasa from the text, Bakāsura, demands that the king and people of the city of Ekacakrā in West Bengal provide him with food every week, each time consuming the food as well as the men who brought it. Eventually the hero Bhīma Pandava is sent by his mother Kuntī to defeat and slay the monster, which he does. Kirmira, Bakāsura’s brother, who also eats dead humans, lives in the Kāmyaka Forest and eventually faces Bhīma too, who defeats and kills him. The rakshasa Vaka is yet another forest-dwelling, corpse-eating monster defeated by Bhīma. The other rakshasa in the area then begged Bhīma to spare them, which he consents to on the condition that they give up eating corpses and living humans. Yet, in other cases, humans marry and mate with rakshasa, often producing heroic rakshasa that do not consume human flesh. Bhīma himself marries the rakshasa Hiḍimbī, who subsequently gives birth to their son, Ghatotkacha, who fought many other 114

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rakshasa and is remembered as a hero, fighting for his family in the great war of the Mahabharata until killed by Karna. In one story from Sri Lanka a princess was fated to marry a rakshasa.6 When her parents die she moves into the house of a rakshasa and must perform all the household chores. The tale notes that the rakshasi family eats human bodies. Each day the rakshasi set tasks for the princess, saying they will eat her next if she does not complete the tasks. Being a folk tale, the princess is always able to complete the tasks and thus the rakshasi cannot eat her, and instead the son of the family marries the princess and they move back into her parents’ palace.

Aswang When the Spanish arrived in the Philippines in the sixteenth century, the priests were warned about the aswang, noting that of all the folklore monsters, it was the most terrifying and dangerous. They are mentioned in Miguel de Loarca’s 1582 book Relación de las Islas Filipinas (In the Islands of the Philippines), in which he observes that the indigenous people ‘light many fires’ around houses in which a death has occurred and the men arm themselves with sharpened bamboo and brass weapons in order to defend the corpse against the aswang.7 In 1589, in a volume entitled Las Costumbres de los Indios Tagalos de Filipinas (The Customs of the Tagalog Indians of the Philippines), Franciscan priest Juan de Plasencia discusses the flesh-eating monster, noting how much it terrifies the Tagalogs. Aswang, also called bal-bal, tik-tik, wak-wak, sok-sok and soo-soo (local variations that often indicate different types of aswang), steal corpses during funeral services. The name is supposedly derived from the Sanskrit word 115

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for demon: asura. Their preferred meal is unborn foetuses eaten out of their mothers, as well as the flesh of young children. The danger of the aswang is that its true form is hidden during the day, when they look like normal people. It is only at night that their monstrous form and practices are revealed: they are often emaciated, rotting, corpse-like monsters with terrifying teeth, grey, mottled skin and either milk-white or bloodshot eyes. They are highly agile and powerful, give off a smell of ­putrefaction and are also allegedly shapeshifters, able to transform into bats, birds, cats, dogs or bears. They are found in every region of the Philippines. In 1838 José Maria Pavon, writing of mourning rituals, observed that in the Philippines, ‘At night they watched for it was said if they did not do so, the aswang would come and eat the liver if the deceased were young and if he were old, the guts.’8 Aswang are clearly dangerous to the living, but some of them prefer to eat the dead. There are five different forms of aswang, only one of which is a corpse-eater. The other types, according to Maximo D. Ramos, are the ‘blood-sucking vampire’ type, which appears as a beautiful maiden but uses its proboscis-like tongue to drain blood from its victims; the ‘self-segmenting viscera sucker’ type, which looks like an attractive woman by day but at night-time discards its body below the waist and, organs trailing, flies through the night to eat others’ guts; the ‘man-eating weredog’, a human by day that becomes a vicious, flesh-eating dog at night; and the ‘vindictive or evil-eye witch’, who can possess others or cause sickness, but is the only aswang that does not in any way consume human flesh.9 Only the fifth and last, the ‘carrion-eating ghoul’ type, consumes corpses.10 The first three types of aswang consume the flesh, blood and organs of living people only; the ghoul aswang steals and 116

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eats the bodies of the dead. And yet even the first three will eat corpses if no other food is available: Although the aswangs will devour just about every part of the human body, they are most partial to the liver and the heart, which are seen as definitive delicacies to these infernal things. When an Aswang is unable to seek out a tasty human, they will resort to prowling around cemeteries and graveyards, clawing into the dirt and digging up the recently buried.11 In other words, aswang in general will feast on a human corpse if necessary, although four of the five kinds prefer living humans for food. The fifth aswang, however, is a cousin of the ghoul – a corpse-stealing carrion-eater. Maximo D. Ramos, the anthropologist who arguably is the most prolific author on aswang from a scientific perspective, offers a number of folk accounts of ghoul-type aswang (as well as the other types) in The Aswang Complex in Philippine Folklore.12 One informant shares the practice of hanging the bodies of the dead under the house and building fires all around to keep the aswang (here called umangob) away.13 Another informant tells of seeing four aswang in a cemetery arguing over a meal. Upon his return home he realized his cousin had just been buried in that cemetery.14 Still another informant reported on a unique manner in which some aswang could get a corpse. The aswang comes to the wake in disguise, blows air into the corpse’s mouth and, later, when the people have left, the corpse will get up and walk directly to the aswang.15 Interestingly, many of the informants allege a dog-like appearance for the aswang, most notably a big, black dog, linking it to the Arabic ghoul, which is also alleged to be dog-like.16 117

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Filipino anthropologist Raul Pertierra observes that ‘The smell of death attracts them irresistibly and they hover around houses where wakes are being held, waiting for suitable opportunities to devour the corpse.’17 In certain cases, they do not wait for burial but instead substitute a corpse with something else, allowing the aswang to consume the body. Ramos relates a tale from a woman whose husband fell ill. His body was replaced with a banana tree trunk that was made to look like his corpse through magic. The local albularyo (traditional healer) told the woman that the dead man was not, in fact, her husband, but a banana tree. An aswang had stolen the corpse and they could still retrieve it in time if they hurried. Leading the family to the place the albularyo indicated, the woman saw the aswang flee and took the corpse back to her

The aswang finally reveals itself, in Aswang (1992, dir. Peque Gallaga and Lore Reyes).

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home. Upon their return, they found a banana tree trunk in the husband’s bed.18 Although replacing a corpse with something else is terrifying, a greater fear is that the aswang might attempt to transform humans into aswang. When in human form, aswang might have jobs related to meat – working as butchers or cooks, which allows them to have access to raw meat and the tools for preparing human meat (as well as a good explanation for blood or viscera on their clothing) and also to put human corpse meat into the food of other humans. Ramos reports that among the Cuyonon people the fear is not only that the aswang might eat the corpse, but that they might replace it with a banana tree or large fish, and then ghouls transform the corpse into a pig and then, having assumed a human shape, feed the pig to the family and neighbors in order to transform them into ghouls like themselves. Or they ride invisible on the corpse as it is borne to the graveyard, eating the corpse on the way after having replaced it with a banana tree to which they have given the exact appearance of the deceased.19 The aswang, like the vampire, is a monstrous threat that can end life, but it can also transform its living victims into aswang. As noted in many cultures in this book, worse than being eaten when dead is being inadvertently and unwillingly transformed into something that eats the dead. The aswang was even used during the Vietnam War by the cia in order to spread fear to the Filipino insurgents at the time. Air Force Brigadier General and cia operative Edward G. Lansdale trained counterinsurgency agents to surreptitiously 119

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seize the last man on a patrol, kill him by puncturing the neck and draining the blood, and leave the corpse on the trail for his comrades to find, spreading rumours that aswang were in the area. The soldiers would then be afraid to patrol, not wanting to be the monster’s next victim – another American appropriation of Filipino culture.20 The aswang is a presence in Filipino literature and arts from the arrival of the Spanish to the present. Beloved author Gilda Cordero Fernando has published many short stories, essays, histories of Filipino culture and children’s books, including a children’s book on the aswang. In 2000 she produced the play Luna: An Aswang Romance by playwright Rody Vera, directed by Anton Juan.21 Subsequently the play has been performed in several locations around the Philippines by university, community and professional theatre groups. Aimed at a younger audience and designed to introduce them to Filipino folk culture, the play follows the story of Jepoy, a young boy who is the child of a kapre (a kind of tree giant) father and aswang mother. Rather than help his mother at home, Jepoy enters an enchanted forest and encounters a number of folklore creatures.22 The aswang has been a presence in Filipino cinema since the origins of the media, starting with a silent film in 1932 starring Monang Carvajal, and has figured significantly and often ever since. In the early 1990s the Philippines saw a cycle of numerous aswang films produced that were very popular within the nation, but not so much seen outside the Philippines. In the best of these, the 1992 Filipino film Aswang, directed by respected and award-winning film-makers Peque Gallaga and Lore Reyes, the eponymous monster eats unborn children out of the mother, but the film does not feature corpse-eating. 120

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Unlike other folklore monsters examined in this volume that have found a life outside their home culture (ghoul, wendigo and so on) the aswang makes only infrequent appearances outside Filipino culture. For example, in Jory Sherman’s 1979 novel The Bamboo Demons, the third in a series of books concerning Dr Russell ‘Chill’ Chillders – an occult detective who hunts and stops supernatural phenomena around the world – Chill and his psychic Native American paramour and assistant Laura Littlefawn, are hired by Felix Bulatao. Bulatao is a professor who believes that an aswang (‘the half-man, half-dog who stalked the night hunting human flesh’23) is responsible for the rape, murder and partial devouring of a beautiful young woman, the girlfriend of one of his friends. Chill, Felix and Laura investigate and find there are

The aswang in human form exudes its tongue, which works like a straw to suck blood from a corpse, from Aswang (1994, dir. Wrye Martin and Barry Poltermann).

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aswang in the rebel groups in the hills outside Manila that plan to use their abilities to overthrow the government of the Philippines. Sherman thus ties supernatural power to the attempt to access political power by insurgent groups – the aswang is the leader of an anti-Marcos militia. Bulatao’s role in the narrative consists mostly of informing Chill (and the reader) of Filipino cultural beliefs, each aswang attack prompting more information about both monster and culture. After one such attack, Bulatao explains how the aswang reproduces. When dying, an aswang may vomit up the chick that lives in its abdomen and, through mouth-to-mouth contact, pass the chick to a new body, which will become aswang. Alternately, ‘If an aswang puts saliva or a piece of human flesh in another’s food, that one becomes aswang.’ In other words, if a corpse-eating monster can trick someone into eating human flesh, that person also becomes a corpse-eater. A 1994 American film called Aswang also employs the titular monster as a source of horror, albeit transplanting the monster to Wisconsin. Kat, an unwed pregnant woman, decides to give her baby up for adoption, and meets Peter Null, a young man who says he needs an heir in order to claim an inheritance from his dying mother. Kat agrees to give her child to Peter and his wife Janine and goes to the Null family estate to give birth. After strange events and the appearance of a scientist who has discovered evidence of a peculiar being on the Null property, the scientist subsequently vanishes and it is revealed the Null family spent a great deal of time in the Philippines. Kat discovers to her horror that the matriarch and the woman who has been posing as Peter’s wife (but is, in reality, his sister) are aswangs. Kat attempts to escape but gives birth to a baby aswang. Also known as The 122

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Unearthing, the low-budget film places a Filipino monster in the American Midwest, presenting the aswang more as a vampire that feeds on foetuses than the ghoul version of the folkloric monster. This text is also the only one to present non-Filipinos as aswang, which means the only film made in the United States about the monster Americanized it. This is a fairly common trope in horror cinema – that travel to a foreign land changes one, makes one more susceptible to becoming an indigenous monster. Similarly, Canadian film-maker Jordan Clark brought the aswang to Canada, so to speak, in a 2008 film he directed and co-wrote with star Janice Santos Valdez entitled Aswang: Journey into Myth, an ‘improvised docu-drama’, according to its makers. Set in Victoria, British Columbia, Valdez plays Maria Villanueva, a writer researching hauntings in Canada who uncovers a photograph from circa 1920 of a young Filipina girl sold into prostitution by the Chinese mafia. As she investigates she uncovers evidence that the young girl in the photo may have become an aswang. When her best friend is attacked by something, Maria goes to Capiz in the central islands of the Philippines to discover more about the creature, the girl and her own past. One of the film’s key themes is that artists perpetuate myths and stereotypes through their work, and, linked with this, the difficulty of presenting an accurate and culturally sensitive narrative of a monster without continuing to enforce negative stereotypes and spread myths and sensationalized versions of the folklore. Clark subsequently created the feature-length documentary The Aswang Phenomenon in 2011, which explores all aspects of the aswang in Filipino culture. The film opens with Clark’s voiceover on top of images of contemporary Manila: ‘What would happen if a country of ninety-seven million people were taught at a young 123

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age that the bogeyman was real?’24 The film anchors the aswang in the history of colonialism and imperialism in the Philippines. Clark details how the aswang has been used to subjugate women, enforce Christianity, as a cautionary tale to promote obedience in children, and even to maintain the modern state. Using interviews, animations and clips from Filipino films as well as the 1992 Filipino film Aswang and the 1994 American film Aswang, the latter of which Clark states was his first exposure to the aswang myth, the film belies its low budget in offering a comprehensive history of the aswang. Clark himself is not Filipino but uses his own identity as a Euro-Canadian and outsider to the culture to explore the ‘aswang phenomenon’, as he calls it. Most recently, Boni B. Alvarez’s play Bloodletting premiered in Los Angeles in 2018. The play uses the aswang to explore the identity of Filipino Americans. The playwright himself played Bosley Lesgapi, who leaves the United States with his sister Farrah to spread their father’s ashes in the village from which he ­emigrated years before. They discover an aswang and that they, too, might be in danger of becoming aswang. Alvarez uses the aswang to explore the disconnect between one’s culture and heritage and one’s contemporary reality. Bosley and Farrah, as their names indicate, are thoroughly Americanized. The aswang links them to their Filipino roots and becomes a source of power for them. Even to this day, fear of the aswang remains pervasive in Filipino culture and an integral part of Filipino monster culture. Raul Pertierra observes that aswang are a symbol, ‘to communicate and express the state of fear, anxiety or apprehension felt during times of personal or communal stress’.25 In 2015 in central Mindanao, a series of attacks on people by a large dog were attributed to an aswang. The same week, in Davao del 124

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Norte, a ten-year-old girl died in an alleged aswang attack, although authorities claimed the bites were from a cobra, not an aswang. Both events were widely reported in Philippine media as aswang attacks, for which the Center for Media Freedom and Responsibility took them to task, accusing them of sensationalizing what were otherwise regular animal attacks.26 Yet the stories of aswang persist, even in urban centres, to this day.

Jikininki Japan has several yokai (monsters) that eat corpses (or at least part of them). From onibaba, whose name literally means ‘demon hag’ and who kills and eats travellers, especially pregnant women, to the kappa, an amphibious demon that resembles a green monkey and attacks people in order to extract a mythical organ called the shirikodama from their victim’s anus so that it can eat it, monsters in Japan consume human flesh. Of particular concern, however, is the jikininki. Jikininki, whose name literally means ‘human-eating ghost’, are the spirits of those who were selfish, greedy or wicked in life. Unlike most of the monsters in this volume, the jikininki are non-corporeal. They are ghosts that look like decaying corpses and appear primarily at night. They do not kill; they seek out the dead to consume. The jikininki, unlike many corpse-eaters, often regrets its state, cannot control its desire for dead flesh and loathes its own need to eat corpses. It does not also seek to transform others into jikininki, as many others in this book do. Jikininki are found in the 1776 novel Ugetsu Monogatari (Tales of Moonlight and Rain) by Ueda Akinari and were introduced to the West in Lafcadio Hearn’s Kwaidan. These monsters are cursed 125

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people who, after death, can only feed upon corpses. In Ugetsu Monogatari, nine supernatural tales are told. ‘Aozukin’ (The Blue Hood), the second to last, tells of the origin of the jikininki, or at least a jikininki. Zen priest Kaian Zenji arrives in the village of Tomita in Shinotsuke Province, causing a panic. The village master explains that the abbot of the mountain temple above the village once travelled to perform a kanjō (a ritual consecration not unlike a baptism) and returned with a beautiful young man. The abbot fell in love with the youth and neglected his duties. When the young man fell ill and died, the abbot refused to cremate the body, holding it to him for days. Finally, before decay set in, the abbot ‘sucked the flesh and licked the bones until he utterly devoured it’.27 The abbot then became a jikininki. Kaian offers to get rid of the monster and spends the night in the mountain temple. The abbot/jikininki cannot see him because of his purity. ‘I desire human flesh,’ the abbot tells Kaian.28 The Zen priest offers his own, and the jikininki is unable to eat him. Kaian blesses him, binds him and tells him to meditate. Kaian then returns in a year to find the abbot wasted away, still chanting. His flesh disintegrates off his body, leaving him a skeleton. This story offers a series of concentric circles of narrative. The story found in the Ugetsu Monogatari is the eighteenth century writing about the fifteenth. When Hearn retells it in Kwaidan, he is the nineteenth century writing about the eighteenth. In both of these cases, the tale is designed to illuminate the power of Buddhism to conquer ghosts, monsters and evil spirits. There is a moral lesson to be learned about the danger of desire and especially desire that runs counter to one’s vows and identity (the abbot, desirous of the young man, becomes a corpse-cannibal, no longer human because of his desire for flesh), as well as the 126

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ability to overcome desire as rooted in the teachings and practices of Zen. As with the ghouls and Islam, jikininki both prove the reality of Buddhism and offer a powerful example of its efficacy. Hearn tells of a wandering Buddhist priest named Musō Kokushi who journeyed through rural Mino and sought shelter in a small village, having first been turned away from a hermitage on the outskirts of the village by its sole occupant: an aged priest.29 The occupants of the next compound at which he had asked for shelter informed him the master of the house had passed away that afternoon, and that he was welcome to stay, but all of the villagers will leave before midnight to stay in the next village as strange things happen to corpses late at night. Musō told them that as a Buddhist priest, he feared neither ghosts nor corpses, so he would stay with the dead man through the night. Sometime well before dawn: There noiselessly entered a shape, vague and vast; and in that same moment Musō found himself without power to move or speak. He saw that Shape lift the corpse, as with hands, and devour it, more quickly than a cat devours a rat, – beginning at the head and eating everything: the hair and the bones and even the shroud. And the monstrous Thing, having thus consumed the body, turned to the offerings, and ate them also. Then it went away, as mysteriously as it had come.30 When the villagers return, Musō asks why they have not asked the priest at the hermitage to help stop the mysterious creature, only to be informed by the villagers that no priest lives there; the building has been abandoned for years. Musō returns to the hermitage and is greeted by the priest, who tells him he 127

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is ashamed as Musō has seen him in his true form – a jikininki, ‘an eater of human flesh’.31 He reveals that when he was a human priest, his piety was false. He would think only of the money and clothing he would get when he performed funeral rites for the dead brought to him from the village. His irreverence in life resulted in his being reborn as a jikininki after his death, forced to ‘feed upon the corpses of the people who die in this district’.32 With a prayer from Musō, the jikininki vanishes, and Musō finds himself kneeling in the dirt outside an ancient priest’s tomb. Jikininki are less of a presence in popular culture, both Japanese and Western, than other monsters: yurei (vengeful ghosts), kaiju (giant monsters) and so on, but a few texts do employ them, to horrific effect. American horror writer Joseph A. Ezzo (who, it should be noted, lived in Japan while teaching at Tsukuba University from 2001 to 2003) wrote a short story called ‘Jikininki’, which imagines the titular monster in Tucson, Arizona. Les, who has just returned from living in Japan for a few years, brings Maiko, his younger Japanese bride, to live in the neighbourhood in which he grew up. The neighbours begin reporting seeing a strange old woman around their house, and when Les awakens in the pre-dawn hours, his wife is no longer in bed with him. Eventually Les drugs his wife and confronts the old woman, banishing her. Maiko reveals the old woman was a hannya, a protective spirit sent by the lord of the dead to keep them safe. With her vanishing, jikininki now have access to their home. ‘They’re dead,’ she tells her husband, ‘but they don’t rest! They feed! They feed! Without stop! They feed! They need corpses!’33 A flood of jikininki then enter the home: 128

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When standing on the floor, they barely reached Les’s waist. They were possessed of short, stubby limbs, bloated torsos, that ran with open sores and were clotted with decay, fed upon by armies of worms, grubs and other monstrosities so repulsive that Les was certain they had no name. As they moved, they left tracks of putrid slime in their wake. Their heads were large and bulbuous, consisting of little more than an enormous, gaping mouth studded with thousands of protruding, needlelike teeth.34 In other words, they appear as small, rotting corpses, almost zombie-like in this description. Ezzo adds to the mythology by requiring a human slave whose job it is to procure corpses for the jikininki. Because he dismissed the hannya, Les becomes that slave. The story ends with the neighbourhood being devoured as the monsters chant, ‘Resu, meshio o kure. Meshio o kure’ – ‘Feed us, Les. Feed us.’35 Tokyo Cowboys, a collective of both Japanese and foreign artists, produced a short film entitled Jikininki (2016), in which two foreign ghost-hunters on their honeymoon in Japan inadvertently encounter the eponymous monster. The film builds on the mythology by adding the concept: ‘if it eats you, everyone forgets about you, I mean it’s like you never existed.’36 The film uses the myth of the jikininki to explore urban alienation and the lack of community in contemporary Japan. When one is devoured, it as if one had never been. One’s absence is not noted, often a condition of urban living. Interestingly, the jikininki in the film is played by Swedish actress Camilla Ståhl. The jikininki is one kind of Japanese hungry ghost. Another was visualized by artists on gaki-zoshi or ‘hungry ghost scrolls’. 129

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Gaki-zoshi often depict hungry ghosts as repugnant, diseased, skeletal corpses with distended bellies, ‘scavenging a graveyard for scraps of corpse-meat and other human detritus’.37 These corpse-eating ghosts are, as with the jikininki, Buddhist ghost monsters, the result of one not living one’s life according to the dharma. They are a transculturation from China, arriving on Japan’s shores with Buddhism, especially Zen (called Chan in China).

Hungry Ghosts The fourteenth or fifteenth day of the seventh lunar month marks the celebration of the Hungry Ghost Festival in China, which usually falls in late July or early August, with similar festivals in Japan, Vietnam and other Southeast Asian countries. While the festival is linked to ancestor worship – with people burning paper money, and more recently things like paper beer bottles, paper computers and appliances and other forms of paper luxury goods, in order for their dead ancestors to have these things in the afterlife – a great concern that must be dealt with during the month are hungry ghosts. The Chinese hungry ghost is different from the other creatures discussed in this chapter. It is the spirit of a dead human being that is hungry because its mouth is so decomposed it cannot ingest anything. The concept has its origins in traditional Chinese religious belief, but the influence of Buddhism has also shaped the understanding of hungry ghosts. One becomes a hungry ghost upon death due to evil deeds in life, most notably stealing, raping and killing. A human being filled with desire, greed, violence and anger becomes a hungry ghost upon death, 130

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as do women who refuse to give away food to the poor and needy.38 Hungry ghosts are filled with insatiable hunger, desire and thirst as a result of this state. They appear as grotesque, humanlike, desiccated corpses, with narrow limbs and bulging abdomens but a tiny mouth, unable to feed except on rubbish or human waste. Some hungry ghosts, however, can only eat corpses – the dead eating the dead. Their presence, like the other entities discussed in this chapter, signal tragedy and destruction. ‘Weighted down by inquietude and desolation, they might turn against the living and bring them all kinds of misery,’ warns Wolfram Eberhard.39 The concept of hungry ghosts has particularly developed in response to the development of Buddhism in China, Japan and Vietnam. Hungry ghosts are the embodiment of negativity in Buddhist culture – those who are unable to stop desiring and

Detail from Gaki-zoshi (Hungry Ghosts Scroll), 12th century, colour on paper.

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consuming, unable to release from this world of suffering, weighed down with evil and bad karma, become hungry ghosts upon death. Prayers, the rituals of Buddhist priests and offerings for the dead, particularly during the Festival of the Dead in the seventh lunar month, are all means of protecting oneself from hungry ghosts and aiding them in seeking release from their suffering.

Corpse-eating Monsters of Oceania The pioneering anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski reports on the mulukuausi of the Kiriwina people of the Trobriand Islands. Mulukuausi are invisible sorceresses who are ‘extremely virulent, powerful, and also ubiquitous’.40 When a death occurs among the Kiriwinians, the community moves to protect the corpse, as the Filipinos do in regard to the aswang, for mulukuausi ‘are possessed of truly ghoulish instincts’.41 They gather at the house where the corpse is and attempt to gain entry so that they can eat the tongue, eyes and all the internal organs. Magic must be used when the corpse is moved to the graveyard to prevent the mulukuausi from feeding. One knows they are present as they cannot mask the smell of carrion that accompanies them. Malinowski recounts that he had an experience of the mulukuausi when attending a funeral at the beginning of his sojourn in Kiriwina. After the service was over the community returned to the village while Malinowski remained behind in the cemetery to see if any other ceremony would be carried out. After only ten minutes some men returned to bring him back to the village, warning him how dangerous mulukuausi were. The men of the village told him not to walk around alone at night as the recent burial meant the mulukuausi would be out and active.42 132

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The Aborigines of Australia, particularly of the Western Desert, tell stories of a number of different corpse-eating ­monsters. The Martu people tell of the ngayurnangalku (which roughly translates to ‘they will eat me’), ancient human-eating beings that live in Kumpupirntily (Lake Disappointment), an endorheic salt lake in the Western Desert. They have sharp, pointy teeth and curved claws, and they eat corpses. Kumpupirntily was taboo territory for the Kurajarra, Wanman, Kartudjara and the Putidjara, who were forbidden to go near for fear of the ngayurnangalku. In the modern period, this proscription even applies to flying over the airspace of Lake Disappointment, as the ngayurnangalku can tear apart even the planes that fly over it. A similar monster is the mamu, a humanoid with protruding eyes that may also resemble a sharp-beaked bird or a dog (creatures that might be threatening to those in the desert). They can be hairy or bald, live underground or in trees. They are, first and foremost, shapeshifters – they can change into anything and therefore are especially dangerous as they rarely appear in their true form but can assume any shape, including that of friends or family. Mamu are always hungry for human flesh, but they also steal people’s souls. They do not speak; they simply devour. In short, mamu are truly monstrous.43 In Warlpiri country they tell tales of the yapa-ngarnu (literally ‘people-eaters’), of which the pangkarlangu is prominent. Huge, hairy, sharp-clawed and vicious, the pangkarlangu kill babies and hang their corpses from their hairstring belts. Once the pangkarlangu has a belt-full of baby corpses, it makes a fire and slowly roast and devour them. It is hard not to see both the metaphoric aspects of this creature of the Dreaming and its use as a cautionary tale. It is a monster of a desert people that kills and 133

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slowly roasts those unable to take care of themselves in the desert. The pangkarlangu is ‘first and foremost about social control with respect to the specific dangers of the desert’.44 If a child wanders off from the group, they might meet a ravenous pangkarlangu that will kill them and burn their corpse away – what better metaphor for ensuring children keep close in the desert? These creatures are prevalent in contemporary Australian art as well. Aboriginal artist Yunkurra Billy Atkins (working with animator Sohan Ariel Hayes) makes ‘animated paintings’ featuring the ngayurnangalku and created a digitally animated seven-minute short film in 2012 called Cannibal Story, which told the creation story of the Western Desert. In 2008 Atkins warned: It’s dangerous, that Country [the land around Kumpupirntily]. I’ve seen that (cannibal) man, he’s there and I know it. I don’t know how white people go over there. If they were to run into him he would eat them straight out. Kumpupirntily, that’s a no good place . . . leave it alone and have nothing to do with it at all.45 The corpse-eating monsters of Australia remain a danger.

Corpse-eaters, Cautionary Tales and Reinforcement of Social Norms Throughout the Pacific rim, a variety of corpse-eating monsters can be found in almost every culture. They often, but not always, serve as reinforcement for religious belief. Jikininki and hungry ghosts reinforce the teachings of Buddhism. Rakshasa demonstrate the truth of Hinduism. The monsters of the indigenous peoples of 134

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Illustration of a yaroma (pangkarlangu) swallowing a man, in R. H. Mathews, Notes on the Aborigines of New South Wales (1907).

Australia very much reflect their worldview and culture. Likewise, as Jordan Clark’s documentary demonstrates, the aswang serves to reinforce the dominant powers on both the micro and macro level in the Philippines. And yet these creatures are more than moral examples or cautionary tales. They reflect the concerns of food scarcity (and its attendant danger of turning cannibal), the danger of literally being consumed (as often learned by other animals that eat 135

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people in all of these places), the concern about body disposal and what happens to our remains after death, and the danger of the unknown. In the thin places, the lands in between, corpse-eating monsters exist, and only divine intervention, the presence of heroic figures (whether gods, warriors or renowned priests) or extreme vigilance can protect us from them.

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Six

Wendigo

The Wendigo is simply the Call of the Wild personified, which some natures hear to their own destruction. From Algernon Blackwood’s The Wendigo1

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ade famous in literary culture by being the eponymous monster in Algernon Blackwood’s novella, the wendigo is a Native American/First Nations myth that has been appropriated both for use in literature and popular culture and as the source of a (mis)diagnosis to explain cannibalism in indigenous communities. It is also an important, albeit dangerous, spirit in First Nations cosmology that has subsequently been employed as a metaphor for colonialism and imperialism. An assortment of cannibal monsters exist in First Nations and Native American cultures, including animated skeletons called pākahks that were the victims of starvation. None of these monsters, however, looms as large as the wendigo.2 Algonquin-, Cree- and Ojibwe-speaking Native Americans feared the wendigo during winter. It appeared as a gaunt skeleton, sometimes with a deer head or antlers. It was obviously a manifestation of the fear of famine or starvation. The 137

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wendigo was never satisfied – it sought food constantly and its preferred food was human. The wendigo, it is said, could inspire people to cannibalism. In 1661 the Jesuit Paul Le Jeune, missionary to Quebec, reported an outbreak of cannibalism attributed to wendigo to his superiors: They are afflicted with neither lunacy, hypochondria, nor frenzy; but have a combination of all these species of disease, which affects their imaginations and causes them a more than canine hunger. This makes them so ravenous for human flesh that they pounce upon women, children, and even upon men, like veritable werewolves, and devour them voraciously, without being able to appease or glut their appetite – ever seeking fresh prey, and the more greedily the more they eat.3 This so-called ‘Wendigo Psychosis’ involves individuals believing they have been possessed by a wendigo, since food is scarce, and they seek out humans to eat. Real-life cases include the Native American Swift Runner, who in 1878 ate his wife and five children, claiming the wendigo possessed him to do so, and Jack Fiddler, a Cree Medicine Man known for killing those who suffered from Wendigo Psychosis. Yet at the end of the twentieth century, science has disavowed Wendigo Psychosis, arguing that it has never existed. Simultaneously the second half of the twentieth century has seen a frightening amount of wendigo literature, both horror-based and employing the wendigo as a metaphor for everything from rapacious capitalism to economic uncertainty to domestic violence. The wendigo is now everywhere, from films to novels to television series including Supernatural, Charmed and 138

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My Little Pony. The Incredible Hulk fought the wendigo in several comic-book issues in the 1970s, as have Wolverine and SpiderMan. Coming within two years of each other, Ravenous (1999), directed by Antonia Bird, and Larry Fessenden’s Wendigo (2001) are films that both make use of the myth, albeit in different ways from each other, and in different ways to indigenous tradition.

The Indigenous Wendigo The wendigo myth is prevalent throughout the indigenous­ peoples of northern North America, a vital presence in Algonquin cosmology and also an ancient belief, pre-dating contact with Europeans by millennia.4 It is a creature that precedes the coming of the Europeans, but the European presence exacerbated and expanded it. The wendigo is known by a number of names. In Windigo: An Anthology of Fact and Fantastic Fiction, his seminal study of the wendigo in culture, John Colombo identifies 37 v­ ariants, including windigo, witiko, windiga, wi’ntsigo, weeghtako and weendegoag, among others.5 There are dozens more that begin with a sound other than ‘w’: atcen, atchen, cheno, djenu, kokodje, outiko and vindiko.6 Most wendigo research comes from three Native American/First Nations groups: Algonquin, Ojibwe and Cree. The term ‘wendigo’ refers to two possible types of being. The first is a spirit, sometimes a giant, that is a personification of hunger and starvation. The second is a human being that either has eaten human flesh, and has thus transformed into a wendigo, or has become possessed by a wendigo and is thus driven to eat human flesh. In other words, the wendigo is a malevolent spirit that is driven by hunger to eat human flesh, a hunger that will 139

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never be satisfied, and also has the power to transform humans into insatiable cannibals like itself. While both are dangerous, the second is more insidious as one never knows if one is dealing with a person or a wendigo, often until it is too late. The Naskapi, a Cree people in northern Quebec and Labrador, told anthropologist Frank Speck that in the summer the wendigo ‘lives like other people and eats the same food’ and is thus indistinguishable from normal folk.7 In winter, however, the wendigo transforms, and then their food is people, both the living and the dead. In most indigenous tales the wendigo possesses a heart of ice, an insatiable hunger and an emaciated appearance. He is often a giant, sometimes as large as 6 metres (20 ft) tall. The wendigo eats anything he can but prefers human flesh, even his own. The Ojibwe, a Native American culture of Canada and the northern Midwestern United States and the second largest First Nations society north of Mexico, tell a tale of a wendigo that was attacked by a group that had been warned he was a wendigo. They cut off his legs and left him for dead. When they returned he was eating his own legs, sucking the marrow out of the bones, so they killed him and cut him into pieces so he could no longer harm anyone.8 The wendigo is ‘the spirit of winter, which could transform a man, woman or child into a cannibalistic being with a heart of ice’.9 It is this heart of ice that is at the, pardon the pun, heart of the myth. Destroying the heart of ice is the best way to kill the wendigo. The Cree and Métis tell a story of a warrior named Wesakaychak who convinces an ermine to jump into the wendigo’s throat when it opens its mouth, find its heart and bite it until he dies, which the ermine does, chewing away at the ice, killing the wendigo.10 Other tales are told of convincing wendigo to drink 140

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boiling water or eat food that is too hot, or of stabbing it with hot weapons so as to melt the heart of ice. As with aswang, the fear was that a wendigo who appeared to be human could trick others into performing acts of cannibalism and thus become a wendigo themselves. If a person had a dream, for example, that someone offered them food, and the dreamer failed to realize that person was a wendigo, they could be tricked into eating actual human flesh.11 The danger, thus, is that anyone could be transformed into a wendigo. Food (especially in a region where during winter food scarcity was a real danger) is both necessary and dangerous. Items associated with food become important implements. In many First Nations folk tales, women use food tools as weapons against wendigo – kettles, pots and even ladles are employed to fight the monster.12 Women are often, but not always, the adversary of the wendigo, as well as frequent victims. Similar to ogres, in some stories wendigo may have a human wife whose sympathies often lie with his human victims instead of her voracious husband. In short, the indigenous wendigo is an important spirit, one whose tales hint at the danger of not finding food in winter. Once one eats human flesh, one is now a wendigo and will not stop eating human flesh. The wendigo is powerful and dangerous, but also a part of the world and the cosmos of the First Nations. He is a necessary evil, one that exists in a world where over the course of one’s life winter famine will several times be not only a possibility, but a probability. Winter famines an explanation for why starving people might turn to the flesh of family members or others who have died.

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The Wendigo Meets Europeans As the French and the English began to explore and colonize North America, first trading with and then making war upon the indigenous peoples, reports of cannibals, hunger spirits and devils began to float back to Europe and be found in publications throughout the new land. The earliest known case (to Europeans) of wendigorelated cannibalism was reported in 1741 at Fort Churchill.13 In 1743 the English trader James Isham wrote of his experiences among the Cree of Hudson Bay, warning of a ‘devil’ that was called ‘Whit-te-co’.14 Similarly Henry Ellis in 1748, Samuel Hearn in 1775, Edward Umfreville in 1790 and David Thompson in 1796 all warned against evil beings, forest spirits, a tribe of cannibals and cannibal giants, all identified by variable names for wendigo.15 As more and more Europeans occupied Canada and what would become the northern United States, more tales of wendigos and more accounts of actual encounters with wendigos followed. In her study of werewolves and wendigos Carolyn Podruchny reports, ‘Starvation cannibalism among fur trade and exploration parties occurred infrequently, but incidents were widely reported and assumed almost legendary status, as demonstrated by the famous and frequently told case of Sir John Franklin’s exploration of the Arctic.’16 Franklin (who had once served on a ship called the hms Polyphemus!) led the Coppermine Expedition from Hudson Bay with the intention of mapping the Artic. The expedition lasted from 1819 to 1822. Out of twenty men eleven died, mostly from starvation. Rumours of cannibalism circulated. His last Arctic expedition (1845–7) met with even more tragedy – the famed voyage of the Erebus and the Terror looking for the Northwest Passage, resulting in both ships being trapped in the 142

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ice for two years. Franklin died on 11 June 1847. Local Inuit told would-be rescuers that the crew engaged in cannibalism. Later archaeology on King William Island seems to suggest at least some of the crew ate the bodies of the dead.17 The entire event served as inspiration for Dan Simmons’s 2007 novel The Terror and the television series based upon it, both of which feature a supernatural monster that shares qualities with the wendigo.18 The painter Paul Kane wrote of his encounters with the wendigo in his 1859 book Wanderings of an Artist, among the Indians of North America. In 1846, while among the Ojibwe, he heard a story of a father and daughter visiting the lodge of an old woman. Suspicious that they had come alone, the old woman feigned sleep until the daughter attacked. Realizing her visitors were wendigos who had killed the rest of their family, the old woman killed the daughter and watched as the father devoured her corpse.19 Kane’s tale is an example of how most of the tales of wendigos have been reported: Euro-Americans reporting at second hand what they have heard from indigenous peoples. Thus they often blend First Nations and European understandings of monsters: Stories about cannibal monsters could represent a literal as well as figurative mixing of motifs between voyageurs and Aboriginal peoples. In voyageur stories, both Euro-American and Aboriginal people could turn into cannibal monsters, and Euro-Americans could also be victims of windigoes.20 This premise is the underlying theme of a number of twentiethcentury wendigo narratives, such as Ravenous, discussed below – namely that now that they were in the New World, Europeans could become wendigos, too. 143

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Wendigo Psychosis (or Not) ‘The outstanding symptom of the aberration known as Windigo psychosis’, wrote Morton I. Teicher in 1960, ‘is the intense compulsive desire to eat human flesh.’21 With the encounter between scientists – ethnologists and anthropologists giving way to psycholo­gists and sociologists – and indigenous people’s accounts of their own culture, the concept of the wendigo moved from myth to psychiatric disorder. Numerous psychologists, anthropologists and psychiatrists have written at length on Wendigo Psychosis, analysing it, giving examples and listing symptoms by which one might diagnose it.22 The only problem being, of course, that it does not exist. Published first in a journal (displaying the prejudices of the period) named Primitive Man, ‘The Cree Witiko Psychosis’, by the Reverend John M. Cooper, a Catholic priest and anthropologist from the Catholic University of America, proved to be highly influential in asserting a unique psychosis among northern First Nations communities. ‘This particular form of mental disturbance is characterized by (1) a craving for human flesh, and (2) a delusion of transformation into a Witiko who has a heart of ice or who vomits ice,’ he writes.23 The two markers of the psychosis are important: one must both crave human flesh and believe that one has become a wendigo. The latter becomes a mental justification for the former. One is ‘allowed’ to crave human flesh as one is no longer oneself but possessed by a cannibal spirit. In some ways ‘Wendigo Psychosis’ is simply a modern psychological reading of the wendigo myth: one was driven by starvation to commit cannibalism and justifies it not through necessity for survival, but through possession – the wendigo made me do it. 144

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Cooper argues that cannibalism during times of food scarcity and starvation would create a psychosis, ‘an “unnatural” craving for human flesh’ felt subsequently even in times of plenty.24 Furthermore, ‘The Cree man or woman who under stress of famine had eaten human flesh was afterwards shunned and feared’ and was considered to have become a wendigo.25 The stigma of eating human flesh stayed with the person who had done it. In the future there was always a chance that the individual could ‘turn wendigo’ again. In arguably the most significant work on the subject, the 1962 volume Windigo Psychosis: A Study of a Relationship between Belief and Behaviour among the Indians of Northeastern Canada, Morton I. Teicher observes: The outstanding symptom of the aberration known as windigo psychosis is the intense, compulsive desire to eat human flesh. In many instances, this desire is satisfied through actual cannibal acts, usually directed against members of the individual’s immediate family. In other instances, before authentic cannibalism takes place, the individual is either cured or killed. One who develops this craving for human flesh or is considered to be in process of doing so is called a windigo. He is plagued by an unnatural hunger, which can only be allayed by human flesh.26 Teicher argues that the Wendigo Psychosis is a real psychological disorder among the indigenous of Canada and the northern United States. However, beginning in the late sixties, psychologists and anthropologists began to argue that the psychosis did not actually 145

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exist, and it was diagnosed as a form of racism to explain behaviour that did not actually occur or that was better explained by other factors. In 1982 Lou Marano furthered the argument that Wendigo Psychosis does not exist by indicating that none of the anthropologists reporting on it had ever observed an actual case, relying on second- and even third-hand accounts as evidence.27 Nathan D. Carlson of the University of Alberta, on the other hand, argues that a ‘witiko condition’ is historically verifiable, but the ‘windigo psychosis’ ‘eludes proper definition as a bona fide culture-bound pathology’, and furthermore no theory proposed so far comprehensively accounts for all instances of a witiko condition among all First Nations.28 In other words, there are wendigo psychoses (plural) or, better yet, wendigo conditions that encompass myth, psychology, cultural phenomena and the lived experience of people driven to eat human flesh during times of survival cannibalism. These cases, however, appear to be fewer and further between than the anthropologists reported.

The Case of Kakisikuchin (Swift Runner) One of the most famous cases of alleged Wendigo Psychosis concerned a Cree named Kakisikuchin, known in English as Swift Runner. A trapper for the Hudson Bay Company, in late 1878 he moved his family to the west bank of the Sturgeon River in Alberta, north of Fort Edmonton. By all reports a good and kind man, he also suffered from bad dreams and a belief that he saw spirits, particularly the wendigo. He returned to his previous village that winter without his wife and children, provoking suspicion when he could not or would not explain their absence. The Mounted Police then sent Inspector Severe Gagnon to Kakisikuchin’s camp, 146

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where he arrested Kakisikuchin upon the discovery of the mangled and partially consumed corpses of his family. Gagnon reported that Kakisikuchin had brought him to the grave of one of his children who he claimed had died from disease. Disinterring the body, Gagnon found no evidence of foul play. However, bones and body parts were found scattered near his camp, and he confessed to the Mounted Police that he had killed his wife and eaten her, he had one son kill the other, then killed that son and ate them both, and had hung his baby from the tent pole until it died. He also killed and ate his mother-inlaw but found her meat to be too tough to chew. On 8 August 1879 Kakisikuchin went on trial in Fort Saskatchewan and confessed his actions. Gagnon reported that he ate members of his own family despite there being other food in the camp. Carlson reports that in his confession to a local priest, Kakisikuchin admitted there was plenty of food both in the camp and available nearby for him to hunt. He was driven to kill and eat his family by a spirit inside him.29 According to Teicher, Kakisikuchin confessed easily as he did not believe he was actually responsible for his actions: ‘His cannibal desires were prompted by the windigo spirit and he had no alternative course of action.’30 In other words, he was not guilty by reason of wendigo. Nevertheless, the provincial judicial system did not accept this argument. He was found guilty of murder and was sentenced to death by hanging. He was executed on 20 December 1879. Kakisikuchin was not a wendigo, but he clearly believed he was. His story brought a great deal of attention both to wendigos and alleged Wendigo Psychosis. The outcome of his case could be seen as predetermined, given his ethnicity and the prejudice of the judicial system against First Nations individuals at the 147

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George M. Dawson, photograph of Kakisikuchin (Swift Runner), a Wendigo, before execution, 1879–80, Fort Saskatchewan.

time. Yet he also stands as an example of the conflict between indigenous belief and Western culture, a clash of cultures that expects the indigenous person to bend their beliefs to ‘modern science.’ However, the wendigo remains a powerful presence in our thoughts and fears even now, almost a century and a half later. 148

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The Wendigo in Fiction and Film The wendigo has become a popular cultural figure outside of its Native American origins, appropriated and used in poems, short stories, novels, graphic novels, television shows, films and role-playing games. One of the first, if not the first, fictional appearances of the wendigo is found in Mary Hartwell Catherwood’s short story ‘The Windigo’, found in her 1894 collection The Chase of Saint-Castin and Other Stories of the French in the New World.31 A Chippewa widow warns Archange, a French settler, of a wendigo (here ‘windigo’) that is ravaging the Native American community: Though a Chippewa was bound to dip his hand in the war kettle and taste the flesh of enemies after victory, there was nothing he considered more horrible than a confirmed cannibal. He believed that a person who had eaten human flesh to satisfy hunger was never afterwards contented with any other kind, and, being deranged and possessed by the spirit of a beast, he had to be killed for the safety of the community. The cannibal usually became what he was by stress of starvation: in the winter when hunting failed and he was far from help, or on a journey when provisions gave out, and his only choice was to eat a companion or die. But this did not excuse him. As soon as he was detected the name of ‘windigo’ was given him, and if he did not betake himself again to solitude he was shot or knocked on the head at the first convenient opportunity.32 Overhearing their conversation, young Michel, a companion of Archange, asserts he would kill a wendigo if it came to 149

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the white settlement. ‘Not so easy to kill a windigo. Bad spirits help windigos. If man kill windigo and not tear him to pieces, he come to life again,’ the widow solemnly informs him.33 A female wendigo moves through the community, causing concern for the effect of her presence. ‘Archange had heard of the atmosphere which windigos far gone in cannibalism carried around them.’34 In the end, the wendigo woman is killed and buried. This marks a very early use of the wendigo myth in a Euro-American story. Algernon Blackwood’s ‘The Wendigo’, first published in the author’s collection The Lost Valley and Other Stories in 1910 and subsequently reprinted in several of the pulps, is arguably the story that brought the wendigo from the world of myth and Native American cultural studies into the world of horror fiction, where it has remained a mainstay. The plot is remarkably simple. Simpson, a Scottish divinity student, joins a hunting party in the wilds of Labrador, hiring a French-Canadian hunting guide named DéFago to guide him. One night around the campfire, DéFago sings a song that ‘they sing in lumber-camps and god-forsaken places like that, when they’re skeered the Wendigo’s somewhere around’.35 At dawn the next morning the two men hear ‘possibly a human voice; hoarse yet plaintive – a soft, roaring voice close outside the tent, overhead rather than on the ground, of immense volume, while in some strange way most penetratingly and seductively sweet’.36 The voice calls DéFago by name, and he runs from the tent, disappearing into the woods. Simpson returns to the rest of the party for help and his uncle, Dr Cathcart and Hank, another guide, set out to seek DéFago. Cathcart informs the others, ‘the Wendigo is simply the Call of the Wild personified, which some natures hear to their own destruction.’37 DéFago, by this theory, has not devolved into a monster but transcended his humanity 150

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and become one with the wilderness. DéFago’s screams echo through the woods at night, and he finally returns to the camp to inform the other three: ‘I seen that great Wendigo thing . . . I been with it too . . . Now you seen it too.’38 DéFago’s pronouncement confirms that he has become a wendigo. Yet, at the end of the story, he dies, frozen and emaciated. Blackwood uses First Nations mythology to craft a fictional monster, a spirit of wilderness, but Blackwood also robs it of many of the aspects that make a wendigo a wendigo. His possessed person is an Other, a French-Canadian (with hints of indigenous ancestry), whose dialogue in dialect suggests a hunting guide not familiar with the language and behaviour of more ‘civilized’ men, guiding Anglo-Americans through the primeval woods. Like other woodsmen before him (most notably Hawkeye in Last of the Mohicans), DéFago is closer to nature than the men he guides, and thus more susceptible to its call. He can hear what they do not. The longer they linger in the woods, however, away from civilization, the closer they come to that primeval spirit of the forest. The remarkable thing about Blackwood is he removed all cannibalism from the wendigo. His monster eats only moss and compels others to do the same. He literally stripped the wendigo of its cannibalism. The danger of Blackwood’s wendigo is not that one might become possessed to eat human flesh; although DéFago does become possessed, he represents no danger to the others of being consumed. The only element of the wendigo that remains is the idea that DéFago proposes – once one encounters and experiences the wendigo, the danger is that one might become one. For Blackwood the danger is not in becoming a cannibal but in losing what little veneer of civilization one has and becoming ‘the Call of the Wild personified’, which he perceives as destructive.39 151

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Matt Fox, illustration for Algeron Blackwood’s The Wendigo, published in Famous Fantastic Mysteries, June 1944.

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For many readers Blackwood’s story was their introduction to the wendigo, and its influence would extend into pulp literature and the disciples of Lovecraft, similar to the trajectory of the ghoul. For horror fans, Blackwood brought the wendigo into the pulp monster canon, albeit without the cannibalism. Others, however, would return to that element of the spirit. Blackwood’s story would eventually even manifest itself in Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark, Alvin Schwartz’s anthology ‘collected from folklore’.40 Schwartz reduces Blackwood’s tale to its simplest elements, leaving the titular creature intact. ‘A wealthy man’ goes hunting in the Canadian woods, hiring an Indian named DéFago to guide him. The wealthy man and DéFago repeatedly hear the wind call DéFago’s name, leading DéFago to run through the frozen forest, crying that his feet are on fire. A year later the wealthy man thinks he sees DéFago at a trading post, however, upon removing the man’s hat, finds nothing but a pile of ashes underneath. Like Blackwood, Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark removes all cannibal elements from the wendigo. Indeed, for all practical purposes, it removes the wendigo from ‘The Wendigo’. Blackwood’s ‘Wendigo’, however, served as a springboard into the creature becoming a staple of pulp literature and entering the ‘Cthulhu Mythos’, the body of literary lore of gods and monsters created by H. P. Lovecraft and developed and added to by many authors since. Both Lovecraft and August Derleth praised the story. As Robert M. Price observes in his introduction to The Ithaqua Cycle, a collection of Lovecraftian mythos stories ­concerning the wendigo, August Derleth ‘coin[ed] a Lovecraftian name for Blackwood’s Wendigo’ – Ithaqua.41 Derleth, Lovecraft’s self-appointed literary heir and co-founder of Arkham House, the company that first published Lovecraft’s stories and novels in book 154

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form, wrote a number of stories concerning the ‘Cthulhu Mythos’, as he termed it, creating the Great Old One Ithaqua, known to the Native Americans of the north as the wendigo. Derleth wrote several stories in which Ithaqua/the wendigo is a presence, including ‘The Thing That Walked on the Wind’ in Strange Tales in 1933, ‘Ithaqua’, which appeared in Strange Stories in 1941, and ‘Beyond the Threshold’, which was first published in September 1941 in Weird Tales.42 Derleth filters Blackwood’s creation through his own ideas about Lovecraft’s cosmos. The last is set in Derleth’s own home state of Wisconsin, ‘Ithaqua’ is set in Cold Harbor, Manitoba, and ‘The Thing That Walked on the Wind’ is set in Navissa Camp, Manitoba. In all of the stories (as in much of Derleth’s writing), the protagonist investigates a disappearance or a strange occurrence and discovers, to his horror, that mysterious entities that exist beyond space and time are causing death and madness around the world. In this case, the wendigo. The gothic and Lovecraftian traditions have continued through the twenty-first century. William Meikle’s Night of the Wendigo (2012) imagines an archaeologist who discovers a Scottish ship four centuries old in the mud of the Hudson River. Possessed by the spirit of the wendigo, the archaeologist first eats one of the hearts of the corpses on the ship and becomes a wendigo himself. He summons a blizzard and hunts through Manhattan, eating victims and transforming them into frozen zombies. Similarly, the wendigo (in its Derleth-interpreted version of Ithaqua) is a monster in the Call of Cthulhu role-playing game, most notably found in the scenario Alone against the Wendigo, subsequently republished under the name Alone against the Frost so as to avoid accusations of cultural appropriation found in the twenty-first 155

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century, but not in the 1980s when the supplement was first published. The wendigo remains a popular monster for horror narratives. Yet it also appears in other genres, for reasons other than to provoke fear. A number of Canadian authors, both First Nations and EuroCanadian, turn to the wendigo as metaphor, allegory or entity of national identity. For First Nations writers especially, however, the wendigo is a creature of great metaphoric significance, often used to critique colonialism, assimilation and the experience of First Nations communities and individuals in Canada. The wendigo in literature becomes a potent symbol, allegory or metaphor, resulting in gay wendigos, goth wendigos, child wendigos, housewife wendigos and other manifestations of alienation. Eden Robinson’s ‘Dogs in Winter’, one of the four short stories in Traplines (1995), offers a critique of native/white relations in Canada by keeping ethnicity ambiguous in the story. ‘Windigo sickness’, as she terms it, affects Canadians of all ethnicities, not just First Nations, in as much as it is a spiritual sickness. Lisa, the protagonist, recalls living with her serial-killer mother, who becomes a metaphoric wendigo.43 Tomson Highway’s novel Kiss of the Fur Queen (1998) employs the wendigo to critique the legacy of residential schools, the government-sponsored religious schools that forcibly removed First Nations children from their families in order to educate and assimilate them into Euro-Canadian culture.44 Highway’s wendigo is a haunting memory of the experience of abusive priests, erasure of culture and identity, and modern Euro-Canadian culture that is an evil presence in protagonist Champion Okimasis, renamed Jeremiah at the school. The titular fur queen is a trickster figure and ancestral spirit whose influence combats that of the wendigo. 156

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Margaret Atwood, a one-woman wendigo industry, has returned to the cannibal spirit again and again, seeing in it a national monster, metaphor and identity for Canadians. Strange Things: The Malevolent North in Canadian Literature collects Atwood’s lectures given at the University of Oxford in 1991. She sees the wendigo as a particularly Canadian monster. ‘In the land of the Wendigoes, it is not who you know but who you eat’ that matters.45 Atwood’s wendigo is a giant, abnormally strong, genderless ‘spirit-creature’ with a heart of ice.46 ‘The Wendigo has been seen as the personification of winter, or hunger, or spiritual selfishness, and indeed the three are connected: winter is a time of scarcity, which gives rise to hunger, which gives rise to selfishness.’47 She goes on to identify three types of literary wendigo: ‘a manifestation of the environment’ or ‘a spirit of place’; second, a messenger or working-out of one’s individual fate (if you get eaten, she argues, ‘we don’t feel sorry for you, because it was definitely your doing’); and third, ‘a fragment of the protagonist’s psyche, a sliver of his inner life made visible’.48 Atwood returned to the wendigo, without ever using that specific term, in Oryx and Crake (2003), a post-apocalyptic novel told in flashback. Jimmy, who calls himself ‘Snowman’, is seemingly the last human being on earth. He misses his best friend Crake and the love of his life Oryx, with whom he was in a love triangle. He is slowly starving and Atwood implies he is ‘going wendigo’, in a world that is already wendigo. Snowman helped Crake release BlyssPluss, a drug designed to give the user a sense of virility, but in fact kills all who ingest it. Snowman, whose name is suggestive of both the Abominable Snowman and the body and heart of ice attributed to the wendigo, is thus a wendigo, devouring a world that consumes all that it is offered. Jimmy is repeatedly portrayed 157

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as being insatiably hungry. He is also revealed to be the teacher and spiritual leader for a tribe of Crakers, genetically engineered, passive creatures. Any society that is in danger of consuming too much is possessed by a wendigo spirit. First Nations playwright Daniel David Moses employs the wendigo in his play Brébeuf ’s Ghost (2000) as a metaphor for colonialism. The title refers to St Jean de Brébeuf, a Jesuit missionary to the Huron, ritually tortured and martyred by the Iroquois in 1649 – after killing him they drank his blood and ate his heart. His ghost appears several times in the play. He is now the patron saint of Canada and arguably the most prominent missionary in that nation’s history. Set among the Lake Nipissing Ojibwa, who are at war with the Iroquois, specifically the Mohawk, a small band of Ojibwa attempt to survive a particularly bad winter while contending with European missionaries who seem to be affected by the wendigo. Shaman Black Star and Chief Fire Cloud, and their women and children, form the heart of the band, and the two men attempt to negotiate disagreements within the group, the dangers from the Mohawk, the weather and the lack of food, and the challenge of interacting with the foreigners, who do not know how to survive in the Canadian winter but who seek to convert all the indigenous to Christianity. The Jesuit missionaries, known as the ‘Black Robes’, consist of Father Noel and Pierre, an acolyte, the former a dedicated priest who slowly goes insane and the latter, not yet a priest, more sympathetic and understanding of the indigenous. Greater than the fear of the Iroquois is the fear of the cannibal spirit pursuing them as winter falls. The titular ghost of Brébeuf appears to Father Noel, offering him his glowing, bloody heart, which the priest takes and eats, transforming him into a wendigo. 158

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During a ‘spectral blizzard’, when the group has little food and are starving, Pierre is killed by the group as he is also revealed to be a cannibal who had killed and eaten the wife of one of the warriors.49 Father Noel returns to the camp and kidnaps a baby. While the others think he has fallen through the ice and perished, it is revealed he lives, and now lurks and hunts at the water’s edge in the rain. He slits the throat of one warrior and then, on another rain- and fog-soaked night, he invades the women’s wigwam; emerging with his face covered in gore, Father Noel is finally attacked by the warriors. As the new shaman slits his throat, black flies descend and ‘eat the flesh off his bones, turning him into a physical facsimile of the ghost.’50 The death of the Jesuit ends the wendigo attacks on the band. Moses sees the Jesuits as the true wendigos, the ones whose arrival spelled doom for indigenous culture and health. The nation is haunted by the legacy of Brébeuf, in which the European consumes the indigenous. Similar to Moses’s play, in Joseph Boyden’s Three Day Road (2005) wendigo possession serves as a metaphor for white colonialist violence against the First Nations. Another wendigo play emerged in Canada the following year. Ojibwe writer, artist and film-maker Armand Garnet Ruffo first wrote and produced A Windigo Tale as a play in 2001, for which he won a cbc Arts Performance Award. Ruffo then adapted it himself as a film in 2010. As with Tomson Highway’s Kiss of the Fur Queen, Ruffo’s play-then-film is an analysis and critique of the effect of the residential school system on generations of First Nations families. Ruffo employs a dual plot: when Harold, a First Nations grandfather, takes his at-risk grandson Curtis on a roadtrip north the family’s dark secrets are revealed, while in an isolated village Lily, fifteen years absent, returns to the home of her 159

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mother, Doris, and realizes they must fight a wendigo from their past. The film exposes the dangers both in the system itself and in the forced assimilation of the First Nations children. Russo states: Generations of Native children were literally torn from their families and forced to assimilate, most often brutally, into Euro-Canadian society. Stories of physical and sexual abuse are rampant . . . My story takes its title from the evil Windigo manitou, which according to Ojibway [a variant spelling] mythology is an insatiable cannibalistic creature, because I think what went on in those schools was a kind of consumption of the human spirit. Of course, I didn’t simply want to write a didactic exposé so the story is framed as both a mystery and a ghost story of sorts.51 Again and again we see indigenous authors, artists and film-makers employing the cannibalistic nature of the wendigo as a metaphor for consumption under the expansion of the Europeans in Canada, as well as more recent political, social and cultural impositions placed upon the First Nations by Canada. Authors from the United States also employ the wendigo in their fiction, and not just horror writers. Winona LaDuke uses the wendigo as a political metaphor in Last Woman Standing (1997), operating as a symbol for rapacious colonialism and internalization of the oppression caused by the coming of the Europeans.52 Louise Erdrich’s 1998 novel The Antelope Wife is filled with a variety of forms of the wendigo, including cannibal humans, retellings of the wendigo myth and even wendigo dogs, all of whom are compelled by a spiritual hunger just as much as the desire to consume flesh.53 160

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Stephen King has evoked the wendigo spirit – it is the monster behind the horrors in Pet Sematary. Jud tells Louis that the Micmac burial ground beyond the pet cemetery is cursed: ‘not even the Micmacs themselves would come here. One of them claimed that he saw a wendigo here and the ground had gone sour.’54 Later, Jud relates that Timmy Baterman, who had been resurrected by his family in the dirt of the Micmac burial ground, was ‘wrong’ when he came back – there is no word for what he was other than ‘something that had been touched by the Wendigo’.55 Later still, Louis begins to panic as he believes the wendigo passed within fifty or sixty metres of his house: ‘the creature that can touch you and turn you into a cannibal’.56 When he wakes up the morning after his dead son Gage returns from the Micmac burial ground and kills Jud and Louis’s wife, Louis thinks, ‘It was the Wendigo, and it had turned him into not just a cannibal but the father of cannibals.’57 He remembers that the night before, when he buried Gage, Louis saw the wendigo: And then, rising behind the deadfall to a titanic height, its skin a cracked reptilian yellow, its eyes great hooded foglamps, its ears not ears at all but massive curling horns, was the Wendigo, a beast that looked like a lizard born of a woman.58 King’s wendigo looks different to the traditional one, which has neither horns nor yellow reptilian skin – it is not a lizard. But King does capture the wendigo spirit – that when we make poor choices in moments of extreme crisis, the result is often threatening and even deadly to those closest to us. Most historic reports of wendigos are of them attacking their own families, spouses and children first. Just as eating human flesh promises an end to starvation in times of famine, but transforms one into a cannibal, 161

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the second life that the Micmac burial ground hints at promises an end to grief and separation, but at a cost of the buried loved one becoming monstrous and consuming others that one loves. The more recent film adaptation of Pet Sematary (2019) sees family member after family member returning from the dead to become a monstrous version of themselves until the entire Creed family is threatening to kill the two-year-old child who has locked himself in the family car. There is no bargaining with the wendigo that ends well. Bernice M. Murphy also sees The Shining as a wendigo narrative: a man going crazy, isolated in the snow, and attempting to kill and devour his family.59 The wendigo can even be found in texts where the wendigo is not mentioned by name, but the spirit of hunger and madness lurk. Other horror writers have also invoked the wendigo in their work. Stephen Graham Jones, a Blackfeet Native American author, summons wendigos in The Fast Red Road: A Plainsong (2000), his debut novel, and in All the Beautiful Sinners (2003), the latter of which concerns a serial killer called the Tin Man who kills native children during tornadoes and who may be a kind of wendigo.60 Like Bird’s Ravenous, the wendigo tales of Jones relocate the northern First Nations myth to the Southwest of the United States. The wendigo is also relocated in Michael Jensen’s Firelands (2004), set in 1799 in the Ohio Territory settlement of Hugh’s Lick.61 Jensen makes the wendigo a creature of the Delaware people, killing settlers as winter sets in. The frontiersmen who make up the town learn of the creature’s existence and then seek to destroy it before everyone in the settlement is dead or a cannibal. The wendigo is a presence in poetry as well. Humorist Ogden Nash wrote ‘The Wendigo’ in 1936 as a poem for children. Although the wendigo comes from Canada, in ‘Tonight, on Your 162

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Veranda!’62 Nash imagines a wendigo very different to the mythological or fictional ones. His wendigo’s ‘eyes are ice and indigo’, and it has yellow blood and tentacles.63 Other wendigo poems include ‘The Walker of the Snow’ (1859) by Irish Canadian C. D. Shanly, ‘The Windigo’ (1901), written in French-Canadian dialect by William Henry Drummond, and ‘Windigo’ (1965) by George Bowering. This last comes closest to portraying the flesh-eating spirit of myth. Bowering’s wendigo has a heart ‘made of hard ice’, lives in the forest, eats those who get lost in the woods, was once a man but has changed into a monster, and is hunger personified: ‘In winter / he is always hungry, he eats / flesh.’64 More recently the wendigo has been a presence on the screen. Wendigo (1978), written and directed by Roger Darbonne (nom de plume of Paul Kiener), is an obscure adaptation of Algernon Blackwood’s short story. Roughly following the plot of the story, a group of hunters and photographers follow a French-Canadian guide into the wilderness where they camp near an ancient Native American burial site that hides a legendary treasure, itself a trope in horror movies by 1978. Their actions summon the wendigo, who proceeds to kill them one by one. Yet another film that also concerns hunters in the woods that accidentally unleash a wendigo was released under the titles Wendigo, Wrath of the Wendigo and Frostbiter: Wrath of the Wendigo in 1995. Produced by Troma Entertainment, a low-budget, purposely low-brow film-making studio, the film owes much more to slapstick and B-movies than to the myth of the wendigo, which serves as a monster-of-theweek to slaughter idiotic characters until the protagonist and his girlfriend learn how to kill it in time for the end credits. Much more critically acclaimed, if not initially a box-office success, is Antonia Bird’s Ravenous (1999), set in the Sierra Nevadas 163

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in the United States in 1847, during the Mexican-American War. As with many of the previous narratives surveyed here, the wendigo is both a traditional monster and a metaphor for colonialism, in this case the attitude of Manifest Destiny that subjugates the Native Americans and drove the United States to seize the Southwest territory from Mexico through war. In the film, soldier John Boyd is publicly decorated for military service in order to cover up his cowardice in a battle that he survived by accident. He is sent to Fort Spenser, an isolated military outpost sparsely manned, in a ‘promotion’ designed to remove him from anywhere significant. While there, Colquhoun, an American soldier of Scottish descent, appears and admits that his party was ambushed and lost in the wilderness. He was guiding a group from Virginia to California, and like the Donner Party, discussed in Chapter Eight, they were trapped in the mountains. He claims that members of his party were forced to eat the flesh of his dead companions to survive: The day that Jones died I was out collecting wood. He had expired from malnourishment. And when I returned, the others were cooking his legs for dinner. Would I have stopped it had I been there? I don’t know. But I must say . . . when I stepped inside that cave . . . the smell of meat cooking . . . I thanked the Lord. I thanked the Lord. And then things got out of hand. I ate sparingly; others did not. The meat did not last us a week and we were soon hungry again only, this time our hunger was different. More . . . severe . . . savage. Rather than waiting for people to die and consume their remains, the group begins killing people and eating them. 164

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George, one of the Native American guides who lives at Fort Spenser with his wife, warns John Boyd about the wendigo by name. Colonel Hart, one of the soldiers, translates for Boyd what George says: ‘What is it, George?’ ‘Wendigo’. ‘A h, it’s an old Indian myth, from the north. A man eats another’s flesh . . . It’s usually an enemy . . . and he, um, takes, uh, steals his strength, essence, his spirit . . . and, um, his hunger becomes craven, insatiable . . . and the more he eats the more he wants to. And the more he eats the stronger be becomes.’ ‘George, people don’t still do that, do they?’ . . .. ‘White man eats the body of Jesus Christ every Sunday.’ As seen in Chapter Two, George evokes the spirit of Christian Communion to explain the wendigo as part of a larger world of flesh-eating. The wendigo is not a Southwestern native monster, however – it has been transferred to this space and place by Bird from northern Canada to Nevada and California. The men at Fort Spenser investigate Colquhoun’s story and discover it is he who ate the rest of the party and he himself is now a wendigo. He begins killing and eating the people at the fort until he and Boyd are left. Boyd kills Colquhoun, but Colquhoun seemingly infects him with the wendigo spirit. The film links the wendigo myth with the history of the Donner Party and the horror of survival cannibalism as a critique of Manifest Destiny. In Ravenous Bird’s wendigo is not the Native American spirit, at least not in and of itself. Corinna Lenhardt argues that Ravenous 165

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commodifies the wendigo myth, infusing it with a strain of EuroAmerican vampirism. The end result is that the film ‘adapts and translates the wendigo myth into mainstream Euro-American cinematic traditions’.65 Colquhoun owes as much to Dracula and the Donner Party as he does to First Nations mythology. Larry Fessenden’s Wendigo (2001) offers a respectful but odd appropriation of the wendigo myth. A family from New York City with two workaholic parents and an alienated young son decide to rent a cabin in the Catskills. The opening credits play over images of a child’s toys. Miles (Erik Per Sullivan) sits in the back seat, making a werewolf and a Mazinga (Japanese anime toy from the Shogun Warriors) battle each other. Note that both of these are transforming creatures and liminal creatures – they alter form into something else and they exist between two categories, just like the wendigo. The film is told primarily from Miles’s point of view. The parents, George (Jake Weber) and Kim (Patricia Clarkson) argue in the front seat. A deer leaps in front of the car, is struck by it and falls to the ground as George slams on the brakes in panic. Three hunters emerge from the woods, angry that the family has killed the deer they were hunting. Words are exchanged and the hunters, after helping pull the car from the snowbank, leave with vague threats, so that the family must call a tow truck. The day after the tow truck pulls them from the snow and the family drives to the cabin they have rented, Kim takes Miles into the nearest town for shopping. Miles meets an elderly Native American (Lloyd Oxendine) who gives Miles a carved wendigo figure, explaining what a wendigo is and warning Miles to beware of them. No one else in the shop can see the man, and the woman at the checkout assures Kim that she is the only one working (and then charges them three dollars for the figure). 166

In Miles’s imagination, the wendigo stands over a fallen hunter, from Wendigo (2001, dir. Larry Fessenden).

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Otis (John Speredakos), one of the aggrieved hunters, shoots through the window of the cabin, and then again later when father and son are sledding, hitting George, whom Kim rushes to the local hospital. When told, Sheriff Tom Hale (Christopher Wynkoop) goes to bring Otis in for questioning and is shot by Otis as well. Miles runs through the woods, pursued (or at least so he imagines) by the wendigo that has been haunting the cabin and the forest. The wendigo appears to be the broken and damaged deer the family hit in humanoid form with elements of a tree as well, representing a spirit of nature that is as much victim as it is monster. The monster finally extracts revenge on Otis, but the ending is ambiguous at best, and the audience is left uncertain how things resolve for the family, or if the wendigo was real or merely Miles’s fantasy. Like Blackwood, Fessenden also removes the man-eating aspect of the wendigo’s myth. Nowhere in the film is it suggested the wendigo is a flesh-eating monster, nor does it inspire cannibalism.

The Wendigo Lives On The wendigo is alive and well and finding new incarnations. Shawn Smallman sees the White Walkers from George R. R. Martin’s Song of Ice and Fire novel series and the hbo series based upon it, Game of Thrones, as simply the latest manifestation of wendigo appropriation: they have hearts of ice, come from the north, and bring winter and death with them.66 In 2020 the Los Angeles-based avant-garde performance collective The Industry performed a site-specific opera called Sweet Land in Los Angeles State Historic Park. The post-industrial, retro-futuristic opera ‘reimagines narratives surrounding the founding of America and 168

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westward expansion in order to make visible the violence and erasure of American history’.67 It also features a character called Wiindigo, played by Korean American actress Sharon Chohi Kim, who is covered in white, black and grey fur and the back of whose head is a giant, toothed mouth. Canadian poet George Bowering describes the wendigo as ‘a long shadow / on the ice’.68 Certainly that long shadow continues to be cast, but Bowering was also referring to the fear of starvation in wintertime and the danger of food scarcity, even in nations of plenty. The wendigo is the irrational manifestation of the fear of starvation, the fear of being eaten and the fear of eating something taboo. Yet, as Margaret Atwood observes, the Canadian literary approach to the wendigo is part of ‘the late twentieth-century project of humanizing traditional monsters’.69 In that, the literary wendigo joins Grendel (at least in John Gardner’s retold version) and Anne Rice’s vampires. Perhaps James B. Waldrum sums it up best in his volume Revenge of the Windigo: The Construction of the Mind and Mental Health of North American Aboriginal Peoples, an analysis and refutation of the idea of ‘Wendigo Psychosis’, when he observes, ‘The Wendigo’s revenge is not to return to eat us in the embodied sense, but rather the persistence and tenacity with which we cling to ill-conceived ideas as truth, the ways in which we are consumed by the very knowledge that we trust to guide us.’70 In other words we ourselves become the eaters of dead ideas, ones that turn our hearts to ice. The wendigo is thus not just a myth or a spirit but an idea. It is employed as a response to colonialism (similar to cannibalism), which transitions us nicely into the next chapter. Native American author and professor Jack D. Forbes, in his foundational 169

Sharon Chohi Kim, company member of The Industry, as the character Wiindigo in the opera Sweet Land, 12 March 2020.

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text Columbus and Other Cannibals (1979) sees the wendigo as a concept that explains the actual experience of colonialism. ‘Cannibalism, as I define it, is the consuming of another’s life for one’s own private purpose or profit.’71 The wendigo is not an indigenous spirit of starvation and cannibalism. It is the Jesuit missionaries, Columbus, the pilgrims and the others who came to the New World who are the wendigos – they consumed the lives of others. There were cannibals found on both sides when Europeans began exploring the New World – some metaphoric, some real, but both upholding the perception that ‘they’ are eaters of the dead. It is with this notion that we turn to actual cannibal narratives in the next chapter.

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Human Cannibals

Each person calls barbarism whatever is not his or her own practice . . . We may call Cannibals barbarians, in respect to the rules of reason, but not in respect to ourselves, who surpass them in every kind of barbarity. From Michel de Montaigne’s ‘Of Cannibals’

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hus far in this book we have mostly examined myths, monsters and animals that devour corpses. In this chapter and the one that follows we will consider what drives human beings to consume the dead. In the absence of an aswang, wendigo or ghoul, under what circumstances do we turn cannibal? What drives a human being to eat the dead? In his volume An Intellectual History of Cannibalism, Romanian philosopher and political scientist Cătălin Avramescu argues that the Greeks and Romans located their cannibal monsters (and cannibal people) on the margins of their world.1 Cannibals that live ‘here’ are dangerous and scary; but most cannibals live ‘there’, meaning far away at the outskirts of civilization (literally and metaphorically). So, too, does virtually 173

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every Western culture since. Eaters of the dead are always ‘over there’. Cannibalism seems to be of great interest now, both historic and within popular culture. In 2016 the San Diego Museum of Man opened an exhibit entitled ‘Cannibals: Myth and Reality’.2 Rather than focus on the carnage, butchery and salaciousness possible with such an exhibit, the museum chose to examine all of the different manifestations of cannibalism within human culture in a series of interactive exhibits. An apothecary shop demonstrated the history of medicinal cannibalism. A room concerning the results of shipwrecks and ships sinking, and how decisions were made about which individuals were eaten, featured the opportunity to see whom in your party would be eaten (draw straws – shortest one is food, second shortest must kill them). Accounts of the Donner Party, the 1972 Uruguayan rugby team and other historic examples of survival cannibalism were offered, as was evidence that we are all descended from cannibals. Most interestingly, a giant game of Operation sat in the centre of the chain of exhibition rooms. Here one used large tweezers to remove organs from a life-sized human shape; the number of calories a particular organ would provide when eaten was inscribed upon it. My five-year-old, who loves the original game, had a great deal of fun removing the figure’s heart, liver and muscles. The exhibit was informative, interesting and tasteful (pardon the pun), although the Operation game did seem to slightly trivialize the experience of survival cannibalism – but it was fun. I found the exhibition odd but inspiring. The first summer the exhibit sold out daily. The first time we went, many, many people came out on a sunny Saturday to explore cannibalism. 174

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In his controversial work on religion The Future of an Illusion, Sigmund Freud claims that of all instinctive wishes, such as incest and a lust for killing, ‘Cannibalism alone seems to be universally prescribed and – to the non-psychoanalytic view – to have been completely surmounted.’3 In other words, he believes humanity indulges all its other dark impulses, but cannibalism is the one universally forbidden. Freud was wrong. There are circumstances within some societies in which eating the dead flesh of humans is not only allowed, but actually mandated. In this chapter we shall consider if large-scale cultural cannibalism ever even happened, explore different types of cannibalism and then examine examples of historic cannibalism, mostly of the survival type.

Are There Any Cannibals? (Yes, Yes There Are) William Arens’s controversial The Man-eating Myth: Anthropology and Anthropophagy argues that there is a ‘lack of documentation’ of true cannibalism in the world; that cannibalism was a myth perpetuated by Europe to justify colonization and anthropology ‘depends’ on the cannibal; and that while survival cannibalism is real and ‘regrettable’, there has been no society on the planet that practised cannibalism.4 As the title suggests, he argues that any sense of culturally approved cannibalism is a myth and does not exist. Individuals may practise it for either survival or psychopathic reasons, but historically there has never been large-scale cannibalism in the world. Scholars have since taken issue with Arens contentions and conclusions, offering first-hand accounts of a variety of cannibalisms. In Divine Hunger, scholar Peggy Sanday, for example, offers three theoretical lenses for understanding why humans 175

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might eat other, dead humans. The first is psychogenic – the ‘satisfaction of certain psychosexual needs’; as an example, see Jeffrey Dahmer in the next chapter. The second is materialist, as in survival cannibalism – we eat the dead because there is nothing else to eat. The third is hermeneutical – ‘conceptualizing cannibal practice as part of the broader cultural cycle of life, death, and reproduction’.5 All three types of cannibalism exist in the world. Cannibalism has existed in a number of different contexts for a number of different reasons. To give a singular example, the Native Americans of the southwestern United States and Mexico practised cannibalism for two reasons. Referring to the food itself as ‘man corn’, the Hopi, Zuni, Pueblo and Anasazi, among others, have an oral tradition of survival cannibalism supported by the archaeological record – broken bones with human tooth marks on them have been found.6 These cultures may have also supported ritual cannibalism, as part of human sacrifice as a form of social control. As we saw in the second chapter, eating gods or eating men as part of a religious ritual becomes a concrete means of forming, maintaining and supporting a community. Man corn helped that happen in the Southwest, both in times of famine and in times of plenty.7 Cannibalism exists. Yet Arens does have a point. Too often cannibalism has been used as an accusation to justify negative treatment of others. The ‘cannibal Indian’ was such a terrifying yet expected figure to Europeans and especially in New England that even when no cannibalism had taken place, writers would still invent it in their accounts.8 This imagination, of course, goes both ways. Europeans exploring the world imagined the peoples they encountered were cannibals and those they encountered assumed Europeans were 176

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‘Insula Canibalium’, engraving of Native Americans attacking a fleet of Spanish ships in 1492, with a scene of cannibalism on the left; from Caspar Plautius, Nova typis transacta navigatio (1621).

the man-eaters. Native American author Jack D. Forbes sees in the wendigo a model for understanding European colonizers as metaphoric (yet just as real) cannibals, that consume, devour and spread their contagion: The overriding characteristic of the wétiko is that he consumes other human beings, that is, he is a predator and a cannibal. This is the central essence of the disease . . . In any event, the wétiko psychosis is a very contagious and rapidly spreading disease. It is spread by the wétikos themselves as they recruit or corrupt others.9 177

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Cannibals are thus intimately connected to the whole colonial enterprise, and often serve as both literal bogeyman and metaphor for consumption, as a model for what one society can do to another.

Colonial Cannibals Frank Lestringant sees the etymology of cannibal as coming from the Arawak word caniba, a corruption of cariba, a word they used to refer to themselves meaning ‘the bold ones’.10 ‘The Bold People’ are seen as the man-eaters. ‘Cannibal’ is thus an occidental word, developed out of the Americas, applied around the world as part of the colonial enterprise.11 Before its coining, the preferred term was ‘anthropophagus’, man-eater. In 1544 Jean-Alfonse de Saintange applied the term ‘cannibal’ to Africans, linking the peoples of Africa with the indigenous peoples of the New World.12 By the nineteenth century, however, South America was perceived of as ‘the continent of cannibals’,13 a perception that continued into the late twentieth century. Cannibalism is equated in most societies with savagery. ‘The orthodox theory of the nineteenth century’, writes A. W. Brian Simpson in his study of cannibalism and the law, ‘seems to have been that cannibalism, once universal, had become restricted in range by the spread of civilization.’14 From the European perspective, Europeans were civilized, and thus had abandoned cannibalism millennia before, and now were bringing civilization to the savage parts of the globe. Everybody is somebody’s cannibal. Since Columbus Europeans have believed the Americas to be the home of cannibals. Montaigne’s famous essay, ‘Of Cannibals’ (c. 1580), explores the cultural practices of alleged cannibals 178

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Theodor de Bry and Joos van Winghe, ‘Butchery of the Indians’, engraving from Bartolomé de las Casas, Regionum indicarum per Hispanos olim devastatarum . . . (1664).

who ate the bodies of their adversaries as a matter of honour and finds them to be no better, and often worse, than allegedly ‘civilized’ Europeans. Montaigne points out that every society ‘calls b ­ arbarism whatever is not his or her own practice’.15 He describes the Tupinambá people of Brazil, claiming they would roast and eat their prisoners in common with the community as a matter of honour. ‘This is not,’ he assures, ‘as people think, for nourish­ment.’16 Interestingly, Montaigne’s argument was that Europe was just as barbarous as the alleged cannibals. His point 179

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of view was lost, however, in the race to colonize and cannibalize (in all senses of the word) the New World. The concept of cannibalism was useful for colonizers, as it transforms the alleged perpetrators into inhuman savages: ‘There is no question that the Spaniards attributed cannibalism to many Indians who did not practice it in order to enslave them,’ writes Lewis Hanke, ‘but there nonetheless seems to be a good basis in fact for the attribution of cannibalism to some Caribs.’17 Too often Europeans ascribed blanket cannibalism to societies that practised a limited form of it for other reasons. Within certain cultural situations, consuming the dead actually makes sense, even if contemporary readers find it anathema.

‘Cannibals in Brazil’, engraving from Theodor de Bry, Americae tertia pars (1592).

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Cannibalism as ascribed by colonialism also crafts a narrative of the colonizer as the one who cannot be eaten. Whereas the cannibal has successfully devoured others, the invader is the one who will not be consumed: ‘The colonizer identity is ­positioned as an eater of Others who can never themselves be eaten, just as the unmarked gaze of the colonizer claims the power to see but not to be seen.’18 The colonizer is subject, the cannibal is object. This differentiation, along with the model of indigenousperson-as-cannibal, is then perpetuated in culture, through art and literature. Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe further contributes to ‘the bleak legend of the cannibals’.19 Anthropophagy in that story, as practised by the indigenous people on the island upon which Crusoe finds himself, is a choice born of inferiority, savagery and ignorance. As soon as Crusoe kills, cooks and serves a goat kid to Friday, the man swears he will never practise cannibalism again, suggesting that the natives simply do not understand that there are better food choices available on the island than each other, and have settled for consuming human flesh until they are taught alternatives by their ‘betters’. Conversely, the colonized peoples of Africa and Latin America have often seen the European invaders as eaters of the dead as well. ‘From the seventeenth century onward the folk beliefs of West and Central Africa from the Senegambia to the Congo explained the insatiable appetite of the Atlantic slave trade in terms of white cannibalism,’ writes William D. Piersen.20 He reports of Olauhdah Equiano, an Ibo boy taken into slavery and sent to North America in 1756 who saw kettles boiling on the deck of a slave ship and assumed that the Europeans were cannibals who planned to eat him during the voyage.21 Piersen reports that so strong was the assertion of white cannibalism in Africa 181

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during this period that the European custom of kissing was perceived in Dahomey as originating from cannibalistic tendencies – Europeans could not resist tasting what they wanted to eat.22 One of the reasons for the famous Amistad rebellion of 1839, depicted in the Steven Spielberg film of the same name, was that the Africans on board the vessel had been told the Americans planned to eat them.23 Account after account of the slave trade focuses on how Africans believed they would be eaten eventually, even if not immediately devoured upon arrival in the Americas: ‘Consuming the bodies of the enslaved was but one of many symbols of avarice and selfishness, and in the context of the slave trade could clearly be applied to or expected of Europeans who manned the slave ships.’24 Cannibalism, applied to indigenous peoples by Europeans in order to denote savagery, was also perceived by those indigenous people as a defining quality of Europeans that denoted the latter’s all-consuming nature. The invaders devour everything they come in contact with, including humans. Furthermore, cannibalism was a marker of intrinsic, ontological malevolence. In many African cultures cannibalism was the province of witches, who ate people in order to work their evil.25 Europeans perceived as cannibals were thus marked as evil, albeit in a vicious circle that saw them defined as evil because they were cannibals and defined as cannibals because they were evil. In the Belgian Congo a colonial governor demanded the right hand of any indigenous people killed as proof that the soldier’s missions had been successful. As a result, the soldiers carried baskets of African hands, which developed a myth that the white men ate black hands. One rumour circulated that the meat that was allegedly canned beef in white men’s houses was, in fact, made from 182

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black men’s hands.26 The cruelty and physical torture inherent in colonialism offered proof positive that Europeans craved and gobbled up African flesh. The eating of the dead was perceived to be real, based in the lived experience of imperial violence, and yet also served on a metaphoric level to explain what Europe was doing to Africa.

Types of Cannibalism No society has ever actually eaten the dead as a primary food source. Instead, there is always a reason for the practice of cannibalism. Five key types have been articulated by Lewis Petrinovich (after Salmon) in The Cannibal Within (I’ve changed the order slightly):27 1. Medicinal cannibalism (consuming parts of corpses for medical reasons) 2. Mortuary cannibalism (eating one’s dead relatives as a ‘burial’ practice) 3. Sacrificial cannibalism (‘to propitiate gods, enact revenge or gain strength of an enemy’)28 4. Political cannibalism (‘to terrify one’s neighbors or enemies by ruthlessly and publicly consuming those you capture and kill’)29 5. ‘To satisfy hunger’ – (gastronomic) aka survival cannibalism While individuals might consume the dead because they have a psychological disorder (as will be discussed in the next chapter), these are societal reasons, reasons why an entire group might engage in this behaviour. 183

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A further distinguishing factor in considering cannibalism is whether it is voluntary or involuntary. One may choose to consume the dead knowingly in most of the categories above. In the final category, however, ‘to satisfy hunger’, lurks a necessary but involuntary cannibalism. The members of the Uruguayan rugby team that survived a plane crash in the Andes in 1972 ate the bodies of their companions to survive, as they would have perished otherwise. Such cannibalism is voluntary in the sense that one chooses to do it, but had any other options been available it would not have occurred. We see, however, both in real life and in art (thinking here of Thyestes and Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus) that there is unknowing cannibalism. Thyestes and Tamora, respectively, are unaware they are eating the flesh of dead humans until it is revealed to them after their meals. The horror of such a scene comes from the characters not knowing what the audience knows. This dynamic can also, however, be played for laughs, as in The Rocky Horror Picture Show when the characters unknowingly eat meat from Eddie until Frank playfully hints at what they are consuming. The larger issue for the purposes of our enquiry here is to consider how cannibals, both voluntary and involuntary, historic and contemporary, knowing and unknowing, have been represented in history and in culture, popular or otherwise. Cannibalism is horrific, yes, but we cannot seem to stop thinking about it, writing about it, telling stories that involve it and reading books on the topic.

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Medicinal Cannibalism Medicinal cannibalism is the consumption of parts of the human body for medical or pharmaceutical purposes. In twelfth-century Arabia one might be able to procure ‘mellified man’, from the Latin word for honey. ‘Mellified man was dead human remains steeped in honey,’ according to Mary Roach.30 In order to create this medicine in China, allegedly an old man is fed nothing but honey for a month. He is then killed and placed in a stone coffin for a century, after which the body is exhumed and the medication prepared in small batches. Supposedly the resulting concoction could cure broken or wounded limbs when consumed.31 In a variety of cultures all over the world, for much of human history, the human body has provided ingredients for cures, restoratives and health products. The sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries saw a craze for Mumia powder (ground-up mummy) for everything from vertigo and palsy to ‘thin blood’. It was traditionally to be taken internally (eaten), although King Charles ii rubbed it all over his body to achieve the same effect. James i refused corpse medicine, but his son Charles i was actually made into corpse medicine, and his grandson made his own.32 As actual mummies ran out, apothecaries would sell Mumia falsa (ground-up recent corpses). Similarly, blood, fat and bone would be taken from the recently deceased or executed to be used for pharmaceutical purposes. Consuming the fat of an executed person allegedly cured rheumatism and joint pain.33 Rheumatism could also be cured through the consumption of human bone marrow. Ground-up skull could cure headaches in a belief that owed as much to 185

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sympathetic magic as to medical science. There is no part of the body that has not been used historically in some cure or another, to prevent maladies or even the effect of old age. We consume the dead as a prologue to joining them. More recent, particularly in the United States, is the trend of placentophagy, or the ingestion of the placenta after giving birth. A number of schools of thought have emerged on the controversial practice (one that is filled with myths of its own in terms of benefits to the mother) in which one may eat the placenta raw, cooked, steamed or dehydrated. It can even be dried and encapsulated, then taken as a medical supplement over the postpartum period – ostensibly in order to gain the benefits that allegedly come with consumption. While the practice of using the placenta as medicine has a long history in China, it is only recently that the West has begun to use it. While the West focuses on the benefit of the placenta to the mother, the Chinese have long viewed the placenta as medicine for a variety of ailments, including diseases of the liver and the kidneys.

Mortuary Cannibalism Mortuary cannibalism, also known as funerary cannibalism, could be considered a relation of the sky burials of Tibet or Towers of Silence of the Zoroastrians, inasmuch as both involve the consumption of dead bodies. In mortuary cannibalism, however, the corpse (or at least part of it) is eaten by the family and/or community of the deceased. For example, the Wari’ of western Brazil as recently as the 1960s disposed of decedents by eating the corpse. Children were fully eaten, but for adults only the flesh and organs were consumed 186

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while the rest was then buried. To bury the entire corpse is seen as unkind and disrespectful. The Wari’ did not eat the dead out of nutrititional necessity, preference for the taste of human flesh or to somehow gain control over the spirit of the deceased. Rather, cannibalism grew out of respect and compassion for the dead and the decedent’s family.34 The body was decapitated, eviscerated and roasted. To honour the departed family member, the important parts of the body would be consumed in a community feast. It served as both a means to honour the dead and to literally incorporate them into their still-living relatives. The Wari’ perceived this practice as vital and necessary for the family and community: ‘More painful than having the corpse eaten would have been to have it not eaten.’35 Mortuary cannibalism is a form of endocannibalism – only those inside the community may be consumed. Outsiders may neither be eaten nor partake in the eating. Survival cannibalism is the only other type of endocannibalism. Most cannibalism, however, is exocannibalism – the eating of those from the outgroup. It is to those we now turn.

Sacrificial Cannibalism Sacrificial cannibalism has historically been practised in a number of cultures, found in every continent. Often after battle or a raid against an enemy group, the captured individuals would be tortured, executed and consumed. A number of indigenous groups in New England and parts of Canada were reported to consume parts of their prisoners, and drink their blood. This practice has also been reported in New Guinea, South America and parts of Africa (including by recent African dictators). 187

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Caspar Luyken, ‘Dutch are captured, murdered and eaten by Indians in Brazil, 1646’, etching from Hiob Ludolf, Allgemeine Schau-Bühne der Welt, vol. ii (1701).

Sacrificial cannibalism exists in order to propitiate gods, enact revenge for wrongs real or imagined, and to gain the strength of an enemy. In many of these cultures, the body of a dead enemy is consumed primarily for two reasons. The first is to gain the strength, courage and other abilities of a defeated foe. The second is to carry out a final defeat of that foe by consuming them. Sacrificial cannibalism thus also helps to distinguish between in-group and out-group, between friend and enemy. The world is divided into two groups: those we eat and those we do not. Those we eat are not fully human; they are enemies who can be consumed because they are not worthy of the respect given to the in-group. 188

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Political Cannibalism Blending with sacrificial cannibalism as a form of exocannibalism is political cannibalism, carried out to terrify neighbours and enemies and demonstrate the power of the eater over others. The Iroquois would eat parts of their prisoners, for example, sometimes in front of them while they were still alive. They would also force the prisoners to eat the corpses of their other captives. These two types of cannibalism served different purposes. The former sought to gain the adversaries’ strength, courage and life-essence while proving superiority over them, as noted above. The latter existed to force prisoners to become cannibals outside of a ritual purpose, and thus make them less than human as well as ones who had eaten the flesh of their friends and family.36 Outside of the ritual purpose of consuming an enemy to gain their strength, when one consumes the body of a friend or in-group member it is considered a different kind of cannibalism, one that is shameful. The same act becomes redefined, or at least defined differently depending on who is doing the eating, whom they are eating and for what purpose. Variants on this form are found most notably in twentiethcentury Africa. Ugandan Idi Amin allegedly practised cannibalism, admitting in an interview in 1976, ‘I have eaten human meat. It is very salty, even more salty than leopard meat.’37 Jean-Bédel Bokassa, dictator of the Central African Republic, allegedly kept human flesh in the refrigerator of his state kitchen which he would feed to unknowing guests. During his coronation ceremony as Emperor of Central Africa, he turned to a French minister in attendance and said to him, ‘You never noticed, but you ate human flesh.’38 These men do so for the same reason the Iroquois of the 189

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seventeenth century did. It terrified their enemies; it demonstrated their power; and they delight in forcing others to unknowingly consume human flesh and thus become defiled. One who chooses to eat is powerful; one who is tricked into eating is weak.

Survival Cannibalism It may help to think of survival cannibalism as an event rather than an identity. The people of Ireland, Russia, Germany, China, the United States and other European nations in this chapter are not and were not per se cannibals. Unlike societies that practise mortuary, sacrificial and political cannibalism, all of which provide specific social situations in which it is permissible, and perhaps even required, that one eat the dead, survival cannibalism is the result of people forced by dire circumstances to consume corpses simply in order to survive. The start of the Little Ice Age, as scientists call it – 1300–1850 – a period of cooling in the northern hemisphere, especially Europe, coincided with a worldwide famine in 1315 from the cold weather and pestilence. As food grew scarce in 1315, reports of cannibalism throughout Europe grew more common. These acts of cannibalism were not part of the social structure, as among the Wari’ or Iroquois, but simple biological need. In times of food scarcity, when one is hungry enough, one will even eat the dead of one’s own community and family. Survival cannibalism has been reported throughout American history, often linked to the idea that, as the nation first took root on the east coast and moved into westward expansion, the frontier was a dangerous place in which one might be required to eventually eat the bodies of one’s companions. Reports of cannibalism 190

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emerged out of Jamestown in Virginia in the sixteenth century. Two years after the Donner Party (detailed in Chapter Eight), members of the 1848 expedition led by John C. Fremont (his fourth) engaged in cannibalism. Ten out of 33 men lost in the San Juan Range died and were eaten. Cannibalism also haunted the 1881 Greely Expedition, and cannibalism is further explicitly implied in the names of such legendary American man-eaters as ‘Big Phil the Cannibal’, ‘Liver-eating’ Johnson and Alfred ‘the Human Hyena’ Packer, also called ‘The Colorado Cannibal’. At the same time as the Donner and Fremont parties practised survival cannibalism, the same scenario was unfolding in parts of Ireland due to the famine of 1845–9, known as ‘The Great Hunger’. Cormac Ó Gráda recounts the story of John Connolly from the west of Ireland, who was arrested for theft. During his trial it was revealed the family was starving so badly that his wife had eaten part of their dead son’s leg after he passed. The body was disinterred, the leg was found to be partially eaten and Connolly was found not guilty of the theft, as the family was clearly starving.39 In addition to natural famine, the famines created by war and by political machinations often result in widespread survival cannibalism. Numerous reports from Germany after the First World War detail cases of food being so scarce that people would consume the bodies of the immediately deceased. The Soviet Union saw repeated moments of mass cannibalism during its history,40 particularly from 1920 to 1922, also in the wake of the First World War, and the period of 1931 to 1933 in Ukraine, known as the Holodomor, which literally means ‘to kill by starvation’. Millions died. Some were eaten. In 1931 Stalin forced collectivization, urbanization and modern­ization upon the people of Ukraine, resulting in a 191

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de-emphasis on agriculture and a subsequent loss of food. Public buildings were turned into mortuaries. Some people were buried alive simply because they would not be alive for long. Eventually, people were too tired and weak to bury the dead. By late spring of 1934 cannibalism was widespread in Ukraine, although Anne Applebaum reports: ‘although the phenomenon was widespread, it never became “normal”.’41 It was also, however, no secret – Soviet officials in Kiev and Moscow were well aware of what was happening. In May 1933, 10,000 people were deported from western Russia to a gulag on Nazino Island with inadequate food, so much so that the place acquired the nickname ‘Cannibal Island’, and local officials began almost immediately to arrest individuals for ‘­cannibalism by habit’, initially the eating of corpses, but rapidly turning to murder in order to obtain fresh food.42 A party ­f unctionary visiting the island in August reported that only onethird of the original deportees were still alive, and they only lived because they resorted to cannibalism.43 The authorities knew the policies were resulting in survival cannibalism but did nothing to alleviate the conditions that caused the eating of the dead. After Stalin’s forces seized all grain for export, the peasants in the Ukraine ate everything edible they could find, and then: Some peasants, driven by hunger, fell into temporary insanity and began to feed on the dead bodies of their own and their neighbor’s children. This cannibalism reached a point where the Soviet government – instead of stopping the mad exportation of grain – began to print posters with the following warning: ‘To eat your own children is a barbarous act.’44 192

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The Ukrainian peasants arrested for eating others during the Holodomor were actually charged with robbery and ‘grave bodily harm to a victim’.45 Like much of the world at the time (and even now!) cannibalism was not technically illegal and was not included in the criminal code, so perpetrators would be charged with taking property (a body) and causing grave harm to it (by eating it). Applebaum reports on Polish women arrested by the Soviets for illegally entering the Soviet Union who would then be sent to a prison in Ukraine. ‘They described how their children died of hunger and how they, themselves, very close to starvation, cooked the corpses of their own children and ate them.’ Later, ‘they lost their minds’ with the knowledge of what they had done.46 The consumption of children was an open secret, but it was a twoway street. ‘Mother says we should eat her if she dies,’ a teenager wrote to his brother.47 Families planned to consume any member who passed away, as it was the only way to ensure the survival of some family members. During the Second World War Leningrad became the site of the next great experience of survival cannibalism in the Soviet Union. In June of 1941 Operation Barbarossa began with the German invasion of Russia. By September of that year Leningrad was completely surrounded and the Luftwaffe destroyed the city’s food reserves. Thus began a 444-day siege by the Nazis, during which the defenders ate corpses when food ran out. First it was the corpses of children, but then those tasked with burying the dead of the city would remove thighs, breasts and arms for the purposes of consumption.48 Once again the scarcity of edible food resulted in the eating of human corpses. A similar pattern emerged in China after the revolution. From 1958 to 1962 the Great Leap Forward produced a famine that 193

Couple selling body parts, including a human head and the corpse of a child, during the Russian famine, 1921.

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resulted in widespread reports of cannibalism. Anhui Province officials reported 63 cases of cannibalism in the spring of 1960 alone.49 In a county of Gansu Province one in three people died of hunger and cannibalism was ‘an everyday event’.50 Later, during the Cultural Revolution, there was allegedly obligatory cannibalism in 1968 in which ‘class enemies’ were bludgeoned and dismembered and various organs would be cooked and served at ‘human flesh banquets’, in which the young communists would literally eat members of the former ruling class.51 At a school in Wuxuan, the students allegedly killed, cooked and ate the teachers in an act of class consciousness.52 In the twenty-first century it appears that an increase in cannibalism is happening in the states of the former Soviet Union. Newspapers in a number of former Soviet states report the homeless being targeted, with criminals killing them, cutting up their bodies and selling the meat in street markets to unsuspecting customers.53 In Kyrgyzstan, Nikolai Dzhurmongaliev, called ‘Russia’s most industrious cannibal’ by Mayhem, allegedly killed up to one hundred women and served them to his dinner guests for years, claiming the meat was a special ethnic dish. When he was arrested he told police a single woman provided enough meat for a week, which saved money considering the Russian economy.54 Cannibalism was also supposedly a problem in Russian prisons in which underfed, overcrowded prisoners would kill and devour cellmates. Experts claim cannibalism increased alongside serial killing in Russia in the early twenty-first century as part of increased examples of sociopathy in response to mounting social and economic problems.55

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Conclusion: The Boundaries of Eating and Being Eaten Cormac Ó Gráda reminds us that not all famines lead to cannibalism.56 Conversely, not all cannibalism comes from famine. Reports of cannibalism in the twenty-first century tend to be salacious and take the form of news reports about individual criminal cannibals, rather than societal ones. Ideally, for national media in the West, the cannibals should be from ‘there’, not ‘here’ in order to maintain the cannibal as Other and the Other as potential cannibal. In 2002 police in Ukraine arrested three men and a woman for killing and eating up to six people. After killing an eighteenyear-old girl, they ate the fleshy parts of the body and then they boiled her head and ate pieces of that as well.57 In 2011 police arrested two brothers in a remote area of Punjab province in Pakistan for digging up a newly buried corpse, cutting off her legs and cooking them in a curry they subsequently ate. Local media reported the brothers had been eating human flesh ever since their mother died a decade before. Police also found the body of a four-year-old girl dug up from a local graveyard and partially consumed. Pakistani law does not dictate a specific punishment for cannibalism, so local authorities could only charge them with digging up and desecrating a grave, which only carried a six-month prison sentence.58 In September 2017, Russian media reported the arrest of a couple who had allegedly murdered up to thirty people and consumed their remains from 1999 until their arrest. They were caught when the man lost his mobile phone, which had pictures of dismembered bodies on it, and it was found and turned in to the police. At his home they discovered a glass jar containing a canned hand.59 196

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In places like Leningrad, Ireland and post-First World War Germany, cannibalism was not the result of any government policy – it was the result of human beings experiencing unimaginable hunger and finally being driven to eat the dead. Cannibalism, as Richard Sugg observes, is invasive and the ultimate act of consumption. Like the Thing in the eponymous film, ‘the boundary line is not simply crossed but utterly annihilated, as two individuals are collapsed together’ by the act of one consuming the other.60 The boundary-collapsing act of consuming the other is the cause of mortuary, sacrificial and political cannibalism. Small groups remain that continue these practices, as well as medicinal cannibalism. It is believed that the Korowai of Indonesian New Guinea still practise political cannibalism, eating captured members of rival tribes, as well as killing and eating male witches called khakhua.61 Twentieth- and twenty-first-century Western society is less interested in the historical reality of cannibalism than the fact that it is fascinating and vastly entertaining. Rather than societies that construct rules for where, when and which bodies might be eaten, our culture is fascinated with the individual or small group of cannibals. This is not just a recent trend. ‘Penny dreadfuls’ in the early nineteenth century circulated stories of Sawney Bean and his cannibal clan, Sweeney Todd, the demon barber whose victims were baked into meat pies for sale at the next-door bakery, ghouls, cannibals and all sorts of corpse-eating monsters.62 In the next chapter we shall look at pop cannibalism, virtually all of which concerns Westerners eating human corpses, from reports of the Donner Party and cannibalism at sea to Ed Gein and the films he inspired, from Hannibal 197

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Lecter and A String of Pearls to exploitation films based on reallife cannibalistic serial killers. It is the individual cannibal who is celebrated and employed as an object of terror in popular culture.

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Eight

Flesh-eating in Popular Culture and Contemporary Reality

A census taker once tried to test me. I ate his liver with some fava beans and a nice chianti. Hannibal Lecter, The Silence of the Lambs1

The history of the world, my sweet Is who gets eaten and who gets to eat . . . From Stephen Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street2

D

uring the sentencing of Alfred G. Packer, known as ‘the Colorado Cannibal’ and ‘the Human Hyena’, at his first trial for killing and eating his five companions in the Colorado wilds, Judge Melville Gerry proclaimed, ‘While society cannot forgive, it will forget. As the days come and go and the years of our pilgrimage roll by, the memory of you and your crime will fade from the minds of men.’3 The judge could not have been more wrong, however. When someone becomes publicly known for 199

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eating human flesh, memories are preserved of them even more than other criminals. There is a reason why the names of Packer, Ed Gein, Jeffrey Dahmer and the Donner Party are known for ages after they have passed. In 1968 the Student Union of the University of Colorado Boulder renamed one of its dining rooms ‘the Alfred Packer Restaurant and Grill’.4 Memories of Packer have not faded; rather, they have only grown stronger with time, not least because Packer has become a pop cannibal – an eater of the dead celebrated in popular culture. This chapter examines modern and contemporary popular literature, film and television for their depictions of the eaters of the dead. From the many pop-culture children of Ed Gein (who numbers ‘Hannibal the Cannibal’, Leatherface and Norman Bates among his fictional spawn) to the dominance in the past decade of zombies as flesh-eaters, our pop culture is consumed (pardon the pun) with the fear of being eaten by other people (or former people). Equally terrifying, as particularly evidenced in films such as Alive and television programmes such as The Walking Dead, is the idea that we ourselves might give in and become consumers of flesh, whether due to circumstances (plane crash in the mountains) or a change in being (becoming a zombie). We fear being eaten; we also fear becoming eaters. In 2001 in Germany, Armin Meiwes (now known as the Rotenburg Cannibal), fascinated by depictions of cannibalism, advertised on the Internet for someone who wanted to be eaten, and a 43-year-old engineer, Bernd Brandes, reached out and volunteered to be butchered (literally) and devoured by Meiwes, who subsequently went to trial and then to prison for his crime. This story was later dramatized in several films, as well as the play Taste by Benjamin Brand. Real-life cannibals were inspired by 200

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art, and then art was created that was inspired by the cannibals. And audiences eat it up (again, pardon the pun) because of the fascination with the taboo and the fear of being both eater and eaten. Let us remember that the working title of George Romero’s film Night of the Living Dead was ‘Night of the Flesh-eaters’ – the horror comes not from the dead coming back to life, but that their sole interest is in consuming the flesh of ‘us’, the living. Children attack parents, wives attack husbands, brothers attack sisters – we are all in danger of being eaten and then, once we have been, we are in danger of becoming eaters ourselves. This fear is both physical and psychological. At the heart it also gets down to some of the great philosophical debates on the mind/body divide. Am I my body? Am I only my body? Cannibalism as entertainment is as old as the first performances of theatre in ancient Greece. The theatre of the Greeks and Romans featured tales of gods and men eating the flesh of the dead, even their own relatives, often unknowingly. Shakespeare referenced cannibalism several times, not least of which in the name of Caliban from The Tempest, whose name is an anagram of ‘canibal’. In Pericles, another one of Shakespeare’s last plays, the title character travels to Tarsus, where a great famine is occurring. Cleon, the governor there, reports: Those mothers, who to nuzzle up their babes Thought naught too curious, are ready now To eat those little darlings whom they loved. So sharp now are hunger’s teeth that man and wife Draw lots who first shall die to lengthen life. (Act 1, Scene 4, ll. 42–6) 201

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This portrait of survival cannibalism, mentioned in passing before Pericles brings food to Tarsus, preventing further cannibalism, follows exactly the accounts of the last chapter. Similarly, in The Two Noble Kinsmen, Hippolyta, lamenting that men go off to war, claims that women live through war, too, and have heard of survival cannibalism practised by mothers: We have been soldiers, and we cannot weep When our friends don their helms or put to sea, Or tell of babes broached on the lance, or women That have sod their infants in (and after ate them) The brine they wept at killing ’em . . . (Act 1, Scene 3, ll. 18–22) Shakespeare offers a portrait of survival cannibalism after war in which women kill their children and cook them in the tears they have wept. Shakespeare also began his career with cannibalism-asentertainment in the well-known example of Titus Andronicus. Titus, a Roman general, defeats and conquers the Goths and their queen, Tamora, who subsequently marries the emperor of Rome and seeks revenge against Titus and his family. As the cycle of revenge continues, Titus finally kills two of Tamora’s sons and cooks their remains into a feast for her and the emperor. He tells the men what will happen to them: You know your mother means to feast with me, And calls herself Revenge and thinks me mad. Hark, villains, I will grind your bones to dust, And with your blood and it I’ll make a paste, And of the paste a coffin will I rear, 202

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And make two pasties of your shameful heads, And bid that strumpet, your unhallowed dam, Like to the earth swallow her own increase. This is the feast that I have bid her to, And this the banquet she shall surfeit on . . . (Act 5, Scene 2, ll. 184–93) He then makes good on this plan, slitting the men’s throats, butchering them and serving their remains to their mother. When, during the banquet, Saturninus the emperor demands the two young men be brought forth, Titus points to the food on the table and triumphantly says: ‘Why, there they are, both baked in this pie, / Whereof their mother daintily hath fed, / Eating the flesh that she herself hath bred’ (Act 5, Scene 3, 59–61). The playwright generally regarded as one of the greatest in the history of the world regularly evoked the eating of the dead in his plays. That fact alone tells us about the place of cannibalism in Western culture. In previous chapters we considered unknowing cannibalism, or the tricking of others into eating corpses, especially that of their relatives or loved ones, which in the twentieth century becomes a theme in horror narratives and pop culture in general, sometimes even played for laughs. In this final chapter, is there something to be said about actual instances of eating? Have these fictional or mythic representations given rise to real-life events? And why do we fear either being eaten or eating the dead – does it tap into a deep psychological well, or is it more simply a manifestation of disgust? Given these fears and the gross-out factor of discovering that one has indeed eaten the dead, why are there so many narratives of corpse-eating in popular culture? Why do those who have done it, either out 203

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of personal proclivity or necessity for survival, become a form of celebrity and remain – like Alfred Packer, the Colorado Cannibal – in our memory decades and centuries later?

Survival Cannibalism and Its Pop Representations One of Monty Python’s most controversial sketches involved five sailors who claimed to have been afloat in a lifeboat for 33 days. The captain, played by John Cleese, tells the others: ‘I’m done for. I’ve got a gammy leg, I’m going fast, I’ll never get through . . . but . . . some of you might . . . so you’d better eat me.’5 An argument ensues for a variety of reasons – one sailor doesn’t want to eat the Captain’s gammy leg (‘You don’t have to eat the leg, Thompson, there’s still plenty of good meat! . . . Look at that arm?’6), another prefers his meat a little more lean, one prefers kosher (‘That depends on how we kill him, sir.’7). They finally reach a compromise: ‘Why don’t those of us who want to, eat Johnson, then you, sir, can eat my leg and then we’ll make a stock of the captain and then after we can eat the rest of Johnson cold for supper’, and summon a waitress to place this order.8 A letter read aloud to transition to the next sketch complains of the programme’s depiction of the Royal Navy as ‘a haven for cannibalism. It is well known that we now have the problem relatively under control and that it is the raf who now suffer the largest casualties in this area.’9 The studio audience was encouraged to boo and express their disapproval of the sketch verbally; indeed, it was the only way the bbc would allow the sketch to air. The law of shipwrecks, as the Monty Python sketch suggests, is that cannibalism is permissible so long as certain rules are followed, the so-called ‘custom of the sea’. What would be highly 204

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problematic and illegal on land becomes permissible in a boat at sea going many days without food. Legally speaking, one might even kill a fellow survivor for the others to eat, if the law is followed. First, survivors must eat the already deceased. ‘Cannibalism under survival conditions may simply take the form of eating the corpses of those who have died naturally. Though disagreeable and distressing, it is difficult to see any moral objection to this,’ claims historian A. W. Brian Simpson.10 Historically, cannibalism in a lifeboat would not begin until at least one person had died from injuries, exposure or starvation. If no one dies, or there are no bodies in the lifeboat or on the land where the shipwreck survivors end up, a fair lottery must be held – a drawing of straws. There is also, as Lewis Petrinovich notes in The Cannibal Within, a hierarchy of who gets eaten.11 Strangers and outsiders are eaten first; often from the fifteenth to the early twentieth centuries this would be any person of colour, followed by anyone of a different nationality from the rest of the crew. Friends are eaten next, followed, last, by family. This custom began as far back as the ancient Greeks. Herodotus reports the first practice of drawing lots to see who will be killed to provide sustenance for the others. King Cambyses’ disastrous expedition to Ethiopia first ate the pack animals when the soldiers ran out of provisions, then the grass that lined their route, and ended with one in ten selected to become food for the rest of the army.12 The tradition of the sea is that all other things being equal, straws are drawn. The shortest becomes food for the others, the second shortest is the one who must kill the first. When this process is followed, prosecution rarely occurs of the survivors. Simpson states, ‘So normal was cannibalism that on some occasions survivors found it appropriate to take pains to volunteer denial that 205

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cannibalism had occurred; suspicion of this practice among starving castaways was a routine reaction’.13 History is replete with examples of survival cannibalism after shipwrecks. In 1710 the Nottingham Galley sank off the coast of Maine with fourteen men on board, after crashing into Boon Island during a sleet storm. Initially all fourteen lived, but after two days when the ship’s cook died, they ate him, followed by the ship’s carpenter two weeks later.14 In a more famous case, the Medusa, a French ship travelling from France to Senegal in 1816, sank. The survivors built a raft out of the wreckage and very quickly turned to cannibalism.15 The Frances Mary ran aground in 1826 with 21 people on board. As the survivors began to perish, those who remained ate the dead.16 In July 1884 the yacht Mignonette was being transported to Australia for its new owner when it sank in the Atlantic. After nineteen days in a lifeboat, the surviving five-man crew drew lots and Richard Parker, a nineteen-year-old boy, was killed and eaten (although some sources claim that the drawing of lots was rigged, as Parker was in a coma at the time). When the crew was rescued, Captain Tom Dudley and mate Edwin Stephens were placed on trial for allegedly killing the man before his natural death. Although Dudley was found guilty and initially sentenced to death, his sentence was later commuted to six months, owing to the ‘custom of the sea’. Stephens was acquitted.17 In an incident that inspired the novel Moby Dick, the Essex was sunk 2,780 kilometres (1,500 nautical mi.) west of the Galapagos by a sperm whale in the Pacific on 20 November 1820. Three whale boats containing the survivors set out from the site of the sinking for the west coast of South America, 4,000 kilometres (2,500 mi.) away. The irony is that the survivors of the 206

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Essex chose to head to South America instead of the much closer Society Islands because, in the words of Captain Pollard, ‘we feared we should be devoured by cannibals.’ In the whale ships, many of them ended up being devoured anyway.18 Two months later, in one of the boats, Lawson Thomas died. Obed Hendricks and his crew discussed whether they should eat the body, rather than bury it at sea, as rations ran low in the whale boat.19 In his book In the Heart of the Sea, Nathaniel Philbrick reports that the crew then cut off the head, feet and hands, ‘the most obvious signs of the corpse’s humanity’.20 They then butchered the corpse, opening the chest and removing the heart, liver and kidneys and as much muscle as possible, which they roasted on a flat stone on the bottom of the boat and promptly ate. One by one, as others perished in the boat, their corpses would go through the same process and provide sustenance for the others. Isaiah Sheppard died on 27 January, followed by Samuel Reed the next day – both were eaten. In Captain Pollard’s boat, Charles Ramsdell suggested drawing lots. Pollard’s eighteen-yearold cousin drew the unlucky lot and agreed to sacrifice himself for the rest. Barzillai Ray died next, of natural causes, and was eaten. Only Pollard and Ramsdell were still alive when the boat was finally found by the Nantucket whale ship Dauphin. They were surrounded by the bones, skulls and detritus of the others they had eaten.21 In the 2015 filmed adaptation of Philbrick’s book, cannibalism occurs almost ninety minutes into the film and is not depicted, but is narrated by Thomas, following the story in the book.

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The Donner Party Out of the 91 members of the Donner Party, 49 survived and 42 perished. After the winter of 1846–7 the name of the group became synonymous with cannibalism in the popular imagination in the United States, so much so that they are arguably the best-known eaters of the dead in American history.22 George Donner, after whom the party is named, was a 62-year-old American of German descent. He and his third wife, Tamsen, and their five daughters (three from a previous marriage of George’s) joined a party of wagons heading west. Included in the party were a number of individuals such as George’s older brother Jacob Donner, his wife and their three children; Levinah Murphy

Drawing of the Truckee Lake camp in November 1846, based on descriptions by William Graves, survivor of the Donner Party.

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and her family of thirteen; James Reed, his wife and mother and four children; Patrick Breen, his wife and seven children; the Foster and Eddy families; and several single men. Also in the group was Lewis Keseberg (or Keseburg, Keesburg or Kiesberg – his name is rendered several different ways), from Westphalia, Germany. Thirty-two years of age at the time of departure, he travelled with his wife Philippine and two children: Ada, aged three, and Lewis Junior, aged one. Lewis was ‘tall, blonde [and] good-looking’, but known in the party as a troublemaker.23 He robbed a Sioux grave at Platte River, was forced by James Reed to return the robe he had taken from the corpse, and was known for physically abusing his spouse. The initial group left Springfield, Illinois, in spring 1846 and joined up with a group of almost five hundred wagons headed west from Independence, Missouri, on 12 May. On 20 July most of the wagon train headed northwest, following the traditional route west via Fort Hall and the Oregon Trail. The Donner Party, at George’s strong urging, decided to follow the ‘Hastings Cutoff ’, a route that allegedly would shave a month or two off the journey. Eighty-seven people in 23 wagons followed Donner down this route. Unfortunately, Lansford W. Hastings had never actually travelled along the shortcut named after him, and the route led through canyons, mountains and salt flats across Utah and Nevada that actually added time to the journey. Along the way, a few members of the party died through violence, misadventure or natural causes. In late October the party arrived at the Sierra Nevada Mountains, the last obstacle before Sacramento. They decided to rest a few days before attempting to cross the pass. The Donner family themselves camped at Alder Creek in three tents. The rest 209

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of the party continued around 10 kilometres (6 mi.) ahead and discovered three abandoned cabins, which they took over. They also built a lean-to against a large rock, all near Truckee Lake. The snows came early and although the party attempted to climb the pass three times, they were driven back by the weather and terrain on each occasion. By 4 November they were trapped in the pass that now bears the party’s name. The families resigned themselves to spending the winter snowbound in the mountains. Sixty people were living in the cabins at the Truckee Lake camp. The Alder Creek camp had a total of 21. Attempts to hunt and fish were not successful and the party’s food supply dwindled.24 The young and old began to die of starvation as the group was reduced to eating ox hide, boiled leather from shoes and boots, and an old rug. Calling themselves ‘The Forlorn Hope’, a group of seventeen (twelve men and five women) set out into the snow on 16 December in an attempt to reach Sutter’s Fort in Sacramento on the other side of the mountains and bring back help. They left the camp on crude snowshoes, carrying six days’ worth of food. Due to a storm, several members were lost or died. The Forlorn Hope is where cannibalism was first practised by the Donner Party. On Christmas Eve Patrick Dolan suggested they draw lots to select whom to kill and eat. The group declined to do so but agreed to eat the next person who died. They did not have long to wait. A man known only as Antonio passed away, rapidly followed by Franklin ‘Uncle Billy’ Graves. While the latter was dying he urged his daughters, Sarah and Mary, to eat his dead body ‘so they might live’.25 Dolan himself died shortly afterwards as well, and ironically ended up being the first one eaten. His companions cut strips of flesh from his corpse’s arms and legs. As Limburg reports, ‘They roasted the lean, stringy 210

Donner Camp Site plaque.

In bad taste? Donner Camp picnic ground.

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meat over the campfire and ate it, turning their faces away from each other.’26 Sarah Murphy Foster and her sister Harriet Murphy Pike attempted to feed pieces of Dolan’s flesh to their brother Lemuel Murphy, but he died the next day and was consumed by the other members of the party. Indeed, for the next four days, all four bodies were harvested and consumed. The party agreed no one would eat their own kin, but the rest of the group was free to; the Murphy sisters were horrified at the open butchering and cooking of their brother, as was Sarah Fosdick when her husband Jay was the next to pass and the group cut out his heart and liver, took his arms and legs and roasted them all right in front of her.27 Thirty-three days after they left the rest of the group, the seven remaining members of the Forlorn Hope arrived in the Sacramento Valley, and were able to alert the authorities about the desperation of the rest of the party. James Reed organized a rescue but was unable to get through the pass. The first rescue party to arrive at the camp left Sacramento on 4 February and arrived at the camp on 18 February. They brought food and supplies and were able to take some of the party with them to Sutter’s Fort. Three more relief efforts followed, but between the first and second rescue parties the group finally ran out of edible material, let alone actual food. Jacob Donner had died and was consumed by his family. Four other bodies of those who had died had been partially consumed. The second rescue party rescued seventeen people, including most of the children except those of the Donners, Fosters and Eddys. Only George and Tamsen, Mrs Murphy and her son Simon, James Eddy (age three), George Foster (age four) and Lewis Keseberg remained. 212

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The third rescue party arrived, containing William Foster and William Eddy, two members of the Forlorn Hope. When they arrived at the cabin, ‘Keseberg met them at the door and blandly informed the men that he had eaten their sons.’ William Eddy asked why Keseberg had not eaten the ox meat left by the previous rescue group, to which Keseberg allegedly responded that he ‘preferred human flesh because it tasted better and contained more nourishment’.28 This statement would haunt Keseberg the rest of his life, as he would be known as the cannibal by choice of the Donner Party. The fourth rescue party arrived at the cabin on 17 April 1847 and discovered ‘a welter of dismembered corpses. Legs, arms and skulls lay scattered in every direction.’29 As the snow began to melt, the evidence of cannibalism was everywhere in both camps. At the Alder Creek camp they found that ‘at the mouth of the tent stood a large iron kettle, filled with chunks of human flesh’, most likely from George Donner.30 It is assumed that Keseberg ate Tamsen Donner and Mrs Murphy. Keseberg’s reputation as a cannibal was cemented by this discovery, as he consumed Tamsen when there was obviously other food available; he was never remorseful about his consumption of corpses. The Donner Party’s fame began almost immediately and the focus was entirely on the cannibalism. Families descended from the party seek to redeem their ancestors by arguing either that cannibalism did not happen, or that it was only practised by a few, or that it was not nearly at the levels as represented in the popular record. They also resent the implication that their forebears became savage. ‘To the emigrants,’ writes Michael Wallis, ‘the bodies of the dead represented sustenance and nothing more. They were not ghouls. It was either eat the dead or die.’31 213

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Remains of Alfred Packer’s victims, illustration by John A. Randolph of the scene of ‘A Colorado Tragedy’, in Harper’s Weekly, 17 October 1874.

People should not be blamed for survival cannibalism, just as the survivors of shipwrecks are pardoned for such behaviour as is necessary for survival. The Donner Party might be the most written-about group of cannibals in the world. Their tragedy has inspired creative works: films, novels, graphic novels. Those who wish to tell the story of the Donner Party seem to have two choices: over-exaggerated and salacious or, in the words of one author, ‘Propriety forbids the description of this indecorous scene. Suffice to say, they survived by treating former companions, now passed, as food.’ Pop culture presentations, unsurprisingly, tend to run towards the former. 214

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As soon as the relief parties began to return from the Donner Party camps, the story started to appear in the media. In February 1847 the first report was published in the California Star newspaper, relating ‘a most distressing account of the situation of the emigrants in the mountains’.32 Interestingly, the Donners are not mentioned at all, although party members Stanton and Reed are. The article closes with a brief mention of ‘bodies used as food’ and noting that the tale ‘would be better suited for a hangman’s journal than the columns of a family newspaper’.33 Four months later, however, in June 1847, a more detailed account was found in the California Star when it published text taken from the journal of one of the rescuers, whose description of the camp sounds more like a ghoul warren: Reached the cabins between 12 and 1 o’clock. Expected to find some of the sufferers alive. Mrs. Donner and Kiesberg in particular. Entered the cabins and a horrible scene presented itself – human bodies terribly mutilated, legs, arms, and sculls scattered in every direction. One body, supposed to be that of Mrs. Eddy, lay near the entrance, the limbs severed off and a frightful gash in the scull [sic]. The flesh from the bones was nearly consumed and a painful silence pervaded the place.34 The ‘family newspaper’ printed an extensive excerpt of the journal, detailing the macabre sights that the rescuers found. While the initial public response to the news of the Donner Party was sympathetic and supportive of the survivors, as details emerged they were perceived with contempt and disgust, seen as depraved cannibals who deserved their fate.35 215

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Charles F. McGlashan published the first book on the topic, History of the Donner Party: A Tragedy of the Sierra (1879), based on interviews with survivors many years later. McGlashan was a newspaper editor from Truckee with a preference for the sensational. Later scholars and Donner Party family members would take exception to many of his characterizations of the party, but his book set the tone for how the Donner Party would be represented in popular culture. The chapter in which the cannibalism begins is entitled ‘Camp of Death’ and one can practically hear McGlashan salivating as he interrupts his own narrative to ask: ‘Would you like to know more of the shuddering details? Does the truth require the narration of the sickening minutiae of the terrible transactions of those days?’36 The answer is, apparently, yes to both. He describes the events in great, grotesque detail, with a Poe-worthy running commentary: ‘Has human pen the power to express the shock of horror this sister received when she saw her brother’s heart thrust through with a stick, and broiling on the coals?’37 The answer, again, is yes. McGlashan was able to interview Keseberg, who was almost 63 years old at the time, and an admitted cannibal by choice. He quotes Keseberg as saying, I cannot describe the unutterable repugnance with which I tasted the first mouthful of flesh. There is an instinct in our nature that revolts at the very thought of touching, much less eating, a corpse . . . I have been told I boasted of my shame – said that I enjoyed this horrid food, and that I remarked that human flesh was more palatable than California beef. This is a falsehood. It is a horrible, revolting falsehood. This food was never otherwise than loathsome, insipid and disgusting.38 216

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Keseberg sued for libel those who had accused him in print of murder and won. He was, however, granted damages of just a single dollar. As Tim McNeese observes, Keseberg ‘became a ghoulish symbol of the worst aspects of the white pioneer party’s legacy’.39 He became the public face of the Donner Party. More recently, a number of different authors have approached the story of the Donner Party through particular individuals. George Donner’s wife Tamsen, whose body was never found, is the subject of Searching for Tamsen Donner by Gabrielle Burton, who followed the Donner Party’s trail with her own family in the summer of 1996. Sarah Graves is the subject of The Indifferent Stars Above, subtitled The Harrowing Saga of a Donner Party Bride, by Daniel James Brown, enthusiastically recommended by my tour guide at Donner Memorial State Park. Scott Welvaert, with illustrators Ron Frenz and Charles Barnett iii, present the history of the Donner party in graphic novel form, for sale at the park’s gift shop.40 The Donner Party has also served as inspiration for fictionalized and filmed accounts of the party and the tragedy that they experienced. Alma Katsu’s Bram Stoker Award-nominated novel The Hunger reimagines the Donner party as being pursued by supernatural beings not unlike the wendigo. The Donner Party is pursued and infected by creatures the local Native Americans call Na’it: ‘It is the hunger. A bad spirit that passes from man to man.’41 The book, however, features another cannibal factor: Lewis Keseberg. Keseberg, the book reveals, comes from a family of killers. ‘He’d first tasted human flesh back in Illinois,’ the reader is told, ‘learned from an uncle who later disappeared while prospecting out west. He’d developed a taste for it. A hunger for it, really . . . ’42 He kills many of those at the camp. ‘He was feeding 217

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the dead to the living. Human flesh. And they didn’t know.’43 Tamsen volunteers to let him kill her if he promises to feed her to her daughters without their knowledge so that they may live. She does not know they are already dead. He claims he has also been leaving ‘food’ for the Na’it so they will leave the living alone. The ‘Forlorn Hope’ encounter the Na’it, which is why they, too, turn to cannibalism. Stanton, one of the leaders of the Donner Party, is attacked by one and realizes, ‘Whatever it was, it had been a human once. And yet it was not human now, this creature.’44 Katsu describes the one that attacked Stanton: It smelled like a corpse left too long in the heat. But its fingers were cold, and slimy, and wet – rotten. He choked on the smell . . . Its mouth seemed to double, its jaw unhinging like that of a snake. He saw teeth sharpened like iron nails, and too many of them, far too many – a long slick of throat, like a dark tunnel, and that horrible tongue, slapping like a blind animal feeling for its prey.45 Katsu takes an all-too-human and natural tragedy and recasts it in a supernatural light. While well done, and sinister and disturbing to read, no such supernatural motive is needed in other adaptations. T. J. Martin’s 2009 film The Donner Party should have more properly been called ‘The Forlorn Hope’, as it concerned that group, rather than the entire Donner Party. Indeed, none of the actual Donners appear as characters in the film. Featuring Crispin Glover as William Foster, the film narrates the journey from the camp to Sutter’s Fort by a group of fourteen party members. The film is not historically accurate, as it depicts the various 218

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party members killing each other or themselves and immediately devouring the corpses. Historically, to the best of our k­ nowledge,46 the Forlorn Hope had the only two murders in relation to the Donner Party: the killing of Native American guides Luis and Salvador at the suggestion of William Foster. The members of the Forlorn Hope ate them first, eventually consuming other party members. Perhaps the Donner Party is haunting to us not because of what they did – after all, the past two chapters have been filled with examples of cannibalism and even group cannibalism. The horror of the Donner Party is that unlike the shipwrecked sailors or Roman army, the people consumed were family members and friends. Children feasted on parents; siblings were forced to endure watching their friends eat their brothers and sisters. Peter R. Limburg reports that when the second relief arrived at the Donner Camp in Alder Creek they found that ‘Inside the shelter Jake’s children were sitting on a log, their faces messy with blood, eating the half-roasted heart and liver of their father.’47 Adding to our horror at the events is the seeming excessiveness towards the end, even as relief and rescue groups began to arrive: ‘Around the fire, as at the Murphy cabin, long hair, bones, skulls and fragments of partly-eaten limbs.’48 The popular reports indicated bodies were harvested more than necessary, and the survivors were living in a charnel squalor. They became an immediate object lesson during an era of westward expansion in the United States: at a time when the idea of the move west promised opportunity and growth, the Donner Party represented the dark side of that move, one that could reduce anyone to savagery and cannibalism.

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The Uruguayan Rugby Team, 1972 More recently, the Uruguayan rugby team that crashed into the Andes in 1972 on Uruguayan Air Force Flight 571 became known for survival cannibalism. Out of 45 people on the plane, eighteen died in or immediately after the crash. It would be seventy days before the survivors were rescued. Food ran out on the tenth day. After some discussion and debate, the survivors ate those who had died in order to survive. In the immediate aftermath, Piers Paul Read’s Alive (1974) was published, which was subsequently the basis for the film of the same name (1992). In Alive, Read reports that the survivors first tried eating lichen, which failed as a food source.49 Read then notes: For some days several of the boys had realized that if they were to survive they would have to eat the bodies of those who had died in the crash. It was a ghastly prospect. The corpses lay around the plane in the snow, preserved by the intense cold in the state in which they had died. While the thought of cutting flesh from those who had been their friends was deeply repugnant to them all, a lucid appreciation of their predicament led them to consider it.50 Roberto Canessa introduced the idea to the group, arguing that the survivors’ bodies were already eating themselves. Given the Catholic beliefs of many of his team-mates, Canessa argued that eating the dead was like taking Communion. Jesus himself had offered his body for others to eat so they may have eternal life, so how is that any different from eating the bodies of those who had died so that they may live? He further argued that the survivors 220

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had a moral duty to survive by any means necessary, concluding that they must stop thinking of the bodies as team-mates, friends, family or even people. ‘It is meat,’ he told them, ‘That’s all it is.’51 The 27 survivors debated ‘whether or not they should eat the bodies of the dead to survive’.52 Gustavo Zerbino stated that if he died, he expected them to eat him, or he would ‘come back from wherever I am and give you a good kick in the ass’.53 When the majority agreed that they must eat the bodies to survive, four men, Canessa, Zerbino, Fito Strauch and Daniel Maspons, cut flesh from corpses and dried it on the plane roof. Slowly but surely the survivors began to eat, washing it down with handfuls of snow. Another account of the rugby team is told in Miracle in the Andes, written by Nando Parrado, one of the survivors of the event. He relates how, in desperation, he concluded they should eat the dead in order to survive: But of course there was food on the mountain – there was meat, plenty of it, and all in easy reach. It was as near as the bodies of the dead lying outside the fuselage under a thin layer of frost. It puzzles me that despite my compulsive drive to find anything edible, I ignored for so long the obvious presence of the only edible objects within a hundred miles.54 Parrado claims to have been one of the first to advocate survival cannibalism, which the rest of the group came to accept. He describes the lengthy debate over whether or not to consume human flesh, ending in a group pledge that ‘if any of us died here, the rest would have permission to use our bodies for food.’55 After that, he confirms that Roberto Canessa, Gustavo Zerbino, Fito Strauch and Daniel Maspons left the fuselage and returned with food. 221

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I reminded myself this was no longer part of a human being; this person’s soul had left his body . . . Finally, I found my courage and slipped the flesh into my mouth. It had no taste. I chewed, once or twice, then forced myself to swallow. I felt no guilt or shame. I was doing what I had to do to survive. I understood the magnitude of the taboo we had just broken, but if I felt any strong emotion at all, it was a sense of resentment that fate had forced us to choose between this horror and the horror of certain death.56 As the ordeal continued, however, it simply became a part of existence. ‘As the days passed,’ Parrado recalls, ‘we became more efficient at processing the meat.’57 They rationed the flesh to make it last longer and dried it in the sun on sheets of aluminium scavenged from the plane. When possible, they cooked it on a fire, ‘which improved its taste dramatically’.58 And yet, Parrado notes, ‘eating human flesh never satisfied my hunger.’59 Parrado’s mother and sister were on the flight as well, accompanying the team. They did not survive the crash. The team agreed that, out of respect, they would not eat them, a pattern we have seen in shipwrecks and among the Donner Party. Like that group, the Uruguayan rugby team became synonymous with cannibalism after their rescue.

Serial Killer Cannibals and the Stories and Films They Inspired While the Donner Party and the Uruguayan rugby team became famous as examples of survival cannibalism, nothing captures the public’s attention more than intentional cannibalism. Serial 222

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killers who consume their victims are obviously in no danger of starvation. They eat corpses by choice. Such individuals have a long history of representation in popular culture. From the beginning of the nineteenth century, so-called ‘penny dreadfuls’ were full of murders, monsters and lurid cannibal stories. For example, in 1836, Charles Whitehead published ‘Sawney Beane: The Man Eater’, a penny dreadful concerning the Scottish cannibal clan. Alexander ‘Sawney’ Bean, the head of a 48-member cannibal clan in sixteenth-century Scotland, was born in a small town near Edinburgh, married Agnes Douglas and moved to Ayrshire County. They occupied a series of caves near the coastline with an entranceway that flooded every high tide. They began to rob and murder passers-by, eventually disposing of the bodies by eating them. Locals would occasionally find body parts or mangled corpses, but the Bean clan remained well hidden until a failed ambush resulted in their discovery. King James iv became involved in the hunt for the family, whose hideout was discovered along with prepared and picked human remains. The entire family was executed; the women were burned alive and the men dismembered. The story is extreme, and some scholars have called into question its reality, particularly since the English used it as anti-Scottish propaganda in the eighteenth century.60 Supposedly the clan ate more than a thousand people. The Bean clan was preceded in cannibalism in the highlands by Andrew Christie, aka Christie Cleek, of Perth, a Scottish butcher turned cannibal. In the foothills of the Grampians what began as survival cannibalism became cannibalism by choice as Christie and his group gained a taste for human flesh after a famine in the fourteenth century.61 These two cases inspired the 1977 film The Hills Have Eyes (dir. Wes Craven). 223

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The first telling of the story of Sweeney Todd, the Demon Barber of Fleet Street, was a serialized version by James Malcolm Rymer in The People’s Periodical and Family Library (1846) under the title The String of Pearls.62 Its origins were based on an allegedly true series of events in medieval Paris in which a barber murdered customers and the bodies of the victims were used in meat pies in the patisserie next door. Rymer’s creation was a psychopathic barber who murdered his victims for profit, in league with Mrs Lovett, his partner in crime, who would dispose of the bodies by baking them into pies she sold in her shop next door. In 1847 George Dibdin Pitt produced an adaptation, The String of Pearls: A Romance, for the Royal Britannia Theatre in the East End of London, where it proved a tremendous hit.63 Kristen Guest argues that the play was popular because it depicted consumer culture and presented the upper classes as eating the poor; Sweeney himself is a ‘caricature of middle-class economic acquisitiveness’.64 In 1973 playwright Christopher Bond introduced psychology into the story, giving Todd a backstory in which a corrupt judge had raped and killed his wife and sent him to Australia. Todd’s murder spree became part of a vengeance plot. In 1979 Stephen Sondheim and Hugh Wheeler adapted Bond’s play, creating the long-running Broadway musical Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street, which opened in London’s West End a year later.65 In this version, whereas Todd murders those who he thinks wronged him, it is Mrs Lovett who conceives of using the bodies of Sweeney’s victims in her pies in order to save her money and dispose of the corpses. They thus promote unknowing cannibalism among the poor of London, which results, in a reversal of the original, in the poor eating the rich. 224

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The nineteenth century saw the emergence of the cannibal killer in the popular press and the popular imagination. ‘Livereating’ Johnson’s wife was killed by members of the Crow Native American tribe in 1847, so he earned his nickname by spending the next two decades killing over three hundred Crow and eating their livers, finally ending his cannibalistic vendetta in 1872.66 Two years later, Alfred G. Packer, also known as ‘the Colorado Man Eater’, ‘the Human Hyena’ and ‘the American Cannibal’, and sometimes given as ‘A lferd Packer’, after his tattoo and own illiterate way of spelling his name, killed and ate his five companions in the Colorado wilderness. Packer was a Civil War veteran and epileptic who in 1874 ventured out with his companions to mine in Colorado during the winter. Packer returned to the camp in April, after the snows had melted. In July the bodies were found in an area now called ‘Cannibal Plateau’.67 He fled. Packer was captured in 1883 and returned to Colorado for trial. The headlines celebrated his status as a cannibal more than any other crime of his. On 17 March 1883 the front of the Denver Republican proclaimed in a large typeface: ‘Human Jerked Beef / The Man Who Lived on Meat Cut from His Murdered Victims / The Fiend Who Became Very Corpulent upon a Diet of Human Steaks / A Cannibal Who Gnaws on the Choice Cuts of His Fellow Man’.68 As with the Donner Party, fame for his corpse-eating rapidly followed: ‘Within a few years of Packer’s death, the Man-eater had already evolved into a creature of folklore and myth.’69 In the twentieth century he would serve as inspiration. Trey Parker (of South Park and Book of Mormon fame) produced a three-minute trailer of a musical cannibal movie based on the life of Alfred Packer for a film-production class at the University of Colorado Boulder. After graduation, he transformed 225

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it into a low-budget feature-length film, his first. Cannibal! The Musical (1993) recounts a highly inaccurate but funny version of the events that led to Packer eating human flesh. Through flashbacks the film establishes that Shannon Bell and not Packer killed the other members of the party. Packer killed Bell in self-defence, but then was forced to engage in survival cannibalism with the others’ bodies to survive the winter.70 Parker’s creation was subsequently adapted for the stage in 1996 at Sierra College, and then presented by Dad’s Garage Theatre in Atlanta, and dozens of venues in several nations since, including productions in Rome in 2004; Victoria, Canada in 2006; Edinburgh in 2008; and Toronto in 2015, in a newly revised and extended version by Christopher Bond (who also co-created Evil Dead: The Musical),71 which subsequently received its American premiere in Madison, Wisconsin. The musical itself has proved fascinatingly popular. Similarly, Devoured: The Legend of Alferd Packer (2005) is a low-budget B-movie from Troma Entertainment that imagines Packer’s spirit possessing present-day college students, driving them to acts of cannibalism. Albert Fish, also known as ‘the Gray Man’, ‘the Werewolf of Wysteria’, ‘the Brooklyn Vampire’, ‘the Moon Maniac’ and ‘the Boogey Man’, was a psychotic child molester fascinated with cannibalism. In 1928 he murdered ten-year-old Grace Budd. The crime remained unsolved for a while, but Fish sent an anonymous letter to Grace Budd’s mother: At that time there was famine in China. Meat of any kind was from $1 to 3 Dollars a pound. So great was the suffering among the very poor that all children under 12 were sold for food in order to keep others from starving. A boy or girl 226

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under 14 was not safe in the street. You could go in any shop and ask for steak – chops – or stew meat. Part of the naked body of a boy or girl would be brought out and just what you wanted cut from it. A boy or girls behind which is the sweetest part of the body and sold as veal cutlet brought the highest price . . . I choked her to death then cut her in small pieces so I could take my meat to my rooms, cook and eat it. How sweet and tender her little ass was roasted in the oven. It took me 9 days to eat her entire body.72 Arrested on 13 December 1934, he soon confessed to a number of victims, of torturing, killing and even eating children. He was executed by New York State on 16 January 1936 and was subsequently the subject of the 2007 film The Gray Man. Of even greater influence on popular culture is the notorious cannibal Ed Gein, also known as ‘the Plainfield Ghoul’. When he was finally arrested in November 1957, the police discovered a horror house in his home: furniture, clothing and a wastebasket made from human skin; the corpses of several of his victims; bones and skulls scattered throughout the house including skulls on his bedpost; a severed head in a burlap sack and many other body parts. Gein murdered women and ate parts of their corpses, but he also admitted to grave-robbing and stealing from local cemeteries.73 His story inspired at least four fictional films: Psycho, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, The Silence of the Lambs and House of 1000 Corpses (2003), as well as more direct dramatizations, such as Ed Gein (2000) and Ed Gein: The Butcher of Plainfield (2007). Carl Friedrich Wilhelm Grossmann (1863–1922) killed young women and, in addition to eating their flesh himself, turned them into sausages. Echoing Sweeney Todd, he sold the meat on the 227

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black market. He committed suicide after his trial and before his scheduled execution, but never confessed, so the details of his crimes are not known. It is estimated that between four and fifty women were turned into sausages and sold to others to eat.74 Similarly, Fritz Haarman (1879–1925) was able to kidnap, kill and eat as many as fifty young boys, ‘then sold the leftovers as black market beef ’.75 He inspired a nursery rhyme: Just you wait ’til it’s your time Haarman will come after you, With his chopper, oh so fine, He’ll make mince meat out of you.76 Like Ed Gein, he also inspired a number of fictional films: M (1931), Tenderness of the Wolves (Die Zärtlichkeit der Wölfe, 1973) and The Deathmaker (Der Totmacher, 1995). Yet another cannibal killer celebrated in pop culture emerged in the 1980s in the Soviet Union. According to Soviet doctrine, serial killers could not exist under communism, which is one of the reasons why the ‘Butcher of Rostov’ was able to kill at least 52 people before he was finally caught. Andrei Chikatilo (1936–1994), a teacher and subsequently a supply clerk, was a cannibal killer. Richard Lourie wrote one of the first histories of Chikatilo in English, referring to him as a ‘sexual cannibal’ because he ate the genitals and breasts of his victims.77 In 1995 hbo produced Citizen X, a docudrama starring Stephen Rea as the police inspector hunting for the killer and Jeffrey DeMunn as Chikatilo. Arguably, one of the best-known cannibal killers is Jeffrey Dahmer. According to Anne E. Schwartz, during his confession to police, Dahmer claimed that the only one of his victims that he 228

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ever ate was Ernest Miller, a 22-year-old African American dancer who accompanied Dahmer back to his apartment for sex and was drugged with coffee laced with sleeping pills. Dahmer ‘ate Miller’s biceps because they were big and he wanted to try cannibalism’, but insisted he did not eat any of his other victims, although he did have a freezer full of organs and a human head in his refrigerator when the police arrested him.78 He also kept Miller’s heart and legs in the freezer to consume later. He later confessed to eating others, arguing he believed they would come alive in him.79 Several films based on Dahmer have appeared since his conviction: The Secret Life: Jeffrey Dahmer (1993), Dahmer (2002), The Jeffrey Dahmer Files (2012) and My Friend Dahmer (2017). Cannibal killers are not limited to the West. Li Hui, known in Thailand as Zee-Oui, was a Chinese serial killer who entered Thailand from China in 1946 and was eventually executed in 1959 for killing and eating at least eight Thai children. A film based on his life, Zee Oui, was released in 2004. Zhang Yongming, ‘the Chinese Cannibal Monster’, was found guilty of murdering eleven boys and young men in Yunnan Province in southwest China and subsequently executed in 2013. He sold the bodies of his victims in a local market as ‘ostrich meat’. Police found eyeballs preserved in wine bottles in his home. These are but a handful of cannibal killers made famous for their crimes and celebrated and decried in popular culture. Dozens more can be found all over the world: Boone Helm, Karl Denke, Luke Magnotta, Robert Maudsley, Omaima Aree Nelson, Katherine Knight, Joachim ‘Duisburg Man-eater’ Kroll, Antron Singleton, Peter Niers, Stephen Griffiths, Tamara Samsonova, Nicolas ‘The Vampire of Paris’ Claux, Stanley Dean Baker, Michael Woodmansee, Gary M. Heidnik and Issei Sagawa, ‘the Celebrity 229

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Cannibal’. Sagawa was a Japanese exchange student in Paris when he killed another exchange student because he wanted to eat her. Found legally insane, he was deported back to Japan to be institutionalized. Owing to a quirk in the law, he was set free and became a public speaker and consultant to the police, writing more than twenty books. His crime served as the inspiration for the Rolling Stones’ song ‘Too Much Blood’ from the 1983 album Undercover.

Eating the Dead in Fiction, Theatre, Film and Television As we have seen in much of this book, the history of literature from the classics onwards has told tales of cannibalism and corpseeating. This topic would continue to be embraced and devoured (pardon the pun) throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries as well. H. G. Wells’s 1921 short story ‘The Grisly Folk’ imagined Neanderthals eating the dead.80 Tales of ghouls and ­cannibals can be found throughout the cinema of the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s. The 1960s, 1970s and 1980s saw a host of exploitation cannibal films coming out of the United States. These included a host of shot-on-video, direct-to-video low-budget films such as Cannibals (1980), Long Island Cannibal Massacre (1980), Cannibal Horror (1981), Lunch Meat (1986), Cannibal Hookers (1987), Splatter Farm (1987), Flesheater (1988) and Cannibal Campout (1988). Those are in addition to (slightly) higher-budget cannibal cinema: Cannibal Girls (1973), The Hills Have Eyes (1977), Eaten Alive (1980), Motel Hell (1980), We Are Going to Eat You (1980), c.h.u.d. (1984), Blood Diner (1987), Parents (1989) and Delicatessen (1991). These latter films tend to fall into either the horror B-movie or cult-comedy ­categories. Films such as Blood Feast (1963) and 2,000 Maniacs (1964) treat cannibalism almost humorously. In the latter, when southern rednecks 230

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discover a dismembered body, one remarks, ‘I reckon we got us the making of a barbecue.’ It will not be the last time humans are associated with barbecue or as an alternative kind of meat. When not eaten by other humans, sometimes corpses are fed to animals. In The Corpse Grinders (1971) human bodies are ground up and served as cat food; the cats then get the taste of human flesh and begin attacking the living. Similarly, in the black comedy Eating Raoul (1982), Mary and Paul Bland kill swingers with a frying pan and petty crook Raoul sells the bodies to the Doggie King Dog Food company. Eventually, to solve the problem with their business partner, Mary and Paul fulfil the title’s promise. And, of course, which of us does not know that Soylent Green (1973) is people? Arguably the franchise most rooted in cannibalism in American cinema is The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974), with its sequels, reboots and remakes. As noted above, the original film was inspired by Ed Gein. The Sawyer family, fallen on hard times because of the closure of the local slaughterhouse, kill passers-by in their rural Texas home. Leatherface, a mute giant who wears a mask made of human skin and wields the eponymous chainsaw, also functions as a butcher, putting one of the teenagers they capture on a meathook in the kitchen, cutting bodies apart with a chainsaw and storing the pieces in a freezer to last the family. The 1986 sequel, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2, set thirteen years after the original, played up the comedy and satire a good deal more. The Sawyer family is economically successful as they manufacture and sell a popular chilli, which is, of course, made with human meat. While the later films in the series tended to focus on Leatherface as a slasher villain, this film emphasized the involuntary, unknowing cannibalism of all who eat the chilli. ‘The 231

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Cook’ Drayton Sawyer even enters a chilli-making contest and wins. When asked the secret of his recipe, he states, ‘No secret, it’s the meat. Don’t skimp on the meat. I’ve got a real good eye for prime meat. Runs in the family.’ Occurring around the same time as the original Texas Chain Saw Massacre was an Italian cannibal film cycle. Umberto Lenzi’s Man from Deep River (Il paese del sesso selvaggio, 1972) set the model for the Europeans-among-contemporary-jungle-savages exploitation film, and was described by Ian Olney as setting ‘a tone of brutal, dog-eat-dog nihilism’ that manifested in reports of real abuse of both animals and humans on location.81 Such films present extreme violence, racism and sexual exploitation in the name of a cautionary tale of Europeans entering the domain of the cannibals, and then discovering ‘the legends are all true.’ Lenzi’s film opened the floodgates and was rapidly followed by Ruggero Deodato’s Last Cannibal World (Ultimo mondo cannibale, 1977), Cannibal Holocaust (1980) and a number of other cannibal films: Emanuelle and the Last Cannibals (Emanuelle e gli ultimi cannibali, 1977), Mountain of the Cannibal God (La montagna del dio cannibale, 1978) and Cannibal Ferox (1981), the last released in the United States as Make Them Die Slowly. The success of the Italian cycle resulted in other artists from other nations making cannibal films of a similar nature: Savage Terror (Primitif, Indonesia, 1978), The Devil Hunter (El caníbal, West Germany, 1980), Cannibals (Mondo Cannibale, West Germany, 1980) and Cannibal Terror (Terreur cannibale, France, 1980). Of these, Cannibal Holocaust, sometimes referred to as ‘the Mother of All Cannibal Movies’, is perhaps the best known and most studied.82 Shot in cinéma vérité style, the film is actually an example of meta-cinema, a film within a film. A group of four 232

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film-makers disappear in the Amazon rainforest, and Harold Monroe, a professor and noted anthropologist, sets out to find out what happened and rescue the four, if possible. He discovers their lost footage and learns they had been seeking out cannibal tribes, but also creating staged scenes, including burning down a hut with many indigenous people in it. The four finally run foul of the Ya̧ nomamö after the men in the party rape a young girl. The rest of the tribe attack and the lead film-maker continues to film as his associates are tortured, murdered and prepared for eating. Monroe returns with the footage to New York, where the film executives decide to destroy it, leaving Monroe to wonder who the ‘real cannibals are’. Cannibal Holocaust has inspired other narratives rooted in its ideas. The working title of the film was ‘The Green Inferno’, a title appropriated by Eli Roth for his 2013 tribute film. Kea Wilson’s debut novel We Eat Our Own (2016) narrates the filming of an Italian cannibal movie very much resembling Cannibal Holocaust.83 In George A. Romero’s Dawn of the Dead (1978), a scientist being interviewed on television suggests that if the zombie plague continues, the only choices left will be to either nuke the cities or eat the dead. This idea represents survival cannibalism of a higher magnitude. Zombies, themselves dead, are also eaters of the dead. In most zombie narratives that follow Night of the Living Dead, the reanimated corpses of the recently deceased feed on the bodies of the recently living. Indeed, the big reveal in Night of the Living Dead is when the ‘ghouls’ (and calling them that really foreshadows what will happen) begin to eat the exploded, burnt remains of Tommy and Judy. From Romero’s sequels to that first film to The Walking Dead, zombies are dead humans that eat the flesh of other humans. 233

Scenes from Last Cannibal World (1977, dir. Ruggero Deodato).

The film-makers record the execution, butchering and consumption of a woman caught in adultery, from Cannibal Holocaust (1980, dir. Ruggero Deodato).

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More recent cannibal cinema is enjoying a revival in the first two decades of the twenty-first century: Wrong Turn (2003) and its sequels, Tooth and Nail (2007), Butcher Boys (2012), We Are What We Are (2013) and Bone Tomahawk (2015) all feature cannibalistic and corpse-eating characters. For Three . . . Extremes (2004) Fruit Chan, a Hong Kong film-maker, contributed ‘Dumplings’, the story of Mrs Li, a former television soap-opera star desperate to regain her youth, who visits Aunt Mei, a former abortionist for the Chinese government who now smuggles aborted foetuses into Hong Kong in order to make dumplings. Mrs Li regularly consumes the dumplings in order to stay youthful. Tooth and Nail (2007), set in the apocalyptic future, depicts survivors eating other humans in the absence of food. This also happens in The Road (2009) and several other post-apocalyptic films. The character of ‘Hannibal the Cannibal’ from Thomas Harris’s tetralogy Red Dragon (1981), The Silence of the Lambs (1988), Hannibal (1996) and Hannibal Rising (2006), all but the last adapted for cinema, the first one twice, is arguably the most popular cannibal in the world, even earning his own television series: Hannibal (2013–15). Thomas Fahy compares Hannibal Lecter and Patrick Bateman from American Psycho (1991, filmed 2000), identifying them as ‘upper class cannibals’, educated and sophisticated in their taste, reaching ‘the logical extension of a marketplace that co-opts bodies’.84 Rivalling reports of screenings of The Exorcist, when Julia Ducournau’s Raw was shown in midnight screenings at the 2016 Toronto International Film Festival, enough audience members fainted to require paramedics to attend screenings. Raw narrates the tale of young Justine and her sister Alex, both attending veterinary school and having been raised as vegetarians. As part of a 236

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ritual hazing of new students, sixteen-year-old Justine is forced to eat a raw rabbit kidney, the first meat she has ever consumed. Filled with revulsion and made ill by the act, she nevertheless develops a desire for more meat. Through a mishap, Justine eats Alex’s severed finger. Alex then causes a car to crash on a deserted country road and eats parts of the dead passengers, revealing the family’s proclivity for cannibalism despite being vegetarian. While the film’s exploration of Justine’s burgeoning sexuality makes it clear that the cannibalism can be read as a metaphor for appetite, desire and exploring new identities, the cannibalism is also literal, with the sisters eating more bodies until their father reveals he and the mother are cannibals as well, preferring to feast on parts of each other. The consumption of the human body remains a potent metaphor and a powerful draw within international popular culture.

Conclusion: You Are Who You Eat From breathless reports of the atrocities done in the South Seas and the Donner Pass in the nineteenth century to the widespread cinema of humans being eaten in the twentieth and twenty-first, cannibals are clearly the most popular of corpse-eaters. Stories of them are entertaining, terrifying, vomit-inducing, edifying and fascinating. We cannot seem to get enough of tales of humans eating other humans. This idea applies not only to fiction and film, but to the very real celebrity status of cannibal killers. Ed Gein has inspired a number of horror films. Jeffrey Dahmer is a household name, even 25 years after his death. Hannibal Lecter is instantly recognizable and oddly much loved. Anthony Hopkins has been nominated for Academy Awards for acting five times, but only won Best 237

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Actor for his performance as Hannibal Lecter. As noted above, the judge in the Alfred Packer case was truly in error in thinking Packer would be quickly forgotten. Much of this volume has been spent considering mythological monsters that eat human corpses. In The Lovely Bones, Alice Sebold observes: ‘Murderers are not monsters, they’re men. And that’s the most frightening thing about them.’85 We create monsters in order to contend with the darkness inside of us, but doing so does not make us monsters. Similarly, as with sacrificial or political cannibalism, we consume things in order to gain their strengths and attributes. So what does it say that we often consume narratives of corpse-eating, and make public personalities out of cannibal killers? I do not have an answer, but I suspect the opposite is true: we consume so that we do not become what we consume. Cynthia Baron, Diane Carson and Mark Bernard remind us, ‘Cannibal narratives serve the interests of people who formulate them.’86 Whose interests are being served when we watch The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, The Santa Clarita Diet or Cannibal Holocaust? I dare suggest, to misquote Shakespeare, that we are holding the mirror up to ourselves, perhaps scaring ourselves a little, but also reminding ourselves, though it is scary to be eaten, it is far scarier to be the eater.

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Conclusion

We Can’t Stop Eating

T

he eating of the dead is a great source of horror in our culture and, indeed, historically in most cultures. The act of cannibalism transforms a person; the one who eats the dead becomes something else. Olga Mane, a Soviet prisoner during the Ukraine famine, feared meeting the Ukrainian cannibals when she was sent to prison with them. Upon spending time with them, however, she learned they were to be pitied, not feared. She still, however, saw them as transformed by the experience of eating the dead – it had driven them mad and they were not the same as before. Virtually all of the mythical beings in this volume carry transformative powers. Wendigos transform, aswangs transform, ghouls take human children and make them changelings. To interact with eaters of the dead can result in one becoming one of them. To eat the dead means to become something no longer human, or at least not normal human. And yet, in the end, we are eaters and eaten. Val Plumwood, who was attacked by a saltwater crocodile in Kakadu National Park in Australia and knows at first hand the fear of being devoured, states the challenge to our psychology and self-image when we are eaten: ‘We may daily consume other ­animals in their billions, but we ourselves cannot be food for 239

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worms and certainly not meat for crocodiles.’1 Yet the monsters in this book and the sheer number of cannibal events throughout history indicate that we are a part of the food chain. We find it disturbing and terrifying that we may be torn apart, devoured, digested and excreted. We imagine it in the form of wendigos, ghouls, aswang and other fiendish creatures. We distance it and make it less real (or at least something that happens to someone else, not us) but simultaneously elevate (and thus distance) ­cannibal killers as celebrities. We find comfort that cannibalism is rare, that the ghouls, and aswang, and wendigo, all seem to have disappeared. Yet, like all corpse-eaters, they lurk in the shadows, ever ready to return and stoke our fears. As I write this volume the United States Department of Defense is funding research into battlefield robots that power themselves by ‘eating’ human corpses. The project is called the Energetically Autonomous Tactical Robot, or eatr for short. As John Scott Lewinski wryly observed in Wired Magazine, ‘What could possibly go wrong?’2

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r eference s

Introduction: The Fear of Being Eaten 1 David Quammen, Monster of God: The Man-eating Predator in the Jungles of History and the Mind (New York, 2003), p. 3. 2 Philip Henslowe, Henslowe’s Diary, ed. R. A. Foakes and R. T. Rickert (Cambridge, 1961), p. 319. 3 G. D. Schmidt, The Iconography of the Mouth of Hell: Eighthcentury Britain to the Fifteenth Century (Selinsgrove, pa, 1995). 4 Philippe Ariès, Images of Man and Death, trans. Janet Lloyd (Cambridge, 1985), p. 157. 5 Jessica Mitford, The American Way of Death Revisited (New York, 1998), pp. 58–9. 6 Mary Roach, Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers (New York, 2003), p. 64. 7 Ibid., p. 65. 8 Ibid., p. 68. 9 Val Plumwood, ‘Being Prey’, in The Ultimate Journey: Inspiring Stories of Living and Dying, ed. James O’Reilly, Sean O’Reilly and Richard Sterling (San Francisco, ca, 2000), p. 142. 10 Margaret Atwood, Strange Things: The Malevolent North in Canadian Literature (Oxford, 1995), p. 67. 11 Erik D’Amato, ‘Mystery of Disgust: Why Do We Love Eating Lobster but Recoil at the Thought of Boiled Roach’, Psychology Today (1 January 1998). 12 Ibid. 13 Ibid. 14 The term ‘sociomoral disgust’ was coined by Dr Carol Nemeroff of Arizona State University, ibid. 15 Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, ed., Monster Theory: Reading Cultures (Minneapolis, mn, 1996), p. 3. 241

e ater s of the de ad one: Sky Burial, Cyclops and the Conqueror Worm 1 Edgar Allan Poe, ‘The Conqueror Worm’, in Complete Tales and Poems (New York, 1975), p. 961. 2 Euripides, ‘Cyclops’, in Euripides’ Cyclops and Major Fragments of Greek Satyric Drama, ed. and trans. Patrick O’Sullivan and Christopher Collard (Oxford, 2013), pp. 93–5. 3 Henry iv, Part 1 (5.4.85–6). 4 David Quammen, Monster of God: The Man-eating Predator in the Jungles of History and the Mind (New York, 2003), p. 133. 5 Ibid. 6 Stephen King, Gerald’s Game (New York, 1992). 7 Herodotus, Herodotus Book i, trans. A. D. Godley (Cambridge, ma, 2004), p. 140. 8 Jamsheed K. Choksy, Purity and Pollution in Zoroastrianism (Austin, tx, 1989), p. 16. 9 Philip G. Kreyenbroek and Shehnaz Neville Munshi, Living Zoroastrianism (Richmond, 2011), p. 8. 10 Ibid., p. 280; James R. Russell, ‘Burial in Zoroastrianism’, in Zoroastrianism, ed. Mahnaz Moazami (New York, 2016), p. 1504. 11 Russell, ‘Burial in Zoroastrianism’, p. 1504. 12 William Woodville Rockhill, Notes on the Ethnology of Tibet (Washington, dc, 1895), p. 727. (Translation is author’s own from the Latin of the text.) 13 Margaret Gouin, Tibetan Rituals of Death: Buddhist Funerary Practices (London, 2010), p. 60. 14 Meg van Huygen, ‘Give My Body to the Birds: The Practice of Sky Burial’, www.atlasobscura.com, 11 March 2014. 15 Michel Heike, ‘The Open-air Sacrificial Burial of the Mongols’, http://userpage.fu-berlin.de, accessed 11 April 2017. 16 Ibid. 17 Ibid. 18 Apollodorus, Gods and Heroes of the Greeks: The Library of Apollodorus, trans. Richard Simpson (Amherst, ma, 1976), p. 291. 19 Quoted in Ken Dowden, The Uses of Greek Mythology (London, 1992), pp. 24–5. 20 David Konstan, ‘An Anthropology of Euripides’ Kyklōps’, in Nothing to Do with Dionysos? Athenian Drama in Its Social 242

r ef er ence s Context, ed. Froma Zeitlin and John J. Winkle (Princeton, nj, 1992), p. 211. 21 Homer, The Odyssey, trans. Robert Fitzgerald (Garden City, ny, 1961), p. 147. 22 Ibid. 23 Ibid., p. 148. 24 Mark Buchan, ‘Food for Thought: Achilles and the Cyclops’, in Eating Their Words: Cannibalism and the Boundaries of Cultural Identity, ed. Kristen Guest (Albany, ny, 2001), pp. 19, 25, 29. 25 Euripides, ‘Cyclops’, p. 97. 26 Ibid., pp. 105–7. Two: Eating the Gods, Gods Eating Men 1 Marina Warner, No Go the Bogeyman (New York, 1998), p. 53. 2 Ovid, Metamorphoses, Book 6, lines 461–71, trans. Stanley Lombardo (Indianapolis, in, 2010), p. 160. 3 Seneca, ‘Thyestes’, in Phaedra and Other Plays, ed. and trans. R. Scott Smith (New York, 2011), p. 227. 4 Ibid., p. 235. 5 Ibid., p. 237. 6 Ovid, Metamorphoses, Book 1, lines 233–7, p. 11. 7 Jan Kott, The Eating of the Gods, trans. Boleslaw Taborski and Edward J. Czerwinski (Evanston, il, 1987), p. 199. 8 Ibid., pp. 199–200. 9 See also Leviticus 26:29. 10 See also Ezekiel 5:10. 11 Bill Ellis, ‘De legendis urbis: Modern Legends in Ancient Rome’, Journal of American Folklore, xcvi/380 (1983), p. 200. 12 Ibid., p. 202. 13 François Marie Arouet de Voltaire, Philosophical Dictionary, trans. Peter Gay (New York, 1962), p. 88. 14 Susan Gubar, Judas: A Biography (New York, 2009), pp. 113–14. 15 James Rollins, The Judas Strain (New York, 2007). 16 Kott, The Eating of the Gods, p. 211. 17 Ibid., p. 211. 18 Quoted ibid., p. 211. 19 The same scene with virtually the same wording appears in the other synoptic gospels, but not in the Gospel of John. See Mark 14:22–4 and Luke 22:19–20. 243

e ater s of the de ad 20 The Catechism of the Catholic Church (New York, 1994), p. 346. 21 Ibid., p. 347. 22 Heike Behrend, Resurrecting Cannibals: The Catholic Church, Witch-hunts and the Production of Pagans in Western Uganda (Woodbridge, 2011), p. 163. 23 Carla Cevasco, ‘“This Is My Body”: Communion and Cannibalism in Colonial New England and New France’, New England Quarterly, lxxxix/4 (2016), p. 556. 24 Ibid., p. 557. 25 Shawn Smallman, Dangerous Spirits: The Windigo in Myth and History (Victoria, 2014), p. 139. 26 Ron Barrett, Aghor Medicine: Pollution, Death and Healing in Northern India (Berkeley, ca, 2008), p. 3. 27 Ibid., p. 140. 28 Michael Safi, ‘Reza Aslan Outrages Hindus by Eating Human Brains in cnn Documentary’, The Guardian (10 March 2017). 29 Ben Guarino, ‘Reza Aslan, Host of cnn’s “Believer,” Catches Grief for Showcasing Religious Cannibals in India’, Washington Post (6 March 2017). 30 Ibid. 31 Timothy J. Knab, A War of Witches: A Journey into the Underworld of the Contemporary Aztecs (San Francisco, ca, 1977), p. 124. 32 Peggy Sanday, Divine Hunger: Cannibalism as a Cultural System (Cambridge, 1986), p. 7. Three: Grendel and the Ogres 1 The other adversaries Beowulf faces are ‘Grendel’s Mother’ and ‘the dragon’. Grendel is the only adversary to merit a name – even his mother is only identified through her relationship with him. 2 Ojibwa, ‘Ancient Europe: Cannibalism in England’, http://m.dailykos.com, 20 June 2011. 3 Geoffrey of Monmouth, History of the Kings of Britain, trans. Lewis Thorpe (Harmondsworth, 1966). 4 Andy Orchard, Pride and Prodigies: Studies in the Monsters of the ‘Beowulf ’ Manuscript (Westbridge, 1993), pp. 1–2. 5 Stephen T. Asma, On Monsters: An Unnatural History of Our Worst Fears (Oxford, 2009), p. 98. 244

r ef er ence s 6 Nora K. Chadwick, ‘The Monsters and Beowulf ’, in The AngloSaxons, ed. Peter Clemoes (London, 1959), p. 175. 7 John Block Friedman, The Monstrous Races in Medieval Art and Thought (Cambridge, ma, 1981), p. 104. 8 Beowulf, trans. Dick Ringler (Indianapolis, in, 2007), p. 9. 9 Ibid., p. 41. 10 Bruce Lincoln, Theorizing Myth: Narrative, Ideology, and Scholarship (Chicago, il, 2000), p. 130. 11 Ibid., p. 131. 12 Orchard, Pride and Prodigies, pp. 59–60. 13 Ben Reinhard, ‘Grendel and the Penitentials’, English Studies, xciv/1 (2013), p. 378. 14 Ruth Johnston Staver, A Companion to Beowulf (Westport, ct, 2005), p. 200. 15 Ibid., p. 201. 16 Michael Crichton, Eaters of the Dead (New York, 2006). See also Crichton’s ‘A Factual Note on Eaters of the Dead’, appearing in the book as an appendix (pp. 245–52) on the origins, intentions and historical facts behind his novel. 17 John D. Niles, Beowulf: The Poem and Its Tradition (Cambridge, ma, 1983), p. 10. 18 Saxo Grammaticus, ‘The Ravenous Dead’, in The Penguin Book of the Undead, ed. Scott G. Bruce (New York, 2016), pp. 165–8. 19 Niles, Beowulf, p. 10. 20 Magnús Fjalldal, ‘Beowulf and the Old Norse Two-troll Analogues’, Neophilologus, 97 (2013), p. 545. 21 E. A. Wallis Budge, ed. and trans., The Contendings of the Apostles (Oxford, 1935), pp. 173–4. 22 Friedman, The Monstrous Races, p. 61. 23 Ibid., p. 74. 24 Marina Warner, No Go the Bogeyman (New York, 1998), p. 95. 25 Ibid., p. 304. 26 Ibid., p. 311. 27 Jack Zipes, The Golden Age of Folk and Fairy Tales (Indianapolis, in, 2013), p. 121. 28 Quoted in Cătălin Avramescu, An Intellectual History of Cannibalism (Princeton, nj, 2009), p. 92. 29 Warner, No Go the Bogeyman, p. 12. 30 Ibid., p. 11. 31 Ibid., p. 15. 245

e ater s of the de ad 32 Quoted in Zipes, The Golden Age, p. 122. 33 Charles Perrault, Puss in Boots, trans. Malcolm Arthur (New York, 1999). 34 Zipes, The Golden Age, pp. 132–3. 35 Al Ridenour, The Krampus and the Old Dark Christmas (Port Townsend, wa, 2016), p. 128. 36 Ibid., p. 152. Four: Ghūls and Ghouls 1 H. P. Lovecraft, The Dream-quest of Unknown Kadath (New York, 1970), p. 55. 2 Ahmed K. Al-Rawi, ‘The Arabic Ghoul and Its Western Transformation’, Folklore, cxx/3 (2009), p. 292. 3 Robert Lamb, ‘How Ghouls Work’, http://science. howstuffworks.com, accessed 5 February 2017. 4 Ahmed K. Al-Rawi, ‘The Mythical Ghoul in Arabic Culture’, Cultural Analysis, 8 (2009), p. 46. 5 Khaled Abou El Fadl, ‘Dogs in the Islamic Tradition and Nature’, Encyclopedia of Religion and Nature (New York, 2004), p. 499. 6 Ibid. 7 Ibid. 8 Brian Palmer, ‘Would Your Dog Eat Your Dead Body? Absolutely’, www.slate.com, 13 July 2011. 9 Ibid. 10 See 2 Kings 9:10. See also 1 Kings 21:23. 11 Palmer, ‘Would Your Dog Eat Your Dead Body?’ 12 Noriko T. Reider, Japanese Demon Lore: Oni from Ancient Times to the Present (Logan, ut, 2010), p. 164. 13 Al-Rawi, ‘Arabic Ghoul’, p. 291. 14 Ibid., p. 295. 15 Al-Rawi, ‘Mythical Ghoul’, p. 51. 16 Al-Rawi, ‘Arabic Ghoul’, p. 295. See also Al-Rawi, ‘Mythical Ghoul’, pp. 46–7. 17 Al-Rawi, ‘Mythical Ghoul’, p. 47. 18 Ibid., p. 50. 19 Robert Lebling, Legends of the Fire Spirits: Jinn and Genies from Arabia to Zanzibar (London, 2010), p. 8. 20 Ibid., p. 16. 246

r ef er ence s 21 Al-Rawi, ‘Arabic Ghoul’, pp. 294–5. 22 Ibid. 23 Lebling, Legends of the Fire Spirits, p. 96. 24 Ibid., p. 97. 25 Ibid., pp. 155–6. 26 The Adventures of Sayf Ben Dhi Yazan: An Arab Folk Epic, trans. Lena Jayyusi (Bloomington, in, 1996), p. 136. 27 Ibid. 28 Al-Rawi, ‘Mythical Ghoul’, p. 56. 29 Ibid. 30 Al-Rawi, ‘Arabic Ghoul’, p. 291. 31 Ibid., p. 299. 32 William Beckford, Vathek (Oxford, 1998). 33 David Whitesell, ‘This Just In: Growing the Gothic’, Notes from Under Grounds, http://smallnotes.library.virginia.edu (19 September 2013). 34 Lord George Gordon Byron, ‘The Ghoula’, in Selected Poems (New York, 2005), p. 192. 35 Edgar Allan Poe, ‘Ulalume’, in Complete Tales and Poems (New York, 1975), pp. 951–4. 36 Sabine Baring-Gould, The Book of Were-wolves: Being an Account of a Terrible Superstition (London, 1865), p. 250. 37 Ibid., pp. 252–3. 38 William Ernest Henley, ‘Arabian Nights Entertainment’, www.poemhunter.com, accessed 4 May 2021. 39 Edward Lucas White, ‘The Ghoula’, in The Stuff of Dreams (Mineola, ny, 2016), p. 209. 40 Ibid., pp. 210–11. 41 Edward Lucas White, ‘Amina’, in The Stuff of Dreams (Mineola, ny, 2016), pp. 28–9. 42 Ibid., p. 33. 43 Ibid. 44 S. T. Joshi and David E. Schultz, An H. P. Lovecraft Encyclopedia (New York, 2001). 45 H. P. Lovecraft, ‘Pickman’s Model’, in Tales (New York, 2005), p. 204. 46 Ibid., p. 205. 47 Ibid. 48 Ibid., p. 207. 49 Lovecraft, The Dream-quest of Unknown Kadath. 247

e ater s of the de ad 50 Ibid., p. 43. 51 Anthony Pearsall, The Lovecraft Lexicon (Tempe, 2005), p. 196. 52 H. P. Lovecraft, ‘The Outsider’, in Tales (New York, 2005), p. 14. 53 Robert Bloch, ‘The Grinning Ghoul’, in Mysteries of the Worm, 2nd edn (Oakland, ca, 1993) p. 53. 54 Ibid. 55 Clark Ashton Smith, ‘The Ghoul’, in The Klarkash-ton Cycle (Oakland, ca, 2008), p. 1. 56 Ibid., p. 3. 57 Lebling, Legends of the Fire Spirits, p. 72. 58 Ibid. 59 Brian McNaughton, The Throne of Bones (Black River, ny, 1997), pp. 53, 85. 60 Ibid., pp. 54, 90, 93. 61 Ibid., p. 85. 62 Ibid., p. 211. 63 Caitlin R. Kiernan, To Charles Fort, with Love (Burton, mi, 2005), p. 50. 64 Caitlin R. Kiernan, The Red Tree (New York, 2009); Caitlin R. Kiernan, Low Red Moon (New York, 2003); Caitlin R. Keirnan, Murder of Angels (New York, 2004); Caitlin R. Kiernan, Daughter of Hounds (New York, 2008). 65 Kiernan, Daughter of Hounds, p. 3. 66 Ibid. 67 R. Chetwynd-Hayes, The Monster Club (Richmond, va, 2013), p. 75. 68 Ibid., p. 82. 69 Ibid., p. 87. 70 Ibid., pp. 88–9. 71 Harry Shannon, Daemon (no loc., 2008), about a ghoul stalking Las Vegas. 72 Brian Keene, Ghoul (North Webster, in, 2007). 73 J. K. Rowling, Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them (New York, 2017) p. 47; see also J. K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (New York, 1999). 74 R. L. Stine, Attack of the Graveyard Ghouls (New York, 1998). 75 Neil Gaiman, The Graveyard Book (London, 2010), p. 82. 76 Ibid., p. 61. 77 Ibid., p. 85. 78 Phil Hardy, ed., The Overlook Film Encyclopedia (Woodstock, ny, 1995), p. 55. 248

r ef er ence s 79 Scott Connors, ‘The Ghoul’, in Icons of Horror and the Supernatural, vol. i (Westport, cn, 2007), p. 264. Five: Asian and Oceanian Flesh-eaters and Corpse-devourers 1 Gordon Grice, The Book of Deadly Animals (New York, 2012), p. 165. 2 Encyclopedia of Hinduism, vol. viii (New Delhi, 2011), p. 435. 3 Ibid., p. 434. 4 See Fredrick W. Bunce, ed., An Encyclopaedia of Hindu Deities, Demi Gods, Godlings, Demons and Heroes (London, 2000). 5 John Murdoch, ed., The Mahabharata: An English Abridgment (London, 1898), p. 23. 6 ‘The Story of the Rakshasa and the Princess’, in Beauty and the Beast Tales from around the World, ed. Heidi Anne Heiner (Nashville, tn, 2013), pp. 762–4. 7 Maximo D. Ramos, ‘Belief in Ghouls in Contemporary Philippine Society’, Western Folklore, xxvii/3 (1968), p. 185. 8 Ibid., pp. 185–6. 9 Maximo D. Ramos, The Aswang Complex in Philippine Folklore (Quezon City, 1990), pp. xvi–xxvi. 10 Ibid., pp. xvi, xxvii. 11 Nick Redfern, ‘Beware of the Deadly Aswang’, http://mysteriousuniverse.org (21 May 2015). 12 Ramos, The Aswang Complex in Philippine Folklore. See also Ramos’s ‘The Aswang Syncrasy in Philippine Folklore’, Western Folklore, xxviii/4 (1969), pp. 238–48. 13 Ramos, The Aswang Complex, p. 1. 14 Ibid., p. 2. 15 Ibid., p. 3. 16 Ibid., pp. 2, 4, 5. 17 Raul Pertierra, Philippine Localities and Global Perspectives: Essays on Society and Culture (Manila, 1995), p. 79. 18 Ramos, The Aswang Complex, p. 7. 19 Ramos, ‘Belief in Ghouls’, p. 188. 20 Darcie Nadel, ‘The Aswang: A Filipino Folk Monster’, https://exemplore.com, 25 June 2020. 21 Elizabeth Lolarga, ‘Creatures of Pinoy Mythology Star in up Play’, https://verafiles.org, 2 December 2011. 22 The entire premiere production in Tagalog can be seen on YouTube, care of the Aswang Project; see www.youtube.com. 249

e ater s of the de ad 23 Jory Sherman, The Bamboo Demons (Los Angeles, ca, 1979), p. 3. 24 The Aswang Phenomenon, dir. Jordan Clark, High Banks Entertainment, 2011. 25 Pertierra, Philippine Localities and Global Perspectives, p. 81. 26 The Center for Media Freedom and Responsibility, ‘“Aswang” in Central Mindanao?’, https://cmfr-phil.org (1 June 2015). 27 Ueda Akinari, Ugetsu Monogatari: Tales of Moonlight and Rain, trans. Leon M. Zolbrod (Vancouver, 1974), p. 188. 28 Ibid., p. 190. 29 Japanese names are given Japanese style, surname first, given name second. 30 Lafcadio Hearn, Kwaidan (Tokyo, 1971), p. 69. 31 Ibid., p. 72. 32 Ibid. 33 Joseph A. Ezzo, ‘Jikininki’, in A Walk on the Darkside, ed. John Pelan (New York, 2004), p. 45. 34 Ibid., p. 46. 35 Ibid., p. 48. 36 Jikininki, dir. Tsubasa Tomori, writer Christopher McCombs, Tokyo Cowboys, 2016. 37 Jack Hunter, Dream Spectres: Extreme Ukiyo-e – Sex, Blood and the Supernatural (Tokyo, 2010), p. 81. 38 Wolfram Eberhard, Chinese Festivals (New York, 1958), pp. 129–30. 39 Ibid., p. 130. 40 Bronislaw Malinowski, Magic, Science and Religion and Other Essays (New York, 1954), p. 152. 41 Ibid., p. 153. 42 Ibid., p. 154. 43 Ute Eickelkamp, ‘Specters of Reality: Mamu in the Eastern Western Desert of Australia’, in Monster Anthropology in Australasia and Beyond, ed. Yasmine Musharbash and Geir Henning Presterudstuen (New York, 2014), pp. 58–9. 44 Christine Judith Nicholls, ‘“Dreamings” and Place: Aboriginal Monsters and Their Meanings’, https://theconversation.com, 29 April 2014. 45 Quoted in Penny Webb, ‘Craft Review: Cannibal Story’, Sydney Morning Herald (16 January 2015). 250

r ef er ence s Six: Wendigo 1 Algernon Blackwood, ‘The Wendigo’, in Horror Stories, ed. Darryl Jones (Oxford, 2014), p. 392. 2 Carolyn Podruchny, ‘Werewolves and Windigos: Narratives of Cannibal Monsters in French-Canadian Voyageur Oral Tradition’, Ethnohistory, li/4 (2004), p. 680. 3 Paul Le Jeune, ‘Veritable Werewolves’, in Windigo: An Anthology of Fact and Fantastic Fiction, ed. John Robert Colombo (Saskatoon, 1982), pp. 7–8. 4 Shawn Smallman, Dangerous Spirits: The Windigo in Myth and History (Victoria, 2014), p. 23. 5 John Robert Colombo, ed., Windigo: An Anthology of Fact and Fantastic Fiction (Saskatoon, 1981), p. 2. 6 Ibid., p. 3. 7 Ibid., p. 124. 8 Colombo, Windigo: An Anthology, p. 121. 9 Smallman, Dangerous Spirits, p. 21. 10 ‘Wesakaychak, the Windigo, and the Ermine’, in American Indian Trickster Tales, ed. Richard Erdoes and Alfonso Ortiz (New York, 1998), pp. 200–201. 11 Ibid., p. 24. 12 Ibid., p. 45. 13 Robert A. Brightman, ‘The Windigo in the Material World’, Ethnohistory, xxxv/4 (1988), pp. 337–9. 14 Colombo, Windigo: An Anthology, pp. 8–9. 15 Ibid., pp. 9–13. 16 Podruchny, ‘Werewolves and Windigoes’, p. 688. 17 Ibid. 18 Dan Simmons, The Terror (New York, 2007). 19 Columbo, Windigo: An Anthology, p. 21. 20 Podruchny, ‘Werewolves and Windigoes’, p. 685. 21 Morton I. Teicher, Windigo Psychosis (Seattle, wa, 1960). 22 See, for example, Thomas H. Hay, ‘The Windigo Psychosis: Psychodynamic, Cultural, and Social Factors in Aberrant Behavior’, American Anthropologist, lxxiii/1 (1971), pp. 1–19. 23 Rev. John. M. Cooper, ‘The Cree Witiko Psychosis’, Primitive Man, vi/1 (1933), p. 20. 24 Ibid., p. 21. 25 Ibid. 251

e ater s of the de ad 26 Morton I. Teicher, ‘Windigo Psychosis’, in Windigo: An Anthology, ed. Colombo, p. 167. 27 Lou Marano, ‘Wendigo Psychosis: The Anatomy of an EmicEtic Confusion’, in The Culture-bound Syndrome, ed. Ronald C. Simmons and Charles C. Hughes (Boston, ma, 1985), p. 440. 28 Nathan D. Carlson, ‘Reviving Witiko (Windigo): An Ethnohistory of “Cannibal Monsters” in the Athabasca District of Northern Alberta, 1878–1910’, Ethnohistory, lvi/3 (2009). 29 Ibid., p. 376. 30 Teicher, ‘Windigo Psychosis’, p. 185. 31 Mary Hartwell Catherwood, ‘The Windigo’, in The Chase of Saint-Castin and Other Stories of the French in the New World (Boston, ma, 1894), available at www.gutenberg.org. 32 Ibid. 33 Ibid. 34 Ibid. 35 Blackwood, ‘The Wendigo’, p. 392. 36 Ibid., p. 396. 37 Ibid., p. 411. 38 Ibid., p. 417. 39 Ibid., p. 392. 40 Alvin Schwartz, Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark (New York, 1981), pp. 50–53. 41 Robert M. Price, ‘Introduction: Ghost Riders in the Sky’, in The Ithaqua Cycle (Oakland, ca, 1998), p. xi. 42 See Robert M. Price, ed., The Ithaqua Cycle (Oakland, ca, 1998) for all three stories. 43 Eden Robinson, Traplines (Toronto, 1996). 44 Tomson Highway, Kiss of the Fur Queen (Toronto, 1998). 45 Margaret Atwood, Strange Things: The Malevolent North in Canadian Literature (Oxford, 1995), p. 9. 46 Ibid., p. 66. 47 Ibid., p. 67. 48 Ibid., pp. 73–4. 49 Daniel David Moses, Brébeuf ’s Ghost (Toronto, 2000), pp. 101, 105. 50 Ibid., p. 136. 51 Quoted in ‘Armand Garnet Ruffo’s Award-winning Movie “A Windigo Tale” Selected for Ontario Film Festivals’, https://newsroom.carleton.ca, 9 September 2010. 252

r ef er ence s 52 Winona LaDuke, Last Woman Standing (Stillwater, mn, 1997). 53 Louise Erdrich, The Antelope Wife (New York, 1998). 54 Stephen King, Pet Sematary (New York, 1983), p. 117. 55 Ibid., p. 259. 56 Ibid., p. 329. 57 Ibid., p. 353. 58 Ibid. 59 Bernice M. Murphy, The Rural Gothic in American Popular Culture: Backwoods Horror and Terror in the Wilderness (New York, 2013), p. 119. 60 Stephen Graham Jones, The Fast Red Road: A Plainsong (New York, 2000), and All the Beautiful Sinners (New York, 2003). 61 Michael Jensen, Firelands: A Novel (New York, 2004). 62 Ogden Nash, ‘The Wendigo’, in Windigo: An Anthology, ed. Colombo, p. 127. 63 Ibid. 64 George Bowering, ‘Windigo’, in Windigo: An Anthology, ed. Colombo, pp. 187–91. 65 Corinna Lenhardt, ‘Wendigos, Eye Killers, Skinwalkers: The Myth of the American Indian Vampire and American Indian “Vampire” Myths’, Text Matters, vi/6 (2016), p. 203. 66 Smallman, ‘Dangerous Spirits’, p. 73. 67 See ‘Sweet Land’, https://theindustryla.org, accessed 16 December 2020. 68 George Bowering, The Gangs of Kosmos (Toronto, 1969), p. 28. 69 Atwood, Strange Things, p. 69. 70 James B. Waldram, Revenge of the Windigo: The Construction of the Mind and Mental Health of North American Aboriginal Peoples (Toronto, 2004), p. 320. 71 Jack D. Forbes, Columbus and Other Cannibals (New York, 1979), p. 24. Seven: Human Cannibals 1 Cătălin Avramescu, An Intellectual History of Cannibalism (Princeton, nj, 2009), p. 9. 2 See ‘San Diego Museum of Man, Cannibals: Myth and Reality’, https://museumofus.org, accessed 16 December 2020. 3 Sigmund Freud, The Future of an Illusion, trans. James Strachey (New York, 1961), p. 13. 253

e ater s of the de ad 4 William Arens, The Man-eating Myth: Anthropology and Anthropophagy (New York, 1979), pp. 172, 173, 175, 9, 10. 5 Peggy Sanday, Divine Hunger: Cannibalism as a Cultural System (Cambridge, 1986), p. 3. 6 Christy G. Turner ii and Jacqueline A. Turner, Man Corn: Cannibalism and Violence in the Prehistoric American Southwest (Salt Lake City, ut, 1999), pp. 2, 461. 7 Ibid., p. 462. 8 Carla Cevasco, ‘“This Is My Body”: Communion and Cannibalism in Colonial New England and New France’, New England Quarterly, lxxxix/4 (2016), p. 569. 9 Jack D. Forbes, Columbus and Other Cannibals (New York, 1979), p. 49. 10 Frank Lestringant, Cannibals: The Discovery and Representation of the Cannibal from Columbus to Jules Verne, trans. Rosemary Morris (Berkeley, ca, 1997), p. 15. 11 Ibid., p. 17. 12 Ibid., p. 34. 13 Ibid., pp. 100–101. 14 A. W. Brian Simpson, Cannibalism and the Common Law (Chicago, il, 1984), p. 113. 15 Montaigne, The Complete Works of Montaigne (Stanford, ca, 1958), p. 152. 16 Ibid., p. 155. 17 Lewis Hanke, Aristotle and the American Indians (London, 1959), p. 4. 18 Val Plumwood, ‘Being Prey’, in The Ultimate Journey: Inspiring Stories of Living and Dying, ed. James O’Reilly, Sean O’Reilly and Richard Sterling (San Francisco, ca, 2000), p. 145. 19 Lestringant, Cannibals, p. 141. 20 William D. Piersen, ‘White Cannibals, Black Martyrs: Fear, Depression, and Religious Faith as Causes of Suicide among New Slaves’, Journal of Negro History, lxii/2 (1977), p. 147. 21 Ibid. 22 Ibid., p. 148. 23 Ibid., p. 149. 24 John Thornton, ‘Cannibals, Witches and Slave Traders in the Atlantic World’, William and Mary Quarterly, lx/2 (2003), p. 281. 25 Ibid., p. 280. 254

r ef er ence s 26 Adam Hochschild, King Leopold’s Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa (New York, 1998), p. 166. 27 Lewis Petrinovich, The Cannibal Within (New York, 2000), p. 6. 28 Ibid. 29 Ibid. 30 Mary Roach, Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers (New York, 2003), p. 221. 31 Ibid., p. 222. 32 Richard Sugg, Mummies, Cannibals and Vampires: The History of Corpse Medicine from the Renaissance to the Victorians (London, 2011), p. 1. 33 Roach, Stiff, p. 226. 34 Beth A. Conklin, Consuming Grief: Compassionate Cannibalism in an Amazonian Society (Austin, tx, 2001), pp. xv–xvi. 35 Ibid., p. 81. 36 Cevasco, ‘“This Is My Body”’, p. 572. 37 Quoted in Marco Margaritoff, ‘Why Idi Amin Dada, “The Butcher of Uganda”, Should Be Remembered with History’s Worst Despots’, https://allthatsinteresting.com, 23 July 2019. 38 Brian Klass, ‘The Cannibal Emperor of Bangui and Africa’s Forgotten Conflict’, www.vice.com, 19 September 2014. 39 ‘Was Cannibalism Practiced during the Irish Famine?’, www.irishcentral.com, 15 May 2012. 40 Cormac Ó Gráda, Eating People Is Wrong, and Other Essays on Famine, Its Past, and Its Future (Princeton, nj, 2015), p. 12. 41 Anne Applebaum, Red Famine: Stalin’s War on Ukraine (New York, 2017), pp. 253, 256. 42 Nicolas Werth, Cannibal Island: Death in a Siberian Gulag, trans. Steven Rendall (Princeton, nj, 2007), p. 141. 43 Steven Béla Várdy and Ágnes Huszár Várdy, ‘Cannibalism in Stalin’s Russia and Mao’s China’, East European Quarterly, xli/2 (2007), p. 226. 44 Ibid., p. 225. 45 Vasily Sokor, ‘Fakty I Kommentarii’ (21 November 2008), at http://fakty.ua. 46 Applebaum, Red Famine, p. 260. 47 Várdy and Várdy, ‘Cannibalism in Stalin’s Russia’, p. 232. 48 Bill Schutt, Eat Me: A Natural and Unnatural History of Cannibalism (London, 2017), pp. 115–16. 49 Várdy and Várdy, ‘Cannibalism in Stalin’s Russia’, p. 233. 255

e ater s of the de ad 50 Ibid. 51 Ibid., p. 234. 52 Sugg, Mummies, Cannibals and Vampires, p. 123. 53 ‘Cannibalism and Vodka’, www.mayhem.net, 16 May 2003. 54 Ibid. 55 Ibid. 56 O Gráda, Eating People Is Wrong, p. 23. 57 ‘Cannibalism and Vodka’. 58 Saeed Shah, ‘Pakistani Brothers “Dug up Corpse and Made It into Curry”’, www.theguardian.com, 4 April 2011. 59 Tim Lister and James Masters, ‘Russian Couple Suspected of Killing and Eating up to 30 Victims’, www.cnn.com, 25 September 2017. 60 Sugg, Mummies, Cannibals and Vampires, p. 113. 61 Paul Raffaele, ‘Sleeping with Cannibals’, Smithsonian (September 2006). 62 See, for example, Penny Dreadfuls: Sensational Tales of Terror (New York, 2014). Eight: Flesh-eating in Popular Culture and Contemporary Reality 1 The Silence of the Lambs, dir. Jonathan Demme, 1991. 2 Stephen Sondheim and Hugh Wheeler, Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (New York, 1979), p. 102. 3 Harold Schechter, Man-eater: The Saga of Alfred G. Packer, American Cannibal (New York, 2015), p. 133. 4 Ibid., pp. 267–8. 5 Graham Chapman, John Cleese, Terry Gilliam, Eric Idle, Terry Jones and Michael Palin, The Complete Monty Python’s Flying Circus: All the Words, vol. ii (New York, 1989), p. 41. 6 Ibid. 7 Ibid., p. 42. 8 Ibid. 9 Ibid. 10 A. W. Brian Simpson, Cannibalism and the Common Law (Chicago, il, 1984), p. 122. 11 Lewis Petrinovich, The Cannibal Within (New York, 2000), p. 37. 12 Bill Schutt, Eat Me: A Natural and Unnatural History of Cannibalism (London, 2017), p. 137. 13 Simpson, Cannibalism and the Common Law, p. 121. 256

r ef er ence s 14 Ibid., p. 50. 15 Ibid., p. 53. 16 Ibid., p. 1. 17 Ibid., p. 123. 18 Nathaniel Philbrick, In the Heart of the Sea (New York, 2000), p. 165. 19 Ibid., p. 164. 20 Ibid., p. 165. 21 Ibid., pp. 170, 174, 175, 181. 22 Mark McLaughlin, The Donner Party: Weathering the Storm (Carnelian Bay, ca, 2007), p. 1. 23 Peter R. Limburg, Deceived: The Story of the Donner Party (Pacifica, ca, 1998), p. 50. 24 Tim McNeese, The Donner Party: A Doomed Journey (New York, 2004), pp. 80–85. 25 Limburg, Deceived, pp. 126–8. 26 Ibid., p. 130. 27 Ibid., p. 137. 28 Ibid., p. 200. 29 Ibid., p. 205. 30 Ibid., p. 206. 31 Michael Wallis, The Best Land Under Heaven: The Donner Party in the Age of Manifest Destiny (New York, 2017), p. 248. 32 ‘Distressing News’, California Star (13 February 1847), available at www.sfmission.org. 33 Ibid. 34 ‘Extracts from a Journal’, California Star (5 June 1847), available at https://cdnc.ucr. 35 Limburg, Deceived, p. 217. 36 C. F. McGlashan, History of the Donner Party: A Tragedy of the Sierras (San Francisco, ca, 1934), p. 85. 37 Ibid., p. 86. 38 Ibid., p. 194. 39 McNeese, The Donner Party, p. 123. 40 Gabrielle Burton, Searching for Tamsen Donner (Lincoln, ne, 2009); Daniel James Brown, The Indifferent Stars Above: The Harrowing Saga of a Donner Party Bride (New York, 2009); Scott R. Welvaert, The Donner Party (Mankato, mn, 2006). One can also read a series of first-hand and period narratives complied by Kristin Johnson in Unfortunate Emigrants: Narratives of the Donner Party (Logan, ut, 1996). 257

e ater s of the de ad 41 Alma Katsu, The Hunger (New York, 2019), p. 255. 42 Ibid., p. 366. 43 Ibid., p. 365. 44 Ibid., pp. 331–2. 45 Ibid., p. 332. 46 Some scholars believe Keseberg killed at least one if not more party members, including Tamsen Donner, although nothing can be proven. 47 Limburg, Deceived, p. 179. 48 Ibid. 49 Piers Paul Read, Alive (New York, 1974), p. 77. 50 Ibid., p. 78. 51 Ibid. 52 Ibid., p. 79. 53 Ibid., p. 80. 54 Nando Parrado and Vince Rause, Miracle in the Andes (New York, 2006), p. 95. 55 Ibid., p. 98. 56 Ibid. 57 Ibid., p. 117. 58 Ibid. 59 Ibid., p. 118. 60 Charles Whitehead, ‘Sawney Beane:[sic] The Man Eater’, in Penny Dreadfuls: Sensational Tales of Terror (New York, 2014), pp. 185–8. 61 John Mackay Wilson, Tales of the Borders, and of Scotland (Edinburgh, 1883). 62 James Malcolm Rymer, ‘The String of Pearls’, in Penny Dreadfuls: Sensational Tales of Terror (New York, 2014), pp. 415–664. 63 Kristen Guest, ‘Are You Being Served? Cannibalism, Class and Victorian Melodrama’, in Eating Their Words: Cannibalism and the Boundaries of Cultural Identity, ed. Kristen Guest (Albany, ny, 2001), p. 113. 64 Ibid., p. 120. 65 Sondheim and Wheeler, Sweeney Todd. 66 Raymond W. Thorp Jr and Robert Bunker, Crow Killer: The Saga of Liver-eating Johnson (Bloomington, in, 2016). 67 Schechter, Man-eater, p. 47. 68 Ibid., pp. 78–9. 258

r ef er ence s 69 Ibid., p. 257. 70 Jason McHugh, Shpadoinkle: The Making of Cannibal! The Musical (Boulder, co, 2011). 71 No relation to the Christopher Bond who wrote the original play upon which Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street is based. 72 Quoted in Marilyn Bardsley, ‘Albert Fish’, www.trutv.com, accessed 2 February 2018. 73 See Harold Schechter, Deviant: The Shocking True Story of the Original ‘Psycho’ (New York, 1989). 74 Maria Tatar, Lustmord: Sexual Murder in Weimar Germany (Princeton, nj, 1995). 75 Harold Schechter and David Everitt, The A to Z Encyclopedia of Serial Killers (New York, 1996), p. 41. 76 Tatar, Lustmord, p. 185. 77 Richard Lourie, Hunting the Devil: The Pursuit, Capture and Confession of the Most Savage Serial Killer in History (New York, 1993), p. 68. See also Peter Conradi, The Red Ripper: Inside the Mind of Russia’s Most Brutal Serial Killer (New York, 1992); Robert Cullen, The Killer Department: Detective Viktor Burakov’s Eight-year Hunt for the Most Savage Serial Killer in Russian History (New York, 1993); and Mikhail Krivich and Olgert Olgin, Comrade Chikatilo: The Psychopathology of Russia’s Notorious Serial Killer (New York, 1993). 78 Anne E. Schwartz, The Man Who Could Not Kill Enough (New York, 1992), p. 81; Schechter and Everitt, The A to Z Encyclopedia, p. 65. 79 Alvin Schwartz, Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark (New York, 1981), pp. 199, 209. 80 H. G. Wells, The Complete Stories of H. G. Wells (London, 1966), pp. 607–21. 81 Ian Olney, Eurohorror: Classic European Horror Cinema in Contemporary American Culture (Bloomington, in, 2013), p. 191. 82 For more information on the film and its controversies, see Calum Waddell, Devil’s Advocates: Cannibal Holocaust (Leighton Buzzard, 2017). 83 Kea Wilson, We Eat Our Own (New York, 2016). 84 Thomas Fahy, Dining with Madmen: Fat Food and the Environment in 1980s Horror (Jackson, ms, 2019), p. 79. 85 Alice Sebold, The Lovely Bones (Boston, ma, 2002). 259

e ater s of the de ad 86 Cynthia Baron, Diane Carson and Mark Bernard, Appetites and Anxieties: Food, Film, and the Politics of Representation (Detroit, mi, 2014), p. 124. Conclusion: We Can’t Stop Eating 1 Val Plumwood, ‘Being Prey’, in The Ultimate Journey: Inspiring Stories of Living and Dying, ed. James O’Reilly, Sean O’Reilly and Richard Sterling (San Francisco, ca, 2000), p. 142. 2 John Scott Lewinski, ‘Military Researchers Develop Corpseeating Robots’, Wired Magazine (15 July 2009).



260

bibliogr aph y

The Adventures of Sayf Ben Dhi Yazan: An Arab Folk Epic, trans. Lena Jayyusi (Bloomington, in, 1996) Al-Rawi, Ahmed K., ‘The Arabic Ghoul and Its Western Transformation’, Folklore, cxx/3 (2009) — , ‘The Mythic Ghoul in Arabic Culture’, Cultural Analysis, 8 (2009) Applebaum, Anne, Red Famine: Stalin’s War on Ukraine (New York, 2017) Arens, William, The Man-eating Myth: Anthropology and Anthropophagy (New York, 1979) Atwood, Margaret, Strange Things: The Malevolent North in Canadian Literature (Oxford, 1995) Avramescu, Cătălin, An Intellectual History of Cannibalism (Princeton, nj, 2009) Barker, Francis, Peter Hulme and Margaret Iversen, eds, Cannibalism and the Colonial World (Cambridge, 1998) Beckford, William, Vathek (Oxford, 1998) Behrend, Heike, Resurrecting Cannibals: The Catholic Church, Witch-hunts and the Production of Pagans in Western Uganda (Woodbridge, 2011) Berglund, Jeff, Cannibal Fictions: American Explorations of Colonialism, Race, Gender and Sexuality (Madison, wi, 2006) Blurton, Heather, Cannibalism in High Medieval English Literature (New York, 2007) Brown, Daniel James, The Indifferent Stars Above: The Harrowing Saga of a Donner Party Bride (New York, 2009) Brown, Jennifer, Cannibalism in Literature and Film (Basingstoke, 2013) Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome, ed., Monster Theory: Reading Cultures (Minneapolis, mn, 1996) 261

e ater s of the de ad Colombo, John Robert, ed., Windigo (Saskatoon, 1982) Conklin, Beth A., Consuming Grief: Compassionate Cannibalism in an Amazonian Society (Austin, tx, 2001) Connors, Scott, ‘The Ghoul’, Icons of Horror and the Supernatural, vol. i, ed. S. T. Joshi (Westport, ct, 2007) Crichton, Michael, Eaters of the Dead (New York, 1976) Diehl, Daniel, and Mark P. Donnelly, Eat Thy Neighbour: A History of Cannibalism (Stroud, 2008) Donner Houghton, Eliza P., The Expedition of the Donner Party and Its Tragic Fate (Chicago, il, 1911) Forbes, Jack D., Columbus and Other Cannibals (New York, 1979) Gouin, Margaret, Tibetan Rituals of Death: Buddhist Funerary Practice (London, 2010) Guest, Kristen, Eating Their Words: Cannibalism and the Boundaries of Cultural Identity (Albany, ny, 2001) Johnson, Kristin, ed., Unfortunate Emigrants: Narratives of the Donner Party (Logan, ut, 1996) Katsu, Alma, The Hunger (New York, 2018) Keene, Brian, Ghoul (North Webster, in, 2007) Kiernan, Caitlin R., Daughter of Hounds (New York, 2008) Kilgour, Maggie, From Communion to Cannibalism (Princeton, nj, 1990) Lestringant, Frank, Cannibals: The Discovery and Representation of the Cannibal from Columbus to Jules Verne, trans. Rosemary Morris (Berkeley, ca, 1997) Limburg, Peter R., Deceived: The Story of the Donner Party (Pacifica, ca, 1998) McLaughlin, Mark, The Donner Party: Weathering the Storm (Carnelian Bay, ca, 2007) McNaughton, Brian, The Throne of Bones (Black River, ny, 1997) McNeese, Tim, The Donner Party: A Doomed Journey (New York, 2009) Moses, Daniel David, Brébeuf ’s Ghost (Toronto, 2000) Ó Gráda, Cormac, Eating People Is Wrong, and Other Essays on Famine, Its Past, and Its Future (Princeton, nj, 2015) Petrinovich, Lewis, The Cannibal Within (New York, 2000) Philbrick, Nathaniel, In the Heart of the Sea (New York, 2000) Plumwood, Val, ‘Being Prey’, in The Ultimate Journey: Inspiring Stories of Living and Dying, ed. James O’Reilly, Sean O’Reilly and Richard Sterling (San Francisco, ca, 2000) 262

bibliogr aph y Podruchny, Carolyn, ‘Werewolves and Windigos: Narratives of Cannibal Monsters in French-Canadian Voyageur Oral Tradition’, Ethnohistory, li/4 (2004) Quammen, David, Monster of God: The Man-eating Predator in the Jungles of History and the Mind (New York, 2003) Ramos, Maximo D., The Aswang Complex in Philippine Folklore (Quezon City, 1990) Read, Piers Paul, Alive (New York, 1974) Roach, Mary, Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers (New York, 2003) Sanday, Peggy, Divine Hunger: Cannibalism as a Cultural System (Cambridge, 1986) Schechter, Harold, Man-eater: The Saga of Alfred G. Packer, American Cannibal (New York, 2015) Schutt, Bill, Eat Me: A Natural and Unnatural History of Cannibalism (London, 2017) Schwartz, Anne E., The Man Who Could Not Kill Enough: The Secret Murders of Milwaukee’s Jeffrey Dahmer (New York, 1992) Sherman, Jory, The Bamboo Demons (Los Angeles, ca, 1979) Simpson, A. W. Brian, Cannibalism and the Common Law (Chicago, il, 1984) Smallman, Shawn, Dangerous Spirits: The Windigo in Myth and History (Victoria, 2015) Stine, R. L., Attack of the Graveyard Ghouls (New York, 1998) Sugg, Richard, Mummies, Cannibals and Vampires: The History of Corpse Medicine from the Renaissance to the Victorians (London, 2011) Teicher, Morton, Windigo Psychosis (Seattle, wa, 1960) Thorp, Raymond W., Jr, and Robert Bunker, Crow Killer: The Saga of Liver-eating Johnson (Bloomington, in, 2016) Turner, Christy G., ii, and Jacqueline A. Turner, Man Corn: Cannibalism and Violence in the Prehistoric American Southwest (Salt Lake City, ut, 1999) Waddell, Calum, Devil’s Advocates: Cannibal Holocaust (Leighton Buzzard, 2017) Waldram, James B., Revenge of the Windigo: The Construction of the Mind and Mental Health of North American Aboriginal Peoples (Toronto, 2004) Wallis, Michael, The Best Land Under Heaven: The Donner Party in the Age of Manifest Destiny (New York, 2017) 263

e ater s of the de ad Warner, Marina, No Go the Bogeyman (New York, 1998) Welvaert, Scott R., The Donner Party (Mankato, mn, 2006) Werth, Nicolas, Cannibal Island: Death in a Siberian Gulag, trans. Steven Rendell (Princeton, nj, 2007) Wilson, Kea, We Eat Our Own (New York, 2016)

264

acknowledgements

Gratitude and thanks are owed to many for their contributions to this book. Thanks to Michael Leaman, Ben Hayes, Martha Jay and the gang at Reaktion Books. To the Horror Writers Association, especially the Los Angeles chapter of that august organization, and particularly Lisa Morton, Michele Brittany and Nicholas Diak. To Loyola Marymount University and the staff of the William H. Hannon Library in particular. The research in this book would not have been possible without them. Thanks are also due to Cinefile, the best video store on la’s westside (maybe now the only video store on la’s westside), and my research assistants Cassidy Kepp, Alexandra Irby and Sika Lonner, who put up with some of the weirdest requests I have ever made of college students and who all delivered. I’d like to thank rj and Marissa Laguda for their help in researching Filipino culture and the aswang. Lastly, in particular, all my gratitude is due to my family: Lacy, Kevin iii and Cordelia, who had more than their fair share of weirdness, but also had a great time visiting Donner Pass.

265

photo acknowledgements

The author and publishers wish to express their thanks to the below sources of illustrative material and/or permission to reproduce it. Some locations of artworks are also given below, in the interest of brevity: Bibliothèque de Genève: p. 38 (ms fr. 190/1, fol. 20r); Andrew Bossi (cc by-sa 2.5): p. 71; British Library, London: pp. 86 (Royal ms 12 c xix, fol. 11v), 90 (Harley ms 4751, fol. 10r); Brown University Library, Providence, ri: p. 98; from Theodor de Bry, Americae Tertia Pars (Frankfurt, 1592): p. 180; photos Jay L. Clendenin/Los Angeles Times, reproduced with permission: pp. 170, 171; from Edward Forster, trans., The Arabian Nights, vol. v (London, 1802): p. 89; Freer Gallery of Art & Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, dc: p. 113; from Harper’s Weekly, xviii/929 (17 October 1874): p. 214; from History of Nevada County, California (Oakland, ca, 1880): p. 208; isogood/iStock.com: p. 42; The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, ca: p. 10; from Bartolomé de las Casas, Regionum indicarum per Hispanos olim devastatarum accuratissima descriptio (Heidelberg, 1664): p. 179; from R. H. Mathews, Notes on the Aborigines of New South Wales (Sydney, 1907): p. 135; Museo del Prado, Madrid: p. 62; The National Library of Wales, Aberystwyth: p. 68 (Peniarth ms 481d, fol. 92r); Palazzo Poggi, Bologna: p. 32; from Charles Perrault, Les contes de Perrault (Paris, 1862): pp. 6, 76, 77; from Caspar Plautius, Nova Typis Transacta Navigatio (Linz, 1621): p. 177; Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam: p. 188; from Johann Schott, Das leben Jesu Christi gezogen auß den vier Evangelisten (Strasbourg, 1508), photo Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Munich: p. 9; © 2021 Steeger Properties, llc, all rights reserved: pp. 152–3; Tibet House, New Delhi: p. 26; Tokyo National Museum: p. 130; photos Kevin J. Wetmore Jr: p. 211. 266

inde x

Aghori 16, 17, 51–3 Alive (book) 220–21 Alive (film) 220 Alvarez, Boni B. 124 Bloodletting (play) 124 American Psycho (film) 236 Amin, Idi 189 Andersen, Hans Christian 91, 106 Apollodorus 29 Arabian Nights, The 87, 89, 90, 92, 96 Aslan, Reza 17, 52 Aswang 14, 15, 16, 115–27, 173 Aswang (1992 film) 120, 124, 118 Aswang (1994 film) 122–3, 124, 121 Aswang: Journey into Myth (film) 123 The Aswang Phenomenon (film) 123–4 Atwood, Margaret 157–8 Oryx and Crake 157–8 Strange Things 157 Aztecs 53, 54 Bean, Sawney 16, 197, 223 Beckford, William 79

Vathek 79, 88–9, 90, 92, 93, 95, 96 Blackwood, Algernon 137, 150, 154 ‘The Wendigo’ 137, 150–51, 154, 152–3 Beowulf 14, 16, 56–65 Bible 43 1 Corinthians 49 2 Kings 44 Deuteronomy 43–4 Jeremiah 44–5 John (Gospel) 243 Lamentations 45 Leviticus 43 Mark 243 Matthew 48, 243 Bloch, Robert 100 ‘The Grinning Ghoul’ 100 ‘The Laughter of a Young Ghoul’ 100 ‘The Secret in the Tomb’ 100 Bokassa, Jean-Bédel 189–90 Brand, Benjamin 200 Taste (play) 200 Brandes, Berndt 200 Brothers Grimm 72 Buddhism 27, 126, 127, 130–31, 135 267

e ater s of the de ad Byron, Lord George Gordon 90 ‘The Giaour: A Fragment of a Turkish Tale’ 90 cannibal cinema 230–32 Cannibal Holocaust (film) 232–3, 238, 235 ‘Cannibal Island’ 192 Cannibal! The Musical 225–6 cannibalism 7, 11, 12, 14, 16, 17, 21, 30, 31, 36, 37, 40, 41, 43, 45, 47, 48, 49, 50, 54, 56, 63, 66, 74, 78, 109, 137, 141, 142, 143, 145, 146, 150, 151, 165, 169, 172, 173–98, 199–238 African conception of Europeans as cannibals 181–3 medicinal cannibalism 174, 183, 185–6, 197 mortuary cannibalism 22, 183, 186–7, 190, 197 political cannibalism 189, 189–90, 197, 238 ritual cannibalism 12, 50, 56, 176, 189 sacrificial cannibalism 183, 187–8, 189, 179, 238 survival cannibalism 11, 13, 33, 43, 45, 54, 66, 74, 146, 165, 174, 175, 176, 183, 190–95, 202, 204–7, 214, 220, 221, 222, 223, 226, 233 Catholicism 17, 35, 49–50, 144, 220 Cheddar Man 56 Chetwynd-Hayes, R. 105 Monster Club, The 105–6 Chikatilo, Andrei 17, 109, 228 Citizen X (film) 228 268

Corpse Grinders, The (film) 231 Crichton, Michael 64 Eaters of the Dead 64 Cyclops 7, 14, 15, 21, 29–33, 70 Cynocephali 55, 57, 67–9 Dahmer (film) 229 Dahmer, Jeffrey 11, 16, 17, 18, 176, 200, 228–9, 237 Dawn of the Dead (film) 233 Deathmaker, The (film) 228 Defoe, Daniel 181 Robinson Crusoe 181 Derleth, August 154–5 ‘Beyond the Threshold’ 155 ‘Ithaqua’ 155 ‘The Thing That Walked on the Wind’ 155 Dionysus 41, 45, 54 dogs 11, 22–4, 57, 65, 67, 69, 72, 78, 80–82, 95, 96, 97, 100, 104, 116, 117, 121, 124, 133, 160, 231 Donner, George 208, 209, 212, 213, 217 Donner, Jacob 208, 212, 219 Donner, Tamsen 208, 212, 213, 217, 258 Donner Party 11, 16, 17, 74, 174, 191, 197, 208–20, 222, 237 Donner Party, The (film) 218 draugr 55, 65, 66, 78 Eating Raoul (film)  231 Ed Gein (film)  11, 227 Ed Gein: The Butcher of Plainfield (film)  11, 227 Energetically Autonomous Tactical Robot  240 Erdrich, Louise  160 Antelope Wife, The 160

inde x Essex 18 Eucharist  46, 47, 48, 49, 50, 63 Euripides  16, 20, 30, 32, 33, 35, 41 Bacchae  35, 41 Cyclops  16, 20, 30, 32, 33 The Exorcist (film)  236 Feast of Corpus Christi  46 Fernando, Gilda Cordero  120 Luna: An Aswang Romance 120 Fessenden, Larry  166 Fish, Albert  226–7 Fox, Matt, The Wendigo  152–3 Frances Mary (ship)  206 Fremont, John C.  191 Gaiman, Neil  107 Gaki-zoshi (Hungry Ghosts Scroll)  131 Game of Thrones (television series) 168 Gein, Ed  11, 17, 197, 200, 227–8, 231, 237 ghosts 7 Ghoul (film)  109 Ghoul, The (1933 film)  108 Ghoul, The (1974 film)  108 Ghoulies (film)  109 ghouls  7, 14, 15, 16, 79–110, 173 Goya, Francisco  60 Saturn Devouring His Son 60, 62 Gray Man, The (film)  227 Great Leap Forward (China) 193, 195 Grendel  55, 57–8, 69, 70, 78, 244 Grettir’s Saga 66

Haarman, Fritz  228 Hannibal (book)  236 Hannibal (film)  236 Hannibal Rising (book)  236 Hansel and Gretel  18, 55, 70, 74–5 Hearn, Lafcadio  125, 126, 127 Kwaidan 125, 126 hellmouth  8, 9, 10 Henslowe, Philip  7–8 Heraclitus 29 Herodotus 24 Highway, Tomson  156, 159 Kiss of the Fur Queen  156, 159 Hills Have Eyes, The (film)  223 Hinduism  13, 16, 27, 51–3, 112, 113, 135 Holodomor 109, 191–3, 239 Hopkins, Sir Anthony  237–8 House of 1000 Corpses (film)  227 hungry ghosts  130–32 hyenas  11, 23, 86, 87, 101, 111, 90 Iliad  22, 30, 31, 81 Islam  16, 80, 81, 83–5, 93, 95, 127 Jamestown 191 Jaws 7 Jeffrey Dahmer Files, The (film) 229 Jenson, Michael  162 Firelands 162 Jikininki 125–30 Jikininki (film)  129 Johnson, ‘Liver Eating’  191, 224 Jones, Stephen Graham  162 All the Beautiful Sinners 162 The Fast Red Road: A Plainsong 162 Judas 47–8 269

e ater s of the de ad Kakisikuchin (Swift Runner) 146–8, 148 Katsu, Alma  217 Hunger, The 217–18 Keene, Brian  106 Keseberg, Lewis  209, 212, 213, 216–17, 258 Kiernan, Caitlin R.  103–5 Daughter of Hounds 104–5 Low Red Moon 104 Murder of Angels  104 Red Tree, The 104 To Charles Fort, with Love 104 King, Stephen  22, 161 Gerald’s Game 22 Pet Sematary 161–2 Shining, The 162 Komodo dragons  111 Krampus 76 LaDuke, Winona  160 Last Woman Standing 160 Last Cannibal World (film) 234 Lewis, C. S.  106 Li Hui  229 Lovecraft, Howard Phillips  79, 90, 93, 96–100, 101, 102, 103, 109, 153, 154 ‘Drawing of a Ghoul’  98 Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath, The  79, 96, 97–9 ‘The Lurking Fear’  99 ‘The Outsider’ 99 ‘The Picture in the House’  99 ‘Pickman’s Model’  79, 96–7, 101 ‘The Rats in the Walls’  99 270

M (film)  228 McNaughton, Brian  102–3 Mahabharata 112, 114–15 ‘man corn’  17, 176 Man from Deep River (film) 232 Martin, George R. R.  168 Medusa (ship)  18, 206 Meikle, William  155 Night of the Wendigo 155 Meiwes, Armin  200 Mignonette 206 Moby Dick 206 Montaigne, Michel de  173, 178, 179–80 ‘Of Cannibals’  173, 178, 179 Monty Python  204 Moses, Daniel David  158 Brébeuf ’s Ghost (play) 158–9 My Friend Dahmer (film)  229 Nash, Ogden  162–3 ‘The Wendigo’  162–3 ngayurnangalku 133–4 Night of the Living Dead (film) 201, 233 Nottingham Galley 206 Odyssey, The  15, 21, 29, 30, 34, 70 ogres  7, 70–78 Ovid  36, 40 Packer, Alfred/Alferd  17, 191, 199–200, 214, 224–6, 238 pangkarlangu 133–4, 135 Parrado, Nando  221–2 Passion of St Christopher, The 57, 69 Pelops 36–7, 40, 43 Perchta 76–8

inde x Perrault, Charles  72, 75, 76, 77 Pet Sematary (film)  162 placentophagy 186 Pliny the Elder  47, 67 Plumwood, Valerie  239–40 Poe, Edgar Allan  20, 21, 91, 93 ‘The Bells’ (poem)  93 ‘Ulalume’ (poem)  91 Psycho (film)  11, 100, 227 Quran 83 Ramayana 112 Rakshasa 112–15 Ravenous (film)  139, 143, 162, 163–6 Raw (film)  236–7 Red Dragon (book)  236 Road, The (film)  236 Robinson, Eden  156 Rocky Horror Picture Show, The (film) 184 Rowling, J. K.  107 Santa Clarita Diet, The (television series)  238 Sayf, King  84–5 Schwartz, Alvin  154 Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark 154 Sebold, Alice  238 Lovely Bones, The (book)  238 Secret Life: Jeffrey Dahmer, The (film) 229 Seneca 37 Thyestes 37–9 Shakespeare, William  22, 201 Hamlet 65

Julius Caesar 22–3 Pericles 201–2 Tempest, The   Titus Andronicus 184, 202–3 Two Noble Kinsmen, The 202 Sherman, Jory  121 Bamboo Demons, The 121–2 Shrek (film)  70, 78 Silence of the Lambs (film)  11, 18, 199, 200, 236, 237–8 sky burial  17, 21, 25–8, 111, 186 Smith, Clark Ashton  101 ‘The Charnel God’  101 ‘The Ghoul’  101 ‘The Nameless Offspring’  101 Soylent Green (film)  231 Stalin, Josef  191, 192 Stine, R. L.  107 Sundar, Shyam ‘Kabandha tells Rama and Laksmana how he came to have his hideous form’  113 Supernatural (television show) 138 Sweeney Todd 197, 199, 224, 227 Sweet Land 168–9, 170, 171 Tantalus  36, 40, 53 Tenderness of Wolves, The (film) 228 Texas Chain Saw Massacre, The (film)  11, 16, 18, 227, 231, 238 Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2, The (film) 231–2 Thousand and One Nights, The see Arabian Nights, The Three . . . Extremes (film)  236 Tolkien, J.R.R.  63 Hobbit, The 63 Lord of the Rings, The 63 271

e ater s of the de ad Tooth and Nail (film)  236 Towers of Silence (dakhma) 21, 24–5, 186 transubstantiation  16, 17, 48–50 trolls  55, 63, 65, 66 Ueda   125 Ugetsu Monogatari 125, 126 Uruguayan Rugby Team  11, 174, 184, 220–22 vampires  7, 91, 93, 105, 107, 108, 109, 116, 123, 169, 226, 229 Walking Dead, The (television show) 200, 233 We Eat Our Own (book)  233 Wells, H. G.  230 wendigo  7, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 50, 85, 109, 137–72, 173, 177

272

Wendigo (1978 film)  163 Wendigo (1995 film)  163 Wendigo (2001 film)  139, 166–8, 167 Wendigo Psychosis  144–8, 169 werewolves  7, 105, 107, 108, 138, 142, 166, 226 White, Edward Lucas  94–6, 101 ‘Amina’ 94–6 ‘The Ghoula’  94 Whitehead, Henry S  101 A Windigo Tale (film)  159–60 Zee Oui (film)  229 Zingerle, Ignatz and Josef  75 Der Menschenfresser 75 zombies  7, 14, 93, 107, 108, 109, 129, 155, 200, 233 Zoroastrianism  21, 24–5, 27–9, 34, 186