Rehumanizing Cannibalism

Michel de Montaigne began his essay on cannibalism with an appeal to readers to avoid knee-jerk reactions and, instead, to approach the subject with reason. I can’t help but agree, even if the reason should avoid reasonableness and, instead, approach the subject with that of madness, cutting satire and a penchant for Greek roots. In this way, we can find an appropriately nuanced take on, to switch to Greek, anthropophagy.

In his Apologia for Herodotus, Henri Estienne, Montaigne’s contemporary and fellow Sixteenth Century humanist, argued that it was “necessary to compare the madness of one with the madness of others.” When it came to eating odd and off-putting things in the antique world, the obvious comparison was with a foundational practice of the philomesses, Catholics, of his own time:

Let us consider without passion what we would say if Herodotus or some other ancient historian recounted that in some country the people were theophages (that is to say god eaters), in the same way that they gave an account of some anthropophages, elephantophages, acridophages [grasshopper eaters], phthirophages [lice eaters] and others: would we not say that theophagy was unbelievable and that these historians must have made these people up, and that in any case that they would be barbaric? And yet we hear some news every day about theophages, and (worse yet) theochezes [god defecators]. What am I saying “some news”? We live in the same countries, the same cities, the same houses as them.

The Apologia was was a prelude to Estienne’s translation of the works of Herodotus. It addressed in a satirical sort of way what he saw as the hypocrisy that surrounded him, where texts of the ancient world were shunned because they were supposedly filled with the immoral and the implausible. His argument was not that the ancient histories were moral and plausible. Instead, he pointed out that common contemporary practices, such as the ritual consumption of bread and wine during the Eucharist, which in the Catholic tradition are actually the flesh and blood of Jesus Christ, was just as mad.

Estienne did not reduce the sacrament to banal physical nourishment or an unthinking act. His intent was that the reader “will agree with what I just said: that in comparison to this there is but honour in Egyptian religion, which is to say in the ceremonies to which Egyptians gave the name of religion.” While he was hostile to the dominant religion of Sixteenth Century France and Italy — and, especially with “theocheze”, certainly took the opportunity to ridicule it — , he still saw it as a culturally important rite.

Montaigne’s anthropophages were similar, only the rite was one of war:

After having treated their prisoners well for a long while, with all the amenities they could provide, the person who is the chief organizes a gathering of his friends and family; he ties a rope to one of the arms of the prisoner and gives the other arm to his closest friend to be held in the same way; and the two of them, in the presence of the whole group, kill him with their swords. That done, they roast and eat him as a group and send cuts to friends who are absent. It is not, as one might think, for feeding themselves as the ancient Scythes did; it is to enact extreme vengeance.

The description was but one pulled from accounts from “French Antarctica,” essentially Brazil. Anthropophagy was part of a ritual with symbolic importance. Montaigne first compares the rite with Portuguese practices regarding prisoners of war: “They took them, buried them up to their waist, and fired projectiles at the exposed body, and then hanged them.” He argued that indigenous groups saw the Portuguese as “people from another world, as those who had spread knowledge of a lot of vice in the area and who were greater masters than them in all sorts of malice.” In response, the groups “had to show themselves as harsher, abandoning their old ways for this.”

Montaigne wrote that he was “distressed to bring up such barbaric horrors […], but while we very much judge their faults, we are incredibly blind regarding our own.” He brought his argument back to France, remarking that the torture he had both read of and seen during the wars of religion “under the pretext of piety and religion” were far more barbaric than killing someone relatively quickly and cleanly, and then eating their corpse. He ultimately painted indigenous groups as stereotypical noble savages, with Europeans as the corrupting and truly barbaric force. Anthropophagy had, in this context, a symbolic, ritualistic role.

Roughly a century and a half later, in Swift’s A Modest Proposal, the role had shifted to ordinary, albeit delectable, food:

I have been assured by a very knowing American of my acquaintance in London, that a young healthy child well nursed, is, at a year old, a most delicious nourishing and wholesome food, whether stewed, roasted, baked, or boiled; and I make no doubt that it will equally serve in a fricasie, or a ragoust.

Like Estienne, Swift was a humanist who satirized a predominantly Catholic country. Both aimed at least in part to, as Montaigne might say, render visible the everyday barbarity that surrounded them. Due to the English domination of Eighteenth Century Ireland, however, Protestantism had a great deal more influence. Estienne did not sign his prelude and his opinions forced him to move from place to place to avoid persecution and prosecution. Swift was comfortable signing passages like the following:

For first, as I have already observed, it would greatly lessen the number of Papists, with whom we are yearly over-run, being the principal breeders of the nation, as well as our most dangerous enemies, and who stay at home on purpose with a design to deliver the kingdom to the Pretender, hoping to take their advantage by the absence of so many good Protestants, who have chosen rather to leave their country, than stay at home and pay tithes against their conscience to an episcopal curate.

While the political climate undoubtedly influenced Swift’s conception of anthropophagy, I would suggest that the change from ritual to livestock was more a result of the agricultural innovations of the time, such as selective breeding. It was caught up in the broader movement from zoophagy, animal eating, to sarcophagy, meat eating. As domesticated herds became larger and more commodified, the distance between animal and consumer was significantly widened. That gap has given room for all new forms of barbarism.

The Soylent Green scenario is the logical endpoint to this particular path of anthropophagic madness. People are eaten in an unrecognizable and anonymized form as basic nourishment. The social commentary on overcrowding and poverty is quite similar to that of Swift. The main difference is that Swift portrayed people as herd animals, to which Soylent Green added industrial processing. The practice ends up being, in a manner of speaking, completely dehumanized.

Paulin Gagne, considered by Raymond Queneau in The Literary Mad and The Children of Clay to be one of Nineteenth Century France’s more intriguing literary mad men, took another route: philanthropophagy. He described the idea as “‘the love of man for man delivered as food’; through the ‘voluntary sacrifice of men and women delivering themselves fraternally and religiously as nourishment to the victims of hunger who devour the world.’” He then added more Greek to champion the idea as the “definitive solution” to the “social problem”:

Archiphilanthropophagy, that will reverse barbarity and all crimes, is the only way the saint can say never to universal famine which, if no one sacrifices themselves, will devour us all on the great vessel of the earth without victuals.

Gagne follows this admirable vision with an elaborate death ritual for these “christ saviours of humanity” to take place in the centre of Paris. In madness, we find ourselves back in the world of Sixteenth Century humanism. The individual, ritualized experience of eating people — and being eaten — was at the forefront. While the sacrifice would serve a basic need, it would be above all an act of divine and brotherly love. And, of course, “it will be an option for those who don’t want to die to simply have their least useful arms and legs cut off.”

The downside to this approach is that it would require the desperation of “universal famine” to be attractive. Gagne seemed to be indifferent to the quality of the nourishment. This is particularly clear with his suggestion that “the cadavers of those dead from hunger or sickness would be eaten, if there was no risk, in order to lessen the number of voluntary victims.” Those bodies wouldn’t be likely to provide a single prime cut among them.

Swift was cognizant of the problem. His “American friend” suggested using children aged between twelve and fourteen as “venison” to replace the deer “of late destroyed” by “our country’s gentlemen.” His response was, in part, “that their flesh was generally tough and lean, like that of our school-boys, by continual exercise, and their taste disagreeable, and to fatten them would not answer the charge.” Consent would be needed for Gagne’s project to be truly humane, yet the most palatable “victims” would be too young to give it.

Desperation, taken as a limiting factor, may not necessarily be a flaw. In a 2016 interview, one of the survivors of the 1972 Andes plane crash immortalized in Alive, Roberto Canessa, touched on the subject of anthropophagy:

My main issue was that I was invading the privacy of my friends: raping their dignity by invading their bodies. But then I thought, if I were killed I would feel proud that my body could be used for others to survive. I feel that I shared a piece of my friends not only materially but spiritually because their will to live was transmitted to us through their flesh. We made a pact that, if we died, we would be happy to put our bodies to the service of the rest of the team.

Philanthropophagy, as the combination of altruistic concern and eating people, captures these ideas rather well. It is a rare combination, characterized by despair, but, per Montaigne and Estienne, the practice should not be demonized impulsively just because it does not fit with our ordinary barbarity. It is effectively a morsel of reason teased out of the madness and satire; a meaningful connection between the eater and the eaten that lands at a comfortable midpoint between Soylent Green and crucifixes set up for “voluntary victims” in the Place de la Concorde.