EATERS of the DEAD
Myths and Realities of Cannibal Monsters
K
EVIN J. WETMORE JR
REAKTION 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
Page references in the Photo Acknowledgments and Index match the printed edition of this book.
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
Contents
Introduction: The Fear of Being Eaten
ONE Sky Burial, Cyclops and the Conqueror Worm
TWO Eating the Gods, Gods Eating Men
THREE Grendel and the Ogres
FOUR Ghūls and Ghouls
FIVE Asian and Oceanian Flesh-eaters and Corpse-devourers
SIX Wendigo
SEVEN Human Cannibals
EIGHT
Flesh-eating in Popular Culture and Contemporary Reality
Conclusion: We Can’t Stop Eating
REFERENCES
BIBLIOGRAPHY
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
PHOTO ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
INDEX
Gustave Doré, illustration for Little Red Riding Hood, in Charles Perrault, Les contes de Perrault (1862).
INTRODUCTION
The Fear of Being Eaten
We 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 selfawareness 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. Corpseeaters? 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 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 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, 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.
Hans Wechtlin, ‘Hellmouth,’ woodcut from Johann Schott, Das leben Jesu Christi gezogen auß den vier Evangelisten (1508).
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.
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 ‘flesheater’ (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.
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 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 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 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 quasi-human 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 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 corpse-eating 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 corpseeating 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 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 cremated bodies, discussed in Chapter Two, clearly demonstrates both the potential for shock value and the concern regarding misrepresentation. 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 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 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!
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
Unless 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 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)
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 carrion-eating 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.
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.
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 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.
Thangka of Vajrayogini (Buddhist deity) drinking blood from a kapala (Tibetan skull bowl), 19th century.
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 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, 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 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
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Bob could keep his temper down as well as most boys but he was a bit nettled by the man's assurance and could not help showing it.
"Indeed I'll show yer," Hains snapped. "You two youngsters get out o' here while the gettin's good. The girl stays with us."
"What?"
"Yer heard me. Git."
"But—"
"Thar's no buts about it. When I say git I mean git."
Bob could see that the man meant business and his heart sunk within him. He was no coward but what could he and Jack do against six armed men? And yet, to desert the girl, even under the circumstances, seemed to him impossible.
"What are you going to do with her?" he asked.
"Keep her till Royce comes back ter me."
"Why not keep me instead?" Bob asked eagerly.
"Nuthin' doin'. We're goin' ter keep the girl an' yer can tell her father that when he gives that guy Royce up ter us he kin have his gal back and not afore."
"I won't go," Bob asserted stoutly.
"You might as well, Bob," Sue broke in. "They've got me and you can't help it."
"But, Sue, I can't leave you like this," he protested.
"I reckon as how yer kin an' what's more yer a goin' ter an' pronto too. Git hold of her reins, Jim, an' be off with yer. I'll tend ter these kids," Hains ordered.
The man called Jim rode up beside Sue and, taking hold of her reins, spoke to his horse and at once started back toward the hills followed by the rest with the exception of the leader.
"Haven't you any manhood?" Bob asked scornfully.
"I've got six hunks o' lead in this gun if yer don't do what I say," Hains growled. "An' I'll give yer just one minute ter start goin'."
The man had the gun in his hand and, seeing that resistance would be folly, Bob turned to Jack.
"Come on, Jack."
But before giving the word to Satan he looked the man full in the eyes and said:
"You dare to harm one hair of her head and I'll get you if it's the last thing I ever do."
"Git."
"This is awful, Jack," Bob groaned as soon as they were out of hearing.
"I'll say it's awful and then some," Jack repeated. "But I can't see that it was our fault."
"No time to argue about that now. We must get to the ranch as soon as possible and give the alarm."
They were riding side by side while talking but now Bob spoke to Satan and the horse seemed to spurn the ground beneath his feet as he drew away from Jack. Bob never could seem to remember much about that wild ride home. His brain seemed dulled by the calamity and all he was able to think was, "How can I tell her father?"
Jeb was on the porch reading a paper as Bob, his horse covered with lather, dashed in at the gate.
"Sue," he gasped as he threw himself from the saddle.
Jeb sprang to his feet. "What about her?" he shouted.
"They—they've got her."
"Who has?"
"Hains and his gang."
"Give it to me quick," Jeb demanded, and, with hanging head, Bob told him what had happened.
The man did not say a word until he had finished.
"It's bad, mighty bad," he declared as Bob came to the end of his tale.
"I—I," Bob began.
"No, you're not to blame. You did all you could. I know you'd have saved her had it been possible. Did he say how long he'd wait?"
"No, he set no time limit. He only said that when Royce came back to him he'd let Sue go."
"But he'll kill the boy," Jeb groaned.
"Do—do you think so?" Bob stammered.
"I'm afraid so."
"Well, he'll have the chance."
Royce was standing in the doorway as they looked up.
"You mean—?"
"That I'm going to Hains at once, of course."
There was no trace of bravado in his voice as he made the statement, only a fixed determination.
"But—" Jeb began.
"There's no room for buts," Royce declared. "You don't suppose I'd be enough of a skunk to allow your daughter to suffer after what you've done for me. Thank God I've got some manhood left."
Jeb could say nothing more but dropped his head into his hand as Royce turned back into the house to come out again almost immediately hatted and booted.
"I reckon I'll have to take one of the horses," he said as he paused a moment beside the two. Then, as Jeb nodded his head, he went on: "I want to thank you both for what you did for me and if I never see you again, I'll never forget you, never."
He was gone, running toward the corral, before either Jeb or Bob could find words to answer him and, a moment later, they saw him ride out mounted on a roan, the poorest horse on the ranch.
"There goes a brave man to his death," Jeb groaned.
"While there's life there's hope," Bob quoted.
Just outside the gate Royce met Jack.
"Where you goin?" Jack shouted.
"Just for a ride," the other called back. "Goodbye if I don't see you again," and with a wave of his hand he was gone.
"Was he going to give himself up to Hains?" Jack asked a moment later as he joined Bob and Jeb on the porch.
"Yes," Jeb replied sadly.
"But what—?"
"I know, but what could I do?" Jeb groaned.
"You did just right and so did he," Bob declared. "But we must do something and do it quick."
"What can we do?" Jeb asked looking up.
"Get the boys and follow him just as soon as he gets far enough away so he won't see us."
"But he'll get out of sight in the hills long before we can get there," Jack objected.
"Of course we'll have to take the chance of finding him. Remember he doesn't know where Hains' hiding place is."
"Then how does he expect to find him?"
"I don't know. Do you suppose he thought of that?" Bob asked turning to Jeb.
"I doubt if he did. But it's more'n likely that Hains will have a man on the watch for him. In fact I imagine he knows that he's coming before this."
"Then he'd see us if we start before dark," Jack suggested.
"Another chance we'll have to take, but, man, we've got to do something."
"Surest thing you know. I wasn't hinting at not going," Jack assured him.
"I know that," Bob said quickly. "But how soon do you think we'd better start?" he asked turning to Jeb.
"I'd say pretty soon," Jeb replied rising from his chair. "You boys go and tell the others about it and send one of them after the boys who are on shift and tell them to leave two on guard and the rest follow us. I'll get my boots on and be ready by the time you get them rounded up."
The night shift had been inside the shack eating dinner and so had seen nothing of Royce as he left nor had they seen the boys return. Great was the excitement when Bob burst in and told them what had happened.
"The miserable skunks! Just wait till I get my hands on 'em," Grumpy shouted as he jumped up and strapped his gun belt about his waist.
"Thar won't be enough left of that Hains guy ter sling a cat at when I get through with him," Slats declared as he followed suit.
Many other remarks of like character were uttered as they were getting ready but the boys were already on their way back to the house. They found Jeb waiting for them and in a few minutes the boys came with horses.
"Spike's gone fer the others," Slats called out as he rode up.
"Then I reckon we'd better be on our way," Jeb said. "But," he added, "we'll take it easy first along."
"Fer why?" Slats asked indignantly.
"I suspect Hains or one of his men is watching from the hills to see if Royce is coming and we want to give him time to quit before we get over the rise," Jeb explained.
"But s'pose he don't quit?" Slats asked.
"Then he'll see us and, of course that'll make it harder but I don't see as we can help it. If we wait too long we'll likely lose him."
"We'll find him all right," Stubby shouted encouragingly.
"I hope so," Jeb returned soberly.
They started off at an easy lope and hardly a word was spoken until they reached the top of the rise.
"There he is," Bob said pointing toward the distant hills.
They could see Royce about half way between where they were and the hills and they knew that he was making the best time possible with the horse he had.
CHAPTER XII.
THE "TAIL" OF THE MOUNTAIN LION.
"If he turns and sees us no knowing what he'll do," Jeb said as they paused a moment at the top of the rise.
"But I don't believe he'll turn," Bob declared. "He's only thinking of getting there and rescuing Sue."
"Then you think we better make a rush for it?"
"I would."
"Then come on, boys, full speed ahead."
And now they let their horses out to the limit and swept across the prairie like an avenging whirlwind. They were about two-thirds of the way from the rise to the hills when Royce reached the timber. They saw him draw rein and, for a moment hesitate as though uncertain just where to go, then he started again and the next minute was lost to view. Twenty minutes later, they were at the point where he disappeared. Far back they could see four horsemen just coming over the rise.
"There comes Spike and the boys," Slats cried.
"But we can't wait for them," Jeb told him.
"Course not, but what's the plan?" Slats asked.
"It's too dry to trail him, I'm afraid so I think we'd better split up and go in by twos. We'll keep within a short distance of each other however, and two shots close together will be the signal to come a-running."
"Righto, let's beat it," Slats agreed.
They had hardly started again when they met the horse Royce had ridden coming out and they decided that it would be better to leave the horses as they believed they could make better time on foot and there would be less danger of discovery. So they tied them to convenient trees and started off on foot after Jeb had explained that the first to catch sight of Royce was to notify the others by giving the hoot of the owl, the signal of the shots to be used only in case of an emergency.
Royce had entered the forest at a point about half way between the trail which led to the Owl's Head and that which they had taken the day before in company with the sheriff. It was the most rugged appearing portion of the range and, as Bob and Jack pushed their way in, it seemed to be getting ever rougher. There was nothing which even remotely resembled a trail and huge boulders interspersed with dense underbrush made their progress decidedly difficult.
"I say, Bob, this seems kind of foolish to me," Jack panted after they had been separated from the others for some ten minutes.
"How come?" Bob asked.
"Well the whole thing seems fishy to me."
"What do you mean fishy?"
"Well, how did Royce know which way to go?"
"He didn't unless someone of the gang met him," Bob told him.
"You think someone did meet him?"
"I think it's more than likely."
"What makes you think so?"
"Common sense."
"How come?"
"Use your bean, boy, use your bean. Hains would know that he wouldn't know how to find him, wouldn't he?"
"I suppose so."
"Well, I imagine he didn't have much doubt but what he would come, no one would. So isn't it probable that he'd either meet him himself or have someone else do it?"
"Sure Mike. You reason like a lawyer. But, even so, what chance have we to find him or them?"
"Very slight, I'll admit, but, you know, one chance in a million is better than none at all."
"I know that and I reckon you've got the ratio about right, one chance in a million."
They had been pushing forward all the time they were talking, all the while looking eagerly for a sign which would tell them that Royce had come that way. At first the way had been a gradual rise but soon it began to be steeper and by the time they had come to the above point in their conversation it was so nearly perpendicular that they were often obliged to pull themselves up with the aid of the bushes which grew here and there. An hour slipped by from the time they started into the hills and both boys were panting with the exertion.
Suddenly Bob, who was a few feet ahead, stopped and Jack saw that he was closely examining the ground beside a huge rock.
"What you found?" he panted as he reached his side.
"Look and see what you make of it."
Beside the rock was a bed of thick moss and he could see that it was damp although the reason was not apparent as everything was dry all about. At first he saw nothing which explained his brother's action but a more thorough scrutiny disclosed two slight depressions. He got down on his knees the more closely to examine them.
"They are foot prints," he announced a moment later.
"You sure?"
"No doubt of it."
"How old?"
"Not more than a half hour."
"What makes you think so?"
"Because it wouldn't take moss like this much longer than that to obliterate marks like that. You ought to know that."
"I do, but I wanted to see if your opinion was the same as mine."
"And is it?"
"Exactly."
"Then we're on the right trail unless——"
"Unless what?"
"Unless someone of our crowd has come this way ahead of us."
"But they wouldn't be that far ahead."
"Not likely."
"Then I believe we've struck his trail and now to see if we can find another mark to show which way he went from here."
