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Title: In Defense of Cannibalism Author: Ausonia Calabrese Date: 12/27/2018 Language: en Topics: cannibalism, anti-civ, domestication, not anarchist, green
In the Aztec Empire before colonization, during the festival celebrating
the Spring Equinox, a captured slave would be flayed alive.[1] His skin,
detached from his body, was worn by an Aztec priest in the rite of
neteotquiliztli, in which he became a living embodiment of Xipe Totec,
the Flayed Lord. In the months leading up to the slave's sacrifice, he
was also recognized as the living image (ixiptla) of Xipe Totec. The
skin would be cast off after 20 days, and it was believed to carry
magical powers. His body would be dismembered and shared amongst the
community.[2]
Xipe Totec was a fertility god. He was a representation of the life
cycle of the maize plant -- the single most important staple of the
Mesoamerican diet, and the substance from which the Gods made human
beings in the epic Popol Vuh.[3] The flaying represented husking of the
corn, and thus the regeneration of the fields.[4] This association
between human flesh and corn was taken literally. In the traditional
dish pozolli, the ancestor to the modern pozole, white hominy was mixed
in broth with human flesh.[5] Dogs raised for food were fattened with
corn, to balance the exchange between the dogs and humans.[6] In
indigenous Mesoamerican religion, dogs had religious significance as
psychopomps who carried their masters to the underworld. As a sacred
animal, it was absolutely imperative to give them proper respect and
rites before slaughter. Sacred sacrifice was a major facet of the
Mesoamerican worldview that permeated every aspect of their society.[7]
As a fertility god, Xipe Totec also had a sexual nature and power. The
flayed skin had a secondary association as a symbol of the foreskin,
pulled back ("cast off") during sexual intercourse. Similar associations
existed in other rituals involving human sacrifice, as sacred war
between city-states (xochiyaoyotl, literally flower-wars) were seen as a
sort of sex or intercourse. Sacrificial victims gained in these wars
were seen as "children."[8]
225 years before the founding of the Aztec Triple Alliance in 1325, the
foreskin of Jesus Christ was allegedly bought in Israel by Baldwin I, a
king of the Crusader State in Jerusalem. Like the phallic skin of the
Flayed Lord, the Holy Prepuce was believed to carry a variety of magic
powers. It even had miracles attributed to it, such as causing three
drops of blood to materialize on a white sheet.[9] This particular Holy
Prepuce is perhaps one of the most infamous items in the history of the
relic trade save the Shroud of Turin, but it is far from a lone example.
There were at least 18 different churches that claimed to own a relic of
the holy foreskin and far more claimed other relics of Jesus or other
holy persons. The Second Council of Nicaea, held in 787, decreed in its
7th canon:
Relics are to be placed in all churches: no church is to be consecrated
without relics.
Relics were important in an economic sense as well: they brought
pilgrims to the community surrounding the church, who needed a place to
rest and to be fed; and offerings left at the altars provided a direct
source of income for the clergy. Despite being specifically prohibited
in the 10th century, the relic trade created an industry out of human
bodies. Though not the physical consumption of human beings, the
cannibalism of the relic trade involved consumption in a symbolic or
mediated sense.
The chief form of man-eating in the west attempted to hide or shroud the
ghastly, but the essential, aspect of it by alienating it as far as
possible. From the 16th century to the 20th, human fat was used as a
salve or ointment, originally as Axungia hominis, and in the modern
period as Humanol. Other products derived from human body parts included
suspensions of human skull in alcohol, and in art, Egyptian mummies
ground into paint, mummy brown.[10]
Despite being ubiquitous in Europe, cannibalism slowly developed as a
taboo colored by colonial attitudes towards natives. Even the word
"cannibal" is a corruption of Carib, the name of a people indigenous to
the islands of Cuba and Hispaniola. Practices of human sacrifice and
consumption contributed to a colonial mythos of the savage, of the
uncivilized. The civilized mode of slaughter seeks to alienate, as far
as possible, the source of food from its actual being. It is a sort of
inversion of the eucharist. Under transubstantiation, on one hand, the
substance of the wafer remains unchanged whereas the essence is
transformed into the literal body of Christ. Slaughter, on the other,
leaves the body of a living being unchanged, but its essence is
transformed into neutral flesh without personality.
As a remnant of the Norman conquest, English preserves a Latinate and a
Germanic word for most animals, where the Latinate form generally refers
to the food prepared from the meat of the animal, and the Germanic form
for the animal "in themselves." Thus, sheep from the Anglo-Saxon scēap,
but mutton from the French moton. Or, cow from the Anglo-Saxon cū, but
beef from the French boef. As the invading Normans became the ruling
class, their words for livestock became contrasted with that of the
underclass, who reared the animals; thus an odd shadow of the feudal
system is cast on the collective memory of English.[11]
This has created a unique situation in [mainly forcefully-imposed]
English-speaking territories, in which children do not always naturally
make the connection between meat and animals. For many, this realization
is somewhat traumatizing, at least until it can be rendered into apathy,
or lies in wait until it becomes a source of cognitive dissonance.
The development of civilization was, fundamentally, an alienation from
the natural world. As subsistence moved into production, the human
became permanently estranged from the nonhuman. Healing and medicinal
properties of food, once attributed to an essential force tied to a
mystical aspect of the being, now becomes a result of the mere matter it
is composed of.
In man-eating, too, the West suffers from this sort of alienation. The
human body is a source for many products in wide use today, from
foreskin fibroblasts in cosmetics, to the lucrative and sometimes
illicit trade in human organs. The sale of human plasma, harvested from
living subjects, is a growing industry. With the invention of new forms
of biotechnology, even genetic code is bought, sold, and traded; even
subpoenaed for use in federal cases. In a less literal sense, human
personalities are rendered into data banks raked in from social media,
wherein the true profit lies -- ads, and algorithms which personalize
ads by enhancing them with human essence. Deleuze christens the
human-rendered-as-data as the dividiual, no longer indivisible but able
to be split into many parts.[12]
The factory constituted individuals as a single body to the double
advantage of the boss who surveyed each element within the mass and the
unions who mobilized a mass resistance; but the corporation constantly
presents the brashest rivalry as a healthy form of emulation, an
excellent motivational force that opposes individuals against one
another and runs through each, dividing each within... We no longer find
ourselves dealing with the mass/individual pair. Individuals have become
'dividuals,' and masses, samples, data, markets, or 'banks.'
In the rite of cannibalism, crystallized as taboo, the "essential"
aspect of consumption is preserved, and precisely why it is stigmatized.
The human personality is raised as sacred, and thus its slaughter and
ingestion lowered as profane. The practice of eating one's family member
is unthinkable, but it remains quite common in some parts of, say, Papua
New Guinea, even status quo, as a fundamental aspect of mourning. Even
in the comparatively rare practice of exocannibalism (eating one outside
of one's community, generally as a part of war,) those eating the person
are generally said to absorb the power of the "food."
To conclude: cannibalism is perhaps the only form of subsistence that
retains a certain sacred connection to that which is being eaten.
Stigmatized and decried as primitive and uncivilized, it has preserved
within its material practice, a primitive and uncivilized worldview in
which sustenance is sacred in a certain sense. In all other foods,
except perhaps the communion wafer, and only then by circumstance -- it
has been wrenched from its essence. The ideology of civilization has
permeated down to such a degree that even one's methods of subsisting on
a mere biological level show its scars: it has no history or being past
the atoms which constitute it. They are, in a certain sense, undead:
alive, because it provides nutrition and is actively traded, but dead
because it is denied the burden of a soul.
[1] As was the norm in most of North America, nearly all war between
indigenous nations was "bloodless" as it concerned primarily, the
capture of enemy soldiers. The Iroquois did this to replace those in
their communities who had died, and the Aztec were interested only in
obtaining sacrificial victims. This greatly contributed to military
defeat in wars against European powers.
[2] There is little evidence to prove that the Aztecs ate the limbs of
the victim in this case, but do to Xipe Totec's association with maize
and with the fact it was far from a taboo activity, it is likely.
[3] For general purposes, I recommend Michael Bazzett's poetic
translation. For an academic and highly-annotated version, I recommend
Allen J. Christenson's exact translation.
[4] See The Life-cycle of a Tezcatlipoca Ixiptla; the Rendering of
Teotl, 2005
[5] Bernardino de Sahagún records this in General History of the Things
of New Spain.
[6] See Histories of Maize in Mesoamerica: Multidisciplinary Approaches.
Also, note the many "fattened dog" effigies depicted eating corn cobs
found near Colima, MX.
[7] See, again, the Popol Vuh, as in Footnote 3.
[8] See The Life-cycle of a Tezcatlipoca Ixiptla; the Rendering of
Teotl, 2005
[9] See God's Doodle: The Life and Times of the Penis.
[10] See A Brief History of Medical Cannibalism in Lapham's Quarterly.
[11] See Anglo-Saxon and Latinate Words by M. Birch.
[12] See Deleuze's Postscript on the Societies of Control.