Cannibals and Kings (18 page)

I have been pursuing the fate of the victim’s body in order to establish the point that Aztec cannibalism was not a perfunctory tasting of ceremonial tidbits. All edible parts were used in a manner strictly comparable to the consumption of the flesh of domesticated animals. The Aztec priests can legitimately be described as ritual slaughterers in a state-sponsored system geared to the production and redistribution of substantial amounts of animal protein in the form of human flesh. Of course, the priests had other duties, but none had greater practical significance than their butchery.

The conditions that gave rise to the Aztecs’ cannibal kingdom deserve careful study. Elsewhere, the rise of states and empires contributed to a withering away of the earlier patterns of human sacrifice and cannibalism. Unlike the Aztec gods, the high gods of the Old World tabooed the consumption of human flesh. Why in Mesoamerica alone did the gods encourage cannibalism? As Harner suggests, we must look for the answer both in the specific depletions of the Mesoamerican ecosystem
under the impact of centuries of intensification and population growth and in the cost/benefits of using human flesh as a source of animal protein where cheaper options were available.

As I said earlier, Mesoamerica was left at the end of the ice age in a more depleted condition, as far as animal resources are concerned, than any other region. The steady growth of population and the intensification of production under the coercive managerial influence of the classic highland empires virtually eliminated animal flesh from the diet of ordinary people. The ruling class and their retainers naturally continued to enjoy such delicacies as dogs, turkeys, ducks, deer, rabbits, and fish. But, as Harner notes, the commoners—despite the expansion of the
chinampas
—were often reduced to eating the algae skimmed from the surface of Lake Texcoco. While corn and beans in sufficient quantity could provide all of the essential amino acids, recurrent production crises throughout the fifteenth century meant that protein rations were frequently depressed to levels which would have biologically justified a strong craving for meat. In addition, fats of all sorts were perennially in short supply.

Could the redistribution of meat from sacrificial victims actually have significantly improved the protein and fat content in the diet of the Aztec nation? If the population of the Valley of Mexico was 2 million and the number of prisoners available for redistribution per annum was only 15,000, the answer is no. But the question is ill-framed. The point should be not how much these cannibal redistributions contributed to the health and vigor of the average citizen but how much the cost/benefits of political control underwent a favorable shift as a result of using human flesh to reward selected groups at crucial periods. If an occasional
finger or toe was all anyone could expect, the system would probably not have worked. But if the meat was supplied in concentrated packages to the nobility, soldiers, and their retainers, and if the supply was synchronized to compensate for deficits in the agricultural cycle, the payoff for Moctezuma and the ruling class might have been sufficient to stave off political collapse. If this analysis is correct, then we must consider its inverse implications, namely, that the availability of domesticated animal species played an important role in the prohibition of cannibalism and the development of religions of love and mercy in the states and empires of the Old World. Christianity, it may yet turn out, was more the gift of the lamb in the manger than the child who was born in it.

I hope I have not created the impression that the sacrifice and eating of prisoners of war was a specialty peculiar to the American Indians. As recently as fifty or a hundred years ago, small-scale sacrifice of prisoners of war and the redistribution of their flesh were common practices in hundreds of pre-state societies scattered across Africa south of the Sahara, Southeast Asia, Malaysia, Indonesia, and Oceania. I have reason to believe, however, that the eating of human flesh was never an important aspect of the redistributive feasts in the cultures which immediately preceded the rise of states in Mesopotamia, Egypt, India, China, or Europe.

Human beings were ritually sacrificed in all of these regions, but they were seldom eaten. Authoritative Roman sources—Caesar, Tacitus, and Plutarch—assert that the sacrifice of prisoners of war was a commonplace among the so-called “barbarian” nations on the margins of the Greco-Roman world. The Greeks and Romans of late classical antiquity regarded any kind of human sacrifice as immoral and were disturbed that honest soldiers should be deprived of their lives for the benefit of the cults of such “uncivilized” peoples as the Britons, Gauls, Celts, and Teutons. During Homeric times, however, the Greeks themselves had not been averse to killing small numbers of prisoners to influence the gods. At the battle of Troy, for example, the hero
Achilles put twelve captured Trojans on the funeral pyre of his comrade-in-arms, Patroclus. And as late as the great naval battle of Salamis in 480
B.C
. between the Greeks and the Persians, Themistocles, the Greek commander-in-chief, ordered the sacrifice of three Persian captives in order to assure victory. The Romans, too, had once practiced human sacrifice. About 226
B.C.
two Gauls and two Greeks were buried alive in order to forestall the prophecy that the Gauls and the Greeks would soon occupy the city of Rome. Similar incidents occurred in 216
B.C
. and in 104
B.C
.

Seasoned Roman troops were unnerved by their first encounters with the Celts, who went into battle uttering weird chants, rushing stark-naked through the snow against the Roman lines. The existence of a Celtic “cult of the severed head” all across pre-Roman iron age Europe makes it clear that blacks and Indians are not the only contemporary Americans who are descendants of headhunters. Celtic warriors placed the freshly decapitated heads of their enemies on their chariots and brought them home to hang from the rafters. In the South of France the Celts exhibited skulls in niches carved into stone monoliths. Skulls adorned the Celtic hill forts and the gateways to their villages and towns. Whether some of these skulls were obtained from sacrificial victims is not known. What is known is that human sacrifice was an important part of Celtic ritual, and that it was carried out under the supervision of the priestly caste called the Druids. The Celts preferred to burn people, and for this purpose they wove life-size wickerwork baskets around the prisoners and then set them on fire. On other occasions the victims were disemboweled or stabbed in the back so that the Druids could foretell the future from the condition of the
steaming entrails or from the position of the limbs when the writhing stopped.

Herodotus reports that another famous headhunting barbarian nation, the Scythians, who lived on the lower Danube and on the shores of the Black Sea, regularly sacrificed one out of each hundred prisoners taken on the battlefield. And in earliest Mesopotamia, according to Ignace Gelb of the University of Chicago, prisoners were sacrificed in temples. An inscription from Lagash written about 2500
B.C
. refers to the piling up of thousands of enemy corpses in large heaps. Gelb also says that “POWs were often sacrificed” in early China.

As the Biblical story of Abraham and his son Isaac shows, the possibility of human sacrifice was clearly very much on the minds of the ancient Israelites. Abraham thinks he hears God asking him to kill his son, who is saved only at the last moment by a friendly angel. When Hiel of Bethel rebuilt Jericho, he “laid its foundation at the cost of Abiram his first born, and set up its gates at the cost of his youngest son Segub, according to the word of the Lord.”

Early Brahmanic scriptures also reveal a lingering interest in human sacrifice. The goddess of death, Kali, bears a striking resemblance to the bloodthirsty Aztec deities. She is described in the
Kalika Purana
—the Holy Book of Kali—as a hideous figure garlanded with a string of human skulls, besmeared with human blood, and holding a skull in one hand and a sword in the other. Minute instructions are given concerning the manner in which human victims are to be killed.

Perhaps the most persistent form of human sacrifice found among early Old World states and empires was the slaughter of wives, servants, and bodyguards at the funerals of kings and emperors. The Scythians, for example, killed off all the old king’s royal cooks, grooms, and butlers. The king’s finest horses were also killed, as well as youths to ride them in the afterlife. Traces of retainer sacrifices have been found in early Egyptian tombs at Abydos and in the Sumerian royal tombs at Ur. Sacrifices of royal retainers had a double function. A king needed to take his court along with him after death in order to enjoy the style to which he had grown accustomed during life. But in a more down-to-earth vein the obligatory murder of a sovereign’s wives, servants and bodyguards went a long way toward assuring him that his closest associates would value his life as much as they valued their own and hence would not conspire against his rule nor tolerate the least threat to his safety. The Chinese during the last part of the second millennium
B.C.
probably carried out the world’s most extensive retainer sacrifices. Thousands of people
were put to death at each royal funeral. This practice, along with the sacrifice of prisoners of war, was prohibited during Chou times (1023–257
B.C.
). During the Ch’in dynasty pottery effigies were substituted for real people and animals. At the death in 210
B.C
. of Ch’in Shih Huang Ti, the first ruler of a unified China, 6,000 life-size realistic ceramic statues of men-at-arms and cavalry horses were buried in a subterranean hall as big as a football field near the emperor’s tomb.

What stands out in this rapid survey of ritual human sacrifice in the nuclear regions of Old World state formation is the lack of any strong association between human sacrifice and the eating of human flesh. Nowhere is there a trace of a system in which the redistribution of human flesh constituted a major preoccupation of the state or its ecclesiastical and military branches. Pausanius of Lydia says that the Gauls under the command of Combutis and Orestorios killed the whole male population of Callieas, then drank their blood and ate their flesh. Similar accusations were later made against the Tartars and the Mongols, but these reports all seem more like war-atrocity stories than ethnographic descriptions of Aztec-like cannibal cults. Reports of cannibalism in Egypt, India, and China are associated either with the preparation of exotic dishes for jaded upper-class palates or with famines, when the poor people fed on each other to stay alive. In post-Roman Europe cannibalism was regarded as so great a crime that only witches, werewolves, vampires, and Jews were deemed capable of it.

From Europe to China it was animal not human flesh that was brought to the altars, ritually sacrificed, dismembered, redistributed, and consumed in communal feasts. The Norse saga of Hakon the Good, for example, contains a clear description of the role played
by animal sacrifice in the redistributions carried out by Celtic and Teutonic kings and princes.

Generosity and communion are the prevailing themes of these rites, as epitomized in a nineteenth-century ballad about Sigurd (known in Germany as Siegfried), whom the sagas depict as an “open-handed man”:

From Tacitus we learn that “it is the custom that each tribesman shall give the chieftain presents either of cattle or of part of his harvests,” and that cattle “are in fact the most highly prized, indeed the only riches of the people.” As Stuart Piggott points out, the ancient Irish tale “The Cattle-Raid of Cooley” begins with a scene in which Alill, chieftain of Cruachan, and Medb, his wife, boast of their wealth, beginning with iron cauldrons and moving up through gold ornaments, clothing, flocks of sheep, horses, and herds of pigs until
finally they reach the epitome—their cattle. Among the ancient Irish, as among the Germans, Homeric Greeks, and earliest Latins, cattle were the most important measure of wealth and therefore, by inference, the most important item in the redistributive feasting upon which rested the organization of these chieftainships and incipient states.