Unspeakable Rites: Cultural Reticence and the Cannibal Question

Social Research, Spring, 1999 by Claude Rawson

When Columbus learned about Caribs, he didn't know he was in the Caribbean. He thought he had reached the Orient, and entertained the notion that cannibals were warriors of the Great Khan. Another idea was that the term was related to the Latin canis, or dog. There is a traditional association of cannibalism with dogs and wolves, which had a powerful existence in classical times long before the term "cannibal" could provide etymological encouragement.(3) This may seem odd, in view of the contrary notion that dog don't eat dog, and a common perception that eating one's own kind, supposedly a reversion to bestiality, is more typical of humans than of other animals. Columbus heard from his interpreters that further to the East were to be found one-eyed ogres and man-eating men with dogs' muzzles (hombres de un ojo, y otros con hocicos de perros que comian los hombres).(4)

These monsters, which had become staples of travel narrative, ultimately derive from the Cyclopes of the Odyssey and the Cynocephali (dog-heads) reported by Pliny in his Natural History, as well as from more recent travel-writers like Sir John Mandeville and Marco Polo.(5) They are an example of the relentless habit of early voyagers to America and elsewhere of consciously or unconsciously assimilating their discoveries to classical geography, history, and myth: speculations that America might be, or might resemble, the lost Atlantis, or Arcadia, or that Indian languages were derived from, or resembled, Greek, were as widespread in actual as in imaginary or fictitious travel-narratives. The fact that reports of cannibal activity generally evoked classical sources or had some classical coloration has recently been adduced as an argument for thinking them to be wholly fabricated. This would be on a par with arguing, on the same grounds, that South America didn't exist.

Cannibal accusations, true or false, are usually expressions of xenophobia. I'll begin with a classical example, the product of a peculiarly exacerbated, even enraged, imperial perspective. It comes from the second century AD, and is by the Roman satirist Juvenal, who is one of the earliest satirists of an imperial metropolis. I don't mean that he was anti-imperialist. But he wrote about a big city that was the capital of a great empire, full of people from conquered lands in Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East. He didn't like it. It was too multicultural. He wanted to return to the good old days when Romans were Romans. The more influential or fashionable the foreign culture, the more he disliked it. He especially hated Greeks, because they were elite foreigners, like European professors in American universities. But he also hated other foreigners: Jews, Syrians, and Egyptians.

In Juvenal's fifteenth satire, there's an episode of cannibalism, said to be a real-life event, unlike the stories told in the Odyssey about the Cyclopes and the Laestrygonians. It seems, in real life, to have occurred in AD 127, about three years before the poem is thought to have been written. It involves youths from two rival townships divided by religious hatred. The scene is Egypt, not Rome. One of the towns was Tentyra or Dendereh, which worshipped Hathor, the cow-headed goddess of love; the other was Ombi, now Negadeh, ten miles away, which worshipped Set, the pig-headed god of darkness, and the crocodile, abominated by Tentyrites.(6) It's perhaps the first account we have, in an important poem, both of urban gang-warfare, and of inter-communal rioting of a sort endemic in our own time, from Belfast to Nicosia or Bombay: