We Are All Cannibals

The title of this post comes from a book of that name by the anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss (1908-2009). He describes the discovery in 1932 in the interior of New Guinea of a people who practiced cannibalism. The act of eating the corpse of close relatives was their way of showing respect for them. The flesh, brains, and viscera were cooked; the bones were ground up and served with vegetables. The women were responsible for cutting up the corpses and other culinary operations. American biologist Carleton Gajdusek was awarded the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 1956 by showing that kuru (shaking, a degenerative disease of the central nervous system), which appeared especially among the women was linked to cannibalistic practices. The disease was similar to Creutzfeld-Jakob’s disease and its origin also similar (eating meat of cows fed with feed containing ground up bones of other cows).

It would appear that nature frowns upon cannibalism, though we have no evidence of whether the Aztecs, Incas, and other cannibalistic tribes suffered diseases of the central nervous system.

In his book The Man Eating Myth (Oxford, 1979) W. Arens claimed that stories of cannibalism were fables. Spanish conquistadors, monks, and explorers reported otherwise, however, and their observations have been confirmed by the politically correct Human Sacrifice in the Mesoamerican Religious Tradition (Spanish). Mexico City 2010. The authors admit cannibalism but justify it as a religious practice. That is far-fetched because butchers’ shops in Tenotchitlan always had a fresh supply of human flesh on hand.

The Aztecs fought wars to secure prisoners to be sacrificed to the gods and then eaten. The evidence shows that the Aztecs especially were serial killers and cannibals.

As Levi-Strauss suggests, we should not feel morally superior to the Aztecs and other cannibalistic peoples because we, like them, are tainted with cannibalism. In our case, however, cannibalism has been suppressed by our laws and customs. That does not mean that it doesn’t still exist deep down in our hearts.

Philosophers from time immemorial have pondered the problem of evil. There are too many of them to mention here (e.g. Leibnitz), but a central (allegorical ) event in the Judeo-Christian system was conceived to account for the evil and misery of the world. That event is the Fall, the only real point of contact between the optimism of the Old Testament and the pessimism of the New Testament. In that event Adam and Eve, the original couple of mankind, were driven out of the Garden of Eden for tasting the fruit of the tree of knowledge and condemned with their descendants (us) to wander the earth and suffer pain and misfortunes until the end of their brief days..

While the Fall points out a great truth, it does not go back far enough. One of the main flaws of the Judeo-Christian system is that it makes an unnatural distinction between man and the animal world, to which he really belongs.

Genesis 1: 26

Then God said, "Let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness, so that they may rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky, over the livestock and all the wild animals, and over all the creatures that move along the ground."

Our religion looks upon animals as merely things, in contrast to Brahmanism and Buddhism, which with the doctrine of metempsychosis make a close link between man and the animal kingdom.

The French philosopher Descartes said that animals are mechanisms that have no soul.

In our wonderful world, the protection of animals is left to the police, for whom this isn’t a priority, and to prevention of cruelty to animals societies, which are too feeble to do much good.

We are demons, and animals are our tormented souls.

Long before animals appeared on land, the vegetable kingdom populated the seas and oceans.

Cannibalism was probably the real reason for the evolution of animal forms from vegetable. In the primitive oceans animals did not exist, all living things were vegetable organisms, receiving direct kinetic energy from the sun, by means of which they built up materials for their cell life. Some organisms, though able to do this, for some unexplained reason turned criminals and began to steal the foods stored by others by swallowing them—and by the laws of selection these types survived and, through the laws of involution of the useless, lost their ability to build up their own food as a plant does. Fish-like organisms first appeared in the Cambrian period about 530 million years ago, amphibians appeared about 300 million years ago.

Who says that crime doesn’t pay?

That crime was the original sin, and with it evil entered the world. It is so primordial that it is inerasable. We enter the world tainted with this sin through our animal nature.

A few species of animals still retain chlorophyll in the skin, and can act in both ways, but the great majority are not able to build up these foods and are wholly dependent upon the foods manufactured by plants.

Animals, therefore, are degenerated plants. That is a metaphysical condition with far-reaching consequences. Animals must use the potential energy of organic foods, though there is no difference whatever between an animal and a vegetable cell. What a strange outcome, therefore, that the whole animal world, now so dependent upon foods built up by vegetable forms, is really a result of the first cannibalism among primitive plants starving for nitrogen.

The crime – the first cannibalism – is responsible for the food chain, in which one animal preys upon another in an endless cycle of eating and being eaten. At the top of the food chain is Homo Sapiens. Mother Nature is not a kindly soul but a blood-thirsty witch, like the Aztec goddess Chalchiutlicue (She of the Jade Skirt), whose festival in February was marked by brutal episodes of human sacrifice that included women and children.

Children nowadays can watch the gory spectacle of the food chain in action on National Horrorgraphic and after a long enough time become desensitized to violence.

The pain of being eaten exceeds the pleasure of eating, so on that basis alone, maybe it would be better if there were nothing. Since there is more pain than pleasure on earth, every satisfaction is only transitory, creating new desires and new distresses.

Since we are the way we are and can’t do much about it, the conclusion is very pessimistic and suggests itself.

Peter Wessel Zapffe, author of The Last Messiah, has become the patron of antinatalism, which he summed up as follows:

Having children is like bringing wood to a burning house.

And

If a deserted island is not a tragedy, neither is a deserted universe.