CANNIBALISM: THE ATREUS LEGEND

I

It will be probably a shock to many people to be told that the cannibalistic instinct still is part of our unconscious. It appears in that pathological state known as lycanthropy where the patient often has a craving for human flesh. It is occasionally revived in cases of starvation and shipwreck, when men are driven to eat human flesh. There should be nothing strange about this, for we are descended from people who were cannibals. And we know that men of the old stone age in France were cannibals and it was practised in Greece in earliest times. It has not yet been exterminated in parts of Africa and Polynesia.

Cannibalism figured considerably in ancient literature. It is not my purpose to go into the question of its origin, or the ceremonials connected with it. There are good articles on the subject in the EncyclopÆdia of Religion and Ethics by J. A. MacCullouch and in the EncyclopÆdia Britannica by Northcote W. Thomas. I shall, however, touch on instances where men ate human flesh at sacrifices.

Cannibalism to-day has chiefly a historic and a literary interest. The subject is worth taking up because of the attention paid to it in literature. We have tales about it to-day. Conrad has given us in his Falk a story of cannibalism. Falk was the survivor on a wrecked ship and was driven by hunger to feast on the bodies of sailors, thus saving his life. The memory of the event is of course horrible to him. The young lady he loves marries him despite his experience.

One of Jack London's stories of cannibalism is "The Whale Tooth" in his South Sea Tales. It tells how a missionary who went out to convert some Fiji cannibals was betrayed by Ra Vatu, a heathen about to embrace Christianity. The savage desired the missionary's boots to present to a chief. In spite of his acceptance of the religion of Christ he was willing to have his benefactor made a victim of cannibalism. In the same story London refers to a chief who ate eight hundred and seventy-two bodies.

Cannibalism is to us but a curiosity that we once practised. We find no injunction against cannibalism, or eating one's children, among the crimes on the statute books. It is no crime under the Common Law. A man who would commit cannibalism among us would be sent to an insane institution. There are no laws against a thing when no one has the least inclination to do it. Society recognises that the instinct for cannibalism is dead, but it is nevertheless in our unconscious. Our psyche never forgets the episodes in the lives of our ancestors.

The only places where there are laws against cannibalism are in savage countries where there is a disposition to practise it; and these laws are made by colonists.

It is prevalent to-day in Africa. John H. Weeks in Among Congo Cannibals (1913) tells us he saw savages carrying dismembered parts of human bodies for a feast and that he was offered some cooked human food. He also speaks of a white man who was a dealer in human flesh to a tribe, an example of degradation that finds a parallel in Kurtz's conduct in Conrad's story The Heart of Darkness. Mr. Herbert Ward in his A Voice from Congo (1910) describes how some human victims were hacked to pieces, alive, for feasts; he witnessed organised traffic in human flesh and saw several cannibal feasts.

II

Let us mark the part played by cannibalism in ancient Greek literature. We will see that the cannibalistic instinct was part of the psychic life of the earliest Greeks. There was a reaction to it as there was to incest of the son with the mother as shown in Sophocles's Œdipus. Enforced cannibalism, where a man was made to eat his own children unknowingly, is the revenge motive of the famous Greek play—Agamemnon; this play depicts the reaction to cannibalism.

In the Atreus legend which Æschylus used in Agamemnon, Thyestes eats the flesh of his children, offered up to him by his brother Atreus, in revenge for having seduced Atreus's wife. In expiation of Atreus's crime his future descendants suffer. The unfortunate Thyestes had a son, Ægisthus, as the offspring of the connection with Atreus's wife—(Pelopia, Thyestes's own daughter, by the way). Atreus and his son Agamemnon were later killed by Ægisthus, who had besides seduced Agamemnon's wife Clytemnestra. Agamemnon's son, Orestes, avenges the murder by killing his mother and her paramour. Orestes is shown as expiating his matricide in the Oresteia trilogy of which Agamemnon is the first play.

In Æschylus's Agamemnon, we have the expiation of the crime of Atreus for enforcing cannibalism on his brother. There are several passages dealing with the crime. Ægisthus describes in detail how his father Thyestes ate the flesh of his own children and how he vomited when he was told what he had done. When Cassandra, who returns with Agamemnon, in her insane ravings is telling of the punishment to befall Clytemnestra she has a vision of the old feast of the children. The Chorus also tells about the story.

All this shows the horror which was inspired by a deed, the eating of one's children, and this must mean that way back in antiquity this act was practised and that the Greeks were now describing the act as revolting.

There are several other stories of enforced cannibalism in ancient literature with revenge as the motive. Herodotus tells us how the King of the Medes punished Harpagus for not killing Cyrus by making Harpagus dine on the flesh of his own son. This was in the sixth century B. C. Tereus, King of the Thracians, was served up his son by the latter's own mother, because Tereus dishonoured his sister-in-law, Philomela, and deprived her of her tongue. In one of Grimm's fairy tales, The Juniper Tree, we have the story of a man who is given the flesh of his own child by his wife, the child's step-mother.

Seneca in the first century A. D. wrote Thyestes, dramatising all the repulsive episodes, describing the preparing of the children for the feast and the feast itself. The most loathsome theme is made the main idea of the story. Shakespeare has a scene in Titus Andronicus where Titus makes the wicked Tamora eat the heads of her two sons baked in a pie. Crebillon wrote a cannibalistic play in the 18th century, AtrÉe et Thyeste.

The tale of Saturn, who swallowed his children when they were born so as not to be dethroned in accordance with the prophecy, with the result that he was compelled to disgorge them later by Zeus, has its parallels in folk-lore among the Bushmen, Eskimos and others. It is a very old story.

Freud saw in the Œdipus legend the horror reaction of the Greeks to two legendary deeds, the killing of a father and the marrying of the mother by the son, deeds which had their basis in reality and which were occasionally repeated in dreams. Similarly we can see in the Atreus legend a reaction to the idea of eating one's children, an act that used to accompany the offering of human sacrifices. But we cannot say that the cannibalistic instinct affects one's future as the Œdipus complex does. It is, however, part of our unconscious. The effectiveness of Swift's famous satirical proposition to help the poor in Ireland by suggesting that they sell the flesh of their own children for food to the rich, is due to the fact that children's flesh was actually once eaten. Swift wrote his essay with ironical intent but he was utilising an ancient historical fact, unknowingly.

We know from the stories of Abraham and Isaac, Jephthah and his daughter, and Iphigenia, as well as from historical records, that children were offered as human sacrifices and that the body of the victim was often eaten; hence there is a connection between human sacrifice and cannibalism.

J. A. MacCullouch in his scholarly article on cannibalism in the EncyclopÆdia of Religion and Ethics, ventures the opinion that human sacrifice rose through an earlier cannibalism, on the principle that as men liked human flesh the Gods would also relish it. The worshippers later shared in the human feasts, with the Gods. Westermarck says that the sacrificial form of cannibalism springs from the idea that a victim offered to a God participates in his sanctity and the worshipper by eating the human flesh transfers to himself something of the divine virtue.

There were many cases of orgastic cannibalism in ancient Greece. There is a vase showing a Thracian tearing a child with his teeth in the presence of a god. Pausanias relates that a child was torn and eaten in a sacrifice to the Gods in Boeotia. In Plato's Republic, VIII 566, we have an account of a survival of an earlier cannibal sacrificial feast. It is related there that a piece of human flesh was placed among the animals sacrificed to Zeus Lycaeus and that in the feasts that followed the eater of the fragments became a were-wolf.

Other people like the Fijis who partook in a human feast offered first part of the slain to the gods.

The custom of human sacrifices and cannibalism died out among the Greeks, and in Æschylus's trilogy we have the horror reaction of the educated Greek against these institutions. The playwright shows the terrible retaliation visited on the man who indulges in cannibalism or makes another do so. Punishment for Atreus's deed is visited upon his son, Agamemnon, in many ways, one of which is being forced to sacrifice his daughter Iphigenia. Agamemnon is also punished by the infidelity of his wife with Ægisthus, and by being murdered by them.

The tale of Iphigenia thus sheds some light on the subject. She figures considerably in the Agamemnon. Æschylus tells us that Clytemnestra felt justified for being untrue to her husband Agamemnon because he sacrificed their daughter Iphigenia. The latter's name is closely associated with human sacrifice in Greek legend.

In the Saturnalia of Rome a human victim was slain as late as the fourth century A. D.

The theory then resolves itself to this: In very ancient times before Greek civilisation made its appearance children were sacrificed to ward off evil and the flesh of those children was eaten by the parents. There rose a reaction to this which we see in the Atreus legend.