Tasmania has a colourful history when it comes to cannibalism. If you’ve seen the movie Van Diemen’s Land or have heard of Alexander Pearce then you know what I’m talking about. The crime of eating human meat is also one that was frequently levelled against witches during persecutions throughout the world. The fact people find the idea of people eating other people so shocking immediately interested me, my intellectual faculties being immediately activated by this like the smell of blood in the water. If you are a consumer of the flesh of other animals then what exactly makes you think your own species, your own meat, is somehow more important, more sacred, or more shocking to consume than that of any other animal? There was a certain kind of anthropocentric, or human-centric thinking, or perhaps feeling, that was going on here.
When I began to research cannibalism for my book ‘People of the Outside: Witchcraft, Cannibalism, and the Elder Folk’ I came to realise this feeling has been with us for a very long time. In fact, accusations of cannibalism have been levelled against new religious groups as early as the original Christians, and have also been used against the Gnostics and the Templars.
In Cannibalism in Our Human Past Neil Bockoven explores the strong connection between Neanderthals, who I call ‘the elder folk’ in my book, and cannibalism. Not just to Neanderthals though, but proof that human species going back as far as Homo Erectus engaged in the same behaviours. When you consider this evidence from archeology our species rests on a whole history of cannibalistic peoples. A few of the themes Bockoven connects with Neanderthal history turn out to be things that were later attached to witches, and other groups that Sapiens as a whole wished to turn into scapegoats, as if Neanderthals and those forgotten ghosts of earlier human species became a kind of Other. Lost to conscious knowledge our own past became a kind of hauntology that followed us through time. This was all very intriguing to me because, as I have noted before, there is also a similarity in the facial shape of the Neanderthal and that of the stereotypical witch.
Neanderthal or Stereotypical Witch?
What I think is most important here is that in the next episode Bockoven explores the same kind of history for Sapiens. What this shows us is that cannibalism, this eating of other humans is made out to be one of the most evil things, it is projected onto various Other groups, usually ones we wish to excuse destroying for reasons hysterical or colonial, but really cannibalism has also been a big part of our own species. Whether that be in the form of predatory cannibalism where those seen as different to ourselves are hunted, funerary cannibalism where those admired or loved are partially consumed, or medical cannibalism where those with certain strengths such as being a mummy are partially consumed to treat medical conditions, or emergency cannibalism where there is a choice between starvation and eating an already deceased person, Sapiens has most certainly got a history of consuming other Sapiens. Anyone with an interest in witchcraft should probably sit with that fact.
As someone that would be identified as a witch by a lot of people I find all this very intriguing. I think we should sit with the sense of shock this ideas gives us, consider it, think about how different, how much better, even, we really believe we are to animals that are eaten for food. To consider how much better we think we are than plants that are eaten for food, trees that are destroyed for wood, fresh water ways that we pollute. Whilst I am far from suggesting we start eating one another, (we don’t have great nutritional value anyway, to be honest) I think this topic requires more consideration.