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 Bœotia. 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.