Second Look at Cannibalism?

Way back in the book, it says that 

Oddly enough, the first thing early humans apparently thought to do upon getting off the ape-man treadmill was to conduct a sacrifice (Gagdad).

I then go on to quote a couple of scholars, one of whom says that "human sacrifice, far from being a cultural oddity, has been a widespread practice" among virtually all cultures, playing a role "in almost every conceivable form of religious observance." 

Sacrificial killing is even said to be "the basic experience of the sacred," and we're all familiar with Girard's theory of scapegoating and sacrificial violence. 

So, recently I read a book called Out of Our Minds: What We Think and How We Came to Think It, which is a chronological survey of pretty much all the bright ideas man has had since becoming man. Of course, it's difficult to know exactly what was going on upstairs before the invention of writing, but our ancestral furbears "have left tantalizing evidence of their ideas."

As far as we can tell, eating our fellow man was indeed the first bright idea:

These were thinking cannibals. We have trained ourselves to recoil from cannibalism and to see it as treason against our species: a form of sub-human savagery.

The evidence, however, suggests the opposite: cannibalism is typically -- you might also say peculiarly, even definingly -- human and cultural. Under the stones of every civilization lie human bones, snapped and sucked. 

What happened? Where did it go, and why did we give it up? "In most human societies" cannibalism was accepted "as normal -- embedded in the way society works":

No other mammals practice it so regularly or on such a scale as we do: indeed all others tend to avoid it except in extreme circumstances -- which suggests that it did not come naturally to our ancestors: they had to think about it.

Certainly the Bible takes it for granted. When God instructs Abraham to sacrifice Isaac, Abraham doesn't do a spit-take, or ask God if he's off his meds. 

So, what's the Big Idea underlying cannibalism and human sacrifice? Is it possible that the religious ritual was just a kind of elaborate defense mechanism to render the wholly unnatural holy? Armesto cites some of the earliest known cannibals, who

were performing a thoughtful ritual, underlain by an idea: an attempt to achieve an imagined effect, augmenting the eaters' powers or reshaping their natures.   

Although plain old hunger is sometimes offered as an excuse,

Overwhelmingly, however, more reflective aims, moral or mental, aesthetic or social, inspire them: self-transformation, the appropriation of power, the ritualization of the eater's relationship with the eaten, revenge, or the ethic of victory.

So, a rather mixed bag, from self-transformation at one end to vengeful sadism at the other.

Back when I was a reductive psychoanalytic theorist, I would have said that Christian communion is a transparently sublimated holdover from our cannibal past. Now I wonder if it's the other way around -- that cannibalism is a dim foreshadowing of communion. 

But supposing you don't take communion, are there other ways to more or less symbolically devour a man and obtain magical benefits?  

Armesto cites the example of a a Papuan tribe that didn't give up literal communion until the 1960s, when the authorities banned it. The Papuan's excuse was that it "was their way of 'capturing spirits' in compensation for lost warriors." Another tribe "ate their dead to conserve vital fluids they believed to be non-renewable in nature." 

Others -- Gimi women, for example -- "used to guarantee the renewal of their fertility by consuming dead menfolk." And no one, of course, tops the Aztec, who "ingested morsels of the bodies of battle-captives to acquire their virtue and valor," not to mention the countless ritual sacrifices needed to nourish the sun and keep it from extinguishing.

So, consistent with what Bob said above in paragraph two,

Theirs was the earliest recoverable idea -- recorded deep in the layers of cognitive stratigraphy: the idea that thinkers can change themselves, appropriate qualities not their own, becoming something other than what they are.

The first psychotropic medication? 

But again, supposing the ubiquity and universality of the impulse, where do we find it today, beneath layers of civilization? This morning while scanning the news of the day, there was this little item in the sidebar:

Jennifer Aniston will ‘try almost anything once’ to look young -- including a salmon-sperm facial

I don't even want to know what Gwyneth Paltrow does. But come to think of it, my wife's grandmother was a bit of a health food fanatic, and I remember her eating shark cartilage in order to magically ward off cancer. I guess it worked, until it didn't.

Nor am I immune to the allure of magical substances. The ingredients of my whole food multi include such powerful substances as spirulina, bee pollen, black currant powder, panax ginseng root, octacosanol, and others. I have no idea what they do except help me to appropriate qualities not my own and to become something other than what I am. Of course, I draw the line at salmon sperm. 

Is it possible that the entire health food industry overlays and exploits the primitive impulse to ingest and appropriate magical transformative properties? A stroll down the aisle of Costco reveals a whole host of such substances, from Hawaiian astaxanthin to Feel Good Organic Matcha Tea Powder to blueberry extract and many other potions and herbal remedies.

There is something in man that makes him recognize that he is not what he is supposed to be. In other words, the drive to self-transcendence is built into the human cake, and it takes any number of forms, from healthy and realistic at one end to Gwyneth Paltrow at the other. 

I think it's safe to say that the history of human thought evolves from more concrete expressions toward the abstract and symbolic. In this regard, Pieper writes of how 

man's chief nourishment is truth. This does not apply only to the man of knowledge, the philosopher, the scientist. Anyone who wishes to live a truly human life must feed on truth (emphasis mine).

I read something yesterday that may go to our subject. Schuon speaks of modern ideologies that "contrive to invent implausible infirmities in order to invent extravagant remedies," and which "always find dupes, even among the so-called 'intellectuals'":

In all these "methods," the point of departure is a false image of man; the goal of the training being the development... of "latent powers" or of an "expanded" or "liberated" personality." And since such an ideal does not exist -- more especially since the premise is imaginary -- the result of the adventure can only be a perversion.

That's about it for today. Excuse me while I devour another book.