Human Sacrifice, Cannibalism and the Colonial Encounter

People living at the margins or outside of the ‘civilised' world had been habitually described as man-eaters by Europeans at least since the time of the ancient Greeks. Thus, Columbus found his expectation of encountering cannibals confirmed when he reached the Caribbean in 1492.

They have a most horrid and abominable custom which truly ought to be punished... whenever they wish to ask something of the idols, in order that their plea may find more acceptance, they take many girls and boys and even adults, and in the presence of the idols they open their chests while they are still alive and take out their hearts and entrails and burn them before the idols, offering the smoke as sacrifice. Some of us have seen this, and they say it is the most terrible and frightful thing they have ever witnessed.^{[148] [149]}

The topic gained particular importance after Pope Paul III issued a bull on 9 June 1537 declaring that the American Indians were ‘truly men' and not ‘dumb brutes created for our service'.^[150] Thus, they were not destined to be ‘natural slaves' and the subjugation, enslavement and exploitation of the indigenous people had to be legitimised by other means such as a ‘just war'. The Dominican Francisco de Vitoria, considered one of the founders of interna­tional law, gave as legitimate reasons to make war on the Amerindians ‘the personal tyranny of the barbarians' masters towards their subjects' or ‘their tyrannical and oppressive laws against the innocent', such as human sacrifice or cannibalism.^[151] Conspicuously, Iberian authors accused mainly those Amerindian groups of man-eating that were resisting European domina­tion.

Reports of anthropophagy have to be critically evaluated for a number of reasons beyond deliberate attempts to legitimise colonial domination and European expectations of finding cannibals among the New World's ‘heathen' and supposedly barbaric peoples. Many reports are based on accusations of alleged cannibalism by neighbouring groups. First-hand and eyewitness accounts are also often problematic. Even Europeans with some knowledge of the local language may have mis­understood the metaphorical usage of native terms that also mean ‘to eat'. Among the Iroquois, for example, the expression ‘to eat a nation' was equivalent to making war, taking scalps or captives.^[154] Certain treat­ments of corpses, such as skinning, decapitation, cutting off legs and arms etc., taken to be indicators of cannibalism, may, in fact, have been merely part of mortuary rituals. Such is also the case when the decea­sed's flesh or ashes were consumed, as in several lowland South American groups. ‘For dying individuals the idea of disappearing into fellow tribes-members' bodies apparently was more appealing than the alternative of being left to rot in the ground' among the twentieth­century Wari.^[155] Jesuit missionaries reported similar feelings in sixteenth­century Brazil, where prisoners of the Tupinamba were ‘so happy about being eaten that they would never consent to be rescued... because they say that it is a sad thing to die, and to stink and be eaten by insects'.^[156] For Tupinamba warriors, to be executed and eaten was a glorious death ‘for they say that only cowards and weaklings die and are buried and go to hold up the weight of the earth, which they believe to be extremely heavy’.^{[157] [158] [159] [160]} Thus, although we have good reason to question many European reports on indigenous human sacrifice and cannibalism (especially its ‘culinary’ variant), there is sufficient evidence to assert that human sacrifice was widespread in the Americas before the conquest.

In spite of the omnipresent damnation of cannibalism by the colonisers, abhorrence of the consumption of human body parts was far from complete even in Europe. Human flesh, blood, heart, marrow and other body parts were consumed for medical reasons from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries. Mumia, prepared from real mummies or from the remains of humans who had suffered sudden, preferably violent death, was an important drug, among others, for the followers of Paracelsus and in folk medicine. To drink the still-warm blood of executed criminals, sold by executioners, was considered a remedy to cure several ills, such as epilepsy.1² Thus, while both Europeans and Amerindians ingested human body parts and substances, the human source of these materials was ‘depersonalised and objectified’ in European medicinal cannibalism.1³ The depersonalisation and the fact that the consumers were more or less detached from the remedies’ preparation probably allowed the colonisers to consider European practices as fundamen­tally different from ‘barbarous' native ones.