Cannibals and Kings (19 page)

The classical Greeks and Romans were also great sacrificers of animals at religious festivals, and various temples specialized in animals that were relevant to their deities. Goats, for example, were deemed appropriate gifts to Bacchus, the god of the vine, possibly because they were a menace to the vineyards. Some Greek cities treated their bulls the way the impersonators of gods were treated among the Aztecs—they were garlanded and feted throughout the year preceding their execution.

As every reader of the Old Testament knows, animal sacrifice was a major preoccupation of the ancient Israelites. The Book of Leviticus sets forth minute prescriptions about where, when, and how animals are to be offered. The Book of Numbers states that, during the dedication of the first tabernacle, 36 oxen, 144 sheep and lambs, and 72 goats and kids were sacrificed in a twelve-day period. As the Israelites moved from pastoral chieftainship to statehood, the scale of the redistributions increased. At the dedication of Solomon’s temple in Jerusalem, 22,000 oxen and 120,000 sheep were slaughtered. The most important of the Israelite sacrifices was that of a lamb at the feast of Passover. While in bondage in Egypt, the Israelites sacrificed a lamb, smeared its blood on the lintels and doorposts of their houses, then roasted and ate it with bitter herbs and unleavened bread. That night the Lord smote all the first-born in the unmarked houses, convincing Pharaoh
that the time had come to let the Israelites leave the country.

Lévites, who constituted a priestly caste analogous to the Druids, held a monopoly over the slaughter of animals for food. Meat had to pass through their hands—literally, since they supervised or actually carried out the butchering of the animals and the redistribution of animal flesh, returning the largest share to the owner and his guests while holding back selected morsels for themselves and Jaweh.

W. Robertson Smith long ago pointed out in his important book
Religion of the Semites
that in old Israel all slaughter of animals was sacrifice: “People could never eat beef or mutton except as a religious act.” Anthropologists who have studied modern pastoral peoples in East Africa have seen the same situation from a slightly different perspective. East African pastoralists generally live not from the meat of the herds but from their milk and blood. As among the Pakot studied by Harold Schneider, herd animals can only be slaughtered on “ritual and ceremonial occasions.” The number of animals slaughtered per occasion and the number of occasions, however, are regulated by the availability of the animals. Anything as costly as an ox is too valuable not to be made part of some ceremonial. Americans who barbecue steaks for honored guests have much in common with the Pakot and the beef-loving peoples of the ancient world. (Incidentally, the word “barbecue” has an interesting history. It comes from the Carib word
barbricot
. The Caribs—whence the word “cannibal”—used the
barbricot
, a grill made of green boughs, to prepare their cannibal feasts.)

Returning to the Israelites, there is no doubt that at one time animals were sacrificed primarily to be eaten at redistributive feasts sponsored by “great provider”
headmen and chiefs. “Open-handed generosity” was as important for the ancient Israelites as it was for the Teutons:

By the time of Christ, the Levites’ slaughter monopoly had been given a monetary value. The faithful brought their animals to the temple priests, who slit throats at so much per head. Passover pilgrims traveled great distances to the temple at Jerusalem to have their lambs slaughtered. The famous temple moneychangers whose tables Jesus overturned ensured payment in coin of the realm. The Jewish rabbinate gave up the practice of animal sacrifice after the fall of Jerusalem in
A.D.
70—but not quite, since Orthodox Jews to this day insist on having animals slaughtered by a slitting of the throat under the supervision of religious specialists.

Because the crucifixion of Jesus occurred in association with the celebration of Passover, his death was readily assimilated to the imagery and symbolism of both animal and human sacrifice. John the Baptist called the coming messiah “the lamb of god.” Meanwhile, the Christians maintained tokens of the original redistributive functions of animal sacrifice in their rites called “communion.” Jesus broke the Passover bread and poured the Passover wine, and distributed the bread and wine to his disciples. “This is my body,” he said of the bread. “And this is my blood,” he said of the wine. In the Roman Catholic sacrament of the Eucharist these redistributive activities are repeated as ritual. The priest eats the bread in the form of a wafer and drinks
the wine while the members of the congregation eat only the wafer. Appropriately enough, this wafer is called the “host,” a word derived from the Latin
hostis
, meaning “sacrifice.”

Protestants and Catholics have spilled much blood and ink over the question of whether the wine and wafer are actually “transubstantiated” into the corporeal substance of Christ’s blood and body. But theologians and historians have up to now generally failed to see the real evolutionary significance of the Christian “mass.” By spiritualizing the eating of the paschal lamb and by reducing its substance to a nutritionally worthless wafer, Christianity long ago unburdened itself of the responsibility of seeing to it that those who came to the feast did not go home on an empty stomach. It took a while for this to happen. During the first two centuries of Christianity the communicants pooled their resources and actually held a communal meal known as the agape, or love feast. After Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire, the Church found that it was being used as a soup kitchen and in
A.D
. 363 the holding of love feasts on church premises was forbidden at the Council of Laodicea. The point that really merits attention is that the nutritive value of the communion feast is virtually zero, whether there is transubstantiation or not. Nineteenth-century anthropologists saw in the line of development which led from human sacrifice to animal sacrifice to the wafer and wine of the Eucharist a vindication of the doctrine of moral progress and enlightenment. I cannot share their optimism. Before we congratulate Christianity for its transcendence of animal sacrifice, we should note that corporeal protein supplies were also being transcended by a rapidly expanding population. What the end of animal sacrifice
really signified was the end of ecclesiastical redistributive feasting.

Christianity was only one of several religions that opted for generosity after death when generosity in life ceased to be practiced or necessary. I do not think it detracts from the acts of mercy and kindness performed in the name of such religions to point out that it was a great convenience for the rulers of India, Islam, and Rome to humble themselves before gods to whom heaven was more important than earth, and a former or future life more important than this one. As the imperial systems of the Old World grew larger and larger, they chewed up and depleted resources on a continental scale. When the globe had filled with tens of millions of ragged sweating drudges, the “great providers” were unable to act with the “open-handed generosity” of the barbarian chiefs of yore. Under Christianity, Buddhism, and Islam they became “great believers” and built cathedrals, mosques, and temples where nothing at all was served to eat.

But let’s get back to the time when there were still enough animals around so that meat could occasionally be part of everyone’s diet. Persians, Vedic Brahmans, Chinese, and Japanese all at one time or another ritually sacrificed domesticated animals. In fact, it would be difficult to find a single society in a belt across Eurasia and North Africa in which domesticated animal sacrifice was not part of state-supported cults. The entire repertory of herbivores and ruminant species was drawn upon for the purpose of these redistributive sacrifices, although some regions displayed preferences dictated by special ecological considerations. North Africa and Arabia, for example, were noted for camel sacrifices; horses were sacrificed among the central Asian pastoralists; bulls
were given special attention throughout the Mediterranean area. Meanwhile, across the same vast belt stretching from Spain to Japan, cannibalism was generally practiced on a very small scale, if at all. The Eurasian state religions prohibited the eating of human flesh and though this proscription was not sufficient to prevent sporadic outbreaks of cannibalism during times of hunger brought on by sieges or crop failures, such lapses had nothing to do with ecclesiastical policy and were usually discouraged rather than promoted by the governing classes.

Much of what I have said thus far has been commented on by previous authors. I am certainly not the first to discover the relationship between the scarcity of domesticated stock in Mesoamerica and the peculiar intensity of the cult of human sacrifice among the Aztecs. Yet it was not until Michael Harner linked the scale of human sacrifice among the Aztecs to the depletion of protein resources that a scientific theory of the divergent trajectories of early Old and New World state religions could be formulated. Others had previously reasoned that it was the lack of animals “suitable” for sacrifice that set the Mesoamericans off on their ghastly career. Allegedly, the Old World had a supply of animals whose demeanor was “suitable” for sacrificial rites. Hence there was no need to employ prisoners of war for such purposes and human sacrifice was replaced by animal sacrifice. Reay Tannahill, to name one recent adherent of this view, aptly notes that the native American horse had been wiped out, that caribou and bison were not found so far south as Mexico, and that other game was scarce. But as to why the dog and turkey—“the only domesticated livestock”—were not used instead of people, her answer is: “These were too contemptible to be worthy of the Gods.”

I feel that this kind of explanation is as defective as the explanations the Aztecs themselves gave for eating their prisoners of war. What people think or imagine is contemptible to the gods cannot be taken as an explanation of their religious beliefs and practices. To do so is to rest the explanation of all social life ultimately on what people arbitrarily think or imagine—a strategy doomed to nullify all intelligent inquiry since it will always come down to one useless refrain: People think or imagine what they think or imagine. Why should dogs and turkeys be deemed unsuitable for the majesty of supernatural appetites? The members of some cultures find it easy to imagine that the gods dine on ambrosia or nothing at all. Surely a people who were capable of imagining what the face of Tlaloc looked like were capable of imagining that their gods were passionately fond of turkey giblets and dog hearts. It was the Aztecs, not their gods, who felt that it wasn’t worth their while to wrench out the beating hearts of turkeys and dogs. And the reason they felt that way had nothing to do with the inherent dignity of dogs, turkeys—or, for that matter, domesticated ducks. Rather, it had to do with the cost of obtaining large quantities of meat from these species. The trouble with dogs as a source of meat is not that they are contemptible but that they thrive best when they themselves are fed on meat. And the trouble with turkeys and other fowl is that they thrive best when they are fed on cereal grains. In both cases it is enormously more efficient to eat the meat or the grain directly than to pass it through another link in the food chain. On the other hand, the great advantage of the Old World domesticated species is that they are herbivores and ruminants and thrive best when they feed on grass, stubble, leaves, and other plant foods which human beings cannot digest. Because of
the pleistocene extinctions, the Aztecs lacked such species. And it was this lack, together with the extra costs involved in using carnivores and birds as a source of animal protein, that tipped the balance in favor of cannibalism. Of course, the meat obtained from prisoners of war is also costly—it is very expensive to capture armed men. But if a society lacks other sources of animal protein, the benefits of cannibalism may outweigh these costs. On the other hand, if a society already has horses, sheep, goats, camels, oxen, and pigs to eat, the cost of cannibalism may outweigh its benefits.

No doubt my story would be more inspirational if I could set aside this cost/benefit approach to cannibalism and return to the old theory of moral progress. Most of us would prefer to believe that the Aztecs remained cannibals simply because their morals were mired in primitive impulses while the Old World states tabooed human flesh because their morals had risen in the great onwards-and-upwards movement of civilization. But I’m afraid this preference arises from provincial if not hypocritical misconceptions. Neither the prohibition of cannibalism nor the decline of human sacrifice in the Old World had the slightest effect on the rate at which the Old World states and empires killed each other’s citizens. As everyone knows, the scale of warfare has increased steadily from prehistoric times to the present, and record numbers of casualties due to armed conflict have been produced precisely by those states in which Christianity has been the major religion. Heaps of corpses left to rot on the battlefield are no less dead than corpses dismembered for a feast. Today, hovering on the brink of a third world war, we are scarcely in a position to look down on the Aztecs. In our nuclear age the world survives only because each side is convinced that the moral standards of the other are low
enough to sanction the annihilation of hundreds of millions of people in retaliation for a first strike. Thanks to radioactivity the survivors will not even be able to bury the dead, let alone eat them.

I see two ways to add up the cost/benefits of cannibalism in the early phases of state formation. First of all, there is the question of the use of enemy soldiers as producers of food rather than as meals in themselves. Ignace Gelb points out in his discussion of the evolution of the state in Mesopotamia that at first men were killed either on the battlefield or in sacrificial rites, while only captive women and children were incorporated into the labor force. This implies that it was “relatively easy to exert control over foreign women and children” and that “the state apparatus was still not strong enough to control the masses of unruly male captives.” But as the power of the state apparatus increased, male POWs were “marked or branded, tied with ropes or kept in neck stocks” and later “freed and resettled or used for specialized purposes of the crown, such as the personal guard of the king, mercenaries, or a movable force.”