The Nomadic Alternative – Page 12

A hard look at cannibalism, prehistoric and present, reveals some startling anomalies. Evidence from his settlement sites certainly suggests that some Palaeolithic hunters ate men; but no archaeologist is in a position to recover their motives. The victim may have died of natural causes and his family then ate him, thus enshrining him in their own lives and ensuring his immortality. Or he may have been an enemy killed off for food. Or the eater may have hoped to acquire the potency of the deceased. There is no means of knowing.

But the cannibals of today – and today is what counts – are either pathologically insane, actually dying of starvation or members of settled or semi-settled tribes who practise agriculture. Ritual cannibalism is a sacrifice for the regeneration of the vegetable world. Body and blood were shed for ripening of corn or harvest of grape. And the cultivator of tubers and root vegetables seem to shed rather more human blood than others, the roots themselves acquiring a quasi-human personality in their minds, inert vegetable matter demanding spilt blood in return for its own execution by hoe.

Furthermore, the cutting-out of the foramen magnum is not without significance. A common hallucination in trance states is that of being possessed, dismembered and devoured by a monster, after which the psychic voyager returns reassembled and reborn. Visionaries and ecstatics of every culture report the same sensation, and clinical accounts of the infernal world of the mentally insane indicate that sufferers imagine the skull to be split open, its sides rolled back from the base, the brain torn out and the limbs scattered. I shall return to this complicated topic later. The point I would like to make is that human sacrifice and cannibalism is the speciality of people obsessed with a morbid desire for immortality and those exposed to stress.

A more sinister turn of Antiprimitivist thought proposes that man is a domesticated animal and follows a suggestion of Plato that the races of man compare to the breeds of dog.* Some dogs are
*See Note at top of p. 13.