Disturbing Descriptions of Anthropophagy

Anthropophagy  - a fancy word for cannibalism!

From the article "The Disposal of the Dead in Australia" by Northcote W. Thompson, in the journal "Folklore", 1908.

I might as well start with the most disturbing juxtaposition of sentences in the article:

Infants and very young children were eaten whole by old women alone. Deformed people were pushed into a log.

I am not certain of the veracity of the informants - and this is my first exposure to any writing on aboriginal culture  - so I am going to take most of this at face value, even though I am kind of skeptical of the research methods, etc.  This article does take the form of the 'oooh look at what these people do' - Believe it or Not! - type of writing, but it is ameliorated with the caveat that these practices were noticeably rare:

As a rule, where only one method of dealing with the body is practised, it consists in simple burial beneath the surface of the ground; occasionally the trunk of a hollow tree in selected as the last resting-place of the remains, and still more rarely cremation, anthropophagy or exposure is the recognised method of disposing of the body.

Thompson analyzes the aboriginal burial customs along linguistic and tribal lines - trying to ascertain any sort of pattern.  I admittedly am not conversant in the said culture - except that I am aware that it is extremely diverse - and Thompson, for his part recognizes this diversity.  The first mention of anthropophagy is among the Dieri:

The corpse was first disembowelled—a procedure practised also at Natal Downs, Queensland—and then dried ; the fat was caught in shells, and put on the tip of the tongue, and here the link is with the Dieri tribe, where certain relatives, usually those in the female line, eat the fat of the dead, which is in this case cut off from the body after it has been placed in the grave.

I will admit that most of my writing on this blog is of the 'hey check this out - Yuck!' variety.  But, hey, yuck.

Like the Narrinyeri, the tribes in the west of Victoria had more than one form of disposal of the dead.1 The body of an ordinary person was corded, the knees upon the chest, in an opossum rug. Two sheets of bark served as a coffin, and it was buried head to the east. If, however, there was no time to dig a grave, a funeral pyre was prepared and the body laid on it, head to the east; any bones which remained were pulverised and scattered about. If, however, it were the body of a married woman, her husband put the calcined bones in a little bag and carried them till the bag was worn out or he married again, when it was burned. Persons of either sex who died by violence were eaten by their adult relatives; the bones and intestines, however, were burnt. This custom they declared to be a mark of respect to the dead.

The reason for disposing of the body through eating it - at least in terms of the peoples from Brisbane and Maryborough regions - is explained practically by Thompson thus:

If it was decided to eat the body, all partook without limitation; it was eaten in the case of well-known warriors, magicians, people killed in battle, or women dying suddenly in good condition ; and the purpose of the rite is said to be to prevent the spirit from annoying the living and to dispose of the corpse, so that survivors were not troubled by its decomposition.

Many factors went into determining if a corpse was eaten or not; the primary factor appears to be age:

At Port Darwin children up to two are eaten ; from two to ten they are buried and a decorated post put up; young men or women are rolled in bark and their bodies put in trees; old people are exposed on the ground and then buried. After two months the bones are exhumed and put in a tree, and finally buried in a small hole about two feet deep.

The bodily fluids of the corpse also held certain import to certain aboriginal peoples; it did not appear to engender the squimishness which would be exhibited by most Westerners.  One of the major reasons someone would actually interact with the body - or parts of a body - of a deceased person was because the body seemed to still possess a power of sort:

Cannibalism, as we have seen, is sometimes inspired by fear, and Roth says that he cannot discover that the desire to acquire the qualities of the deceased is anywhere the object of the ceremony. Howitt, however, states in positive terms that the young men of the Kuinmurbura would stand beneath the burial stage of a great warrior, and stand underneath in order to let the products of decomposition fall upon them and transfer to them some of the strength and fighting power of the dead man.

There are countless beliefs in western culture which suggest that such a relationship to a body whose soul has shifted off this mortal coil is not that unusual.  Reliquaries spring to mind.  So does Ted Williams frozen head in an Arizona cryogenics tank.