TOP OF THE
FOOD CHAIN
TOP OF THE
FOOD CHAIN
Top of the food chain is a
publication that explores cannibalism in a way that doesn’t focus on the gory crimes of recent times. It simply shows examples of the subject in religious, tribal and evolutionary terms and doesn’t show it as a taboo subject. An exploration of something that at times can mean the difference between life and death and can also represent a huge religious part of the lives of people who lived thousands of years ago. The stories within this paper are all related to the subject in their own way. All of them include a reference to cannibalism, but only of them were considered a crime. In today’s educated and moral western society, when cannibalism is reported it is met with shock and disbelief as it was considered to have been a mainly third world tribal activity and a thing of the past. The following articles show that cannibalism has been present throughout history as a means of survival and religion, culture and curiosity.
C O N T E N T S
The Last Supper
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Korowai Tribe
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Feast of Men
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Fairchild FH-227D Human Sacrifice
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THE LAST SUPPER
The Last Supper (Leonardo da Vinci)
Jesus shared unleavened bread and red wine with his disciples to symbolise his body and blood
The Passover commemorated Israel’s escape from bondage in Egypt. In Exodus, the blood of the Passover lamb was painted on the doorframes, causing the plague of the firstborn to pass over their houses sparing the firstborn sons from death. The Last Supper was very significant because Jesus showed his disciples he was about to become the Passover Lamb of God. His blood would open the door to freedom. His followers would exchange slavery to sin and death for eternal life in God’s Kingdom. From Bethany Jesus sent Peter and John ahead to the Upper Room in Jerusalem to make the preparations for the Passover Feast. That evening after sunset, Jesus washed the feet of his disciples as they prepared to share in the Passover. By performing this humble act of service, Jesus demonstrated by example how they were to love one another. Today, many churches practice foot-washing ceremonies as a part of their Maundy Thursday services. Then Jesus shared the feast of Passover with his disciples saying,
“I have been very eager to eat this Passover meal with you before my suffering begins. For I tell you now that I won’t eat this meal again until it’s meaning is fulfilled in the Kingdom of God.” (Luke 22:15-16, NLT) As the Lamb of God, Jesus was about to fulfil the meaning of the Passover by giving his body to be broken and his blood to be shed in sacrifice, freeing us from sin and death. During this Last Supper, Jesus established the Lord’s Supper, or Communion, instructing his followers to continually remember his sacrifice by sharing in the elements of bread and wine: “And he took bread, and when he had given thanks, he broke it and gave it to them, saying, ‘this is my body, which is given for you. Do this in remembrance of me.’ And likewise the cup after they had eaten, saying, ‘this cup that is poured out for you is the new covenant in my blood.” (Luke 22:19-20, ESV) Later Jesus and the disciples left the Upper Room and went to the Garden of Gethsemane, where Jesus prayed in agony to God the Father. Luke’s Gospel says, “his sweat became like great drops of blood falling down to the ground.” Late that evening in Gethsemane, Jesus was betrayed with a kiss by Judas Iscariot and arrested by the Sanhedrin. He was taken to the home of Caiaphas, the High Priest, where the whole council had gathered to begin making their case against Jesus.
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The disciples all consumed part of Jesus’ ‘body’. Albeit only in spirit, the thought was there They were asked to imagine that the offerings were indeed human body parts washed down with a lashing of Holy blood. That’s not to say that I think eating human beings was suggested in the Bible, so why don’t we practice similar acts now. Cannibalism may be a taboo subject in our culture, but there are many religions which feature it embedded within their holy scripts. It may not be a direct link in The Last Supper story, but if you think about it, the suggestion is there. This example isn’t the only one to feature within the Holy Bible. Here are a few examples with references to cannibalism.
Because of the suffering that your enemy will inflict on you during the siege, you will eat the fruit of the womb, the flesh of the sons and daughters the Lord your God has given you. Even the most gentle and sensitive man among you will have no compassion on his own brother or the wife he loves or his surviving children, and he will not give to one of them any of the flesh of his children that he is eating. It will be all he has left because of the suffering your enemy will inflict on you during the siege of all your cities. The most gentle and sensitive woman among you - so sensitive and gentle that she would not venture to touch the ground with the sole of her foot - will begrudge the husband she loves and her own son or daughter the afterbirth from her womb and the children she bears. For she intends to eat them secretly during the siege and in the distress that your enemy will inflict on you in your cities. Deuteronomy 28:53-57 As the king of Israel was passing by on the wall, a woman cried to him, “Help me, my lord the king!” The king replied, “If the Lord does not help you, where can I get help for you? From the threshing floor? From the winepress?” Then he asked her, “What’s the matter?” She answered, “This woman said to me, ‘give up your son so we may eat him today, and tomorrow we’ll eat my son.’ So we cooked my son and ate him. The next day I said to her, ‘Give up your son so we may eat him,’ but she had hidden him.” 2 Kings 6:26-29
I will make them eat the flesh of their sons and daughters, and they will eat one another’s flesh during the stress of the siege imposed on them by the enemies who seek their lives. Jeremiah 19:9
Jesus said to them, “I tell you the truth, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you. Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise him up at the last day. For my flesh is real food and my blood is real drink. Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood remains in me, and I in him. John 6:53-56
KOROWAI TRIBE Until 1970, they were unaware of the existence of any people beside themselves
The Korowai are so adapted to the jungle that they have taken to the trees. Building their housing high up in the canopies. Using Stone Age tools and collecting all of their materials from the environment, they are the only tribe in the world that live in tree houses and they do so for a number of reasons. They are used as an escape from the floods, the biting insects on the rainforest floor and they offer protection from attack; but most of all it is a display of their jungle prowess. For the Korowai, the higher the house, the higher the prestige. Through knowledge, skill and ingenuity the rainforest people have mastered their environment. They live intunne with their environment and show it respect that is lost elsewhere. Their remarkable lives remind us that we are nothing without nature. They live a free life compared to our standards and rely souly on what they have in their environment. It sounds idyllic. A perfect way of living away from out the busy bustle of our twenty-first century lives. However the Korowai have a not so documented part of living that we may find disturbing. If an un-explained illness over powers a Korowai tribesman, he may whisper a fateful name with his last breath: that of another tribes-man, typically a friend or relative, who he believes is his killer. Family members at the dying man’s side know instantly what he means. He has fingered a Khakhua, a sorcerer disguised as a human. The Khakhua assassinates people by eating out their guts, replacing them with ash as the victim sleeps. The tribesmen hunt down the Khakhua. Whether he is comrade, kinsman or child; or whether he screams his innocence all the way until death, none of that matters. He is tied up, slaughtered, hacked apart and cooked like a pig, every morsel to be devoured with pleasure, especially the scrumptious brain. The Korowai don’t eat humans. They eat Khakhua. Or so they will tell you. This is part of their way of life and has always been so. It’s as natural to them as going out for a drink with a friend is for us. It’s not classed as cannibalism as such to them; it’s just what needs to be done when they believe there is a Khakhua amongst them. It has been part of their culture since the start of their tribe, it just seems odd to us as outsiders because of our own culture; but who are we to try and change their way of life? There are many tribes living within the rainforests that have never had contact with anyone else but themselves. There could be more unidentified tribes that also practice in cannibalism; but hopefully, we never make contact with them, we should leave them to their own way of remote living. They are the last truly free humans.
FEAST OF MEN
15 As you turn off the Kings Road in to Vaileka in northern Viti Levu you come across a neatly kept grave on your right, 12 kilometres before the town. The neatly-inscribed grave stone and serene surroundings belie the terror with the Fijian chief buried there held sway over the area more than 200 years ago. Ratu Udre Udre, a tribal chieftain in the area, was the last-known cannibal in Fiji and was known to practice this gruesome feat even after influential chiefs like Ratu Seru Cakobau ceded Fiji to Great Britain and accepted Christianity. Nobody knows exactly when we islanders came to the South Pacific. However, based on archaeological evidence, the occupation of Fiji began between 1600 to 1200 BC. Samoa, Hawaii and New Zealand were later occupied by the Polynesians (around 800 AD). Fiji is widely considered to be the crossroad of the South Pacific. The physical features of the Fijians resembled that of the negroid race of Melanesia but adopted the Polynesian culture instead. Historians claimed that that there were two waves of migration in Fiji; the Polynesians first settled on the island and later came the Melanesians. Fijians adopted cannibalism from their long voyage at sea. The lack of adequate nutrition forced these sailors to consume the dead in order to survive. When these seafarers landed in Fiji, cannibalism became part of the Fijian diet. Not to mention, the gradual increase of human population on the island led to the competition for natural resources, property and women. Early historical accounts from Christian missionaries like John Hunt and William Cross depicted the gruesome and inhumane-like behaviour of the early Fijians. An account in John Hunt’s book “A missionary among cannibals” (1859) where he experienced the savages digging up of the recently buried graves for human consumption. In the book “Fiji and the Fijians”(1858) by Wesleyan missionary Reverend Thomas Williams, he witnessed a chief’s wife from a small island of Lakeba who ran away in the middle of the night. The chief ordered his trackers to look for her the next day. A couple of days later, she was brought back to Lakeba. He had his wife’s arms chopped off and cooked. Later that evening, he called on her and as she sat across from his dining table while she watched him consumed her arms in horror. She died a couple of days later after she was christianly baptised.
He is reputed to be the world’s most prolific cannibal
Ratu Udre Udre’s tomb
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Ratu Udre Udre, a tribal chieftain in the area, was the last-known cannibal in Fiji and was known to practice this gruesome feat even after influential chiefs like Ratu Seru Cakobau ceded Fiji to Great Britain and accepted Christianity. He is reputed to be the world’s most prolific cannibal. During the 19th century, Ratu Udre Udre reportedly ate more than 999 people. He kept a stone for each body he ate, which were placed alongside his tomb in Rakiraki, in northern Viti Levu. According to Udre Udre’s son, the chief would eat every part of his victims, preserving what he couldn’t eat in one sitting for consumption later. While it is believed that Udre Udre ate over 9000 people, this would have been impossible considering the time it would have taken per person. Actual estimates from the count of gravestones near his grave, the count is near 872. The National Museum in Suva has on display part of Udre Udre’s dining table, with several of the actual ceremonial forks used by Fijians to eat human flesh. The excellent Lonely Planet guide to Fiji gives the following story. In 1849, some time after Ratu Udreudre’s death, the Reverend Richard Lyth, who was staying in Cokova in northeastern Viti Levu, saw a long line of stones placed together in a row. Each stone represented one of the chief’s victims and amounted to a personal tally of at least 872 corpses, in addition to any eaten in his youth. The Reverend recounted a conversation with Udre Udre’s son Ravatu. “Ravatu assured me that his father eat all this number of human beings - he was wont to add a stone to the row for each one he received - they were victims killed in war he eat them all himself - he gave to none. However much he had on hand - it was cooked and re-cooked (by which it was preserved) until it was all consumed - he would keep it in a box so that he might lose none ... he eat but little else, very little vegetable - and being an enormous eater he was able to get through a great deal.”
Fa i r c h i l d
FH-227D
“I felt very, very humiliated. My dignity was on the floor, having to grab a piece of my friend and eat it in order to survive.”
On Friday 13th October of 1972, a Uruguayan plane, which was carrying 45 passengers to Chile, most of whom were students and rugby players, crashed in the Andes Mountains. Twelve of the people died in the crash. The survivors not only had to withstand the hunger and the fearful Mountains, but also 30 degree-below-zero temperatures during the night. They tried to survive with the scarce food reserves they had until being rescued, but they lost their hope when heard that the search had ceased on the radio. Desperate owing to the lack of food and being physically exhausted, they were forced to feed themselves on their death partners to keep on living. Finally fed up with the extremely low temperatures and the avalanche threats, as well as anguished by the continuous deaths of their partners and the bad rescue prospects, two of them decided to cross the huge mountains to reach Chile.
A still from the 1993 film ‘Alive
Dr Roberto Canessa when rescued (right) and in 2012 (left)
Uruguayan Air Force Flight 571
Dr Roberto Canessa was among the people who lived through the crash of Uruguayan Air Force Flight 571 in the remote Andes Mountains between Chile and Argentina on October 13, 1972. They would eventually be rescued 72 days later after Roberto and another passenger trekked for ten days to get help but in the meantime they faced starvation in the hellish conditions which saw temperatures plunge as low as minus 40°C at night. Roberto, now 59, recalls: “I felt I was taking advantage of my dead friends. But then I thought, ‘If I die, I wouldn’t have liked to have given my body for the project of life of other people’ it was a source of protein and fat the only source we had. But it was repugnant. Through the eyes of our civilised society, it was a disgusting decision. I felt very, very humiliated. My dignity was on the floor, having to grab a piece of my friend and eat it in order to survive. And at that moment I was saying, ‘Is it better to die?’ But then I thought of my mother and wanted to do my best to get back to see her. I swallowed a piece, and it was a huge step — after which nothing happened.” Of the plane’s 45 passengers, who included Roberto’s rugby team, the Old Christians, 12 died in the impact, another five had died by the next morning, and another a week later. On the 17th day another eight were killed in an avalanche. In the weeks that followed, another three died. But the outlook for the 16 who lived on was just as bleak. Stuck 11,800 feet up in brutal mountainous terrain, they were all assumed dead by rescue teams. And the families of those on the plane had all but given up hope until more than two months later, when news trickled through that two bedraggled men had emerged from the icy wilderness to raise the alarm. Their story was immortalised in the 1993 film Alive, and Roberto now an eminent paediatric cardiologist says memory of the freezing conditions have remained with him. He says: “The cold on your bones was like someone pressing down with pliers. We were in a lifeless environment with only snow and stars up there and we felt the need of life, which we knew was out of the mountains. We were in a place not for humans and which we didn’t belong to. The mountains are just wind, snow, avalanches and rocks. The place we belonged to was like a plane that goes on and we were left back.”
Crash site of flight 571
“I thank God for the life I’ve had and look back and think of the memories of my friends who died. The memory of our friends has been respected by us having tried hard to succeed in life because of them. My children are very similar to me they all have a great sense of humour. They say, ‘Today, you cannot speak to Daddy because he is the hero of the Andes. He knows everything and he knows what to do. We’ll wait for him to be a normal daddy!’ When people ask my son what it is like to be the son of a hero, he says, ‘I don’t know, I wasn’t born at that time.’”
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Roberto, who was then a medical student, says it was thinking about his mum that helped him through — rather than his girlfriend Laura, who he went on to marry. They now have three children. He reveals that he battled for survival so that his mum would not go through the same anguish of loss that he felt in losing his friends. “If you die yourself, then that’s one thing, but if you cause suffering to someone else, that was something I couldn’t stand. I did my best for her. It kept me going.” And having lived through the ordeal in the Chilean Andes, Roberto who today lives in Montevideo, Uruguay, has dedicated his life to helping others. In his work as a doctor, he likens the ultrasound scans of newborn babies to his memories of gazing out of the windows of the wrecked plane where the 16 survivors took refuge. But from that inhospitable prison, looking ahead to 2012 seemed all but impossible. “When I was in the Andes in 1972, there is no way I could have looked ahead 40 years to now. I am thankful to God for the chances I had that others didn’t. Sometimes I try to imagine what it would have been like if all 45 of us had lived instead of just 16. But I have tried to live for my friends who didn’t make it out of the mountains. It woke me up to life. When there’s a sunny day, you enjoy it without complaining. You enjoy everything after being in the mountains with no water, no bed, no laughing. I realised that we receive more in life than what we need and do less than what we can. It’s up to us to be happy. We always complain about being left aside. When we realised the search had been called off, a friend of mine said to me, this is good news because now we have no doubt about whether to wait for the rescuers or go out of the mountains ourselves. We see people in life waiting to be helped because they are unhappy; their happiness is dependent upon someone else. “We knew the search had been called off. The only thing we could do was to buy time. It’s a part of the experience, but it wasn’t the most important thing about surviving. When you’re safe in civilised society, you can’t imagine what it is like to be in the situation we were in. We were freezing and you feel it in your bones.” But, he adds, despite the constant focus on the subject, it wasn’t just eating their dead friends that enabled them to survive. For the camaraderie, which the Old Christians rugby club had instilled in the men during their playing days served, them well in the Andes. He says: “We survived and were able to walk out of the mountains because of our teamwork. Leaving the Andes, it was like a trip to heaven. Slowly, all your instincts come back. Your instinct on the mountain was just survival. All kinds of our emotions had just been locked up. You become a machine you only care about your next step and whether your friends around you can give you heat. And all you can think about is what to eat, where you can shelter and to think about your dreams. You regress to the most basic form of life.” Yet Roberto says he feels inspired, not haunted, by what he suffered in the mountains. He continues: “I think life is very simple. We make it complicated with lots of irrelevant factors. We forget what life means until your plane crashes and you’re stranded in the mountains and you realise how fortunate you were. It makes you appreciate the time you lost complaining and not enjoying life. My wife and I are a very normal couple. Life goes on, I play tennis and I am enjoying life.”
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HUMAN SACRIFICE A religious practice characteristic of pre-Columbian Aztec civilization
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Religious theories have been proposed explaining the practice as the product of religious beliefs about the need to sustain the universe through the spilling of human blood
After Columbus found the New World, hordes of Spanish colonists settled in the West Indies. Many of the colonists were ex-soldiers no longer able to find work in Europe. They eagerly left to stake a claim in the Indies for Spain. They travelled westwards again, toward the new frontier. The age the Spanish Conquistadores began. The Aztecs were their most imposing foes. The Aztecs considered themselves chosen people of the gods. Their chief god was Huitzilpochtli who represented the sun, the warrior, and fought the Aztecs’ battles with the other gods to ensure the Aztecs’ survival. Huitzilpochtli needed food to nourish him so he could continue to fight. His preferred food was human blood. In order to keep feeding Huitzilpochtli, the Aztecs warred continuously. Their army was of the utmost importance, and they had several different factions of warriors. The Knights of the Eagle and the Knights of the Jaguar were two such bodies of troops. These were the men who went forth to capture suitable human sacrifices. Sacrifices were taken to the tops of the Aztec pyramids and laid upon a flat stone. There, their chests were cut open and their hearts were ripped out. The bodies were then thrown down the steps of the pyramid. The Spaniards who witnessed this violence were horrified. More than blood lust prompted these ritual sacrifices. The Aztecs believed in a concept of “tonalli” or the “animating spirit”. Tonalli was believed to be carried in the blood, and since blood flowed from the heart, this was the organ that was offered up to sate the god’s appetite. It was believed that without these sacrifices, all motion would stop including the movement of the sun. The Aztecs’ human sacrifices were intended to keep the sun from halting its orbit. Also, the Aztecs did not have livestock. They practiced cannibalism on their captives. After the sacrifices tumbled down the stairs, the Aztec priests removed the limbs and cooked them. The hands and thighs were delicacies. Estimates suggest the Aztec royalty sacrificed 20,000 people a year. This royalty was made up of a priest class. The priests directly served the Chosen Speaker. In Tenochtitlan, the Aztec capital city there were five thousand priests. The priests painted their bodies black in order to symbolize religion and war. Their hair was matted with blood from human sacrifices. They filed their teeth to sharp points. The Aztecs never fully conquered the surrounding states because they needed a continual supply of sacrifices for Huitzilpochtli. When the Spaniards came to conquer the Aztecs, they found numerous local allies. Even so, the Aztecs were not easily defeated, and much of their legacy is remembered.