Die Anthropophagie

An ethnographic study written in the late 19th century. It examines habitual cannibalism as a cultural practice—excluding famine-driven cases—across prehistory, classical sources, European folklore, and contemporary societies worldwide. The work assembles evidence, classifies motives (vengeance, ritual, magic, social law), maps geographic distribution, and suggests a gradual decline alongside expanding European influence. The opening of the study lays out this scope and method, then moves swiftly into evidence. It first debates prehistoric cannibalism via cave finds and cut-marked human bones (Belgium, France, Italy, Iberia, Germany), citing scholars like Spring, Garrigou, Regnault, Piette, and others to argue at least plausible ceremonial or nutritive consumption (notably brain and marrow). It next surveys “survivals” in myth and folklore—from Greek legends (Polyphemus, Tantalus, Atreus) and European witch tales to Slavic, Finnic, and Turkic stories—and shows living superstitions that attribute power or healing to human blood and organs, with modern cases of grave violation and battlefield organ-eating as grim parallels. A concise historical chapter gathers classical testimonies (Herodotus, Strabo, Porphyry, Sallust, Juvenal, Jerome) to bridge antiquity and the present. The regional survey then begins: in the Malay Archipelago it details the Batta’s legally sanctioned cannibalism and rarer practices among Dajaks and Philippine groups (Manobo ritual heart-eating, outcast Asuan families, head-taker customs), while on the Asian mainland it notes only sporadic, famine-driven or rumored cases. Entering Africa, it documents West African practices from Sierra Leone to the Niger Delta—including multiple eyewitness accounts of killings and open sale or cooking of human flesh in Bonny, Okrika, and Old Calabar—and in equatorial West Africa reports on the Fan, where cannibalism extends to trading in corpses and grave-robbing.