Shah - Three Essays

Tahirshah.com

Essays

The Legacy of Arab Science

Cannibalism: Its Just Meat

The Kumbh Mela: Greatest Show on Earth

Books

Casablanca Blues

Eye Spy

Scorpion Soup

Timbuctoo

Travels With Myself

In Arabian Nights

The Caliphs House

House of the Tiger King

In Search of King Solomons Mines

Trail of Feathers

Sorcerers Apprentice

Beyond the Devils Teeth

An Essay

TAHIR SHAH

SECRETUM MUNDI PUBLISHING

MMXIII

TAHIR SHAH

Secretum Mundi Publishing

3rd Floor, 36 Langham Street, London W1W 7AP, United Kingdom

http://www.secretum-mundi.com/

Cover design by www.designbliss.nl

First published

Secretum Mundi edition, 2013

978-1-78301-133-9

TAHIR SHAH

Tahir Shah asserts the right to be identified as the Author of the Work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

A CIP catalog record for this title is available from the British Library.

Visit the authors website at: http://www.tahirshah.com/

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The protagonist of the novel I have just written is a surgeon who develops a secret delight in eating human eyes. The more of them he devours, the more he begins to realize that human flesh and eyes in particular are a kind of manna sent from Heaven. And whats more, he comes to understand that, when eaten, eye tissue has an astonishing and ameliorating effect on the human psyche. He doesnt understand why were not all scoffing down our friends and neighbours as research suggests our ancient ancestors probably did.

Last night, while sitting in bed, I read my wife a random passage from the work, which is called Eye Spy. The main character had just sucked out a drug addicts eyes in Paris. Clasping hands to her cheeks, my wife let out a shrill scream and then exclaimed:

You cant publish that!

Why not?

Because people will be horrified.

Who will?

Everyone will, she said.

Cannibalism has been described as the last taboo, and is the one that seems to shock the masses more than anything else. Its right up there with incest, cold-blooded murder and human sacrifice. In researching my novel, I have done a great deal of background reading on the subject, and have found myself wondering constantly why we regard it with such disdain after all dead people are just meat, arent they?

I think the answer lies in the way our society has structured itself around great monolithic pillars of right and wrong. An advanced culture has to lay down certain ground rules, without which a kind of disintegration begins to occur or, rather, without which advancement cant take place. It may seem like obvious stuff, but Id argue that it isnt obvious at all.

As I see it, thinking that cannibalism is wrong is a hugely sophisticated idea, one that took millennia to become ingrained in human civilization. After all, most animals are quite happy to eat their own kind. I found a list of almost two thousand species online that regularly gulp down their spouses, their young, or those around them. With the exception of apes perhaps, the animal kingdom doesnt have anything the majority of us would regard as real civilization. And so, I suppose we can draw a baseline under our society and say, We are civilized because we dont eat people.

The same cant be said for a great many of the generations which came before us. Theres no doubt at all that ancient man ate his fellow men in a great many places and circumstances.

Ill come to that in a moment.

But all the more interesting is that cannibalism was, it seems, a tolerated taboo across almost all societies until relatively recent times. Its a subject that is nailed to the bedrock of our world, infused within our cultures through folklore and religion. There are plentiful examples of blood-gorging cannibalistic deities, for instance, whose actions provide cautionary tales for mankind.

The Greek Myths are an entertainment often poised on the edge of acceptability, as much as they are a body of folklore. Their shock value makes them compulsive reading. But however depraved the taboo-shattering tales are, the Classical Myths are always tempered with a kind of righteousness. The bad guy (or I should say the bad deity) usually comes a cropper on the grand scale of things, and hes taught a lesson thats passed down to us all.

The Greek god Kronos was an example of a deity seemingly unfazed by the thought of eating his fellow kind. Fearful that his own children would usurp him, he gobbled up five of them in a row. Kronos was married to his own sister (itself an example of incest being rather less taboo than cannibalism), and she conspired to hide their sixth child Zeus in fear that he would be gobbled up, too.

In his wisdom, the young deity fed his father an emetic, which caused him to regurgitate Zeus siblings. Happily, and rather amazingly, they all survived unharmed.

Another strange cannibalistic tale from the Greek Myths concerns Pelops. He was killed and stewed up by his father, Tantalus, who fed the meat to the gods in an elaborate banquet. Having caught on to what was set before them, the deities didnt touch the meal, none except for Demeter who ate part of the boys cooked shoulder. On Zeus orders, the flesh and bones were boiled up once again and, the shoulder having been recreated from ivory, the boy was somehow cooked back into his original form. Tantalus (from whose name we get the word tantalize) was punished by being made to stand in a pool of pristine water, with the branches of a fruit tree hanging over him. Whenever he stooped down to drink, the water receded, and whenever he reached up for the fruit, the branches rose up into the air.

For all their rip-roaring action and intrigue, the Classics are in a realm of their own, one adrift on a sea of fantasy. They fall under the same umbrella as Hansel and Gretel (if you recall, the witch in the story ate little boys), and Sweeney Todd, the demon barber of Fleet Street. But the most memorable thing among recent cannibalistic phenomena was undoubtedly Dr. Hannibal Lecter of TheSilence of the Lambs fame.

Lecter sends shivers down our collective spines for the way he preys on the audiences raw fear, while operating with savvy and audacious method. The genius of the story is, of course, using a cannibal to catch a cannibal. This, coupled with the fact that Lecter was a connoisseur of high culture, made him a devastatingly irresistible anti-hero.

Coming back to reality, theres no shortage of evidence that our ancient ancestors ate each other. Archaeologists and anthropologists have pinpointed examples on a global scale of primitive humans feasting on their fellow men. Despite appreciating the attention they attract for suggesting cannibalism existed at sites uncovered at their digs, archaeologists usually have a hard time in deciding what kind of man-eating actually went on. Did our ancestors really chomp away at their dead on a daily basis, or was it a practice they indulged in only during famine and during occasional bouts of warring?