When the police entered the house of an individual, who was up till then just mildly suspicious, they were not prepared for what they found inside. They were not prepared to find severed heads in the fridge, body parts strewn across the kitchen, decapitated fingers and phallus in a kettle, and more bags in the closet. On deeper inspection, they found that Jeffrey Dahmer’s house was full of people—only they were dead, cooked, and partially eaten.
The world responded in utter horror. It was unlike anything people had ever seen before. Sure, they had seen serial killers before. But they had not seen someone so supposedly demented that he would cook and cannibalize fellow men.
But was their surprise and shock justified? Because humans have been known to do that for a long time.
Cavemen ate reindeer and woolly mammoth—that much we know from the paintings of them hunting down these giant beasts. But that wasn’t all they ate—and a recent study has revealed that. The Neanderthals, some 40,000 years ago, were feasting not just with each other but on each other. This revelation came courtesy of their bones that have now been found: many showed marks of having suffered cuts in places where flesh was removed, indicating that they were butchered for consumption. Researchers say that the evidence of cannibalism is irrefutable.
Interestingly, this was also said about the doomed Franklin Expedition—that was when Sir John Franklin set out with a large crew to find the “North-Western Passage,” aboard the HMS Terror and Erebus. Neither the ships nor the men came back—in fact, the ships that had disappeared in 1813 were found only some years ago, in 2016, somewhere near Canada.
However, even as far back as 1813, people had conjectured that the ships’ crew had cannibalized each other. Noted Englishmen like Charles Dickens had angrily refuted this claim—based on no evidence and the belief that “Englishmen” could never do such a thing.
Of course, Dickens was proven wrong when researchers found the bodies of the crew, bearing marks very similar to that of the Neanderthals: knife marks on the bone, which clearly indicated that flesh had been removed.
Perhaps most appalling of all is the fact that scientists don’t really see cannibalism in a bad light. In fact, they say that cannibalism is inevitable—and that climate change might lead us to the situation. According to a Swedish scientist, it is just “selfish” prejudice against our own flesh that stops us from feasting on humans. A recent development in the “human flesh industry” makes us wonder if he was right after all.
That leaves us with just one question . . .
We know that there were cultures where people would eat the flesh of their enemies in victory. We know that indigenous cultures, cavemen, and even Englishmen have tasted their brother’s flesh. The siege of Leningrad saw people eating human meat in the 1940s. More recently, in the North Korean Famine of 2013, people also engaged in cannibalism. But these were practices of ritual—or extreme need. Or, as in the case of Dahmer, a case of mental disturbance of the highest order.
Could someone in their right mind, who knows right from wrong and has food in the fridge, do it? Could someone like you do it?
And how medically safe is it?
Medical science says it isn’t bad at all. Cooked human meat is no different than cooked non-human meat. However, the brain should be avoided. There are people in Papua New Guinea who ritualistically cannibalize their dead relatives. They paid the hefty price of eating dead human brains: a kuru outbreak. Kuru is a sickness that can be classified as a mix between mad cow disease and laughing sickness. But perhaps it’s fitting that people who were mad enough to eat their dead relatives should end up laughing like a madman and then dying from it.
Some movies have been known to promote the idea as an acceptable one. Hannibal Lecter was shown to be one swell individual whose class and culture somehow justified his psychotic desire for human flesh. Other movies have tried to do this too: set up very un-heroic characters as heroic, or, as they call it these days, “badass.” Another example would be Thenns, in the wildly popular show Game of Thrones, who were depicted as “great warriors”—the implication being that eating human flesh made them so.
But there have also been other movies that have provided a much more nuanced view on the matter. Cannibal Holocaust is one such example—and don’t let the name fool you. This movie from an Italian director followed a group of white tourists who go looking for their friends on an island famously inhabited by cannibals. Every step of the way, they find evidence that the team had been killed and eaten by the indigenous tribe. Eventually, they find a tape, bring it back, and settle down to watch it.
What they see gives them a whole other perspective. The tape reveals how the team of researchers had been “setting up” the indigenous tribes as “savages” by clever editing, provoking and attacking them, and even raping an indigenous woman to see how the locals would react. Eventually, the locals do react. And it’s bloody.
This movie is widely regarded as one of the most disturbing movies for viewers to watch—and rightly so. But what’s disturbing about this movie isn’t the grotesque violence or bloodshed (which is relatively tame compared to movies like A Serbian Film), but how a revelation of the truth can make us completely change tack and think about the binaries of “good and evil” in a totally different light.
Sure you can. But you cannot dismiss the moral side of the story even after knowing the full history of human taste for human flesh and the medical nonissue of such. It’s safe to say that cases of cannibalism are few and far between—although we have seen a surge in ritualistic cannibalism of late. Satanic rituals are often accompanied by cannibalism. It should also be noted that incidents like the Franklin Expedition and Jeffrey Dahmer weren’t so simple as they look—there were other entities at play.
Find out more about these hidden truths by joining the Get Wisdom Forum today. And relax, we don’t condone cannibalism here—but we’ll give you a helping hand in matters concerning spiritualism and divine wisdom.
Emily Scott writes about creativity, technology, spirituality, health, fitness, fashion, education, literature and everything that needs to be pondered on. She has been passionate about writing from an early age, which can be seen through the articles, blogs, research papers she has been delivering.