#8 - How to Serve Man - Sacrifice & Cannibalism, pt. 1

Hey everybody, this is Darryl Cooper and you're listening to the Mardermade Podcast. You're about to hear how to serve man, an exploration of the nature and practice of ritual cannibalism. This episode was inspired by my friend Danielle E's History on Fire Podcast series on the Spanish Conquest to the Aztec Empire. If you enjoy this series or this podcast in general, please consider subscribing to my sub-stack page where you'll find supplemental writings and exclusive podcast episodes available only to subscribers for just $5 a month or $50 a year can be found at www.mardermade.substack.com. And all of you who are already contributing, I really appreciate you allowing me to do this. Hope you guys don't like this one. It's a little dark. Here we go. I can content to die for my beliefs. So cut off my head and make me a martyr. The people will always remember it. No. They won't forget. God is a thought. I'm going to tell you a little bit about the story. One of my very favorite authors of fiction, Ursula Laguin has this wonderful little short story called The One Who Walk Away from Omellus. Laguin begins her little story. It's just a few short pages, a beautiful little story. And she begins by describing the idyllic fictional town called Omellus and all of its joyful inhabitants as they're preparing for a festival and the story opens up. Now in the town of Omellus, the utopian town, no one wants for anything, no one is oppressed. The families get along and the families love one another. They love each other. The community is very cohesive. Everything works. The story opens. It's the festival of summer. It's just beginning. And so the seaside town is decorated for celebration. All the men are working, you know, contentedly putting their hands to their tasks while mothers with babies smile and chat with one another in the park. Groups of people dance and play instruments, you know, feel in the rest. However you want to fill it in. People are dressed in bright colors and children are running trailing streamers behind them. And yet, Laguin writes to us, "They were not simple folk, though they were happy, but we do not say the words of cheer much anymore. All smiles had become archaic." Given a description such as this, one tends to make certain assumptions. Given a description such as this, one tends to look next for the king, mounted on a splendid stallion and surrounded by his noble knights, or perhaps on a golden litter borne by great muscled slaves. But there was no king. They did not use swords or keep slaves. They were not barbarians. I do not know the rules and laws of their society, but I suspect that they were singularly few. As they did without monarchy and slavery, so they also got on without the stock exchange, the advertisement, the secret police and the bomb. Yet I repeat that these were not simple folk. Not dulcet shepherds, noble savages, bland utopians. They were not less complex than us. And then Laguin makes very plain to us that she's dealing in fantasy. She admits it in the story. She says that her illustration here of the town of Omellus, it might not suit every reader. So she encourages us, the readers, to imagine the town and its people. However, we need to, to make the utopia the way our utopia would be. She encourages us to do that. And so as we follow the joyous procession of parade goers and festival goers near to its end, we're caught up in the reverie of no place. And we're almost wanting to willfully ignore the impossibility of this vision because it's so beautiful when Laguin, the dark sorceress, turns it around us and reveals her magic. This is why Laguin is so good. Do you believe? It's a place where you can find the place where you can find the place where you can find the place where you can find the place where you can find the place where you can find the place. It's a place where you can find the place where you can find the place where you can find the place One of them may come up and kick the child to make it stand up. The others never come close, but peer in at it with frightened disgusted eyes. The food bowl and the water jug are hastily filled. The door is locked. The eyes disappear. The people at the door never say anything, but the child, who has not always lived in the toolroom and can remember sunlight and its mother's voice sometimes speaks. "I will be good," it says. "Please let me out. I will be good." They never answer. The child used to scream for help at night and cry a good deal, but now it only makes a kind of whining "eha, eha," and it speaks less and less often. It is so thin that there are no calves to its legs. It's belly protrudes. It lives on a half bowl of cornmeal in Greece a day. It is naked. Its buttocks and thighs are a mass of festered sores as it sits in its own excrement continually. They all know it is there, all the people of Omelos. Some of them have come to see it. Others are content merely to know that it is there. They all know that it has to be there. And some of them understand why and some do not, but they all understand that their happiness, the beauty of their city, the tenderness of their friendships, the health of their children, the wisdom of their scholars, the skill of their makers, even the abundance of their harvest and the kindly weather of their skies, depend wholly on this child's abominable misery. This is usually explained to children when they are between 8 and 12, whenever they seem capable of understanding. And most of those who come to see the child are young people, though often enough an adult comes or comes back to see the child. No matter how well the matter has been explained to them, these young spectators are always shocked and sickened at the sight. They feel disgust, which they have thought themselves superior to. They feel anger, outrage, impotence despite all the explanations. They would like to do something for the child, but there is nothing they can do. If the child were brought up into the sunlight out of that vile place, if it were cleaned and fed and comforted, that would be a good thing, indeed, but if it were done, in that day and hour, all the prosperity and beauty and delight of O'Mailas would wither and be destroyed. Those are the terms. And to exchange all the goodness and grace of every life in O'Mailas for that single small improvement, to throw away the happiness of thousands for the chance of the happiness of one, that would be to let guilt within the walls indeed. The terms are strict and absolute. There may not even be a kind word spoken to the child. Often the young people go home in tears or in a tearless rage when they have seen the child and faced this terrible [BLANK_AUDIO] paradox. They may brood over it for weeks or years, but as time goes on, they begin to realize that even if the child could be released, it would not get much good of its freedom. A little vague pleasure of warmth and food no doubt but little more. It is too degraded and imbiciled to know any real joy. It has been afraid too long to ever be free of fear. Its habits are too uncouth for it to respond to humane treatment. Indeed, after so long it would probably be wretched without the walls about it to protect it, and darkness for its eyes and its own excrement to sit in. Their tears at the bitter injustice dry when they begin to perceive the terrible justice of reality and to accept it. Yet it is their tears and anger, the trying of their generosity and the acceptance of their helplessness, which are perhaps the true source of the splendour of their lives. There is no vapid, irresponsible happiness. They know that they, like the child, are not free. They know compassion. It is the existence of the child and their knowledge of its existence that makes possible the nobility of their architecture, the poignancy of their music, the profundity of their science. It is because of the child that they are so gentle with their own children. They know that if the wretched one were not there sniveling in the dark, the other one, the flute player, could make no joyful music as the young riders line up in their beauty for the race and the sunlight of the first morning of summer. Now, do you believe in them? Are they not now more credible? I love the Gwen. And what's wonderful about a story like this is that it works at almost any level that you feel like playing at. You can read it psychologically. That's a pretty easy one. Every one of us has to subdue the free and naive children that we once were in order to survive and remain presentable in the adult world. You can read it politically because every society seems to grease the skids of internal cohesion by projecting its collective hatred and hostility out onto another either outside or at the bottom of their own society. Or you can read it culturally. Every culture has skeletons hiding in plain sight, which if you strip them of the familiarity that we've developed for them over a lifetime of close contact and indoctrination, they would appear to us as monstrous as they, in fact, very often are. Today's secular activists in the West are morally and ethically appalled that the Christian resistance to things like gay marriage and abortion, right? But almost nobody seems all that concerned about the fact that those Christians all gather on Sundays to worship a victim of torture and execution and then pretend to eat his flesh and drink his blood. A good part of Western civilization gets together weekly to vicariously practice what is arguably the single most powerful taboo we still have in place and everybody is fine with that part. They almost never mention it. And then of course you can keep going with it because the psychological and cultural and political readings of the story are all interrelated and nested within one another. Just to take one example, all parents have to suppress the early oral fixation and their young children, right? And this means breaking the child to a degree and forcing it to either repress its behavior or find some sort of more acceptable substitute. We're going to get into this later by the way. I'm just using as an example now. If you have a very, very young child and he bites somebody, you know, gently correct him. An older child is going to be punished or counseled, but an adult who bites even in the middle of a fight is going to be seen as just almost uniridimably uncivilized, right? In other words, you've got a psychological stage that's got to be overcome before we allow a person to enter into the political world of adult relations. And the degree to which we successfully repress or find substitutes to carry us past that stage and what forms those substitutes end up taking, that both draws from and creates the content of our culture. You know, think for example, just of how much effort we put in, especially when you think of the self-conscious morays of the upper classes or the middle classes who imitate them. Think of how much effort we put in to making eating, eating a meal as unlike what it actually is as possible. And eating is what we're here to talk about. So, you know, we're here to talk about cannibalism. So let's get into it. The first thing that I really need to do at the outset here is to define the scope of what it is I'm trying to do. This is not going to be a broad survey of every type and instance of cannibalism that's ever existed. I'm trying to go narrow and deep. We're not going to talk about cannibalism born out of desperation. We're not interested here in the aberrant acts of a few psychotics. You know, the fascination that stories about cannibalism from the Donner party or Hannibal Lecter, the fascination that those stories have for us does tell us something. There's information there. But the violation that they represent, the fact of the violation is part of the fascination. These aren't acts that enjoy general social approval. In these next two episodes, this one here on cannibalism and the next one on sacrifice are about social violence, institutionalized violence that everyone or almost everyone in a society either accepts as legitimate or at least doesn't consider it worth energetically opposing. I have heard people raise the question whether something like car accident deaths in the modern world can be classified as a type of sacrifice to some abstract god of convenience or economics. What they'll say is that we can predict with close accuracy how many people are going to die this year and the next year and the next year on into the future from car accidents. If we know with apodictic certainty that about 30,000 people are going to die in vehicles next year and that highway driving is essentially a game of chicken where we all compete to see who's going to draw those 30,000 short straws, how is that not a sacrifice? And fine, whatever, I get the point. I guess it makes sense if you're interested in the statistics of it, but despite the best efforts of Ballard and Cronenburg, nobody's constructing a cultural system out of car accidents and their victims. Of course, most drivers don't die in car accidents, just as most people in Mesoamerica were not sacrificed in Eden. And when it does happen, in any case, it's the killers, not the victims who actually remain behind, to act in the world and to apprehend and interpret what they've done. But that's about where the parallels in between those two things. I get where they're coming from, but I don't like it as an example. A modern person who kills another person in an auto accident might end up in therapy for years. And even then is not likely to ever be completely whole again. But I'm not aware of any King's torturers or executioners ending up in therapy, unless you count confession, which maybe we should, I suppose. But that's a different episode. I'm not aware of any tribesmen. Let's do this. I'm not aware of any primitive tribesmen ending up on a psychiatrist couch talking about this. This is from volume three of America's featherment, social history of the races of mankind. And he, well, you'll see, it's a description of the herons of the Great Lake region, the heron natives having returned with a captive after a revenge raid. The captive selected as a trophy of war to gratify their vindictive spirit was subjected to the most inhuman and even more inquisitional torture. The nails of their fingers and toes were torn off by force. The three principal fingers used for drawing the bow were lopped off. The skull was denuded of its hairy scalp and coals of fire and hot ashes were heaped upon the bleeding head or hot seething gum was poured upon it. Sometimes he was made to walk across a great number of fires with his body and feet entirely naked between two files of tormentors who struck him with burning firebrands and rubbed his legs with heated axes. At other times they threw hot water on his back to increase his pain and touched his fingers and in his sexual organs with burning cinders. Then they pierced his arm with a splint, drew out the nerves and tore them away by force. The captive remained entirely composed amidst all these agonizing tortures, singing, uttering threats against his fiendish executioners and giving expression to his scowling hate by jeers, scoffs and words of defiance. When the victim approached the death struggle he was placed upon a scaffold. His head was cut off, his bowels were torn out which were taken possession of by the children who tied them to a stick and exhibited them in passing through the village's trophies of victory. It is said that the body was properly dressed and cooked in a large pot and that the flesh was devoured with much relish at the public festival amidst universal merriment and rejoicing of the assembled multitude. "A story from Sierra Leone in West Africa, R.G. Barry wrote in the proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy in 1912 about the Leopards, which were a very prestigious society of warrior cannibals revered by their respective tribes, which their tribes were required to provide sacrificial victims to this Leopards society. So once they received a victim and as we go through this, no attempt through any of this is made to lessen his suffering." The Sacrificer came forward dressed in a leopard skin, and with the leopard knife cut open the victim's stomach from the center towards the right side. An assistant placed a pan under the wound, and a third inserting his hand into the wound pulled out the liver and intestines which he placed in the pan. Now came forward five others. The first placed his hand upon the wound and drew forth some fat, and four others did the same. The pan with the intestines, liver, and blood was taken away to a house. The body of the victim was carried to the piazza of the late chief's house. It now being midnight, they separated. No one was left with the victim who was still alive and chained and remained alive for some hours." I was recently listening to a psychologist lecture about post-traumatic stress disorder, and he was talking about how people can just as easily be afflicted with PTSD after doing something horrific as they can from witnessing something horrific or having something horrific happen to themselves or to someone close to them. And now obviously I'm not a psychologist, but I think I can say with some confidence that there's some cultural relativity clearly at play here. If a modern person, and not any person, but a volunteer soldier in a society that values and honors its soldiers, and gives them a lot of leeway as we do for decisions that they make on the battlefield, if somebody like that can suffer from PTSD just because he got to trigger happy in a wild firefight and ended up taking out a civilian at a distance. This does happen. People do get PTSD from things like that. You would expect pretty much every single society before about the 19th century, so the whole human species to have just long ago collapsed into a post-traumatic stupor of incapacitated grief for its lost innocence. How did we ever get anywhere? Just look at the world. Look at nature. A quick look at every animal species right on up to our closest relative, the chimpanzee. Look at one observation above all asserts itself. The unabating and forever unabating, forever and ever unabating, visceral, unhesitating violence of the world. Just think of what life is. Not this or that life form, but just life in general. Think about what it is, about how nature proceeded through the eons. For a really, really long time, there was no life. It was just for most of the history of the universe. There's no life. It's just inert matter. Billions of years when just chemistry and physics matter. If you had shown up back then and asked somebody about biology, they would not have known what the fuck you were talking about because there was no biology. Then at some point, who knows why, some of that inert matter started self-organizing, at least, that's what I'm told by people who are way smarter than I am. What did these little self-organizing proto-life forms start doing pretty much as soon as they existed? They looked around at each other and immediately started tearing one another apart, eating each other and then using the energy that they absorb from eating each other to reproduce copies of themselves. For a really, really long time, that's all there was to it. That's what happened. That's just all there was. But over time, these little buggers kept inventing new ways to kill and eat each other and new ways to avoid being killed and eaten. Now up here at the macro level of large mammals and other megafauna like ourselves, it's easy to forget sometimes what an absolute fucking nightmare life is at the microscopic level or in places like the ocean, for example. There's this really unbelievable scene in Werner Herzog's documentary "Encounters at the End of the World" where he's talking to a biologist about, well, he and a biologist are talking about this subject exactly at a research station down in Antarctica. The biologist is describing to Herzog what kind of creatures are found in the water under the ice and what life is like at the microscopic level down there. The sky, this biologist, he's very serious as he's speaking. He's not joking around. He seems, I almost said he seems disturbed, but it's not that. He seems chasened. He has the chasen look of a man who has seen something fundamental about the world that he would probably like to forget if he could, but he can't. The creatures that are down there, he says, are like science fiction creatures. They range in the way, I'm quoting him now. They range in the way they would gobble you up from slime-type blobs but creepier than science-fiction type blobs. These would have long tendrils that would ensnare you and as you try to get away from them, you just become more and more ensnared by your own actions. Then, after you would be frustrated and exhausted, then this creature would start to move in and take you apart. When you watch him describe this, he's kind of looking away from the camera and the look on his face. Like, swear to God, it looks like he's looking at the murder scene right in front of him. He goes on. Then there are these other worm-type things with horrible mandibles and jaws and just bits to rend your flesh. It is a horribly violent world that is obscure to us because we're encased in neoprene and we're much larger than that world. If you were to shrink down, many iturize into that world. It would be a horrible place to be, just horrible. This biologist is so caught up in this vision of brutality. You don't want to interrupt them. I think Herzog is the only filmmaker alive who could probably keep the interview moving at this point. He asks the biologist. He says, "And this world is a world earlier than the human world. Do you think that the human race and other mammals fled in panic from the oceans and crawled on solid land to get out of all this?" The biologist is already nodding his head. He says, "Yes, I think undoubtedly. Unquestionably that is the driving force that caused us to leave the horrors behind, to grow and evolve into larger creatures, to escape what's horribly violent at the miniature scale." I love that. Because there's truth in it. Life begins. Billions of years ago. Life begins and just immediately starts devouring itself. And evolution is the process of life running screaming away from other life and hiding from it in any form that it can think of. From our humble beginnings, we stampede through every exit we could find until one thing led to another and we've got ducks and platypie and duck-billed platypie and all types of shit running around. But no matter what happens, no matter what form they take, one thing remains. All of that matter that decided to start self-organizing and consuming energy to hold that pattern over time. All that stuff that is still subject to physics, even as it defies gravity to lift itself off the ground, that's still subject to all the laws of chemistry, even though it has sort of begun to sidestep some of their consequences by incorporating them in specific combinations to create energy. All that stuff that we call life with a few exceptions is pretty much a closed loop. You can't eat a rock. Life eats life and that's all there is to it. More complex creatures like ourselves, I mean think about what it takes just to keep us moving. Think about how many cows and chickens and pigs, how many fish, how many pounds of wheat and rice and fruit and everything else. Think of how much it takes just to keep one human child from collapsing and dying of starvation and becoming a pile of rotting goo for just one year. It's incredible. The earliest forms of life used chemical and photosynthetic energy to replicate themselves. Those replicas began eating each other, taking on more complex and clever forms to ensure that they were the eaters and not the eaten. And then again, for billions of years, we said that's how things went. You've got a new set of laws, laws of evolutionary biology, but we're running according to law. And it's amazing. We proliferate. You've got 130 foot long dinosaurs for a while. Plankton's been around for a really long time. So of course life has had plenty of time to figure out and evolve this big vacuum cleaner-like thing, like the blue whale that just swims around efficiently sucking it up. We've got crustaceans that haven't had to change much in a few hundred million years, but through it all, the essence of the thing never changes. See past the forms, look behind the curtain, behind all the disguises that life uses to hide from and ambush itself. The entire production takes place in a butchery, a slaughterhouse. Plants absorb sunlight from above and chemicals from below, and then you've got a few chemotrophs here and there sucking up minerals that the earth gives off, but other than the energy pouring into the biosphere from those two unconscious portals, everything else lives by killing and eating. Plants of years of just chasing each other down, tearing each other apart, breaking each other down, and saying, "You are no longer you, you are now a part of me." Killing and eating is the first and the most complete form in which domination can be expressed. But then something else happened. One of those creatures, for reasons that we will speculate about as the series goes on, one of those creatures began to wake up and look around. Because there are lots of ways to be dominant in this world, at least in various parts of it, right? If a loss of raptors made a comeback right before we split off from chimps and bonobos, we might all be speaking dinosaur today, but they didn't. Our species embarked upon an evolutionary journey that uses the energy that would normally go into things like skull crushing jaws or cheetah sprinting legs, and instead put that energy into this big brain that can do things like calculate the trajectory of a spear in the wind or build a habitat-specific shelter or lay complicated ambushes adapted to the environment and the prey and the number of killers you've got available. And so instead of being forced to adapt to every single change in our environment, we dampen those changes. And within certain constraints, we even make the environment adapt to us. If a loss of raptors made a comeback tomorrow, I mean, we'd put the mullens' hooves and take our children to see them. The difference between animals and humans is that there's very little that separates what an animal is from what it does. I mean, a plant is what it does. It's a pattern of organic matter that uses photosynthesis to manifest in a particular way. Plant is what it does. A fish is a little more complicated. It's a persistent pattern of organic matter with a series of reflexes and motor abilities to seek out and incorporate its preferred energy sources. A lion is still a pretty well-oiled machine. It's pretty dialed in with pretty much every feature and bit of energy going into being a lion. But now you're starting to see a little something else going on, something you don't recognize in fish and certainly non-plants. You take a cat and you put it in the wild and it's a pretty straightforward creature, which is understandable. A human and a famine becomes a pretty straightforward creature too. But if you give us or a cat a little bit of room to catch our breath, suddenly we're full of surprises, right? Human beings are not really custom-made machines the way most animals are. There's a big space between what we are and what we do, between impulse and action. And that gap, I think, is maybe what we call consciousness. Okay, fine. So freedom isn't free, of course, though, right? And consciousness comes with a cost. And that cost is not negligible. We've constructed entire cultures and civilizations to help us deal with the fallout from having stepped out of nature and waking up into this nightmare. For one thing, we look around. Unlike any other animal, we have to look around and see what's been going on all this time while nobody but God was paying attention. This is the vision of Job in the whirlwind or of Arjuna's vision when Krishna takes on his infinite form in the Bhagavad Gita. Those are two archetypes that help us illustrate a very basic human dilemma, waking up to what kind of world it is that we've been thrust into and coming to understand our own complicity in this ongoing mass murder. In Sam Keen's introduction to Ernest Becker's great book, The Denial of Death, he kind of describes it well. He says, quote, "The world is terrifying. Mother Nature is a brutal bitch. Red and tooth and claw who destroys what she creates. We live in a creation in which the routine activity for organisms is tearing others apart with teeth of all types, biting, grinding flesh, plant stalks, bones between molars, pushing the pulp, greedily down the gullet with delight, incorporating its essence into one's own organization, and then excreting with foul, stenching gases." Many of us naturally have a few questions about the design of this whole thing. What exactly it's supposed to be for? The psychologist, Ardy Lang, Rommel Lang, in his book, The Politics of Experience, describes the experience of a schizophrenic with whom he was familiar. The schizophrenic patient had the absolutely, subjectively certain experience of sitting on his bed as his house burned around him. The house had two stories and then an attic above that, and then the attic was God. And God was a madman, always and forever screaming and raving because he alone had full knowledge of what the world really was about. In the Bible, Job, we mentioned a second ago, Job is afflicted by various sufferings and tragedies, despite being a righteous man. Being out of a tribal, honor, culture, Job, even like many of us still today, expected that there should be some kind of reciprocity in his dealing with God, or with the universe, if you like. I haven't done anything, he insisted. This is not fair. What did I do to deserve any of this? And so his friends come along and they sort of run through the various theological arguments that were being made at the time. They were all insisting that what happens to us in the world is always a result of our own righteousness or unrighteousness that, however it seems to us, God is just. And so there is this reciprocity to it. But of course, we already know what his friends don't know, that despite everything that's befallen him, Job is a righteous man because the story told us so right up front. And so Job, to his credit, refuses to accept any of their arguments. He insists on his blamelessness and he essentially demands an audience with God. He wants God to come before him so that he can make his case and get an explanation out of God for why all these terrible things have happened to him. He never curses God as his resentful wife implores him to do, but he refuses to say what he does not believe is true, that he somehow deserves all of this. And so finally, the end of the book, after this ruined man, poor Job, is left covered in sores with a dead family, all his cattle and sheep and goats and goods taken away, sitting in a pile of ashes, whereas house used to be. God comes on the scene in one of the great pieces of world spiritual literature. His message to Job as spectacular and overwhelming as its imagery is very simple. He tells Job that he's right. He doesn't deserve any of this. But what gave Job or anybody the idea that deserve has anything to do with what happens to anyone or anything in this universe? God appears in a whirlwind. He takes Job up into the whirlwind and he says to Job, "You've made demands in question me and now it is I who will question you." Exactly do you think this place is Job? Who told you that this was a safe space? God, in all of your experience of this world, made you think that that's how things work. Does the gazelle deserve to be ripped to pieces by a lion? Does it deserve to be ripped to pieces by you for that matter? From the book of Job, God speaks, "Hast thou given the war horse's strength? Was it thee who clothed his neck with thunder? Once thou make him afraid as a grasshopper, a fury of his nostrils is terrible." Behold how he stampeth in poth and the valley and rejoiceeth in his strength. Charging on to meet the armed men, he mocketh fear and is not a frighted, neither turneth he back from the sword. The quiver rattleeth against him, the glittering spear in the shield. He swallaheth the ground with fierceness and rage. neither believe it he that it is the sound of the trumpet, he saith among the trumpets, "Ha-ha!" and he smeleth the battle of far off, the thunder of the captains and the shouting. Doth the hawk fly by thy wisdom, and stretch her wings toward the south. Doth the eagle mount up at thy command, and make her nest on high. She dwelleth in a biteeth on the rock, upon the crag of the rock, in the strong place. From then she seeketh prey, and her eyes behold the far off. Her young ones also suck up blood, and where the slain are, there is she." Everything in this world has been tearing, and clawing, and killing from the beginning of time. And what, Job? I'm just supposed to call the whole thing off, because why? Because the process finally landed on your doorstep? "Sheh, does Job have any idea how this works? Tell me all about it, Job. Were you there when I set the stars in motion and hung the earth in place?" No, you weren't, and you don't have any idea of the questions you're even asking me, let alone what the answers to them are. And now today we might look at this and say, "Well, this is awfully mean of God, but it's mean of the universe." You know, this is life. If you've ever lost anyone close to you unexpectedly, you know what I mean when I say that there's a random inhumanity to this world. You know, our minds are robust adaptable devices for making that chaos somewhat livable. People can say that the ways that we do come up with to live lives of apparent order in a world of swirling ravenous chaos, that it's all just human delusions or opiates of the masses, and fine, yeah, fine, there's something to that, but it's also the glory of our species. That gazelle in the lion's mouth is just a piece of meat, which is all any of us are when we're stripped of meaning. If you want an idea of what it's like to live that way, go read Lovecraft when he's at his best, or read Thomas Legade's conspiracy against the human race. Legade's a horror author, a great horror author in the vein of HP Lovecraft, but his power to unseat and discomfort us comes not just from good, suspenseful pacing of his stories or from well-conceived monsters, but from his vivid and often emotionally devastating vision of what life is when it's stripped of meaning and conspiracy against the human race. A nonfiction book that he wrote just to address some of these ideas directly. He describes how the most mundane and unthreatening objects can become uncannily horrific if you stare at them long enough to let your attachments of meaning fall away, kind of the way that repeating a word over and over and over and over soon turns it into a meaning, just a meaningless babbling of syllables. So if you've ever done that, this is Legade quote. In no time at all, even the most unexceptional things may cease to be seen the way we usually see them and come to be seen as something else, something we may not be able to name. The unsteadiness of quality and meaning in something, a puppet doll for instance, repels our lasting inspection of it. For the longer this inspection goes on, the more we become lost in a paradoxical state of knowing and not knowing what was once known and familiar. And it is then that the question, why should there be something rather than nothing, may become lost in the inexplicable even preposterous ambition to resolve it without losing our minds to the uncanny. Every day objects seem curiously liable to being perceived as uncanny because we see them every day and know how they should be and should not be. One day those shoes on the floor of your closet may attract your eye in a way that they never have before. Somehow they've become abstracted from your world. Appearances you cannot place, just lumps of matter without any fixed quality and meaning. You feel confused as you stare at them. What are they? What is their nature? Why should there be something rather than nothing at all? But before your consciousness can ask any more questions, you dial it back so that your footwear seems familiar again and not uncanny in its being. You select the pair of shoes to wear that day and sit down to put them on. It's then that you notice the pair of stockings you're wearing and think of the feet that they can seal and the rest of the body to which those concealed feet are connected. In the universe in which that body is roving about with so many other uncanny shapes, what now a voice from the other side of being seems to say? And what if you should look at yourself the most every day object there is and feel at a loss to attach a quality and a meaning to what is being seeing or what is seeing it? What now indeed? End quote. See he's not looking at his leg or his foot as the limb of a human being with a family situated in a cultural context and a historical moment and so forth. Suddenly he's looking at that leg is well he's seeing it the way that a cannibal would see it. See I remember where we're going with this. We're going to get deep into the mythology and the theology that the Aztecs built around this stuff as we go through this series but we can't start there. We got to back up. All that's very important and we're going to have to talk a lot about it to get an idea of how the Aztecs understood what they were doing but it won't tell us why they were doing it. I mean how could it? Like a growing child human groups, human groups are always already caught up in the world of action before it ever occurs to them to have to explain any of it to themselves. The explanations that men come up with for something like ritual cannibalism vary within a few broad categories but first we need to focus on the act itself. So a lot of popular books that you'll find on cannibalism begins similarly with a survey of cannibalistic behavior and animals and then they might spend some time asking what we really mean by cannibalism and whether you know I don't know eating your boogers or some hippie chick frying up her after birth after giving birth counts. I don't care about any of that. I don't care what the Donner party did. I'm not going to talk about what happened in some famine. People trapped in the snow or stuck in a famine who eat human flesh. Those people find themselves in the world that LaGuardi was just describing. Okay. Crazed with hunger, meanings drop away and suddenly a human leg is reduced just to its potential as a calorie rich drumstick. Although to be honest, even then I would bet that it takes a measure of ritual to turn the leg into a drumstick. You know you can imagine members of the Donner party in a circle praying for permission or forgiveness before the human could be reduced to meat. But but even still that's not what we're here to talk about. I'm talking about cannibalism as part of a cultural system practiced by people who are not starving in a manner that enjoys social legitimacy. Sacrifice and cannibalism are forms of institutionalized aggression. This is one of the first things to know and understand. One of the foundations upon which any serious understanding of of these acts can be approached. Do not imagine that it is possible to cut into another living man's chest to extract his still beating heart except as an act of aggression. The formality of the ritual structures, you know, and that structures the aggression disguises it. But aggression is the rippling energy that drives that knife into the flesh. And all societies have forms of institutionalized aggression because all societies are full of individuals who experience aggression all the time. Things like sexual and aggressive energies. These are primary human motivations that drive our individual and collective lives. But every society has got to find ways to manage the sexual and aggressive impulses of its members. Doing so is a big part of what makes us human. I mean, you think like all these years after an Iron Age tribe of desert nomads inscribed their ten commandments on some tablets. Things like thou shalt not murder, thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's wife. They still hold up pretty well because in order to sustain certain modes of social life, people have got to figure out how, for example, to ensure against stuff like this. Quote, "What follows is a matter of fact, not fiction, a matter of history, not of legend." Princess Lluitte was the niece of Muteza, king of Buganda, 1856 to '84. Buganda is the largest kingdom discovered by the British around Lake Victoria and East Africa. It's like modern day Uganda as you probably guessed. So, where am I? Yeah. She had been given as a wife to prime minister Mucasa by Muteza as a reward for the minister's good services. They had two children together. One day, as was the custom with female members of the royal family, Princess Luele paid a visit to Princess Sansa, a senior member of the family. Princess Luele found the company being entertained by Kalemba, a comely youth who was amusing those assembled with music on the harp. The youth, his youth, the harp is singing, we're all too much for the only two human princess. Prime Minister's wife that she was and she became dangerously infatuated with Kalemba, regarding him as the most charming young man she had ever seen. Knowing nothing of Puritan restraint, Princess Luele confessed her need and desired a Princess Sansa, who assured her cousin that arrangements would be made for the lovers to meet in private. We are not told of Kalemba's feelings, but presumably he could not refuse such an offer from a woman of high rank, and he must have known beforehand the risks and rewards of such beautiful singing and harp playing. Several days later, Princess Sansa with seven other women, and with the youth Kalemba dressed as a woman, all proceeded to the house of Princess Luele in the Prime Minister's compound. Each of the visitors carried a parcel of food, that being the public purpose of the visit. Overjoyed at the success of the strategy, Princess Luele sequestered Kalemba in her hut and they spent several days obliterating the distinction between day and night. Getting Kalemba out of the Prime Minister's compound proved more difficult than getting him in. Questioning one of Luele's companions, Mucasa discerned the truth of the matter. Luele's house was pulled down. After most of the grass had been removed, the harpist was found hiding under the last thin layer. Both Kalemba and Luele were brought before the Prime Minister, who was surrounded by followers, sure to ascent to whatever judgment he gave. Luele confessed her fault, asserting that she had been helpless in the face of the youth's exceptional beauty and asked for mercy. Kalemba, however, struck the arrogant pose of the conqueror, who has himself been conquered. He asserted that he had been perfectly aware of the risks he had hazarded and was prepared to take the consequences. Kalemba's arrogance infuriated Mucasa. He ordered the youth's head cut off and given to Luele. His blood was to be smeared all over her head and dress. There was no court to appeal such a verdict from the Prime Minister. His executioners carried out the sentence. The Prime Minister was so caught up in his own cruelty that at first he insisted Luele carry her lover's head with her when she went back to her father, the king, although his subordinates prevailed upon him to forego such a dangerous royal insult. That was the author Eli Sagan's rendering of a first-hand account provided by British explorers. So, see, that's what you got to have rules about when aggression is okay, what types of aggression are okay, who should sleep with whom and under what circumstances. You got to have rules like this. It's either that or heronamistbosh. Those are the options. These rules are associated with more advanced forms of social life for a reason. If it seems like high civilization, if it sometimes seems like high civilization has fewer rules than more primitive societies, that's only because most of the rules that we live our lives by aren't explicit. They're deeply embedded at the level of habit and custom and self-evident common sense and you don't necessarily know where the boundaries are until you step over one. Now, all societies have forms of institutionalized aggression, but the more direct and literal expressions of it are almost always found at very primitive levels of social development. And throughout this, throughout the rest of this series, and anytime, I'm not using primitive as a pejorative here. I mean it in the sense that relates that word primitive to the word primary. You know, it's an antecedent stage of our advanced complex societies. One of the reasons that the Aztecs are so fascinating is that they maintained these bloody practices, just unbelievably bloody sacrifices and cannibalism and everything along past the stage when most societies have given them up. You know, there's no evidence of institutionalized cannibalism in the ancient hiratic city states of Egypt and Mesopotamia, for example. And the Aztecs were at least as advanced as those societies. Very arguably more, but at least as advanced as them. On the other hand, we have very extensive evidence of cannibalism throughout Africa, through the islands running from the Indian out into the Pacific Ocean and all throughout the New World. Polynesia actually provides a really interesting case study of sort of the general point I'm trying to make, because in the pre-contact Pacific islands there were all these isolated societies developing kind of in their own way that were able to rank in terms of social complexity and political development from stone age tribes all the way up to the Hawaiians, which, you know, Hawaii was arguably a state and it certainly seemed to be on its way to being a state at least. And what you find in those places where European explorers encountered societies practicing cannibalism, the rule was that it was engaged in most directly and most frequently the lower down the scale of development you go. Now, as you go through the literature around cannibalism, one of the inescapable facts that you realize right off the bat very quickly is that a human being can never be reduced entirely to meat. And try as we might to dehumanize and objectify other people, some part of us always recognizes them. Now, that's why it takes an act of aggression to hurt them. It doesn't take an act of aggression to step on an ant. It takes a little bit more to gut a fish. It takes enough aggression to strangle a puppy that if a kid does it, we send him to an army of psychologists and keep a close eye on him. It's usually a him. We are talking about aggression after all. And we do that because we know somehow even if we haven't seen the statistics that anybody can kill an ant, but it's not that much of a leap for somebody to ignore the panicked pleading cries of a puppy and for that same person to show a similar lack of empathy for you or me. At some level, we understand that. And yet, you know, neither of us had ants for breakfast this morning. Most of us in the last week have eaten something that if we had to kill it up close ourselves by hand, would at least take a few minutes of mental preparation. Have you ever petted a lamb, a little lamb? They're freaking adorable. I mean, you go, guess what? You know, they don't just lay lamb chops like chickens lay eggs. You don't just walk around the lamb farm and find shanks and chops lying around over the place. No, somebody had to had to grab that little guy and club him over the head or cut his throat, cut him open, rip out his guts, cut him to pieces and send those pieces to your local supermarket. The hesitation that many of you would feel that one or another step in that process, that is a modern luxury until very, very recently. Pretty much everybody had to be at least prepared to kill something. You're alive today because 10,000 generations of your human ancestors and an inconceivable number of your evolutionary ancestors did not hesitate. The Tagarian people of New Guinea, they were particularly nasty little bunch, savage, warlike, incredibly cruel. They were kind of like proto-viking's actually. They would terrorize more peaceful villages along the coast west to the backstreet river there in New Guinea. And what they would do was, what they would do is they build these long canoes and they would take them on expeditions along the coast and up the rivers like Vikings and they would just plunder and steal and slaughter people and take slaves. And when they would take these slaves, these prisoners, they would keep them on the canoes with them because they would stay out on these raiding expeditions for months at a time without staying in one place. And so they would keep them for food. They would break their arms and legs and just leave them there so that they couldn't escape. And yet they would keep them alive so that when they needed meat, they could just lop off an arm or lop off a foot or a lower leg from one of these mobile meat lockers that they kept. So that's one end of it, right? That's one of the more primitive and non-symbolic looking examples of regularized cannibalism that you're going to find. But even here, even something just like that where it looks like just there's no difference between humans and you know, any other food that they happen to gather up, even here, the use of human meat was set about with taboos and superstitions and rituals that you had to perform before you could eat it and you know, all these things, rules just very clearly they know the difference and they're maintaining the difference ritualistically. Very often cannibalistic rituals would involve the entire community. Well, here's a Polynesian example provided by a Scottish missionary of women following their men into battle and the women would go in as the men were fighting and they would stay just behind the battle line as the fighting rage quote, they pick out the good bodies of the slain for the oven and throw the bat away. They tie up a captive to a tree, dig a hole and kindle a hot stone oven for his body before his very eyes. The women go to battle, they keep to the right. rear and attend to the commissary. Whenever they see one of the enemy fall, it is their business to rush forward, pull the body behind, and dress it for the oven. The hands of the choice bits, sacred to the priests. The priests go to the battle, but sit in the distance fasting and praying for victory. If the body of a chief is cooked, everyone must partake down to the little child, and before a gourmandizer proceeds to polish the bones he calls out, have all tasted? If it is the body of a woman, they eat only the arms and the legs. On Maure, they devour all. Sometimes they cook in joints, and sometimes the whole body is doubled up in a sitting position with the knees to the chin, put into the oven, and served up so as they squat around for their meal. Their appetite for human flesh is never satisfied. Do you mean to say that you will forbid us the fish of the sea? Why? These are our fish. This is how they talk when you speak against cannibalism. Very often, institutionalized cannibalism contains a strong element of vengeance. Killing another human being. Actually, let's talk about this for a second. Killing another human being, especially in societies where incurring a blood feud with his kinsman was the only means of justice, it stays with a person psychologically. It stays with a person similar to the way that leaving a lie outstanding stays with you. Lying is devastating to the liar because it creates this internal tension that ends up expressing itself in unbidden thoughts and suspicions and fears and dreams, and psychologists and self-help authors and religious leaders who were actually doing their jobs figured out a long time ago that the way to discharge that tension and exercise that demon that demon that parasitically attaches itself to the back of your mind to constantly remind you of your deception is to just confess it. Lying like killing is an act that is fraught with ambivalence. And ambivalence is what I'm trying to get at here with the analogy. It gets you out of trouble, right? I'm talking about a lie. A lie gets you out of trouble or maybe it gets you something that you want in the immediate future. But over time, the costs of maintaining your deception become so unres, that, well, I mean, people literally lose themselves in drugs and alcohol or break up their families or even kill themselves or other people just to escape the pressure of their lives without having to face the terror of telling the truth. You know, there's so much ambivalent energy in there that tears people apart. Unless you're a psychopath, the main product of all that ambivalence, forget about the thoughts, those are secondary. The feeling that gives rise to the thoughts is this vague sort of dull but somehow perfectly clear sense that this is not over. There's something still outstanding. There's something still out there. And killing is like that. You know, there's so much ambivalent energy tied up and killing. There's, you know, the feeling of joy that comes with having defeated an enemy. There's the sublime animal power of having released that primal aggression. But then there's the recognition of yourself and the dying eyes of your victim. There's the fear of vengeance and there's so much more. All these ambivalent energies just pulling a killer in different directions, just threatening to tear him apart. Ritual mythology in part function to structure these opposing feelings in a way that discharges the tension and frees the individual from that ambivalence. Psychologists that we mentioned earlier, Eli Segan, he's got this great little book on the psychogenesis of ritual cannibalism that I've drawn on very heavily for this by the way. He wrote quote, "A great many tribes regard the slayer of the cannibal victim as being in great danger and rituals are performed to ward it off. The danger does not come from any real threat. We may surmise that the slayer is not particularly vulnerable to revenge attacks from the enemy tribe since the ritual that is performed is not protect the slayer from harm from that quarter. The danger has a supernatural source. Sometimes it is spoken of as the dead man's ghost and answer given to the question of what threatens the slayer but not really an explanation. One method of protecting the slayer was to forbid the slayer himself to eat the human meat. Yet, this action might not be a sufficient protection, therefore, and now he's quoting an anthropological report. The killer or captor of the man who was to be eaten would go straight to his own hut and stay there for about a month, living on roast taro and hot coconut milk. His wife would continue to share his hut but must for that period sleep apart from him. He remains thus isolated in his hut because he is afraid of the blood of the dead man. It is for this reason that he does not join his fellow warriors in partaking of the flesh. For if he were to do this, he believes his belly would become full of blood and he would promptly die." Look, side note, that subquote that Sagan is quoting there by the way. It is from a book on cannibalism and human sacrifice that I have not been able to get my hands on. Whenever there is a citation like that, I try to find and read the book in question and usually I am able to do it but sometimes not. Those of you who have donated to this podcast by the way, you don't have any idea what a huge hell but it is because that is where it goes. Anyway, I couldn't find this one. I am not sure which people he is talking about but the taro and coconut tells us somewhere it is out in the island. End of side note. In addition to being in personal spiritual danger, a killer or a captor of a cannibal victim was also frequently felt to be a serious danger to the rest of his own community. Sagan continues quote, "In Mallory," so we are talking about New Zealand now. In Mallory, the war party was met outside the village by the priestesses who danced a wakatama, a dance of derision, and sang a song that asked the warriors whence they had come. They answered that they were followers of two, the war god, and had come from taking vengeance. The warriors were not allowed to mingle with the joyful people of the village until they had gone through the right of wakahoa, making common. They proceeded to sit naked on the side of the stream while a naked priest offered to the god Tiki, a pebble from the stream, a piece of fernroot and a piece of human flesh. The principal priest took portions of the locks of hair from the warriors and offered them to the war god too. The high priestess was given the ear of the first man killed to eat. It was the only occasion when a woman might partake of human flesh. The hearts of the slain were roasted, a portion offered to two, and the rest eaten by the priests. The fighting men started dancing toward the village, bearing fern stalks in their hands to which were tied the hair of their victims. The priest shouted spells that finally removed the blood curse and left the warriors haught, and the common, free from taboo, and able to enter the ordinary activities of the tribe. Segyn is drawing his account from Edward Treger's book, The Mowry Rastes, it's an old book. It's a really interesting example because you know, go back to the beginning of the quote, "The Mowry villagers are already celebrating the successful taking of revenge by their warriors. The warriors are quarantined outside the village and enduring a dance of derision from the priestesses." That reminds me of an earlier version of waiting for Vietnam soldiers to get home and get off the plane so we can spit at them and call them baby killers or something. It seems like there's some kind of an ancient ritual going on there. Even as the rest of the village is celebrating their victory, the killers have to go through a series of rituals to cleanse them of a curse. That ritual is very interesting because it carries a double meaning, right? Waka Hoa, the ritual that allows them to be integrated back into the society means making common and on the most basic level, you know, it allows them to re-enter the common life of their people, but it also means to make them common, to bring them back down from the realm of the sacred. Many people all around the world, certainly the Aztecs, experienced the inexplicable, right, as opening portals to sacred power. Death, disease, natural disasters, you know, the generative power of women, the growth of plants, you know, these and other mysteries were always set about with rights and taboos to control the unpredictable power that they pointed to from pouring uncontrollably into the world of everyday life. Now, today we know that war veterans who are unable to properly re-acclimate to the mundane world of civilian life can suffer and sometimes even become a danger to themselves and others. Well, earlier people were not stupid and they certainly didn't lack observational powers. were limited only by their language and the conceptual framework that they had available to describe what they were seeing. And so they understood that men who came back from killing had changed somehow. And it was not a simple thing to successfully take those men and re-involve them back into an everyday life that includes, you know, grandmothers and scurrying toddlers running around. It's just ambivalence, ambivalence, ambivalence. I mean, this is the word. It's the word to keep in mind at all times when talking about sacrifice and cannibalism, ambivalence. In fact, if you lodge one word in your head to frame this in the next episode, ambivalence is Peewee's word of the day, okay? The killers are heroes, they are cursed, they're protectors, they're dangerous, they're triumphantly joyful, they're regretful. The killer himself, glory is in his victory and yet he feels this unaccountable stain of corruption on him. He's closed his account with the other person, but he might have incurred a terrible blood debt with his relatives. And so again, the overwhelming feeling underneath whatever words and explanations we use to methodologize the experience, as long as there is unresolved ambivalence, the overwhelming feeling is that this is not over. So if it's not over, the question is how to make it over, how to end it. And now, you know, with some of these last examples, we've begun to see that structuring these ambivalent feelings relative to one another, disentangling them in a way that allows their energy to be discharged, again, as a primary function of ritual in myth. Another way to put it is maybe like this, animals kill and eat, right? But only humans sacrifice and feast. Animals are slaughtered, only humans could be martyred. It sounds strange to say, but there was a time when ritualized human sacrifice and cannibalism were a highly civilized and highly civilizing institutions. In fact, I'll claim with confidence that without them, there would have been no path, politically, sociologically, psychologically, whatever. It would have been no path forward to our modern world. Now I get that I'm going to need to back that up. So next, we're going to go down to the borderlands of Ecuador and Peru around the three rivers Pistasa, Marana, and Ponto Santiago. We're getting closer to Mexico, be patient, getting there. And we're talking about the Hibaro natives. The Hibaro that dominated the region, they were among the fiercest and most savage tribes in South America at the time of contact. And so as you'd expect, they never united beyond just small tribes that maintained themselves in an almost permanent state of total war with one another. The education of their young boys focused pretty much exclusively on raising fierce warriors. Tribes were often dying out, merging with one another because wars of extermination happened all the time. And so going through the literature, I found this old piece about them from 1923 in this Smithsonian archive called Blood Revenge War and Victory Feast among the Hibaro Indians of Eastern Ecuador. You got to love the old days when the humanity's actually got to the point. Here's a quote. The Indian does not content himself with merely killing his enemy. He wants to shed as much blood as possible in delights in mutilating the body of the slate enemy. Being especially anxious to secure his head. The scene of battle between Hibaro Indians therefore generally appears as a dreadful spectacle of savage lust of destruction and thirst for blood. Along the backside of the head, from the apex downward, along cut is made with a knife, whereupon the scalp and the skin of the face is slowly and carefully drawn off from the skull. In much the same way as has done with the hides of animals for stuffing. The skinning of the face is said to be the most difficult part of this work. However, here the skin is not loosened merely by drawing it off, but has to be cut from the flesh with a sharp knife. The skull and all fleshy parts that adhere to it are thrown away and the scalp obtained is further prepared. End quote. Now, when we read that, especially the first part, is the delight in mutilating and destroying their enemy as much as possible, you read that and we're not thinking that these people are somehow too gentle or too civilized for cannibalism, right? You read through the rest of that book and you'll see that the Hibaro could and probably did do pretty much every horrific thing you can think of to their enemies, except for one thing they never ate any part of the bodies. Why not? You know, if I had read that quote that I just read and then followed it up by telling you that then after that they finished up by cooking the corpses, it's not like you would have been terribly shocked by that. You know, especially when I tell you how they would speak to their worst enemies. "Yutai," they would say, "which means I will eat you." And it was the equivalent of saying "each shit" or "fuck you" in our culture, which is interesting in itself because, yeah, okay, I wasn't sure if I was going to talk about this. Let's talk about it for a second. Because it mirrors Freud's theory of psychosexual development, okay? So human infants, as you may know, are born very early. It's one of the things that distinguishes us as a species. If aliens zoologists were serving the life on earth, it's one of the first things that they would notice about the human species, is that we're born very, very early too early. In fact, speaking about that, I keep going off on tangents, but we'll see how this goes. I remember watching this old Disney nature documentary one time. Joseph Campbell, I could talk about this. Anyway, it was on this beach in an island somewhere where giant sea turtles would come every year to lay their eggs. Only now was time for all the eggs to hatch. So the parents are long gone by now and these turtles, these little baby turtles, start crawling up out of a sand where they'd been buried and as soon as they became visible, bam, the birds are swooping down and scooping them up, right? And so these things immediately just make a beeline for the water, which means going through crashing waves that toss around these little silver dollar sized turtles all over the place. If they're lucky enough to make it through the birds, pass the waves and into the water, these 10 minute old creatures have got to start looking for things to eat right away. If they don't find something soon and then consistently, there's good as bird food. And yet somehow there are still sea turtles. How are there still sea turtles? There are still sea turtles because they come out of the gate. You know, they come out of the egg with most of what it takes to be a sea turtle already pretty much wired up. Keep it simple, keep it specific, spit out a lot of them, a few of them will make it through the gauntlet. You got sea turtles, right? Humans are very, very different. As our brains got bigger, women's hips had to grow, had to widen to accommodate the birth process with our big ass heads, with our big ass brains. But eventually you kind of hit this point of diminishing returns, right? Where, you know, eventually you get to a point where wider hips are becoming a greater liability than the bigger cranium was worth, I guess. And so we compensated for that by being born very, very, very early and doing a lot of our development outside of the womb, okay? Those little turtles, they pop up out of the egg, crawl up into the sand and they just make a run for the su-surface. As soon as they're born and when they get to the water they know exactly what to do. But you could, you know, this thing's their 10 minutes old. You'll leave it two year old little human on the beach and it's just going to wander around like an idiot until it stars. I mean, you know, a newborn baby is really just, it's still a fetus in a lot of ways, basically. It's not just that we were born and we don't know how to do things yet. I mean, our early disabilities are, they run way, way deeper than that. I mean, think about it. Human infants, I mean, human infants are little worms for a long time. You know, we're first born and for some weeks afterward, most of our nervous system isn't even finished being wired up yet. You ever watch an infant try to move, it's ridiculous. You know, just the infant can suck on a nipple, it can digest whatever it gets out of it, and that is about it. That's literally about all it can do. The muscles and the nerves of the mouth, throat and digestive system, most come out pretty much pre-pre-made, you know, ready-made, but nothing else even really works yet. So this is the oral stage of psychosexual development that Freud described. And it's kind of a human universal, even if you don't follow his exact theory of the way he handles it, this period is a human universal. In the beginning, we all experience the world through the mouth. That is how it begins. Our first knowledge of the world comes through the organ of the mouth and is understood in the vocabulary of tastes and textures defined by the mouth. The mouth is also the medium of our first social interaction. This is something that Jordan Peterson has really helped me understand. It's obvious when you think about it, but it's just so brilliant to think about how intensely social. of a thing that breastfeeding is. Infants can struggle, they bite. You know, if they're screaming, the mother has to calm them down first. And all of this has to be nonverbal. You know, all communication is nonverbal. And at first, it's non-visual. Okay, you can't even look the thing in the eye or anything like that. It's purely through touch and maybe a little bit of sound to kind of coup out and set the mood, but that's it. And that's all you have to kind of to manage this insanely complicated and primal interaction. It's one of those mysteries that as a man, I can only look at it from the outside and marvel at, but I definitely don't have access to it, but it fascinates me. The mouth is also the first medium through which we have our, you know, our first experience is of repression and frustration when a mother has to teach her baby in their secret little language, not to do certain things. She has to control its behavior. It's also, you know, our first experience of alienation comes through the mouth in the sense that the first time that we ever open our mouths to cry out so that the world can come and fill it up to satisfy our hunger and that doesn't happen right away. There's a delay between our demand and its fulfillment that, you know, that delay sort of sets us down the path of realizing that, hey, you know, that age of warm, unified, amniotic bliss is over for good. This is just very complicated stuff that we all have to go through. And so babies begin to grow, begin to ambulate, move around and parents find themselves, what, repeating one phrase more than anything else. Don't put that in your mouth. Get that out of your mouth, right? Because kids at this age are putting everything in their mouth because it's still the primary means by which they experience and interact with the world. And why wouldn't it be? You know, you're born that way. It's the first thing that you have. It's your whole world in a way. At the very beginning, it's your whole world in a way. It's your portal out into the rest of the world. And you start to grow and your body starts to fill out and everything else starts to work. And now you've got to start to learn to use, you know, the rest of your body and everything to experience the world. But that's a process. It's a process that we all have to mature into, right? And as you can imagine, you know, these things tend to go in order for a reason. There's a reason that it's very important to get kids past this stage pretty quickly where they're just putting everything in their mouth. You want to get finished with that before you start toilet training, right? You know, occasionally parents are toilet training in their kids and after they've had a little bit of practice, maybe you'll leave them in the bathroom to kind of try it themselves. And a lot of parents have this experience at some point where they walk in and find the kid, you know, their little trainee making art on the walls with their waste products. But that's better than walking in and finding out that the kid is still caught up in the oral stage, right? You don't want to walk in and find that. And so it's very important. I mean, this is, it sounds kind of silly, primitive or something. It's very important stuff. So when talking about this stuff, the thing to know and to keep in mind is that anything humans are forced to repress tends to become a matter of intense fascination for us. It's just how we're built. We first experience the world through the mouth. And so the first attempts to civilize us and structure our behavior concerns what we do and do not do with our mouth, you know, right at the beginning, not to bite the nipple. That's the first thing, but then it's don't put things in your mouth and so on and so forth. The next stage of trying to civilize a little potential barbarian involves potty training him. And, you know, in this stage, intense attention is typically paid by the parents to controlling where and when and how the child does it and what they do with the waste products afterwards, right? It's very important to most parents, at least it should be. People get stuck sometimes in one or another of these stages of development due to trauma or some other set of causes sometimes. And it will mangle their personality. I mean, into adulthood, absolutely mangle your personality. After the oral and anal stages of psychosexual development, there's some other stuff in there. There's two other stages that we're not going to worry about right now and finally the general stage. And this is a period where, you know, you're walking through target and you got to keep telling your little boy to take his hands out of his pants all the time. Parents have to go through this stuff all the time. Wait, you mean that was just me and never mind. Anyway, the goal of each of these stages is to come out of them having been properly socialized in the use of your mouth, the elimination of your waste and in the management of your sex organs. That's the goal, properly socialized in those, you know, in those incredibly important, you know, sort of functions, not only biological, but social functions. And again, it sounds so incredibly primitive, but this is the foundation of all human social life, although I do want to be clear that, you know, I'm drawing out and simplifying aspects of this that I think are relevant to our topic. It's obviously much more complicated. So depending on a child's natural tendency to be agreeable or rebellious among other factors, it can be a real struggle to move the kid through these stages successfully on schedule. It can be, I mean, it's a big deal and it's not easy. And a lot of it has to do with the child's natural inclination. So not keeping up is, it is an absolutely cataclysmic failure of socialization. It destroys lives. Okay. If you're still soiling your pants regularly or even occasionally in third grade, this is very likely to set off a cascade of effects on that child's developing personality, they're going to lead him far away from the general run of social life to which he's supposed to be adapting. You know, parents try to socialize and prepare their children, but other children eventually take over the undone portions of that work and kids are not gentle about it. Kids are brutal. You know, if you've got a soil, your pants is a third grader. It's much better to do it on the way to school in front of your mother than it is to do it in the middle of class in front of your peers. And if a kid continues to struggle with that, then suddenly school and all social situations with other children, all of this becomes charged with pressure. Other children might start to seem very threatening. Before you know it, you got a kid who avoids interacting with other kids who never develops adequate social skills, who, you know, perceives other people as sources of potential danger and so feels perpetually alienated because he was never firmly plugged into a social context in a way that really let him become comfortable in the world and with himself. I mean, this is what happens. This is serious stuff. So the pressure to successfully traverse these stages, to be able to master impulse through the executive discipline of the mind is the pressure is so tremendous, just incredible pressure for a small child, you know, who's very existence. Certainly the affection of his parents to them, you know, seems to the child to hang on whether or not he can master these things and become an acceptable social being for his age. It's no wonder that many kids retreat from it, you know, and end up on a psychiatrist couch at 40 years old, crying about how they can't stop watching internet porn. Because that's the thing, right? Becoming moves in one direction. If you aren't able to move through these stages on time, nobody is waiting for you. Nobody is waiting for you. Your peers are moving on and they will judge you harshly for being delayed in your progress. Your body keeps growing, which obviously alters your relationship to the world and starts introducing entirely new biological imperatives, sex and so forth. You keep learning new words and new skills, you know, you start to look like and behave in many ways like an adult. Whatever your human mind is doing, your animal body just stays the course, right? The thing is on tracks. Your biology doesn't just hit the pause button until you figure out how to stop pissing your pants or putting everything in your mouth. It just doesn't work like that. And we give babies pacifiers sometimes to sort of help bridge the gap when we take away their primary oral reference, the mother's breast. And sometimes small children, even not just babies, but small children still require a helping hand. And so maybe for a while we allow them to do something like suck their thumb. But what we need is we need some sign that you're making progress, right? If you're three years old and still putting everything in your mouth, that's a problem, but we'll let you suck on your thumb as a substitute, at least for a while, but time waits for no man. So, you know, it's three turns into four and four turns into five and so on, the child keeps growing and their social roles begin to change and become more complicated. And so, you know, as this happens, the society applies more and more pressure to send the signal that it's time to grow up. It's time to move on from the oral fixation. Now, you know, I mean, it's amazing to me sometimes that anybody grows up and isn't completely insane, but this process isn't helped by the fact that most parents are completely clueless about any of this except on a very dull sort of basic level. I think in a lot of ways culture destroys the natural wisdom. of parents in a lot of ways, but many, you know, many exasperated parents who don't know what else to do just end up using threats or physical punishment to force the child to repress these impulses of a given stage. Because I mean, we're talking about small children, so we don't like hearing words like threat or physical punishment in the same sentence with them. But on the other hand, you have to understand what a parent is facing. A parent knows full well what happens to children in public schools who still suck their thumbs or piss their pants or get caught fondling themselves in class. It destroys lives. It causes suicides. It creates adults who are never able to properly relate to their social world. And so you see this possibility for your child as a parent, and you don't know what to do, and nobody you know knows what to do. And anything you have to do to force the child to stop that behavior seems better than allowing it to continue, right? I mean, sometimes you'll hear about parents with children who won't stop sucking their thumbs who put hot sauce on the thumb or something to, you know, condition the child like Pavlov's dog. And that's barbaric, but you know, it's barbaric from one standpoint, but most parents, they don't have the resources of the knowledge to deal with this kind of thing much better than the children do. And this is, you know, sometimes I think that the reason a lot of us don't remember our early childhood is not because we don't actually remember it, or just because it was so goddamn stressful that we don't want to remember it. I mean, this is stressed that a child does not need, and this certainly does not have the emotional resources or maturity to deal with, but they have no choice but to deal with it. And so forced into this situation by the collision of their biology with a complicated social world, the child faces the choice of either finding socially acceptable substitutes wherever it can. Freud, for example, thought that overeating and smoking and constant gum chewing were examples of adults who still had too much energy tied up in the oral stage, for example. I have some problems with that part of it, but anyway, or if you can't identify and employ substitute satisfactions, you just have to repress whatever's left over, just repress it, just push it down, just get it out of here. But that again does not come without a cost, and it's a significant one, not least because as we mentioned, whatever repress becomes a center of fascination, right, as our psyche sort of seeks ways to work it out and give expression to it. Now aggression is often thought by many people to only be a secondary emotional response to frustration or fear, experiences like that. And there's a case to be made for that perspective, but I don't think that way. I think we come out of the womb built for war, like Witslopochtli, the Aztec God of War who was born fully armed in a raid for battle. I think that's human beings. You might have heard before that babies seem to have some natural sense of what to do when they're dropped in water, right? They know to close their eyes and hold their breath, for example. They also sort of move their arms and legs in a manner that looks like it's trying to stay afloat, but apparently that's not what that is. That's what I've heard. So the whole thing doesn't work very well, obviously, and they don't last very long, so don't go run an experiment with your baby in the ocean and tell the cops that martyr made said it was cool. It's not cool. But the point is, that the reflex exists and it seems to emerge very early. Similarly, if an insect or a spider crawls across an infant's face, the infant often seems to know to attack it, which at first just means to bite it if it can. We might think, well, infants will bite anything, so who knows what they're doing and fine, but nursing mothers often find out that their babies will refuse the breast when they're not hungry by biting the nipple. And some really strong, wild, precocious little bastards will actually let the mother know when they're ready to be weaned altogether because they'll just start biting the breast all the time and refusing to take it. And I mentioned this to emphasize that aggression, like all of a child's libidinal energies, follows the path of psychosexual development that we were just talking about, collecting around and seeking satisfaction through whatever the dominant stage is at the time. And that means that the first experiences and expressions of aggression in all human beings is oral aggression, aggression with the mouth. Our people who engage in cannibalism are engaging in oral aggression. Societies that do it are institutionalizing oral aggression. Ritualization is the first step toward achieving control over any given behavior. And the rituals of people with obsessive compulsive disorder, for example, are all about establishing control. The Austronesian societies that I mentioned earlier, the island societies, they all grew up out of an identical cultural base, but they can be ranked by their level of relative social complexity and political development. We mentioned earlier, among those, among the peoples that practice or refer to ritual cannibalism, the rule is that the more primitive societies eat with minimal hesitation and less ritual preparation. And as you move up the ladder of development and complexity, you start to see societies that engage in very limited and specific forms of cannibalism. For example, eating only certain, ritualistic parts or restricting the practice to a special cannibal society and the rest of the society just sort of vicariously shares any experience. When those head hunting, "Hibbaro warrior shout, "I will eat you at their enemies, but don't eat them, but only take their heads as trophies, we're observing a substitute practice. Serving as a bridge, just like the thumb sucking, or the pacifier, for a society that's moving beyond the oral stage as its primary mode of experiencing and enacting aggression. There are a few tribes that practice both head hunting and cannibalism, but they are the exception. The overwhelming majority practice one or the other. And the ones that do both, they very clearly link them together. Seggin informs us, quote, "If we think about the occasions for head hunting, they appear to be identical to those for cannibalism, war, revenge, sadism, and proof of masculinity. The ritual of taboo and ceremony that surrounds head hunting activity is almost indistinguishable from that which is intimately associated with cannibalism." Just below the surface of the phenomenon, you get down beneath the disguise and the cannibal and the head hunter seem to be doing something like the same thing. Quoting again from the earlier source about the "Hibbaro" quote, "It is a rule that when a victory has been attained over a foreign tribe, the heads of the slain enemies are taken. Most Hibbaro warriors would consider any victory over such an enemy incomplete, and the whole war expedition more or less a failure, unless they returned with one or several head trophies. It, of course, not seldom happens that the Hibbaro is able to kill an enemy but not take his head because his comrades were not able to secure the body. In such a case, there cannot be a victory feast." In most primitive societies, male social status is determined by your ability to bring back food and share it with one's allies and family members, and by your ability is a warrior. So obviously those two things are related. Head hunting societies, head trophies take over that role and sort of combine them in a way. They fulfill that very fundamental social function. Sagan also writes, "In the Solomon Islands, it was the general practice to take heads and preserve them as signs of power and success. These heads were set out on stages or hung up under the eaves of the canoe house. When a chief had a man killed for an offense or murdered out of revenge or hatred or sacrificed, he added the head to his collection as a fresh sign of his power and greatness. In Nigeria, a young man was considered no better than a girl, and no one would marry him until he had obtained his head in a prescribed manner, and his prowess had been celebrated by a public feast. After the feast, he was considered a man and a warrior." Real quick, another sidebar here. Just on behalf of all men, here's a public service announcement to all the women out there who are like, "Oh my god, why are men so violent and crazy? I don't know, ladies. Maybe because for a huge chunk of our history, none of you would marry any of us until we brought back a head hunting trophy or a cannibal feast. Could that have anything to do with it? Maybe. Things have changed pretty quickly in the world. Give us a little bit of time to get our bearings. For most of our history, you've had us run around cutting off heads and eating human flesh. Give us a little bit of time. We'll come around, but give us a break. Anyway, did I? Yeah, so I think I mentioned this. In societies where we do find both head hunting and cannibalism, you can almost see the baton being passed from one to the other, from cannibalism to head hunting. That's that a head hunting is taking over for cannibals. C.K. Meek, in one of the volumes of his tribal studies of Northern Nigeria, he kind of writes about this quote. The slayer wrote around on his horse, brandishing a knife in his right hand. One of the first duties of the headgetter on reaching home was to go to the house of the priest who had charged of the head hunting rights and receive a further dose of protective medicine consisting of two mouthfuls of palm and mahogany oil and a small piece of the flesh from the victim's skull. This right of eating a small piece of flesh of the skull is of particular interest, I'm sorry, of peculiar interest, and proving one purpose at least of cannibalism had the religious object of destroying the dead enemy soul. End quote. In a similar vein, Sagan reports quote, "Among the Cagaro, the protective medicine included a few drops of blood from the captured head. The warrior spent the night in the priest's house covered with a cloth infumigated by the smoke of branches of certain trees. This whole process was engaged in to ensure that the ghost of the slain victim would not pursue the headtaker." In several cases, Sagan writes, "The priest ate part of the flesh to protect the headgetter, but the headgetter himself did not. This flesh eating was part of the ritual that protected the slayer. The Chauai brought all captured heads to the chief priest. The heads were boiled, the priest ate a piece of the flesh, and the skulls were then deposited in the sacred hut. The headgetter was anointed with a filthy smelling mixture that included the intestines of a porky pine, and he remained hidden during these purification rights. Afterward, he rejoined the tribe, was treated as a hero and drank beer with the elders. In the education of the young, a small amount of cannibalism might be permitted by tribes who engaged in no other forms of eating human flesh. A father who has been on a successful headhunt and returned with a coveted trophy, should he have a son of five or six years, will take a small portion of the flesh from the head about the size of a pea, and a drop of blood mix these with a little sego, yam, or taro, or some other vegetable, make it into a kind of pill and give it to the young child. This is said to make the boy, "Sarau and Nino, fierce forever," end quote. So it seems pretty clear to me, 'cause there's a lot of other examples like this. Obviously, don't wanna linger on it too long, but there's so many examples that make it very clear to me that headhunting, which is such a strange practice to just invent ex nihilo, especially since it's one that we find all throughout the Austronesian islands, Africa, and the Americas at the time of contact, probably around the world if we go back far enough, I think. It's pretty clear to me that headhunting is a transition form, used by people who are leaving behind the oral stage as the primary locus of aggressive motivation, and is Raphael Karsten, who's our source for the Hibbaro Indian Headhunter's informs us headhunting, just like cannibalism, is always a profoundly religious act, just as the transition from cannibalism to headhunting is always a religious process. Writing about how the Hibbaro believed the spirits of their dead enemies whose heads they had claimed would be compelled to serve their killers as advisors or slaves, and that they would work with loyalty to facilitate the success of their murderer, Karsten wrote, quote, "Now according to the idea of the Hibbaro, it is precisely the Tonsa that is the preserved head, which will cause the domestic animals and fields to grow and develop not only in the normal way, but with an extraordinary force." The Hibbaro did not find anything contradictory in the thought that the spirit of the slain enemy on the one hand entertains feelings of hatred and revenge against his slayer and always looks for an opportunity to harm him, and on the other hand, at the same time as it were, plays a role as his friend and advisor. The latter, it must be understood he has become under the influence of the magical conjuration through the ceremonies performed at the feast, Sue Amartiniu. The Tonsa of the Hibbaro Indians thus is not a trophy in the common sense of the word, not exclusively a mark of distinction or a visible proof that an enemy has been killed. The Hibbaro warrior not only tries to take the life of his enemy, but above everything wants to secure control of his soul. The so-called Ain Supane is not merely a victory feast in the sense of familiar to us, but at the same time, and first of all, a kind of mystery feast when we are able to penetrate into its real meaning, throws which when we are able to penetrate into its real meaning, throws an interesting light not only upon the social life of these Indians in general, and the ideas they connect with their wars, but also upon their in some respect, rather far-reaching religious views. The rule is, however, among the Hibbaro that a warrior who is captured ahead should celebrate a feast. The head feast for the Hibbaro opens the road to honor and fame, to material wealth, to new victories over enemies in a long life. It is the great mystery feast of the Hibbaro Indians, as will presently be seen, it in part has a purely religious significance. And as much as the Hibbaro through the ceremonies thereby performed, believes he acquires the same benefits as most other savage peoples do try to acquire by cult actions of a different kind. End quote. Some tribes believe that their crops simply won't grow without the aid of taken heads. Many times their head hunting expeditions are time to coincide with planting or reaping. There's the example of the Bantock people of the Philippines who believe that every farm requires a new head for every planting season. This is around the world we find this kind of thing. And what's very interesting about it is that the benefits that are supposed to accrue from the taking of a head are pretty much down the line, exactly the same as the benefits that cannibals expect to accrue from their activities. Now, to come back to Freud and Freudian terms, this process that we're talking about here, this transition from cannibalism to head hunting, this process of employing a substitute to satisfy a more basic desire is called sublimation. And we all do it. Zombies are completely unsublimated human beings. They're human beings without symbolic consciousness. And when you strip that away, all that's left is their appetite. Head hunting is, to us, it's unimaginably barbaric, right? But somehow, even to us, it's somehow less barbaric than ritual cannibalism. And ritual cannibalism is somehow less barbaric than just chaoticly attacking and tearing apart an enemy and eating his flesh without any rules or restrictions at all, like a zombie would do. Sublimation is a term that I think Freud borrowed from chemistry. It refers in chemistry to the process by which matter passes from solid to gas without passing through the intervening liquid phase. And it's a brilliant reappropriation of that term. He uses it to refer to the process by which a person satisfies an instinctual drive through symbolic means. A tribe that collects and preserves heads for the same purposes previously satisfied by devouring the flesh of their enemies has sublimated the oral aggressive drive through a symbolic substitute. A person who can extend his instinctual loyalty and desire to protect his bio-locked life, his own life, and the person who has no idea what to do. His instinctual loyalty and desire to protect his biological kin who can extend that feeling to fans of the same sports team or to patriots of the same nation is engaging his capacity for sublimation. He's-- he's-- he's-- etherealizing a natural impulse directing its energy toward a symbolic object, if that makes sense. Sublimation always refers to a vertical substitution. It's not talking about the replacement of a sacrificial goat with a sacrificial sheep. That's no more psychologically significant than someone with an oral fixation switching from sucking on a pencil to sucking on a pen. Sublimation is taking place when we see the replacement of raw cannibalism for ritual cannibalism of ritually sacrifice of victims, or replacing that with human sacrifice with only symbolic cannibalism. Like when people make a sacrifice and then offer the human flesh to their gods as food, right? Or from there to the sacrifice of animals, just like in the Bible, when God stopped Abraham from sacrificing his son Isaac and gave him a ram to sacrifice instead. And then replacing that maybe with just, you know, effigies made out of dough in the shape of the animals as they did in ancient Greece. And as you'll even still today see in many Anglican churches to commemorate St. George's slang of the dragon. A society that can satisfy its oral aggressive drive by eating a loaf of bread in the shape of a dragon on St. George's day, that is a different kind of society than one that has to still satisfy it by eating the liver of its enemies. This is a process. the question at every level from the individual to the broader social context is whether the mind can devise and the individual and the society can tolerate the replacement of a more direct literal expression of an act with a symbolic, etherealized version. It's through the long and painful history of this process that human beings who once sacrificed and cannibalized other people were able to leave that behind by sacrificing and pretending to consume the body and blood of Jesus Christ every Sunday in the Christian Mass. One of the most useful examples and extensive examples that we have of this process comes from the Quakutil tribes of the Bountiful Northwestern United States and Canada. When the Quakutil were discovered by Europeans, excuse me, been talking too long. When the Europeans discovered the Quakutil, the Quakutil had already developed a form of ritual cannibalism that was restricted to a special society of almost pseudo-Holymen called Hamata. The whole Quakutil society, all their tribes, were divided up into these special societies like this and they all had a special role in the ceremonial calendar. The cannibal society, the Hamata, were among the most prestigious of all the societies. The Hamata would go out of their way to put on a performance of being overcome with a ravenous desire for human flesh when the time of their festivals in the winter came. It might not have been a performance, I don't know. It's hard to say with things like this. It might have been an identity that they took on and once they took it on, shaped that person in a profound way once they were inducted into the cannibal society, you know. But anyway, a candidate for the cannibal society would be kept apart from everyone else for a period of months. And then at the appropriate time, he would start to poke around at the outskirts of his village, whistling and shouting, "Hap, hap, hap!" Eating, eating, eating. That's what "happ" means. Eating, eating, eating. When the villagers would hear this, a certain designated female relative would come out to get him and bring him into the village for something to eat. And once he was in there, the cannibal would just rush around, whooping and shouting and screaming like a wild animal, biting pieces of flesh out of the arms and chests of the villagers. Members of the tribe who had died during his months-long separation, they tried to preserve the corpses and they would use those to provide him with food. And he could also just have slaves slaughtered on demand whenever he was hungry. So, a great deal of deference was given to this chaotic creature, right? The anthropologist Franz Boas reported of one such instance. He said, "A female slave was asked to dance for the Hamata. Before she began dancing, she said, 'Do not get hungry, do not eat me.' She had hardly said so when her master, who was standing behind her, split her skull with an axe, she was eaten by the Hamata." Now, it's interesting about this particular form, that is, of taking the activity of cannibalism and sort of splitting it off to one special designated group, is how the rest of the tribe related to the cannibals. You would think that they would hate these people. You would think that they would despise this bunch of nut jobs running around taking bites at a random people, but it was not that simple. For one thing, they found a way for just about everybody in the society to participate in the cannibal right one way or another, either in the killing, the preparation of the body, in the ceremony of the meal itself, something. Everybody had a role. Members of the Bear Dance or Society, for example, after other people had cut up the body of a slave to be eaten, they would have the privilege of picking up the flesh with their bare hands and bringing it to the Hamata. As they would hand it to them to be eaten, they would growl like hungry bears. Another society within the Quake Uddle Tribes had the job of keeping the cannibal calm and relaxed and soothed. And then another society had the task of taunting them with food and riling them up and making them as crazy as possible. The Hamata was supposed to be driven into a frenzy by certain words like ghost skulls and the word for decapitated heads would drive them crazy and so the people would deliberately use these words in his presence or they would sing them in songs to drive the cannibal crazy. And if they were successful in drawing out the beast, people would run for the exits if they were inside and whoever got out there and was able to would try to shut and hold doors closed so that whoever was trapped inside would have bites taken out of them by this frenzy campal. So this is very complicated. For all the chaos that the existence of these people seems to have brought into the social life of the Quake Uddle, these were highly revered and honored members of their societies. So the obvious question, if cannibalism is so respectable, why doesn't everybody do it? It's meat and so if there's nothing wrong with it, why would any of them give it up? And the answer again is that it's a sacred act. It's a religious act. It's not just a mere mundane munching of calories. There's something similar at play here too to what happened with the Malri War here's earlier who, you know, they had returned from taking revanges, both honor guests and his people who were dangerously charged with sacred power. Something very similar, quote. After they have bitten people and particularly after they have devoured slaves and corpses, the cannibals have to observe many stringent rules before they are allowed to mix freely with other people. As soon as they have eaten a corpse, they swallow great quantities of saltwater to make them vomit. The bones of the body, which they have devoured, are preserved for four months. The cannibals may not go out of the house by the ordinary door, but must always use the secret door in the rear of the house. When they go back to the house, they must raise their feet four times before they enter it. With the fourth step, they actually pass the door and go in right foot first. In the doorway, they turn four times and walk slowly into the house. They are not allowed to look back. Further, for four months after eating human flesh, the cannibal uses a spoon, dish, and kettle of his own, which are afterwards thrown away. Before taking water out of a bucket or brook, he must dip his cup, thrice into the water, and he may not take more than four mouthfuls at a time. He must carry the wingbone of an eagle and drink through it, as his lips may not touch the brim of his cup. For sixteen days after partaking of human flesh, he may not eat any warm food, and for four months, he is not allowed to blow on hot food in order to cool it. For a whole year, he must not touch his wife, nor gamble, nor work. When the dancing season is over, he fangs to a forgotten ordinary ways of men, and has to learn everything anew. He acts as though he were hungry all the time. End quote. And so now, I think we start to see what seems to be happening. The entire society participates in Hamatsu cannibalism vicariously by being somehow enlisted in one or another part of the ritual, allowing them to partially experience the act without taking onto themselves the dangerous taboo involved. The Hamatsu is revered as the one who takes the sins of the community upon himself, and then injures the period of penance required to purge it. And I want to be very clear, sin and penance, and very, very imprecise words here. These people would not have recognized the Christian concepts that we would mean by those terms, but I'm using them because I don't have a better one. There's unquestionably some kind of a similar dynamic at play, I think. We the people no longer wish to take on the negative effects of engaging in cannibalism, yet we're not ready to give it up. You people will do it for us, and we will experience it through you, and we will serve and review you as you recover from the consequences of that. The Cawke Uddle they provide some of the best illustrations of this process of sublimation and action, because a lot of it took place before our eyes. Parents placing sanctions on their children, European settlers came in and saw what was going on and forced the Cawke Uddle against their will to give up many of these more barbaric practices. We see the process of substitution take place in real time, and we even see that the Cawke Uddle themselves were perfectly aware of what they were doing. When the Europeans arrived, Cawke Uddle tribes were aggressive and warlike, and they engaged not only in limited cannibalism, but also in headhunting, incest and warfare, and vendettas. They're famous for a form of symbolic combat called the potlatch. Where two combatants, two rivals, would compete for status by seeing who was willing and able to waste or destroy the most of his own property, including sacrificing slaves. And so when Europeans began to settle the region, they weren't going to abide cannibalism and human sacrifice next door to them, and so they forced the Cawke Uddle knock it off. And what happened next, I mean, it sums up the whole process of progressive science. sublimation almost perfectly. They would destroy blankets and food, and important men would compete by destroying these decorated pieces of copper that they called coppers that were the most valuable items in the whole Quack Udall world. There were one good copper would often be worth hundreds of blankets. And so the aggressive nature of this kind of symbolic combat, it was right out in the open, and it was recognized by everybody. This is a passage reported about an interaction that involved one of the white settlers named Charles Wilson, quote, and he threw the copper on the ground, saying, "You, we have also heard that you are another one who doesn't want our nephew to change his position." And here's another copper for you, and I'm giving it to you to make you shut up. They put these two coppers together, and he says to the young men to take these out to the deep water there and drown them. That means that they want to drown old one-ock in Charlie Wilson. That was why I warned you not to come near my house and wake the baby up, but since you have waken him up, today I'm going to break this copper for you too, that have been making all the noise. And he cut half the top off in another corner from the bottom and gave one part of each to mama-le- good luck with Quack Udall language, mama-le-le-le-le-le-cala chiefs that threw their coppers into the water. Then he says, "Hap, ha, ha, I've eaten you. You're all in my belly now." And quote, so, yeah, so after the settlers arrived and began to pressure the natives to stop all this, even the cannibal society modified its own behavior and they did it themselves. Instead of taking bites out of people, they would lift up a bit of the skin with their teeth and slice a tiny piece of skin off. And instead of swallowing it, they would put it behind their ear and then run around all crazy like they do. But then later on, they would come and give the piece a skin back just to let the person know that they weren't gonna work any magic using it or something like that. So these things are evolving. I mean, right in front of Western anthropologists, Franz Boas reported that the destruction of property was not only used against a person to harm the prestige or take revenge on another person, but it was also used as a replacement for other instances when sacrificing human beings normally would have taken place. Quote, "This is done mainly at the time when houses are built, when totem poles are erected or when a son has been initiated by the spirit presiding over the secret society of his clan. It seems that an olden times slaves were sometimes killed and buried under the house posts or under totem poles. Later on, instead of being killed, they were given away as presents. Whenever this was done, the inverted figure of a man or an inverted head was placed on the pole. In other cases, coppers were buried under the posts or given away. This custom still continues, he's writing this in, I think, 1895. This custom still continues, and in all such cases, coppers are shown on the post, often in such a way that they are being held or bitten by the totem animals. A held in the mouth are bitten by the totem animals. The property thus destroyed is called the Omayu, the price paid for the house, the post, or the initiation, and quote. So that's just perfect. It's a perfect illustration we're talking about. They used to kill slaves and bury them under the pole. Then they gave those slaves away as presents and attached the inverted figure of a man pointing down to the ground under the pole. And then lacking slaves, they gave away or put their valuable coppers in the ground where the slaves formerly would have been buried or else placed them in the mouths of the totem animal. I mean, that is a step-by-step process of sublimation that we were able to record in real time. And stuff like this is to be found all over the world once you know where to look, but you gotta know how to see through the outer forms to the level of being where everything is a symbol. You know, if you came across a tribe that dedicated a new totem pole or building by giving away valuable property at a great feast, it would just look just as innocuous as Ursula Laguin's joyful town of O'Mailus, right? But there's a child down in that basement. And so soon after the switchover, the sublimation had been forced by the white settlers, the quakeodal themselves, this is the really interesting thing about it, is the quakeodal themselves knew perfectly well the symbolic meaning of their acts. Another anthropologist, Helen Coderi speaking, she spoke with a lot of quakeodal informants, reported how many of them experienced their sublimation almost as a type of salvation, quote. Fighting with property instead of with weapons, wars of property instead of wars of blood, our quakeodal phrase is expressing what has proved to be a fundamental historical change in quakeodal life occurring within the period known to history. The general conclusion is that the binding force of quakeodal history was their limitless pursuit of a kind of social prestige, which required continual proving to be established or maintained against rivals. And that the main shift in quakeodal history was from a time when success and warfare and headhunting was significant to the time when nothing counted but successful potlatching. And now she's just direct quoting several of her native quakeodal informants, quote. We are of Yaksa El's blood, but instead of fighting our enemies with his deathbringer, we fight with these blankets and other kinds of property. We are the caskimo who have never been vanquished by any tribe, neither in wars of blood nor in wars of property, of olden times the quakeodal ill treated my forefathers and fought them so that the blood ran over the ground. Now we fight with button blankets and other kinds of property smiling at each other. Oh, how good is the new time? We used to fight with bows and arrows, with spears and guns. We robbed each other's blood, but now we fight with this here, pointing at the copper that he's holding in his hand. And if we have no coppers, we fight with canoes and blankets. True is your word. When I was young, I have seen streams of blood shed in war. But since that time, the white man came and stopped up that stream of blood with wealth. Now we are fighting with our wealth. The time of fighting has passed. The fool dancer represents the warriors, but we do not fight now with weapons. We fight with property. And now this is back to the anthropologist's voice. It would be difficult to exaggerate the degree to which the talk, the songs and the ceremonies of potlatching borrowed the metaphor of war. And even developed it to the point where the metaphorical war had even more meaning and thoroughness than their one time fighting with weapons. The usual word for potlatch was, I still don't know how to deal with these things. I think it's a click, click it. The little exclamation point, I'll just spell it for you. It's P exclamation point, E-S-A. P-S-A anyway. The usual word for that is, the usual word for potlatch is to flatten. And it came to mean to flatten a rival under a pile of blankets or means of flattening. Because the very word for potlatch blanket took its origin from the same root and has this literal meaning. The names of coppers often indicated that they were indeed weapons of the new kind of warfare, names such as war and about whose possession all are quarreling. And the cause of fear or the means of strife. A great copper belonging to a chief was spoken of as his acropolis or fort on which he and his tribes could stand in safety and greatness. A broken copper was spoken of by its owners as lying dead in the water off our beach, meaning that the breaking of it was a successful and attack against the rival as a killing would have been. End quote. So there you go, right? Next time we hear about a big charity gala where wealthy people are paying $10,000 a plate for food or competitively displaying their wealth in an auction. I hope you will join me in waiting outside to shout at all of them that there are a bunch of cannibals. It might sound silly, but if you think that we didn't go through a similar psychological and sociological process to get to a place where our elites can now effectively compete for status with one another through institutionalized pro-social ways like in now in university chairs and supporting foundations, I mean, too often we don't recognize these as the monumental advances that they are. And we don't necessarily always recognize how fragile these advances are. Sacrifice, cannibalism, slavery, revenge murder, and rape have been the rule of history. They predominated in most of the world until very recently. All of these still occur all over the world in various contexts and it's far from impossible to go from a society where elites fight with property back to one where they fight with blood. Some of you might remember back in 2013, 2013, I think, one of the rebel commanders in the Syrian Civil War was caught on camera cutting out the heart of a regime soldier and taking a bite out of it in front of his cheering men while threatening his enemies. He took a bite out of it and he's shouting to his men, we will eat. your hearts and livers you soldiers of Bashaar the dog. And so later on, the man, Abu Sucker was his name. He was asked by a BBC reporter why he had done this. And he said, I didn't want to do this. I had to. We have to terrify the enemy, humiliate them just as they do to us. Now they won't dare be wherever Abu Sucker is. So he's no longer surrounded by his cheering compatriots. And he was asked to justify this act by a Western journalist. And he said about his victim, this guy had videos on his mobile. It showed him raping a mother and her two daughters. He stripped them while they begged him to stop in the name of God. Finally, he slaughtered them with a knife. What would you have done? Indeed. Well, so far, we've been talking about exocanableism, which refers to eating humans from outside the social group, because that's the most common and because the Aztecs engaged in it. I should have mentioned though that people also do eat members of the in group as well. And this is called endocannibalism, as you can imagine. And I bring it up because we can actually draw something interesting and relevant about the ambivalence tied up in cannibalism from it. So I have to be very quick about this part because it's getting late. And I kind of forgot to bring it up. But I want to go over a few examples because it'll round out the themes of ambivalence and sublimation. So typically when people eat members of their own in group, I love how this is what I'm talking about now. I just just rolls off my tongue like it's no big deal. Typically when people eat members of their own in group, anyway, it occurs as part of funerary rituals. And the balance of ambivalent energies is tilted away from the aggressive impulses, one feels for an enemy. Very occasionally old people would be killed by tribes to avoid sending them into the afterlife, weakened by disease and other breakdown or whatever. Sometimes these people would be eaten, but typically group members were only eaten after they die for other reasons in combat or natural causes or something. Overwhelmingly, endocannibalism is engaged in only by close family members of a dead relative. John Roscoe, a British observer writing in 1924 about the tribes of British Uganda. It's a very just a strikingly detailed example of this kind of cannibalism. Quote, there can be little doubt that the custom of disposing of the dead by eating the bodies during the days of mourning was common to all Begesu clans. For various reasons, the custom was kept secret and even members of the tribe were not permitted to look on during the ceremony, which was performed at night. Yet the custom was known to all, and each family member, each family, rather, was aware of what was going on, though they never sought to watch their neighbors doings. When a man died, the body was kept in the house until evening, when the relatives who had been summoned gathered for the morning. In some exceptional instances, it took one or two days to bring the relatives together, but as a rule, always ready by the evening of the day of death, and its sunset, the body was carried to the nearest waste ground and deposited there. At the same time, men of the clan hid themselves in different places round about, and as darkness deepened, they blew upon gourd horns, making a noise like the cry of jackals. The villagers said that the jackals were coming to eat the dead, and young people were warned not to go outside. When darkness had set in, and it was felt to be safe to work without intrusion from inquisitive onlookers, a number of elderly women relatives of the dead man went to the place where the body lay and cut it up, carrying back the pieces they wanted to the house of mourning and leaving the remains to be devoured by wild animals. For the next three, or sometimes four days, the relatives mourned in the house, and mourned in the house in which the death had taken place, where they cooked and ate the flesh of the dead, destroying the bones by fire and leaving nothing. In quote, writing about the indigenous turbo-all tribes of southeastern Australia, Seagan talks about how occasionally an adult male would be killed during the ritual combat of their initiation ceremonies. And he says, quote, "In such cases, his body was eaten by those members of his tribe who were present. A great medicine man singed the body all over with a fire stick, which caused the skin to turn copper-colored. The body was then laid face downward and opened down the neck with a stone knife, turned over and slipped down the front and finally skinned. All the entrails, including the heart and lungs, were burned, and blackened sticks tied with grass were laid over the burial place. The medicine man cut off pieces of the flesh, and threw it to the several groups sitting around who cooked and ate it. The medicine man rubbed the fat all over their own bodies. When asked where they did all this, the people of the tribe, and remember these are the dead boys, father, uncles, and cousins. They replied that they knew him, and were fond of him, and they now knew where he was, and his flesh would not stink. His mother carried the skin and bones for months with her, and when one tribal group met another, the old woman would lift the apostle rug off the skin, which was placed in a hut. End quote. Generally speaking, the reasons given for why tribes ate their dead kinsmen had something to do with some magical benefit they were supposed to get out of it. This applies to aggressive enemy cannibalism and, let's say, affectionate endocannibalism. In another Australian example, a boy that was killed in a ceremonial fight like the one above would be skinned by his father, uncle, and the fat around the kidneys would be rubbed on the tribe's spears, and the kidneys themselves of this boy would be impaled on two of the spears, and this was supposed to make the weapons more accurate and deadly. And then the flesh would be eaten by the men of the tribe, because they thought that the virtues and strength of the dead of the dead boy would pass into those who would consume them. And so is this kind of affectionate endocannibalism is sublimated. Its nature is a therapeutic means of externalizing the grieving process becomes much clearer. Very often, nothing is eaten that could credibly be, you know, that it's not intended to satisfy the appetite, but only a certain part might be eaten or a little, you know, just a little bit nibbled on. Very often when the goal was to absorb a warrior's strength, other warriors would often cook and eat the penis. It's very common. Other times, the powdered remains of a burnt corpse might be mixed into a drink and passed around. AWS Howlett, who's book on the tribes of Southeast Australia, I'm drawing on here, he wrote that, quote, the aborigines said that the body was eaten with no desire to gratify or appease the appetite, but only as a symbol of respect and regret to the dead, and quote, this is also clear in the practice of a tribe called the Tungara there on the same region, who would, they would carry the remains of dead relatives around with them in a bag. And anytime that they felt overcome with sorrow or grief, they would reach into the bag and cut off a piece of the flesh and eat it. And how it says he reports that it actually did seem to do what it was supposed to do. It had a therapeutic effect, at least apparently. Another Tungara practice really brings this out into the light. When a killer slew a warrior of another tribe, he would sometimes keep some of the fat, some of the body fat. And when he was inevitably accused by the dead man's relatives, he could present them with some of their dead relatives body fat. And apparently this was very often usually an acceptable compensation. And how it says that the relatives reported that they would no longer be afflicted with sadness and weeping since they had gotten back some of the body fat. And it's again, it's stuff very complicated. You know, because the thing that I, you know, what I want to emphasize here is that both affectionate and aggressive cannibalism contain elements of the other. Okay. Aztec victims who were slated for sacrifice and cannibalism were often cared for like family by their captors before they met the obsidian knife on the sacrificial stone. All throughout North America, you find captives who were marked for the most grisly, tortured death. You can imagine in the meantime, before that happens, being given the name of a dead man who had been killed by the captives, who the, by the captives' own tribe, they would give him the dead man's name. And very often he would even take over the duties of husband and father for the dead man's family. There's a lot of ambivalence going on here. You know, usually that captive was eventually tortured and killed. But then the wife would have mourned him as her husband. And this would provide her with, you know, her and the tribe a means to grieve as well as to take revenge in one act. And sometimes the captive was never killed and he would just simply remain in the role of the man that he replaced as a member of the new tribe. And this is what I mean by ambivalent emotions. I mean, all wrapped up in one thing. You've got hatred and love and affection and aggression and revenge and just, you know, there are so many complicated and contradictory feelings crying out for satisfaction. And as savage and unsophisticated as it seems to us, it also reveals Kind of a deep human ingenuity for dealing with psychological crises that you almost can't believe. Cannibalism against enemies excites this, excites unbidden compassion because despite being hated, the victim is nevertheless recognized and identified with as a human being. Aggressive cannibals take joy in the aggression and the compassion that sort of wells up from that identification tends to get in the way. And so the ritual efforts work to downplay or purge or repress the familiarity of the meal. Funerary cannibalism of one's own relatives is the opposite. This is an act of affection as one seeks to incorporate the positive attributes of the dead into oneself in order to keep something of the other person around after they're gone. And yet it takes aggression to bite into the flesh of one's father to chew it up and choke it down and then to squat the next day knowing what or who is being pushed out the other end of you. And worse, this is what makes it incredibly ambivalent is that the aggressive aspect of that act syncs up very nicely with the anger felt at the dead person for having abandoned their family. Which again, that's something that sounds who feels anger over that but the truth is most people on some level. This is something that's been very well documented in the psychological literature by now that people consistently experience feelings of betrayal and abandonment. And anger at loved ones who die. We don't mean to, of course, but it happens all the time. And it's not surprising when you look at how small children react when they think that they've been abandoned. They don't react with passive sadness, sort of accepting their situation as it is. They explode and rage. And they only stop exploding when the person that they're missing reappears. So we grow into adults and we no longer pitch fits of rage at loved ones for dying, but just because we learn to manage our reaction doesn't mean that the impulse dies. Now just as with the aggressive cannibalism engaged in against enemies, affectionate cannibalism of relatives eventually gives way to sublimated forms if the people can manage it. One way that some tribes would do this was to associate some animal with the dead man in one way or another and then slaughter and eat the animal instead. Roscoe, our source for the baguessu of British Uganda a moment ago, writes about this quote. When a man died, his widow or widows slept beside the body for two days before it was buried. They threw all kinds of grain upon the body in the grave and also through in the first earth. A cow or bull was killed and the body was wrapped in the skin while the meat was eaten by the mourners during the days of mourning. The grave was dug in the house where the man had died and mourning went on for five days, the people wailing each morning at four o'clock. On the third day, a second cow was killed and eaten by the mourners and on the fifth day they departed their own homes. We hear about the Vata people in the new hebrides who were known for executing the elderly when they were becoming informed by burying them alive. When they would do this, they would dig a hole and have the old person sit or lay down inside the hole with a pig tied to each arm. Then they would begin to fill the grave with dirt and at a certain point they would cut the pigs loose and slaughter them and serve them at the funeral feast. It's very easy to see that that very possibly, very likely used to be a cannibal feast and that this is a substitute. You move even further up the golden ladder of sublimation, many tribes would preserve the bones of the corpse and wear them as jewelry. Instead of incorporating the dead into their own essence by eating him or by pretending to eat him by proxy, here some people were able to achieve something like the same effect of maintaining the continued presence of the dead by carrying around his relics. There's something here in the manner of a child who refuses to let go of some object to which has become attached. There's a similar thing going on. There are many, many, many, many examples of this kind of thing right on up to the modern world in fact. In the early 20th century, when many of the ethnologies that I've been drawing on were written, some of them comment on the parallels between these kinds of practices and that of an English mother wearing a lock of her dead child's hair and a brooch or pin. Which I guess was common back then. Today, you know, I don't think it's common today. I don't know, but I've never met anybody who does it. We might have moved a little bit more up that ladder of sublimation and so we might find having a lock of your dead child's hair and a pin. Even that, a little bit too creepily obsessive. But we don't find anything remarkable about a mother who wears a pendant with a picture of her beloved child after he or she has died. The spirit is the same. Although by the time you get to an advanced, very highly sublimated, almost metaphorical, almost, but not quite metaphorical, culture-form like the pendant with the picture, by the time you get there, the aggressive aspect of the relationship between the living and the dead has been almost completely, if not completely, purged. We've got modern examples like in Albania until very recent times, at least. I'm not sure if this still happens. Morners would carry wheat cakes in the funeral procession, and then when they would get to the grave and lower it, as soon as the grave was filled up, they would all eat these wheat cakes while standing over the grave. This process and the products of this progressive sublimation is what we call civilization. For civilization to exist, society and the individuals within it have got to have energy freed up for activities other than satisfying basic instincts. You'll think of how much more social energy goes into sacrificing and cannibalizing, as opposed to the Christian ritual sacrifice and consumption of Christ. The Gwins, Omellus, keeps a child in the dungeon, but it doesn't build pires on which to sacrifice children every week. It doesn't have a society built around going out and raiding other towns to take their children and bring them back to sacrifice them. We might say that the choice isn't merely between those two options, but at one point it was. At one point it was, for all of us. And perhaps one day, Omellus will someday progress through stages whereby the residents merely bury the effigy of a child under the foundation of each new public building, instead of having a live one in the basement to abuse. And they pray that the building grows as sturdy as a child growing into a man, and that's all they do. Or maybe they keep going and progress even further, leaving the image of a child off all together and instead stepping on a glass at weddings or smashing a wine bottle on the prow of a newly-made building. On the prow of a newly-launched ship, richly destroying just a mere physical object for good luck instead of a child. In fact, I think that a lot of what we call culture is just the progressive, sublimated symbols and behaviors that various people's devised for managing and expressing these common human impulses. But these things are born out of ancient soil, and so sublimation takes courage and it takes work. I mentioned earlier, and you'll have noticed throughout this episode, that the Aztecs were a far, far more advanced society than the other examples that I brought to bear. These are not tribes running around Papua New Guinea. It's an explanation, but as with the rest of this episode, all I can offer is speculation, and it's speculation that is going to dovetail much more comfortably with the next episode on human sacrifice if I save most of it until then. And so that's what I'm going to do. So, in some ways, think about it like this, and some ways we're less shocked to learn that a primitive tribe in Papua New Guinea engaged in these bloody practices than we are to hear about it with the Aztecs. It's less strange that that New Guinea tribe did it than it is that the Aztecs were doing it. And they were fascinated with the Aztecs for the same reason, were fascinated with a character like Hannibal Lecter. People so sophisticated and obviously able to construct and maintain a complex and orderly world for themselves, we think, should not be capable of engaging in those kind of practices. They don't seem to go together. It seems somehow paradoxical for good reason. Real killers don't die of old age very often. Some of them can kind of put on a reasonable social mask for a while, but eventually their pathology starts to catch up with them. They're almost always loners, and however successful they are at slipping through the nets, their law enforcement puts out, very few of them are able to maintain long standing relationships without people starting to catch on to the fact that there's something going on with them. Civilized people are not supposed to gather beneath a pyramid to watch hearts being ripped out, and then to eat the remains. They're supposed to gather in movie theaters and watch hearts being ripped out with a little more. more psychological distance, right? But as with children working their way through the psychosexual stages, the question at all times is whether the subjects themselves feel comfortable and secure enough to leave behind a key support to their particular understanding of the world in favor of a substitute. Whether that substitute will work for them, whether they have confidence it'll work for them. Or if it won't, whether or not they have a reason and the ability to simply repress it. Explanations for Aztec cannibalism, there are several. And again, they go much better with the episode on human sacrifice. So I'm going to save them until then. But explanations for cannibalism, like the hypothesis that Mesoamerica just didn't have much in the way of animal protein lacking cattle and other stock animals. So they just had no choice but to eat people that I just can. That ignores everything else, literally everything else we know about cannibalism in other parts of the world, which is why I spent this entire episode talking about those other places and those other cultures. There's going to be a lot more Aztec coming up in the next two. These people built an entire civilization and religion and everything around the ritual, sacrifice, and cannibalization of other human beings who are culturally very similar to themselves. Something like that, something so central to their cosmology and their social lives is not merely a form of cattle ranching with which we're not familiar. OK, because so much deeper than that. For all their savagery, for all their savagery, I want to take it back to the near the beginning and remember what kind of world we live in. The world of Job and our June, we describe in the beginning, the Aztecs and any of these people that we've been speaking about. They don't have theoretical books on natural science because like other peoples of similar social development, the Aztecs still perceived and understood the world in terms of agency, action, narrative, mythology, things like that. That's how they understood the functions of the world. They encoded their understanding of the cosmos, not in books to put on a library shelf. They encoded their cosmology and their entire cultural system. You know, all of us, we all of us have to figure out how to navigate a world which constantly thwarts our attempts to assign stable meanings to it because our minds are meaning-making machines. It's just-- this is our glory in our curse. It's what we do. The world constantly dodges and thwarts our attempts to assign meaning, but assign meaning we shall over and over and over and over. It's supposed to mean something that I love my family, but eventually they will all die and so will I and so will the children and grandchildren that I teach to value the same things. My attempts to bolster meaning by writing it in books and encoding it in stone and painting it on canvas, all of that's going to fade and rot away. Even if we build an entire civilization to keep our unique story of the universe going, that civilization will fall. And the Aztecs were extraordinarily aware of this. This is going to be a big theme in the next episode. The Aztecs knew this as well as anybody. They inhabited a landscape and a culture realm where the land was littered with the ruins of cities greater than anything that they'd built themselves by people of whom they had no memory because they were wiped out before anybody could even remember what was going on. The people who built Teotewa Khan are gone. They got wiped out. What do you think's going to happen to us? That is a primary theme in all Aztec life. The languages in which we record our myths are going to be forgotten as Mesoamerican Noato has been mostly forgotten and probably will be completely someday. And now, thanks to modern science, we understand, say, the pre-Christian Germanic tribes and many others that no matter what we do, it all comes apart in the end. Eventually, the sun blows up. Eventually, the universe dies in heat death. Yet we have to live in this universe and the reflex of consciousness compels us to seek meaning in it. Who knows why life split off from the blind momentum of dead matter and chartered its own course? All we know is that once it did so, it immediately started cannibalizing itself and using the life energy of whatever one part could get a hold of to bolster its weapons and defenses against the other parts. Of course, as we reflected, life is not a completely closed system, right? The energy that supports it pours in from the sun through the unconscious portal of vegetation, seed-bearing plants and trees on the land that bear fruit with seed into according to their kind, as the Bible says. And the one other means by which energy enters the system is from the planet itself, from the earth, through the lichens and chemotrophs, it suck up mineral nutrients from the ocean floor vents and other openings in the earth, right? And then convert that into biomass. And that's it. Those are the ways in. Other than that, it's a closed loop. It's just life eating life eating life. At the top of the temple of myor, the great pyramid in the center of the Aztec capital, the top of it were two temples, one each to the sun god and the rain god. The sun impregnates the earth with its rays and the god Tlullac released the rain, which was equated on a one-to-one basis in Aztec cosmology with blood. The blood of the gods who had sacrificed themselves the beginning of time to create life on earth. And the goddess, the earth goddess, was pictured as a decapitated corpse in her most famous Aztec representation with two spurts of blood spraying out from her neck. That was how they pictured the earth goddess. And you wonder what the consequences are to believing that rather than a big bang or a spoken sentence of let there be light, the founding event of the cosmos was an act of murder. You wonder what type of society might grill out of such an idea? Perhaps a society in which the people believed that they had a debt, a blood debt, to the universe itself. Sun rays and blood rain provided the energy of life. But once you're inside those gates, again, in the kingdom of biology, it is nothing but one big competition to see whose blood is going to be repaid to keep the whole enterprise moving. Single-celled creatures become multicellular. Multicellular creatures become animals. And flee the chaotic brutality of the ocean's screaming on a dry land. Your life hid from itself in progressively larger and more adaptable forms until finally, the one creature destined to rule woke up to what was happening and wondered what it meant for him. This is the fall of man from the garden. And we have been trying to find ways to mitigate its consequences for us ever since. Many answers that we've come up with are-- well, they're understandable. But they're life denying. They're world denying. Playing psychological tricks to pretend that it's not actually happening as many Eastern philosophies do. The Abrahamic religions, they admit that it's happening, but they say it doesn't really matter because the real show begins after we pass through this nightmare into the afterlife anyway. Modern secular culture tries to convince itself that technology is somehow going to overcome the basic parameters of biological life that have existed for billions of years. But the Aztecs didn't do any of that. The Aztecs embraced it. His life hid from life until emerged the human standing upright at the top of the pyramid of life, recognizing the carnage that was necessarily reaked simply to keep the human kingdom going. And their culpability for all the destruction, they didn't exempt themselves from that carnage. That wasn't the point of their society to get themselves out of the big, big mass of life chewing on itself. They weren't trying to escape. Instead, they gathered in their thousands, in their tens of thousands, at the very center of their universe, literally, and offered the most precious water of their own blood back to the universe to replenish all that they had taken and returned with the meat of their cultural cousins to their neighborhoods to celebrate their feast. Mr. Chambers. Mr. Chambers, don't get on that ship. Get to the boat to serve men. It's a coquette. [MUSIC PLAYING] [MUSIC PLAYING] (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music) [Music]