BHS, LXXIV (1997)

Cannibalism in Iberian Narrative:

The Dark Side of Gastronomy

HARRIET GOLDBERG
Villanova University, Pennsylvania

What is it about cannibalism that captures the human imagination? It is

the only tabu that has provoked a whole branch of popular humour. We do
not joke much about incest, for instance, but cannibal jokes are myriad,
although cannibalism has been called ‘alimentary incest’. We are all
familiar with the drawing of the missionary whose pith-helmeted head
peeps out over the rim of the cannibal’s cauldron. Does this fact show that
we are especially uncomfortable with the topic? Perhaps we free ourselves
from this discomfort by making jokes or by attributing the practice to
people who live in a remote place or in a past time. To be sure, every time
we examine the culture of a remote people, we view it through a filter of
our own culture, and judge their behaviour in comparison with our own.
Our reaction is double; first we are appalled, then we seek a way of dealing
with our discomfort. Commonly, laughter serves to relieve the discomfort
generated by the experience of thinking about the unthinkable.
This inquiry is limited to the large body of Iberian narrative, within

1 See Gian-Paulo Biasin, ‘Italo Calvino in Mexico: Food and Lovers, Tourists and
Cannibals ’, PMLA, CVIII (1993), 72-88, at p. 86.
2 Jill Tattersall, ‘Anthropophagi and Eaters of Raw Flesh in French Literature of the
Crusade Period: Myth, Tradition and Reality ’, Medium Aevum, LVII (1988), 240-53, at p.
255.
3 David Quint, ‘A Reconsideration of Montaigne ’s Des cannibales’, Modern Language
Quarterly, LI (1988), 459-89, at pp. 462-63 .
4 An academic joke has circulated on U.S. campuses for years. It tells of a group of
anthropologists or ethnologists who had landed on an island in the South Pacific, only to
find that it was inhabited by cannibals. Captured, they watched helplessly as plans were
made to eat them one by one. Professional curiosity seized one member of the team who
had noticed that they were to be eaten in order of their academic ranking —research
assistants, lecturers, associates, full professors and finally the dean. Unable to resis t
asking the cannibal leader whether the visiting scientists had silently conveyed their
ranking system to this alien group, he asked why they had placed the dean last. The
astonished leader grimaces with disgust and says: ‘Have you ever cleaned a dean? ’

107
108 BHS, LXXIV (1997) HARRIET GOLDBERG

which I hope to arrive at an answer to the question of why we tell so many

tales of this abhorrent act, and to find the metaphor that it represents. To
begin this exploration, I call attention to one feature in the oppositions
created by Northrop Frye in his portrayal of the universe of romance
narrative. In his scheme he sets up such expected oppositions as
God/ Satan, angels/ demons, and heaven/ hell, but then he proposes an
opposition between the wedding feast in the upper world (heaven and the
earthly paradise) and the cannibal feast (human sacrifice) in the
underworld (hell). He writes: ‘At the bottom of the night world we find the
cannibal feast, the serving up of a child or lover as food’. Perhaps the real
contrast is between normal, happy, human intercourse in the upper world
and the most horrific of demonic activities in hell.
Dealing first with the nature of the act itself, we go, definition in hand,
ready to examine the psychological explanation for the almost universal
fascination with the topic. From the personal and the individual, we will
proceed to the political and societal aspects of these strange stories, and
finally we will deal with, perhaps, the strangest aspect of these remarkable
narratives, what might be called cannibalism in the kitchen, the act of
orally incorporating either an enemy or a loved one.
As a first step in our trip to the cooking pot, I will define the various
kinds of anthropophagic activity. Ethnologists concern themselves with
the societal nature of this strange activity identifying: ‘(1)
endocannibalism, ... eating a member of one’s own group; (2)
exocannibalism ... the consumption of outsiders; (3) autocannibalism ...
ingesting parts of one’s own body’. For those of us interested in folk
narratives another taxonomy is of greater utility: what Arens calls ‘cross-
cutting typology: (1) gastronomic cannibalism ... human flesh is eaten for
its taste and food value; (2) ritual or magical cannibalism ... an attempt to
absorb the spiritual essence of the deceased; (3) survival cannibalism ... a
resort to this normally prohibited behaviour in crisis conditions’. In any
event, the overriding fact is that those who practise cannibalism are
treating other beings as objects, bereft of humanity. Eli Sagan goes
directly to the central meaning of anthropophagy when he writes: ‘We may

5 Northrop Frye, The Secular Scripture: A Study of the Structure of Romance

(Cambridge, MA: Harvard U. P., 1976), 118 .
6 Stith Thompson, Motif-Index of Folk-Literature: A Classification of Narrative
Elements in Folktales, Ballads, Myths, Fables, Mediaeval Romances, Exempla, Fabliaux,
Jest-Books, and Local Legends (Bloomington: Indiana U. P., 1955-58), 6 vols. The folkloris t
assumes that cannibalism is associated with ogres. He subdivides it into G10-G49 ‘Regula r
Cannibalism ’; G50-79 ‘Occasional Cannibalism ’. Within this second category he places G60
‘Human flesh eaten unwittingly ’ and G70 ‘Occasional cannibalism —deliberate ’ and G80-
G99 ‘Other motifs dealing with cannibals ’.
7 W. Arens, The Man-Eating Myth: Anthropology & Anthropophagy (New York:
Oxford U. P., 1979), 17-18 .
CANNIBALISM IN IBERIAN NARRATIVE 109

define human aggression as the systematic, recurrent, legitimatized

treatment as objects of one group of people by another’ . The first hint of
the meaning these tales hold for the tellers and for their audience lies in
one aspect of human behaviour, a universal tendency to dehumanize the
‘other’.
It does not follow that this dehumanizing of the victim reduces the
horror that the act inspires. On the contrary, because cannibalism is the
ultimate hostile act that one human creature can inflict on another, it is
clearly an act outside the usual limits of human behaviour. Even talking
about it takes on a special piquancy as if by expressing our dread in words
we find a safe way of taking part in its depravity.
Perhaps the rawest point in the human psyche is affected when we tell
tales of inter-generational cannibalism—hostility between parents and
children. Freudian and Kleinian theorists see a link with the oral
aggression experienced during human infancy and our fantasies about the
eating of human flesh. The infant, unable to discern boundaries between
self and maternal breasts, reacts angrily at the symbolic abandonment
inherent in the recognition of separation between self and source of
nourishment. Then, having been abandoned symbolically, the poor mite
experiences real deprivation at the moment of weaning. Norman Cohn
explains why so many cultures develop the fantasy of cannibalistic
infanticide: ‘Psycho-analysts of the Kleinian school would argue, ... that
infants in the first two years of life experience cannibalistic impulses that
they project on to their parents; and that the source of the fantasy lies
there’. Furthermore, the very act of eating has an aggressive side.
Kilgour cites Bakhtin to equate eating and aggression. She writes of
eating: ‘It is the most material need yet is invested with a great deal of
significance, an act that involves both desire and aggression, as it creates a
total identity between eater and eaten while insisting on the total control—
the literal consumption—of the latter by the former’. Thus our
explanation of the way these stories enthrall us is that they recall in a safe
way certain primordial feelings all of us have experienced in infancy. So
we go forward knowing that these stories satisfy two profound psychic
needs, first to dehumanize others safely, and second to recall our own
infantile aggressivity.

8 Eli Sagan, Cannibalism: Human Aggression and Cultural Form (New York: Harper
& Row, 1974), xv.
9 W. Ronald D. Fairbairn, Psychoanalytic Studies of the Personality (London:
Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1952). See Fairbairn ’s discussion of the early oral phase in which
he notes the internal conflict in the nursing child between feelings toward the gratifying
and depriving aspects of the mother (23-24) .
10 Norman Cohn, Europe’s Inner Demons (New York: Basic Books, 1975), 261 .
11 Maggie Kilgour, From Communion to Cannibalism: An Anatomy of Metaphors of
Incorporation (Princeton: Princeton U. P., 1989), 7.
110 BHS, LXXIV (1997) HARRIET GOLDBERG

Then just as infants project cannibalistic impulses on their parents, the

inverse is true. Adults experience dread at the thought of a cannibalistic
infant. Folk literature reflects some of the revulsion we feel at the idea of
a cannibalistic infant, a creature that acts out a dreadful violation of the
infant/ nurturer bond. The tale of the monster baby Endriago, child of a
father/ daughter incestuous union, in the Spanish chivalric novel Amadís de
Gaula reflects a primitive discomfort with the relationship between baby
and nurturing female. This evil babe is so aggressive with his wetnurses
that he kills them by exuding a poison that penetrates their breasts. One
nursemaid, wiser than the rest, weans him to cow’s milk. After a year his
parents visit the chamber of their monster son, and he attacks and kills his
mother, clawing her to death. This dis-ease appears with clear
cannibalistic details in a folktale reported in Spain and in Latin America
by twentieth-century folklorists. Here the mother’s sin is a reckless
(blasphemous) wish to have a child even if it be a lizard. Her grotesque
wish having been granted, the creature ‘ate the breasts’ ( ‘le había comido
los pechos’) of his first wetnurse. Unable to find a new one, the desperate
parents find a clever woman who fabricates two iron breasts connected to a
reservoir of milk she wears on her back. Might not the aggression be
mutual? In both stories the baby is the instrument to punish the mothers’
sin—Endriago’s mother’s incest, and the infertile woman’s blasphemous
wish.
In the continuing battle between the generations as revealed in stories
of the consumption of human flesh, some tales are guideposts. Norman
Cohn identifies the inherent hostility in two tales commonly told to
children, ‘Snow White’ (A-Th 709) and ‘Hansel and Gretel’ (A-Th 327A):
‘The common theme is a generational conflict, between those who at
present hold power and those who are destined to inherit it’. However,
two groups of outsiders—heretical sects and witches—are the principal

12 Amadís de Gaula, ed. Edwin B. Place, 4 vols (Madrid: CSIC, I, 1959 and 1971; II,
1962; III, 1965; IV, 1969): ‘y luego que entraron en la cámara donde estaua y vieronle andar
corriendo y saltando. Y como el Endriago vio a su madre, vino para ella, y saltando echóle
las vñas al rostro y fendióle las narizes y quebr óle los ojos, y antes de que saliesse de sus
manos fue muerta’ (3, 73, 796).
13 Julio Camarena and Maxime Chevalier, Catálogo tipológico del cuento folklórico
español: cuentos maravillosos (Madrid: Gredos, 1995). They report it in Castile, Catalonia ,
Panama, Southwestern United States, Mexico, Puerto Rico, Venezuela, Ecuador, Bolivia ,
Chile, Argentina and Portugal (245-46) .
14 ‘El lagarto de las siete camisas’, Cuento Tipo 425A (Camarena and Chevalier, op.
cit., 241). See also Aurelio M. Espinosa, Cuentos populares españoles (Stanford: Stanford
U. P., 1924), 3 vols, 130, 267-71 .
15 Although it is the wolf who consumes the grandmother in ‘Little Red Riding Hood ’
(A-Th 333), the rescue from the belly is a significant feature in childish fantasies abou t
consuming of the mother (Fairbairn, op. cit., 23-24).
CANNIBALISM IN IBERIAN NARRATIVE 111

practitioners of this terrible act.

We are all familiar with the hag/ witch in ‘Hansel and Gretel’. The
children had already been the object of adult aggression, having been
abandoned in the woods. In the pan-Hispanic tradition the witch, another
hostile adult, appears as ‘una ogra’ (‘a female ogre’) who wants to fatten up
Periquito because she wants to serve him to her friends at a dinner party.
This does not appear to be survival cannibalism, but rather a type of ritual
dinner. When the young boy and his sister trick her with a hen’s foot
instead of a human finger, she says: ‘Si el chico está delgao, aso también a
la chica y entre los dos, ya tendremos comida’. The subsequent roasting
of the evil witch in her own oven is the other half of the hostile equation,
although they do not eat her. In ‘Snow White’ the wicked queen (also a
witch), and an undoubtedly hostile stepmother, thinks she is eating Snow
White’s lungs and liver (heart) and is committing the ultimate aggressive
act against her young rival. Sagan notes the essence of aggression in
cannibalism, ‘Sadism, that is, human satisfaction in the suffering of others,
plays a role in all cannibal activity’. In both these folktales, a sadistic
witchlike figure is a symbol of adult hostility.
Of course, other adults, who are not witches, but who are outsiders, are
also guilty of cannibalistic infanticide. A folktale combines two disparate
elements, a devil and a mother accused of eating her newborns. An
innocent young mother is accused of this despicable act twice. A devil
comes to her directly after she has given birth, demanding that she answer
a riddle or give him her child. She is unable to answer, the devil kills the
baby, eats it and dabs her mouth with flesh and blood. Her mother-in-law
finds her and accuses her. In contrast to the innocent in the folktale, the
story of Mary of Jerusalem is told to show the depravity of a Jewish
woman (clearly an outsider on two counts) during the siege of her city. In
a thirteenth-century Castilian chronicle, she reveals her perverse delight
in her own wickedness, murmuring as she eats the roasted babe: ‘Oh my

16 Cohn, op. cit., 260.

17 Camarena and Chevalier, op. cit., 135. See Stith Thompson, op. cit., G82.1.1,
Captive sticks out bone instead of finger when cannibal tries to test his fatness.
18 Cohn, op. cit., 260. Camarena and Chevalier find ‘Blanca Nieves ’ in Castile ,
Asturias, Leon, Valladolid, Segovia, Ciudad Real, Catalonia, Basque Country, among Judeo -
Spanish tales, Latin America, Portugal (A-Th 709).
19 Sagan, op. cit., 9.
20 The wish, if not the physical act, is expressed in the cooked baby legend reported in
this century in the United States as ‘The Hippie Baby Sitter’. A babysitter, befuddled by
drugs, mistakes the baby for a turkey and responds to a parental inquiry that everything is
fine. The turkey is cooking in the oven. The frantic parents know they have not left a
turkey speed home, arriving too late (Jan Harold Brunvand, The Vanishing Hitchhiker:
American Urban Legends and Their Meanings [New York: Norton, 1981], pp. 65-69, 72-73) .
21 ‘El diablo maestro’ (Espinosa, op. cit., 104.192-96) .
112 BHS, LXXIV (1997) HARRIET GOLDBERG

child, you were never more sweet to me than you are now’. Of course,
these stories have roots in the farthest reaches of human memory. At least
twice God curses the people of the Old Testament for disobedience,
condemning them to eat the flesh of their children during a siege
(Deuteronomy 28.52-53 and Leviticus 26:28-29). Kings 2 relates a quarrel
between two women during a famine caused by a siege. They had each
agreed to cook a son on succeeding days. The first had complied and had
boiled her child but the second had reneged on the agreement. Later God
accuses the Israelites of dreadful acts: ‘The hands of the pitiful women
have sodden their own children; they were their meat in the destruction of
the daughter of my people’ (Lamentations 4.10). Finally they are cursed
for their iniquity with a prophecy of the destruction of Israel: ‘Therefore
the fathers shall eat the sons in the midst of thee, and the sons shall eat
their fathers and I will execute judgments in thee, and the whole remnant
of thee will I scatter into all the winds’ (Ezekiel 5:10) . Biblical
commentary identified cannibalism as a hereditary trait perpetrated by
either the sons of Cain or the descendants of Ham. If we read the Old
Testament as a unified narrative, then it becomes clear that God first took
notice of the Israelites’ violation of a powerful taboo, then he warned them
that their persistence would cause their own destruction, and finally he
punished them, causing them to leave the holy land and to disperse.
After thinking about these individual instances of accounts of personal
cannibalism—eating one’s own offspring—we turn to a curious pattern of
accusations of cannibalistic infanticide directed at members of heretical
sects or at conquered enemies. Given these stories’ power to disturb we
are not surprised that they are told to dehumanize an enemy, a rival

22 Motif S12.2, Cruel mother kills child and eats it during siege of her city. See also
Kings 2, 6:26: ‘And as the king of Israel was passing by, there cried a woman unto him ,
saying, Help, my lord, O king’; Kings 2, 6:28-29: ‘And the king said unto her, What ailet h
thee? And she answered, This woman said unto me, Give thy son, that we may eat him
today, and we will eat my son tomorrow. So we boiled my son, and did eat him, and I said
unto her on the next day Give thy son that we may eat him; and she hath hid her son’. See
also Ezekiel 5:10; Stith Thompson, op. cit., G72, Unnatural parents eat children; Castigos e
documentos para bien vivir ordenados por el rey Don Sancho IV, ed. Agapito Rey, Indian a
Univ. Publications, Humanities Series 24 (Bloomington: Indiana U. P., 1952), 5.55.
23 A thirteenth-century collection of midrashim explains the difference between the
two sons of Adam as follows: (1) ‘When the serpent injected his impurity into Eve she
absorbed it, and so when Adam had intercourse with her she bore two sons —one from the
impure side, and one from the side of Adam ... Map of northeast Asia: Here are exceedingl y
truculent men, eating human flesh, drinking blood, cursed sons of Cain ’; (2) ‘The Apostles
trace for the cannibals an insulting genealogy: “Ham cursed by his father was reprobate in
his progeny, proscribed through the ages from whom the filthy people take their source,
whence they are shunned by God, and you, O cannibals are the filthiest ” ’ (John Block
Friedman, The Monstrous Races in Medieval Art and Though t [Cambridge, MA: Harvar d
U. P., 1981], pp. 95, 102) .
CANNIBALISM IN IBERIAN NARRATIVE 113

religion or a conquered people. Cohn studies the strange prevalence of

accusations of cannibalistic infanticide levelled at the Christians in the
first century after Christ. One of their rites of initiation involved ‘a child
covered in dough ... The novice stabs the child to death ... They drink the
blood and compete with one another as they divide his limbs’. Later
Christian apologists derided these fantastical tales, but during the first
and second century of the millennium the fantasy of ritual cannibalism
was free-floating so that Christians began using the story to attac k
heretics.
Typical of these tales was the account of an atrocity at the end of the
first millennium, as a natural precursor to the End and the Coming of the
Antichrist. In 1050 Michael Constantine Psellos wrote of an abhorrent
practice of the sect of the Bogomils of Thracia: he described a celebration in
which the lights were extinguished, and the participants threw themselves
upon young girls in an orgy. After nine months the fruits of these dreadful
unions were killed ritually: ‘They cut their tender flesh all over with sharp
knives, and catch the stream of blood in basins. They throw the babies still
breathing and gasping, on the fire to be burned to ashes. After which, they
mix the ashes with the blood and so make an abominable drink ...’. What
an impossible scene this story conjures up!
Accounts of orgiastic meals associated with hatred of the other
lingered, leaving traces in the pan-European narrative continuum. For
instance, in fifteenth-century Spain, when Juan de Flores wrote a bizarre
culmination of his sentimental romance, Grisel y Mirabella, he created a
shocking scene that throbbed with the same sort of excitement found in
first-century stories of ritual cannibalism. The anti-feminist Torellas,
stripped of his clothes, bound, and gagged is attacked by an assemblage of
furious women who intend to punish him. They came armed, some with
burning pliers, and others with fingernails and teeth, and ferociously tore
him to pieces, leaving him half dead: ‘y tales houo que con tenazas
ardiendo, y otras con vnyas y dientes rauiosamente le despedeçaron,

24 Cohn, op. cit., 1.

25 A folk legend had attached itself to the stories of cannibalistic infanticide: the motif
of binding novices or co-conspirators by forcing them to share this unspeakable act. The
Greek author Polyaenus wrote that the tyrant Apollodorus of Cassandreia sacrificed a
young boy, and ordered a meal prepared from his entrails. This he served to his
countrymen who were then bound to him ‘through the shared pollution ’ (Cohn, op. cit., 7).
Cohn goes on to doubt that these feasts ever really took place. Nevertheless, the stereotype
of a ritual killing and the consumption of the victim’s flesh appeared in tales that told of ‘a
ritual by which a group of conspirators affirms its solidarity; and in each case the group’s
aim is to overthrow an existing ruler or regime and to seize power’ (ibid.).
26 Cohn, op. cit., 19. About the heretics burned at Orleans in 1022, Adhémar de
Chabannes said that these heretics had been given the ashes of dead children to eat to bin d
them to the sect (ibid., 20).
114 BHS, LXXIV (1997) HARRIET GOLDBERG

estando assi medio muerto por creçer más pena en su pena non le quisieron
de vna vez matar ...’. Exhausted, they enjoy a meal (another echo of
ancient tales), during which the afflicted man must listen to their verbal
attacks. When they had left no flesh on his bones they burned his remains,
and each woman took a bit of his ashes to put in a locket as a keepsake.
Let us pause to consider how the human mind can deal with the
unbearable pain of thinking about these acts. Once the self is conscious of
the inherently aggressive nature of the act of eating human flesh, it is
overtaken by a realization of its evil nature. Peggy Reeves Sanday makes
use of Ricoeur’s oppositional structure to show that cannibalism symbolizes
both power and evil. We see that, simplified, the defilement caused by
the consumption of human flesh causes dread (ethical terror) of pollution.
The polluted self seeks a way to control its dread and converts it into a fear
of God’s wrath. Then the self is conscious of a sin that can be expiated
ritually, and thus its guilt is controlled.
Granted the existence of a self, aware of evil, capable of managing its
dread, by expiation of guilt, then another opposition is obvious: self as
opposed to other. We have arrived at the next significant feature of these
peculiar stories. The self/ other opposition has more than one facet. First,
it refers to the distinction the self makes between its own flesh and that of
the other (subject/ object). The other person is treated as an object, not a
part of humanity. Second, the self recognizes a societal distinction of
we/ they. It says in effect: we do not indulge in this dreadful activity but
others do. Typically, in the face of accusations that Christians were
cannibals, Tatian wrote in AD152: ‘There is no cannibalism amongst us’
and Justin Martyr, in his Apology, asked ‘how a glutton who enjoys eating
human flesh could possibly bring himself to welcome death, as Christians
did; for would it not deprive him of his pleasure?’. All commentators
denying their own cannibalism were careful to say that they did not
indulge in these abominable acts but that others did.
About the ubiquitous nature of this denial, the anthropologist W. Arens
says that most tales of the cannibalism of others are second- or third-hand,
and are unreliable. In fact, usually the taleteller attributes this loathsome
custom to other people or to long-gone ancestors. Arens asks the reader to
ponder the question of why one group invariably assumes, although they
do not consume human flesh, that others do. He sees it as a way of
denying the humanity of another group. He proposes a justification for the

27 Barbara Matulka, The Novels of Juan de Flores and Their European Diffusion: A
Study in Comparative Literature (New York: Institute of French Studies, 1931), 369-70 .
28 Peggy Reeves Sanday, Divine Hunger: Cannibalism as a Cultural System
(Cambridge: Cambridge U. P, 1986), 40.
29 Ibid., 32-35.
30 Cohn, op. cit., 2.
CANNIBALISM IN IBERIAN NARRATIVE 115

charge: ‘Warfare and annihilation are then excusable, while more

sophisticated forms of dominance such as enslavement and colonization,
become an actual responsibility of the culture-bearers’.
Continuing to think about the prevalence of cannibalistic infanticide
stories, we recall the persistent legends of American Indians who were said
to have cannibalized captive children ‘despite strong evidence that Indians
are not and never were “cannibals” or “baby killers” at least not in any
systematic and culturally sanctioned way’. Elsewhere, we read of the
same attitude among the Spanish conquistadores in Mexico: ‘The gradual
transformation of what little evidence is available for Aztec cannibalism is
also an indication of the continual need to legitimize the Conquest’. He
makes similar comments on the motivations of the colonizers of Africa.
On the other hand, another sort of ritual was enacted by consuming
some form of the remains of a dead person, either those of a beloved
relative or those of a defeated enemy. In a Portuguese ballad, the youthful
Cid kills the count who had insulted his father. He mutilates the corpse
and eats a bit of the heart. This act of oral incorporation symbolically
afforded a post mortem physical union. Theorists explain our eagerness to
think about the eating of the flesh of a loved one by harking back to our

31 Arens, op. cit., 141. Peggy Reeves Sanday questions this conclusion: ‘A search of
the literature convinces me that Arens overstates his case. Although he is correct in
asserting that the attribution of cannibalism is sometimes a projection of moral superiority,
he is incorrect in arguing that cannibalism has never existed’ (op. cit., 9-10).
32 Colin Ramsey, ‘Cannibalism and Infant Killing: A System of “Demonizing ” Motif s
in Indian Captivity Narratives ’, Clio, XXIV (1994), 55-68, at p. 56. So dehumanized are
some cannibals that they were described as half human, half animals in some stories. In an
apochryphon, the Acts of Andrew and Bartholomew among the Parthians, translated from
Coptic and Arabic originals into Greek, Syriac, Latin and Old English, Christ sends Andrew
and Bartholomew on a mission to the cannibals in Parthia. As they near Parthia, a hungry
cannibal accosts them. An angel of God warns the cannibal that no harm must come to
them and then converts him: ‘He was four cubits in height, and his face was like unto the
face of a great dog, and his eyes were like unto lamps of fire which burnt brightly, and his
teeth were like unto the tusks of a wild boar, or the teeth of a lion, and the nails of his
hands were like unto curved reaping hooks, and the nails of his toes were like unto the
claws of a lion and the hair of his head came down over his arms like unto the mane of a
lion, and his whole appearance was awful and terrifying’ (Friedman, op. cit., 70-71).
See also subsequent accounts of the dog-headed people: a Cynocephalus (a dog-heade d
person) named Reprobus was converted to Christianity —new name Christopher. A witnes s
who saw him said: ‘I have seen a man with a dog’s head on him and long hair, and eye s
glittering like the morning star in his head, and his teeth were like the tusks of a wild boar ’
(Friedman, op. cit., 73).
33 Arens, op. cit., pp. 55-80, 102 .
34 Manuel da Costa Fontes, O romanceiro português e brasileiro: índice temático e
bibliográfico (Madison: Hispanic Seminary of Medieval Studies, 1997), I, 55-56, tipo A3.
See Stith Thompson, op. cit., E714.4.1, Eaten heart gives one the owner ’s qualities.
116 BHS, LXXIV (1997) HARRIET GOLDBERG

infantile emotions. The other side of infant/ parent aggressivity is, of

course, affection. As has been pointed out, ‘the anger of an abandoned
child is expressed in a desire for oral incorporation’, a return to complete
and total unity of parent and child. Similarly, a person whose relative
has died sees the death as an abandonment and therefore seeks ‘oral
incorporation’. So great was the grief of Artemisia, King Mausolus’ widow,
that she defied the custom of preserving the ashes of the departed in a
golden vessel and assumed that the only worthy repository was her own
body. The Cárcel de Amor includes Artemisia’s story, and shortly after
that the author has his principal character perform an act of symbolic
cannibalism. Leriano has starved himself to the point of death, and must
find a suitable repository for the letters his beloved Laureola had written
to him. His only thought is one of oral incorporation since any other
treatment of these precious remains of their love would be a desecration.
So with his last bit of strength, he tears them and dissolves them in water
so that he can consume them. Chorpenning reports some critical views:
‘Commentators on Leriano’s consumption of Laureola’s letters consider this
action variously a “sacramental communion”, a “travesty of the Eucharist”,
and a contrafactum “of the Viaticum, and the shredding of the letters an
allusion to the ritual fragmentation of the host into the communion
chalice” ’.
Clearly these imaginative acts of oral incorporation have been
transformed into ritual acts. Mourners, several steps removed from
mythical societies, do not actually consume the flesh of a dead person.

35 Sanday, op. cit., 10-11.

36 ‘La beuio toda: & la restante vida consumio toda en lagrimas. y en aquella manera
consumiendo el humor radical: creyendo yr mas presto a su marido / vino muy leda ala
muerte’ (Text and Concordance of the Zaragoza 1494 edition of ‘De las ilustres mujeres en
romance’ [microfiche edition], ed. Harriet Goldberg [Madison: Hispanic Seminary of
Medieval Studies, 1992], 62v). See also the catalogue of womanly virtues in Cárcel de Amor:
‘Artemisia, entre los mortales tan alabada, como fuese casada con Mausolo, rey de Icaria,
con tanta firmeza lo am ó que después de muerto le dio sepoltura en sus pechos, quemand o
sus huesos en ellos, la ceniza de los cuales poco a poco se bevi ó, y después de acabados los
oficios que en el auto se requerían, creyendo que se iva para él mat óse con sus manos ’
(Diego de San Pedro, Obras completas, II. Cárcel de Amor, ed, Keith Whinnom [Madrid:
Castalia, 1985], 167-68) .
37 ‘Cuando pensava rasgallas, parecíale que ofender ía a Laureola en dexar perder
razones de tanto precio; cuando pensava ponerlas en poder de algún suyo, temía que serían
vistas, de donde para quien las enbi ó se esperava peligro. Pues tomando de sus dudas lo
más seguro, hizo traer una copa de agua, y hechas las cartas pedaços, echólas en ella, y
acabado esto, mand ó que le sentasen en la cama, y sentado, bevi óselas en el agua, y assí
qued ó contenta su voluntad; ...’ (Cárcel de Amor, ed. cit., 176-77).
38 Joseph F. Chorpenning, ‘Loss of Innocence, Descent into Hell, and Cannibalism :
Romance Archetypes and Narrative Unity in Cárcel de amor’, Modern Language Review,
LXXXVII (1992), No. 2, 343-51, at p. 350 .
CANNIBALISM IN IBERIAN NARRATIVE 117

They express their grief metaphorically, for instance, eating and drinking
in the presence of the deceased as at a wake or at a post-burial party.
Sagan assumes that metaphorical thinking is a characteristic of developed
societies and that so-called primitives are not capable of metaphorical
thinking. He wrote: ‘This need for oral incorporation is sublimated in
advanced societies where the preservation of a lock of hair or the ashes of
the dead person is a socially acceptable practice’. One hardly needs to
remark on the inherent cannibalism involved in the Eucharist. Sagan
crystallizes this opinion: ‘The crucifixion is the primary visual religious
symbol of the most influential religion in the history of the world. Central
to that symbol is a god in the very process of being killed and sacrificed ...
The ritual mystery of this religion is expressed through an act of symbolic
cannibalism; the flesh of the god is eaten and the blood is drunk, not
actually but symbolically’.
Although oral incorporation frequently is affectionate we see evidence
of deep-seated anger in some tales in which sinister meals are dished up—
kitchen cannibalism. In several ballads and folktales in the Hispanic
tradition women, not grotesque monsters, are a designated other in the
sense that they engage in this unspeakable sin. Several stories tell of a
woman who tricks an unaware husband into partaking of a tasty stew
whose principal ingredient is human flesh. In the first, the woman’s
outrageous behaviour was justified by her righteous anger. Ovid’s story of
the transformation of Philomela captured the popular imagination so that
it moved into the popular tradition, and in Spain it appears in a popular
ballad. Since ballads live in the sum of their variants, I will give a
summary of the plot that includes variant motifs. Two young women catch
the eye of a passing horseman (knight). He falls in love with one,
Blancaflor, but is also attracted to her sister Filomena. Nine months after
his marriage to Blancaflor, he appears at her family’s door, requesting that
Filomena come to attend her sister since she is about to give birth. The
parents are reluctant to let Filomena go since she is young and is a virgin.
The evil son-in-law swears by his fortune and his life that he will guard her
well. No sooner are they under way when he assaults her. After raping
her he leaves her after he has cut out her tongue so that she cannot tell
what has happened. A shepherd comes by and she writes a letter with her
blood to warn Blancaflor, her sister. The sister reads the letter and the
shock causes her to miscarry. Filled with fury she prepares a casserole/ a
stew of the fetus and afterbirth. When Tereno/ Tereo/ Turquillo/ Tarquino
comes home, he asks what she has for dinner. He tells her how wonderful
the meal smells and tastes, and she responds: ‘¿Qué me diste Blanca Flor,

39 Sagan, op. cit., pp. 30, 49. In North American parishes, some communicants report
that as children they were admonished not to chew the Host because it might cause pain to
the body of Jesus Christ.
118 BHS, LXXIV (1997) HARRIET GOLDBERG

qué me diste para cena? / Sangre fue de tus entrañas—gusto de tu carne

mesma; / por mejor te sabrían—besos de mi Filomena; ¿Qué me diste,
Blancaflor; que tan dulce me supiera? / ¡Más dulces, traidor serían, los
besos de Filomena!’.
Although Blancaflor’s/ Procne’s husband deserved a grisly punishment,
another ballad relates the story of a woman who must silence her own
child, who had been a witness to her sexual adventures. It is a folkloric
commonplace that husbands should not neglect their marital
responsibilities by absenting themselves from the house. Here, the
husband’s frequent absences had left his wife free to take lovers. Her son
reproached her for her adultery, and threatened to tell his father. The
woman kills the boy and prepares a welcoming meal for her husband, and
the unsuspecting man sits at the table and prepares to eat when the
casserole speaks. The murdered son’s voice pleads with his father not to
eat his remains saying: ‘Padre mío y de mi alma, no comáis de mis
entrañas, / que una madre tenía mereciera degollarla’.
In a sense, the vengeful wife of the Filomena story and the adulterous
woman of the ballad are two sides of a composite portrait of the menacing
woman. In another story, she is simply a foolish creature whose greed or
negligence puts her in harm’s way. This story probably began as a second-
hand report of a local legend about ‘the people who lived in a nearby town,
or across the sea, or on the other side of the mountains’ who survived a
famine by eating their dead. So powerful was the legend that it

40 Marcelino Menéndez Pelayo, Apéndices y suplemento a la Primavera y flor de

romances de Wolf y Hoffman. Antolog ía de poetas líricos castellanos textos poéticos, vol. 10
(Santander: Ediciones Nacionales / CSIC, 1945), 21.200-01, 22.201-02. In one ballad, he
faints and she cuts out his tongue to display it to warn others against violating youn g
virgins. Armistead gives complete summaries (Samuel G. Armistead, with Selma
Margaretten, Paloma Montero and Ana Valenciano, El romancero judeo-español en el
Archivo Menéndez Pidal [Madrid: Cátedra-Seminario Menéndez Pidal, 1978], 3 vols, F1) .
The folkmotif is S183.2, Grieving woman avenges sister’s rape and death. Serves her guilty
husband fetal remains of their infant .
41 Paul Bénichou, Romancero judeo-español de Marruecos (Madrid: Castalia, 1968) ,
250-51. Michèle de Cruz-Sáenz records a ballad collected in 1987 in which the wife says :
‘Vamos, marido a cenar, cenerás una cabeza ’. She explains that a neighbour ’s calf had died .
As he takes the first bite, the meat cries out: ‘Padre, padre, padre mío, no comas de esta
cabeza / salida de sus entrañas’ (Spanish Traditional Ballads from Aragon [Lewisburg :
Bucknell U. P., 1995], 27). See also Menéndez y Pelayo, Apéndice 26, 27.302-03; Os
Romances, M6 (M10/0096); (Don Alférez) Juan Busto Cortina, Catálogo índice de romances
asturianos (Asturias: Principado de Asturias, Consejer ía de Educación, Deportes y
Juventud, 1989), 104.1-2 (0096/M10); Ana Valenciano, et al., Catálogo-antolog ía del
romancero de Galicia (Madrid: S.M.P. in press), IV.117 (0096). See also Stith Thompson, op.
cit., G64, Human flesh being cooked speaks out.
42 Eli Sagan writes: ‘During the siege of Leningrad in World War II, not only did
people cut the flesh from dead corpses and use it for food, but the more criminal elements of
CANNIBALISM IN IBERIAN NARRATIVE 119

developed into a full-fledged folktale ‘The Stolen Liver’ (A-Th 366). In the
folktale the eater feels no antagonism toward the eaten, but the taleteller
has chosen a greedy, negligent woman as the target for our hostility.
Sylvia Grider locates the original legend in the European famine of the
fourteenth century where reports of people eating their babies or the
bodies of hanged men circulated. Over the centuries the story merged with
stories of the malevolent return of the dead (Thompson, E200-99), and
circulated throughout western Europe from England to Spain with a heavy
concentration in Denmark. A woman goes to the market to buy liver for
her husband’s dinner. She spends the money (loses the money). On the
way home she passes a graveyard where she digs up a corpse, steals its
liver which she cooks and serves to her unsuspecting husband. The
offended corpse comes to her house to reclaim its missing parts moaning
‘María Mandula / dame mi asadura / que sacaste / de mi sepultura’. In the
Castilian version, the dead man drags her to the graveyard, kills her, takes
her organs, inserts them into his own body and buries himself.
An even uglier twist to the story of meals prepared with the flesh of a
departed family member appears in an advice prepared by a king for his
young son who will rule one day. As happens with many exemplary tales
interpolated in this political tract, our story has its roots in antiquity.
Athenagoras, a Christian apologist, writing in the first century decries the
fact that Christians were wrongfully demonized. He alludes to two
dreadful slanders directed at them: Oedipean feasts or sexual orgies, and
Thyestean feasts, dreadful acts of ritual infanticide and cannibalism.
Atreus had killed the children of Thyestes, his brother, and had served
them to him at a banquet. If we imagine that the Thyestean story had

society deliberately murdered human beings, eating the flesh for their own sustenance and
selling what was left over’ (op. cit., 1). His source is the reputable journalist Harrison E,
Salisbury, The 900 Days (New York: Harper & Row, 1969), 479-81. See also Michael West,
‘Cannibalism and Anorexia: Or Feast and Famine in French Occupation Narrative’, in
Visions of War: World War II in Popular Literature and Culture, ed. M. Paul Holsinger and
Mary-Anne Schofield (Bowling Green, Ohio: Popular, 1992), 191-200 .
43 Sylvia Grider, ‘From the Tale to the Telling: AT 366 ’, in Folklore on Two
Continents , ed. Nikolai Burlakoff and Carl Lindahl, with Harry Gammerdinge r
(Bloomington, Indiana: Trickster Press, 1980), 49-56, at p. 50.
44 In Camarena and Chevalier, op. cit., La asadura del muerto. They locate it in
Castile, Catalonia, Honduras, Puerto Rico, Bolivia, Argentina and Portugal. José Antoni o
León Rey reports it from Cundinamarca, Colombia (85-86). Human flesh enters the food
chain in the romancero: reported in Galicia by Ana Valenciano (‘La rueda de la fortuna’,
IV.109 and ‘Los presagios del labrador ’, IV.116) and in Portugal by Manuel da Costa Fonte s
(M12, ‘O pressentimento do lavrador ’ [é-a]. While working in the fields, the farmer has a
premonition that his wife is betraying him. He returns home, finds her in bed with anothe r
man, and kills both. He then announces that he has the meat of a cow and the meat of a
sheep for sale. Those who cannot afford to pay can have some for free).
45 Cohn, op. cit., 3.
120 BHS, LXXIV (1997) HARRIET GOLDBERG

circulated in the popular mind for centuries, it comes as no surprise to find

it used to illustrate the dangers of tyranny. In King Sancho IV’s Castigos e
documentos he tells his son to resist excessive anger and to be temperate in
his judgments. The concerned father tells him the tale of Apolonio: ‘E pone
alli seneca otro tal enxienplo de apolonjo Rey de Persia que conbido avn
principe que queria mal & mando a sus priuados que tomasen los fijos de
aquel principe & lo matasen & que adobasen de comer dellos. E despues
que ouo comido demando si le sopieran bien aquellos manjares el dixo que
sy. E mando traer aquellas cabeças de aquellos sus fijos & ponergelas
delante. E dixole delos cuerpos destas cabeças ha seydo tu cena. Plazete
con tal conbite. Respondio el cauallero, “En casa del rey toda çena es
plazentera” ’.
Given that Apolonio’s horrible dinner party was not a gustatory
experience but rather a hostile act directed at an enemy, then the
belligerence inherent in the behaviour of the citizens of the besieged city of
Numancia is understandable. Instead of being merely a starving populace
pushed to an extreme step, the citizens of the besieged city choose to eat
the unfortunate enemy prisoners they hold. In cases of simple survival
cannibalism, the flesh that is eaten is that of recently deceased members of
the group, although there is a notable example in an account of the
Crusades, where the dregs of the army (los taúres, los arlotes) eat the
Moorish dead with the indulgent approval of Peter the Hermit, their
officers and the Bishop of Puy. High moral ground is held by the Moorish
king of Antioch who says: ‘Señores, agora ved la gran crueza desta genta
maldita, que no les basta matarnos e quitarnos lo nuestro, mas después
que nos han muerto, nos desentierran e nos comen bien como si fuessen
bestias fieras’. In contrast to the aggression inherent in the consumption
of enemy flesh, the desperate survivors of an expedition described by Álvar
Núñez Cabeza de Vaca eat their own companions: ‘Cinco cristianos que
estaban ... llegaron a tal extremo, que se comieron los unos a los otros,
hasta que se quedó solo, que por ser solo no hubo quien lo comies’. After
the murder of a cruel officer he comments offhandedly: ‘y los que morían,
los otros los hacían tasajos, y comiendo de él se mantuvo hasta primero de
marzo’. In constrast to these examples of endocannibalism, Cervantes, in
Numancia, has Teógenes propose a radically different hostile step, an act

46 Castigos e documentos del rey don Sancho (MS A with interpolated material from
the Spanish gloss of Egidio Romano, Regimiento de príncipes), ed. Pascual de Gayangos ,
BAE 51 (Madrid: Rivadeneyra, 1860), 13.118. See also Castigos y documentos para bien
vivir, ed. John Zemke (corrected by C. F. Faulhaber), ADMYTE disk 0, CD-Rom (Madrid:
MICRONET, 1992), 52v-53r.
47 La gran conquista de Ultramar, ed. Louis Cooper (Bogot á: Instituto Caro y Cuervo ,
1979), 4 vols, 2.2.60, 38-45 .
48 Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, Naufragios, ed. Juan Francisco Maura (Madrid:
Cátedra, 1989), pp. 125, 141 .
CANNIBALISM IN IBERIAN NARRATIVE 121

of exocannibalism. To sustain themselves during the remaining days of

the siege they will kill and eat their Roman prisoners: ‘Y para entretener
por algún hora / la hambre que ya roe nuestros güesos / haréis descuartizar
luego a la hora / esos tristes romanos que están presos’.
The sub-theme of the grisly use of the flesh of the already dead in times
of poverty and famine is reported in seventeeth-century Spain by Francisco
de Quevedo in La vida del buscón. Pablos, a young man, angry at his
family’s inferior status, and their neglect of him comes seeking his father,
and learns that his paternal uncle, a venal executioner, had officiated at
his father’s death. Quevedo’s contempt for the corrupt executioner-uncle
and his cronies is patently obvious. The uncle tells the lad: ‘Hícele cuartos
y dile por sepoltura los caminos. Dios sabe lo que a mí me pesa de verle en
ellos, haciendo mesa franca a los grajos. Pero yo entiendo que los
pasteleros desta tierra nos consolarán, acomodándole en los de a cuatro’.
The angry irreverent young man does, in fact, witness the eating of meat
pies he believes to contain his father. He describes the dreadful event
ironically: ‘Parecieron en la mesa cinco pasteles de a cuatro. Y tomando
un hisopo, después de haber quitado las hojaldres, dijeron un responso
todos con si requiem aeternam, por el ánima del difunto cuyas eran
aquellas carnes ... trayendo un plato de salchichas (que parecía de dedos de

49 Cervantes, Numancia, ed. Robert Marrast (Madrid: Cátedra, 1990), 92.1434-37 .

On another narrative level the aggressive nature of the eating of human flesh is evident in
the behaviour of the angry giants that populate folktales. These monstrous creatures are
not pathetically hungry; they shout: ‘¡A carne humana me güele aqu í!’ (‘Pedro de
Urdemalas ’ Espinosa, 163.359). See Stith Thompson, op. cit., G84 Fee-fi-fo-fum . Cannibal
returning home smells human flesh and makes exclamation.
50 Francisco de Quevedo, La vida del buscón, ed. Fernando Cabo Aseguinolaz a
(Barcelona: Crítica, 1993), 103 .
51 Joseph Ricapito speculates about why anyone would want to ‘incorporate’ the
essence of these hanged criminals. He reminds the reader of the aggressive dimension in El
buscón recalling that Pablos had returned home filled with shame about his family. He
writes: ‘The affection expressed by the executioner uncle as he relates how Pablos ’s father
died and was drawn and quartered and later incorporated into meat pies also gives Pablos a
story that satisfies the young man’s anger toward his family’ (‘Los “Pasteles de a cuatro”:
Quevedo y la antropofagia ’, Letras de Deusto, XVII [1987], No. 37, 161-67, at p. 165).
52 La vida del buscón, ed. cit., 103. In note 18 the editor Cabo Aseguinolaza explains: .
‘Hícele cuarto = lo descuarticé—los cadáveres de algunos condenados a muerte eran, como
castigo suplementario, descuartizados y expuestos en los caminos normalmente en la
entrada de las ciudades ’ (103). Elsewhere Quevedo sought justice for the meat-pie makers .
In El sueño del juicio final, a pastelero should restore the parts of the deceased from the pies
in which they had been incorporated (Los sueños, ed. Ignacio Arellano [Madrid: Cátedra,
1991], 116-17, 143b). See also the tale of ‘Sweeney Todd, the Barber of Fleet Street’
(Stephen Sondheim). Stith Thompson lists as a note to his entry G60: Human flesh eaten
unwittingly , an entry, K2392: Man sells pastries made of human flesh.
122 BHS, LXXIV (1997) HARRIET GOLDBERG

negro)’. However, Pablos’ uncle and his friends are not unwitting victims
of an unprincipled pie baker or of a world in which famine had forced its
inhabitants to violate the rules of human decency. They are not Mary of
Jerusalem nor the starving citizens of Numancia. Their cheerful
blasphemy and playfulness mark them as fitting companions of the evil
king Apolonio who had taken such evident pleasure in inquiring if his
enemy had enjoyed the dish he had just eaten. These are people who
cannot aspire to ascend to the upper world but who belong in the
underworld where their despicable tastes would be appropriate.
Finally, we are ready to answer our initial questions. First, there is no
question that people tend to laugh in some circumstances when they
cannot find a suitable reaction. The fact that there are so many cannibal
jokes is a clear sign that the custom inspires more dread in us than many
other violations of human behaviour. I suspect, for instance, that the
reading public of Buscón reacted with laughter to the tale of the meat pies,
and at the same time, experienced some discomfort. Furthermore, as the
jokes reveal, we characteristically accuse others of practising this
unspeakable custom.
Furthermore, frequently the victim is an infant. Rejecting the
frivolous notion that childish flesh is undoubtedly tenderer than that of
mature adults, we ask why they are so frequently chosen. Might not one
explanation be that, in some respects, children are seen as less human
than adults? In many cultures, they are not admitted to full citizenship
without taking part in a ritual of acceptance, a confirmation of their rights.
Of course, another reason for their selection as the targets of cannibalistic
sacrifice is the increased horror adults feel when they violate a societal
rule—the nurturing of the weak and helpless. It comes down to a question
of power—the power one individual exerts on another. Clearly children are
less powerful than adults. And finally, we conclude that the ceremonial
consumption of a dead enemy or a departed loved one—orally incorporating
another—is the ultimate exercise of power.

53 La vida del buscón, 136.