July 26, 2022 • 39 mins
Cannibalism is an ancient taboo, but how often has it actually occurred? Join the guys in this classic episode as they explore the grisly rumors and frightening facts behind history’s stories of cannibalism.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
This is one of the classic episodes that people still
write to me about on social media, and sometimes when
someone catches me in the wild and the field, they
want to talk about cannibalism. How do you protect yourself
against the people that want to talk cannibalism with you.
I'm an open book in a meadow on a sunny day,
(00:22):
man a, m A. That's how I treated. It's weird though,
right like it's it's such a in many cases, it
is a cultural and social taboo for most, but not all,
of societies throughout history in the world. And the thing
that I think continually fascinates me. Here are the different
(00:45):
types of cannibalism. Encounter and Matt. I don't know if
we asked this question uh in the episode, but one
of the big, one of the big questions I had
was whether eating one's fingernail counts as cannibalism or whether
you know, when like kids eat their boogers not to
(01:06):
beat too crass, is that cannibalism. I mean, it's not flesh, flesh.
I don't think accounts or eating hair, eating hair. I
don't know where in this episode we're really just talking about,
you know, the flesh parts, the stuff under the skin,
the meat that we're all made of, and eating that
(01:27):
because it usually because you have to resort to it,
sometimes because it's part of a ritual. Let's learn about
cannibalism together right now. From UFOs to psychic powers and
government conspiracies. History is riddled with unexplained events. You can
turn back now or learn the stuff they don't want
(01:47):
you to know. Hello, welcome back to the show. My
name is Matt. I am no, they call me Ben.
Hopefully you have a name as well. Welcome to stuff
they don't want you to know. Ladies and gentlemen, As
Timothy Leary used to say, turn on, tune in, drop
(02:10):
out of the mainstream. Malarkey, have we got a show
for you? You know what I say, Ben, what's that? Malarkey? Schmilarkey?
You have said that often? Yeah, you know what I
always say? What's that? Don't eat other humans? But is
it wrong to eat people? I think so in our
(02:32):
modern society. Sure, you guys were not here to make
judgment calls. Okay, we're here to report the facts and
the you know, conjectures surrounding said topic. Yes, that is correct. No,
we are looking at cannibalism fact and fiction today. As
Matt pointed out just a second ago, cannibalism is a taboo.
(02:54):
It is a great and it's an ancient taboo. But
it is also a practice that is as old as
human civilization, older than Western civilization, as old as the
passage of the stars first measured by man. It may
predate civilization. There is evidence that human beings. You know,
(03:17):
we did our earlier show on the difference, let's say,
demo reels of what would become modern humanity. Dennisovans, Neanderthals,
the Hobbits out in Indonesia. There's evidence that I thought
they lived in New Zealand. New Zealand. Oh, that was
the worst I've been worked. I had a pretty good
(03:38):
New Zealand accent for a while. You should watch Hunt
for the Wildered People. You'll get in real quick. You know.
Flight of the Concords helped me with it. Some of
the same folks, some of the same folks. No kidding, Mary,
Mary's in it. Maybe he plays a conspiracy theory. Not
who lives in the bush? It's on. It's on the
top of my must be fantastic. Yeah, alright, but we digress. Oh, yes,
(04:00):
what's I mean, no, we're all we're all digressing together.
And what what else is a conversation if not a
series of matroshka dolls, you know. Uh. So there is
evidence though that even before the Homo sapien that we
know now was on the scene, early man was eating itself. Yeah.
(04:20):
There's this place called Goes Cave in Somerset, England, and
in this cave there were discovered animal bones and human
bones that were placed together. Uh it's from fifteen thousand
years ago, that's when these these bones were placed in there.
The bones displayed evidence of the fleshing, the skin ripping
(04:41):
off of it, marrow extraction, like crushing those bones and
getting all the good insides out of delicious marrow and
get this human teeth marks on both animal and human bones,
which is which is horrifying, but still not quite proof
positive of cannibalism. I mean, obviously it's damning evidence, but
(05:04):
they're the only The only proof positive we have of
cannibalism is actually found in human feces because there is
a protein that can only come from human flesh that
will end up in human feces if someone is eating
(05:26):
someone else. You like, how we're getting right? To the
grossest part. Yeah, this is this is great. I'm loving
this especially I'm imagining all the different things that people
could be doing while listening to this. That's actually the
tagline for cannibalism is I'm loving this. Yeah. Yeah, McDonald's
took it too, I'm loving it. But now we changed
(05:48):
the word. Okay, we changed the word uh, the same
way Vanilla Ice took that Queen's. Remember he did get
sued though, yeah he did. Did he win? I don't know.
So let's put this in the historical context. The fancy
five dollar word for cannibalism is anthropopagy. And my girlfriend
loves their clothes, but I find them really overpriced in detention,
(06:11):
and they keep eating their customers, right, not cool. I
feel so worried about you every time you go into
that store. I try try to avoid it at all costs.
So here's here's the deal with cannibalism. For a long
long time, accusations of cannibalism have been used to dehumanize
(06:33):
groups of other people. Right Crystal Bala Cologne Street named
Christopher Columbus rationalized some horrific things he did to the
natives of the Caribbean by saying that he was bringing
Christianity to cannibals, or that he was, you know, stopping
their acts through somehow slavery and mass pillaging and rape.
(06:58):
But yeah, he also said that, uh, the native peoples
that he met when he landed the air Wak I
think his name of the tribe in North America, and
they they told him, or allegedly they told him that
there was another group it was outside of theirs, that
practice cannibalism, and hey, Christopher, you should be careful those guys.
Don't go near them. They were really doing a massala.
(07:21):
He really did not pay it forward. No, he said, great,
move new slaves. But there Yeah, but there was also
no evidence and there has been no evidence to show
that that was true. Right, so we see that cannibalism
is one of the ultimate accusations. Yeah, it certainly can
exist almost as like a specter where people are suspected
(07:42):
of doing a thing and you kind of like, there's
this lingering, you know, do they don't they Well we
heard they did, so we better steer clear, you know,
that kind of thing, or we our community is acting
in self defense rather than aggression. Legends of adjacent cannible
groups are across six of the seven continents, unless something's
(08:06):
going on in Antarctica that we are not aware of
at this time. But we do know that this great
debate is aside from that socio political context. We do
know that cannibalism does occur. As Matt pointed out, it
occurred repeatedly and often in ancient times. It also it
(08:27):
also occurs in the past and the recent past, recent
enough that people you know, including maybe yourself, depend on
when you were born, were alive when acts of cannibalism occurred.
And it also occurs in isolated incidents via individuals. So
our question today will be how prevalent is cannibalism, how
(08:51):
much of this stuff is a rumor, how much of
it is fact? And to do that we're gonna lean
on an article at our parent web site, How Stuff Works,
and you can check it out now. It's how Cannibalism Works,
written by josh Clark of Stuff you should know. Oh yeah,
that's right, Joshua, with this one. That guy's into some
freaky stuff, sure is. No, Hey, no, what's the first
(09:16):
type of cannibalism? Well, I'm glad you asked, Ben. It
just so happens. The first type of cannibalism is what's
known as survival cannibalism. So this is sort of a
Donner Party esque kind of situation, So consuming human flesh
in the hopes of surviving long enough to eat something else.
So not for funsies, not for funsies. Unfortunately, sometimes that
time for eating other things, delicious nuggets, chicken nuggets, whatever,
(09:39):
never comes, so you end up kind of you know,
exhausting your uh, your buddies in the form of you know,
digesting their flesh, and then you're left to starve and
also feel like a terrible, monstrous human person. Yes, here's
an example. In the eighteen hundreds, four men on a
(09:59):
yacht named Mignonette were sailing from England to Australia and
they were stranded in a lifeboat after the yacht sank
in the Atlantic. They were adrift for more than two months,
and they they captured one sea turtle and rationate as
they could. They eventually ran out of meat. One of
the men was a sailor named Richard Parker, and he
(10:22):
got so desperately thirsty that he drank seawater, and of
course his health declined more precipitously than his three surviving shipmates.
As he lingered between death and life with morbidity looming
in front of him, the shipmates said, will kill him
(10:45):
and eat him rather than waiting for him to die
of natural causes. And there's a brutal logic to that
as well that we can explore. I'm just gonna really
quickly point to me out here, and it just struck me.
Have you seen Life of Pie? Yes, I'm aware of that.
I've not seen anything. Isn't the tiger's name Richard Park? Yes? Huh?
(11:05):
And they're like stranded on a ship spoiler alert, it's
so much as like the whole movie. Yeah, alright, sorry,
but that's interesting and the Life of Pie, which is
a wonderful book, and uh, I was a fan of
the film as well. We see the shipwreck situation repeated
(11:26):
in fiction. Unfortunately, this fiction is based on fact because
for a very long time it was a code of
the sea. It was understood that if people were stranded
and the shipwreck, someone may well end up being consumed
by the other people. And oddly enough, another twist here
(11:49):
is uh for fans of Ed Grallan po and the paranormal.
Around the same time, roughly A. Grolland po wrote a
short story called The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pen. He
wrote that in eight thirty eight, And that's pen p
y m, which follows almost exactly the real life story
(12:12):
of Richard Parker. Is it synchronicity? Is it a young
Gian super consciousness? Is it? So? Did he hear about
it maybe and then wrote about it? Did he hear
about it before it happened? Or did he do it
to them? Did he somehow do it to them? But
speaking of the ritual, what is it the ritual of
the sea or the code of the code of the sea.
(12:35):
I've got three straws here, boys, I don't think we've
reached that place yet. We can find out, we can
find out who's gonna eat who you're gonna eat me?
Guys the same size. Well, they're got the short straw.
You have to kill him? Is there a hierarchy here
because you got the long straw? And wait, and you
(12:55):
brought the straws, brought the straws out. But hey, you chose.
There's a another example that happened more recently. And listeners,
this may have occurred in your lifetime. This may sound
familiar to you. There was a plane crash in nineteen
seventy two of forty two people included a Uruguayan rugby team,
(13:16):
which is what probably the reason you may have heard
of this before it got The story of this event
got turned into a movie called Alive. Also of a book. Uh,
there are several places where you can read about this
and a sweet Pearl Jam song. Yeah kidding, I don't
note there. So keep in mind it's minus thirty degrees
(13:36):
fahrenheit out there. That's super cold. Um. Now, you've got
a lot of people who didn't make it through the
initial crash. Their bodies are there. Um, you don't have
much to eat because you know, they had some supplies,
some wine and chocolate it was on the plane, but
it was very limited. There was also an avalanche that
(13:56):
they had to deal with and ended up killing eight
more of the surviving people that were killed. Half of
the survivors, eight of the sixteen. The bodies of some
of the people who were here that are frozen. Or
do we die? Do we all just decide to die.
That's a tough choice to make, and they made it
and they were ultimately rescued. Yes, they were driven to
(14:18):
desperation after seventy to seventy two days, and they took
a sort of a Hail Mary ten day trip to
find some sort of civilization and they ran into a
Chilean herder. I believe who brought them back. This kind
of cannibalism is uh, you know, it's frightening. And we
(14:43):
drew straws in ingest, but were the three of us
on a boat and in desperate circumstances, who knows what
would occur. And Matt, I think you're right. It is.
It is a tough decision, and I don't mean to
denigrate it at all, but also it's a decision that
I feel like, I know most people. Oh I know
(15:07):
what most people would decide. Very very few people, including
you vegetarians in the audience, would slowly starved to death.
And the worst part about this kind of cannibalism is
that it encounters rabbit starvation. Rabbit starvation is something that
happens when someone's diet is only lean meat. So when
(15:28):
people are driven to cannibalism in this sort of situation,
the person that they're consuming unless they were already dead.
If everybody was starving, and they just ate the first
one who expired from starvation or dehydration. Then the food
that they are eating from that body is not nutritious
enough to sustain them. There's no fat, so they will
(15:50):
continue eating while they are starving because their body has
enough lean meat. What it needs is some sort of nutrition.
So the worst part of this sort of cannibalism, unfortunately,
is that it doesn't help. And that is rabbit R
A B B I T starvation. Yes, yea. So we
(16:13):
talked about the we talked about the Code of the Sea.
I've talked about survival cannibalism in small groups, but it
has happened in large scale events as well, most notably
for history, buffs the Siege of Leningrad. Perhaps this was
(16:35):
a nearly three year siege. Eight hundred and seventy two days.
A million people died easily from various circumstances, right from war,
from hardship, from being abducted, butchered and eaten. The population
was slowly starving with no way to replenish the food supply.
(16:56):
Gangs of starving people roamed the street like fair old dogs.
The city had to dedicate an entire unit of its
dwindling law enforcement justified cannibalism, and people were arrested. Hundreds
of people yea. As a matter of fact, two hundred
and sixty people were arrested for cannibalism and the parents
(17:17):
kept their children inside at night for fear that they
would be abducted. Absolutely no. This shows us that people
will eat one another, not just in small isolated groups,
but entire cities can be driven to cannibalism under the
right circumstances. If this seems strange to you, ladies and gentlemen,
(17:38):
look around. Is there anyone in the room with you?
Are you outside? Is there anyone walking by? If there's
no one near you, think about the closest person. Think
about what would happen the next time you're trapped in
an elevator. Right, Think about what would happen the next
time you're stranded somewhere. How long would it take you?
What choice would you make? And we will ponder that
(17:59):
question and others when we returned from a quick sponsor break.
(18:19):
So our second type of cannibalism is what's called learned cannibalism,
essentially a socially reinforced form of form of eating human flesh.
And there are two types of this. Yeah, there is
endo cannibalism, and that's one that occurs within the group,
(18:40):
the social group in which you exist. And there are
several examples of this. Most of the examples we have
our tribes, tribes in Indonesia and New Guinea, several other
places like that. This is what you might describe as
ritualistic cannibalism, brand for sure. So like the Wari tribe,
practice is Indo cannibalism in the in the form of
(19:03):
UH mortuary cannibalism. UH. They're also known as the Paca
Nova and they are in Brazil, and so this sort
of cannibalism occurs when they So what happens is when
a when a valued member of the society dies, the
closest relatives hug embraced the deceased person. They leave the
(19:24):
body for three days approximately, and then they send out messengers.
So in the time between the death and the actual funeral,
it's an average of three days. But that's not a
hard and fast rule. And of course this is in
the Amazon, so decomposition sets in very quickly. It is
a hungry, hungry environment. And once they arrive, once all
(19:50):
the relatives arrive, they build a fire, they remove the
visceral organs. They roast the body and then they have
attendant relatives consume the flesh to a suadge to the
family's grief, because what what they thought. What they think
thought of this is that by ingesting this corpse, the
(20:14):
dead person is living on in some way in the
body of their family, transferring over and transferring the soul,
rather than being abandoned to wander the forest alone as
a spirit. So it's considered an act of compassion rather
than an act of desperation. And in its own way,
you know, the reasoning behind that is beautiful. And then
(20:38):
there is the Foray tribe in Papua New Guinea, which
you have probably heard of if you have looked into cannibalism.
So upon the death of a member of this community,
the women in the family, the maternal kin, dismember the corpse,
removed the arms and feet, stripped, the limbs, removed the brain,
cut open the chest and take out the organs. This
(21:01):
is where um, this is where you hear about kuru, Right,
I've heard of this, Yes, so kuru? Is this infection
you can get from consuming a human brain? Yeah? Is
this from the prions? Like um? Like mad cow? Yeah,
and so this, uh, the thing is that people who
(21:23):
died of kuru there was a bit of a positive
feedback loop because those people would die um quickly, right,
and they would have still have a layer of fat
on them that resembled fatty pork, so they would be
choice bites. And this this produced, um, you know, has
produced massive complications. There's also an X Files episode about
(21:46):
people transmitting couru to each other. Uh. And then there's
another tribe in Indonesian New Guinea. Yeah, this is the
coral I tribe and it the practices of the coral
I tribe in the path asked that that's what we're
talking about here. It appears that most of cannibalism within
this tribe has ceased. Um. But in the past, when
(22:08):
a member of the tribe died for some less than
obvious reason, let's say a disease, something internal that you
couldn't see. They didn't fall out of a tree, or
you know, die in battle or get attacked by an animal.
If this occurs, then it was believed that their death
was caused by a kakua or a witch man from
the nether world, which is pretty intense. I think that's
(22:31):
also a pokemon a kakua. I did not know that really. Listeners,
correct me if I'm wrong. Okay, but these kakua were
only believed to be able to inhabit the bodies of
a male another male, and when they did inhabit that body,
they magically ate the interior of the human. So, in
(22:53):
order to enact revenge on this witch man that is
eating the insides the core, I believed they had to
eat the body of the person who died. And you know,
there's this whole list here of how they prepared the meat,
which I kind of don't even want to get into,
but they basically steamed the body and chopped it up
in order to consume all the parts. And we have
(23:15):
a description here from an interview that Vice conducted with
someone who spent some time with this tribe that discusses
exactly how they prepared the human meat. Just for the record,
the pokemon is a cocuna. But here's the quote. They
steam everything with an oven made from leaves and rocks.
They treat it like they with the flesh of a pig.
(23:37):
They cut off the legs separately and wrapped them in
banana leaves. They cut off the head and that goes
to the person who found the cakua. They cut off
the right arm and the right ribs as one piece
and the left as another. Theyd everything except for the hair,
nails and the penis. Children under thirteen are not allowed
to eat this flesh. They believed the eating the cockua
(23:58):
is very dangerous, that their evil spirits all around and
the children are vulnerable. And again this is these are
practices that occurred in the past. It's thought that now
these practices are discussed as a way of getting people
to come and visit the tribes um but you know
(24:19):
that is unconfirmed currently. There's another one that's perhaps the
oldest practice of cannibalism, which is exo cannibalism eating a
member of another family, group, community, tribe, culture, at etcetera.
For instance, the Mienmen in Papua New Guinea again were
well known for practicing this. They would raid neighboring villages.
(24:43):
When an anthropologist questioned members of this community why they
carried off dead at Bullman's, an adjacent community, uh they
said they considered them good meat to this tribe. The
Miamens the at Ballman's, who existed outside their community weren't
people they were game. They were there to be hunted,
(25:06):
the same way that the Morlocks hunted the Eloi in
the Time Machine by she Wells, or the way Gary
Busey hunted Iced Tea in Most Dangerous, Most Dangerous Game. Well,
that wasn't what was the movie was just called it
was called Surviving the Game. Yeah, hunting a person, though,
is often referred to as the most Dangerous Game. There's
another example. There was a former secret society and Sierra Leone,
(25:28):
calling themselves the Leopard Society. They would kill people, they
would attack them with claw like weapons, and uh they
would take the human blood and fat of killed members
of other groups and they would mix it into a
potion called Borthena was consumed to attract wealth and power,
similar to a few of those isolated incidents amongst Narco religions. Yeah,
(25:56):
and uh, you know, of course, while we're in that
part of the world, while we're in South America, let's
let's look at the Azdec culture of Mexico and Central
America just a little ways north right. Uh, there were
large scale human sacrifices to appease the gods, to uh
(26:19):
attend the god's needs in hopes of gaining greater glory,
valuable harvest, and so on. Ritualistic sacrifice and harvesting is
something that we can examine in a later podcast. But
there was also cannibalism that occurred, and this is not
necessarily something from the bygone days of civilizations that have fallen.
(26:43):
In World War Two, when some of our ancestors, right,
we're traveling across the world waging war, When some of
our listeners today might have been traveling in one part
of a war effort or another, hannibalism occurred, especially in
the Pacific theater. And this is, um, this is recent,
(27:08):
this horrific. We see that wartime cannibalism is almost its
own thing, you know it. It can occur in survival
situations like the Siege of Leningrad, but we've categorized it
in a different way. When there is an attack in
military force as engaging cannibalism not because it needs to,
(27:31):
not because it is looking for nutrition, but because of
the madness of war. Yeah, it's called battle rage. In
a couple of places, um, specifically with Iroquois and Fiji cultures.
It's it's one of these awful things where people if
(27:54):
they were captured, they would be mutilated, like in front
of a crowd. Sometimes sometimes up and eating in front
of a crowd. People talking about taking suit like souvenirs
or trophies where someone will have like a necklace with
you know, severed ears on them or something like that.
You know. And while we're talking about this stuff, this
(28:22):
darker stuff, let's move to pathological cannibalism, which is the
maybe one of the It's difficult to make a hierarchy
for this, so I won't attempt it. But pathological cannibalism,
pathological cannibalism is what mentally disturbed individuals will do. And
(28:42):
for instance, well, let's name the elephant in the room.
We're talking about serial killers. We're talking about Albert Fish,
We're talking about Jeffrey Dahmer, who famously practiced cannibalism on
some of his victims. Uh and believe Eve tried to
conduct trap nation operations in order to create undead uh slaves. Well, yes,
(29:12):
and this this is the reason it's pathological is because
this is not a survival situation. This is not a
socially reinforced thing or a ritual or funereal. Right, you know,
this is a person who is disturbed acting out on
(29:34):
their own inner demons, right, acting out on the orders
of their own inner demons. And then there's another case here,
of course, that some of us may remember from two
thousand and one, which we have a quote here from
an advertisement very built men eighteen thirty who would like
(29:57):
to be eaten by me? This was an ad taken
out by a guy named Arman Males m E I
W E s uh. He was looking for someone to
consentually be consumed. He found a willing partner and year
old burned Urgan brands. This was a little bit different.
(30:18):
It's still pathological cannibalism, but but it was a consenting partner.
So over the next over the next few months after
they met, in the first eight pieces of this guy
uh his genitalia um. After they the genitalia, Arman put
(30:45):
the guy in a bath, was bleeding, slid his throat,
butchered him, and over the next few months eight uh
about forty pounds of his dead body. So it wasn't
really a crime, but it does lead us to or
in terms of in legal terms in German courts, this
(31:06):
wasn't who would make a law for that? Who saw
that coming? No one, that's a Shamalan move for sure.
This leads us to another form of cannibalism, which would
be auto cannibalism. Hey, ladies and gentlemen, do any of
you bite your nails? Do any of you, uh lists,
We're continuing to be a little crass engross with this.
(31:28):
Does anyone pick their nose or eat their boogers or
chew on the edge of their fingers or their hair? If, sir,
you are committing an active auto cannibalism. This makes me
think of a story um from I believe a Skelton
Crew collection of Stephen King short stories called Survivor type
where a doctor UM finds himself stranded alone on a
(31:49):
desert island and has his medical bag and anesthesia and
systematically methodically anesthetizes different parts of his body and um,
you know, cuts them off and eats them until he
has no limbs left. WHOA, that's that's great, Stephen King,
Thanks thanks for putting that in my head. And then
(32:11):
there's what in my opinion, and I wonder hear what
you think, folks. In my opinion, the most horrific form
of cannibalism is forced auto cannibalism, forcing someone to eat
themselves like that scene in Hannibal. Yes, all right, we're
entering a little bit of spoiler territory here. So if
anyone hasn't seen the movie Hannibal from what ten years ago? Um,
(32:34):
years fast forward about a minute and a half. There's
a scene in this film where um, Anthony Hopkins character
Hannibal lecter Um has isn't it has a brain open? Yeah? Yeah.
Raliotis character who's sort of his nemesis in the movie. Um.
He abducts him, lobotomizes him and cuts out little parts
(32:58):
of his brain and fry it up in a pan
and then feeds it him and stuff like this happens
in the real world. I want to warn you before
we continue, folks, that this may not be a pleasant story.
So if you would rather not hear it, this is
your chance to turn back. We'll keep it short. This
really happened, and it's important not to forget that these
(33:22):
things occur. In four in Jackson County, Florida, a group
around two thousand white Southerners intended to sacrifice a man
named Claude Neil, an innocent black man. They sent invitations
about this, they announced it in local newspapers. They castrated him,
(33:44):
and they forced him to eat his own testicles. And
then they tortured, further mutilated him, cut off other parts
of his body. Some saved his mementos similar to wartime cannibalism,
skinned him and burned him. This is what the human
species is capable of. Forest auto cannibalism is, in my opinion,
(34:10):
the most insane and disturbing part of of this entire thing.
And then, as a palate cleanser, let's go right to
one another one that a lot of people don't think
about newly discovered auto cannibals. Matt and I among you
nail biters, Right, there's another. There's another thing. And as
(34:32):
symbolic cannibalism, you attend a Christian mass Body of Christ.
Body of Christ. Yeah, this is something I can't remember
we've talked about on the show before, but it was
a new revelation for me. And I guess just because
I grew up in such a Christian centric environment that
I never thought twice about that ritual. Um, you know,
(34:55):
it is symbolic. Of course, you're not actually eating blood
or body, you of anything. But still, even though it's symbolic. Now,
some sects of Christianity. Do believe that it is the
actual body of Christ once it is transubstantiation. Yeah, I
mean it's mind blowing when you really think about it. Sure,
(35:18):
from an outsider perspective, it's it's got a sound, you know,
like cannibalism, and it just seems it's it's so strange
how things can normalize for people, you know what I mean. Sure,
it's like if we think back to individuals in a
human sacrifice oriented culture, then they would say, well, we
(35:39):
have to do this. Well, that's sort of the nature
of ritual, isn't it, Where you normalize the abnormal and
it becomes Of course, we do that. That's just what
we do. We've always always done that. We've always been
at war with East Asia, the Middle East or whomever.
So here's the here's the crazy part. This is a
brief check in because we're we're running out of time
(36:00):
today and we'll have to come back next week. Cannibalism
occurs in modern context. It occurs in West Africa. It
occurs in India. It occurs in Papua New Guinea. It
occurred in North Korea during the famine of the nineteen nineties.
Cannibalism is much much closer then you may think. It
(36:20):
is not just some old unfortunate happenstance with shipwrecks. It's
not just something that an isolated, disturbed individual would do
to innocent people. In times of crisis, people no matter
how well you know them, may change, and ultimately the
(36:41):
human goal, the thing we are built to do, is
to survive by any means necessary. Not all of these
forms of cannibalism that exists in the modern age are
necessarily bad or criminal. Right. There is ritualistic, spiritual cannibalism, right,
the propitiation of the dead in in other terms. For example,
(37:03):
in India, there's the a Gory tribe, and these are
cannibal monks. They feast on human flesh, they drink from skulls,
They live amongst the dead. But they are not um.
They're not going out and killing people. They will chew
the heads off live animals. They meditate on top of cadavers.
(37:23):
They live with death, you know what I mean. But
this is not necessarily criminal. Another thing that we see
is the allegations of cannibalism amongst the elite. There are
a lot of allegations of cannibalism among the elites. But
there is not. I haven't found anything that we can substantiate,
something that we can come forward and say, yes, absolutely,
(37:45):
this is happening. Um. There are allegations about Bohemian Grove
that you've probably read, where they are allegedly human sacrifices,
the creation of care through the cremation of care, where
there's a body. You know, it's believed to be just
a prop effigy and effigy. Yes, but you know there
(38:06):
are people who think otherwise. Who knows, I've never been there.
The only people I know have been there are presidents
and you know, some of the elites and Alex Jones.
So we are going to end it here today, Ladies
and gentlemen, on a question, would you eat someone's to survive?
(38:28):
Do you have the will power to let yourself slowly
starved to death rather than consume human flesh? How prevalent
do you feel cannibalism is? And what do you think
about the spiritual nature of consuming human body parts? Yeah?
Do you think there is power to be gained by
doing that? Somehow? Let us know. You can find us
(38:50):
on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram where conspiracy stuff on Facebook
and Twitter where conspiracy stuff show on Instagram and got
to the game kind of late, but you can see
a lot of behind the scenes things that you wouldn't
ordinarily see on our Instagram. If this podcast interests you,
you can check out a related content on our website,
Stuff they Don't Want You to Know dot Com, where
(39:12):
we have every single podcast we've ever created. And that's
the end of this classic episode. If you have any
thoughts or questions about this episode, you can get into
contact with us in a number of different ways. One
of the best is to give us a call. Our
number is one eight three three st d w y
t K. If you don't want to do that, you
(39:32):
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your favorite shows.
This is one of the classic episodes that people still
write to me about on social media, and sometimes when
someone catches me in the wild and the field, they
want to talk about cannibalism. How do you protect yourself
against the people that want to talk cannibalism with you.
I'm an open book in a meadow on a sunny day,
(00:22):
man a, m A. That's how I treated. It's weird though,
right like it's it's such a in many cases, it
is a cultural and social taboo for most, but not all,
of societies throughout history in the world. And the thing
that I think continually fascinates me. Here are the different
(00:45):
types of cannibalism. Encounter and Matt. I don't know if
we asked this question uh in the episode, but one
of the big, one of the big questions I had
was whether eating one's fingernail counts as cannibalism or whether
you know, when like kids eat their boogers not to
(01:06):
beat too crass, is that cannibalism. I mean, it's not flesh, flesh.
I don't think accounts or eating hair, eating hair. I
don't know where in this episode we're really just talking about,
you know, the flesh parts, the stuff under the skin,
the meat that we're all made of, and eating that
(01:27):
because it usually because you have to resort to it,
sometimes because it's part of a ritual. Let's learn about
cannibalism together right now. From UFOs to psychic powers and
government conspiracies. History is riddled with unexplained events. You can
turn back now or learn the stuff they don't want
(01:47):
you to know. Hello, welcome back to the show. My
name is Matt. I am no, they call me Ben.
Hopefully you have a name as well. Welcome to stuff
they don't want you to know. Ladies and gentlemen, As
Timothy Leary used to say, turn on, tune in, drop
(02:10):
out of the mainstream. Malarkey, have we got a show
for you? You know what I say, Ben, what's that? Malarkey? Schmilarkey?
You have said that often? Yeah, you know what I
always say? What's that? Don't eat other humans? But is
it wrong to eat people? I think so in our
(02:32):
modern society. Sure, you guys were not here to make
judgment calls. Okay, we're here to report the facts and
the you know, conjectures surrounding said topic. Yes, that is correct. No,
we are looking at cannibalism fact and fiction today. As
Matt pointed out just a second ago, cannibalism is a taboo.
(02:54):
It is a great and it's an ancient taboo. But
it is also a practice that is as old as
human civilization, older than Western civilization, as old as the
passage of the stars first measured by man. It may
predate civilization. There is evidence that human beings. You know,
(03:17):
we did our earlier show on the difference, let's say,
demo reels of what would become modern humanity. Dennisovans, Neanderthals,
the Hobbits out in Indonesia. There's evidence that I thought
they lived in New Zealand. New Zealand. Oh, that was
the worst I've been worked. I had a pretty good
(03:38):
New Zealand accent for a while. You should watch Hunt
for the Wildered People. You'll get in real quick. You know.
Flight of the Concords helped me with it. Some of
the same folks, some of the same folks. No kidding, Mary,
Mary's in it. Maybe he plays a conspiracy theory. Not
who lives in the bush? It's on. It's on the
top of my must be fantastic. Yeah, alright, but we digress. Oh, yes,
(04:00):
what's I mean, no, we're all we're all digressing together.
And what what else is a conversation if not a
series of matroshka dolls, you know. Uh. So there is
evidence though that even before the Homo sapien that we
know now was on the scene, early man was eating itself. Yeah.
(04:20):
There's this place called Goes Cave in Somerset, England, and
in this cave there were discovered animal bones and human
bones that were placed together. Uh it's from fifteen thousand
years ago, that's when these these bones were placed in there.
The bones displayed evidence of the fleshing, the skin ripping
(04:41):
off of it, marrow extraction, like crushing those bones and
getting all the good insides out of delicious marrow and
get this human teeth marks on both animal and human bones,
which is which is horrifying, but still not quite proof
positive of cannibalism. I mean, obviously it's damning evidence, but
(05:04):
they're the only The only proof positive we have of
cannibalism is actually found in human feces because there is
a protein that can only come from human flesh that
will end up in human feces if someone is eating
(05:26):
someone else. You like, how we're getting right? To the
grossest part. Yeah, this is this is great. I'm loving
this especially I'm imagining all the different things that people
could be doing while listening to this. That's actually the
tagline for cannibalism is I'm loving this. Yeah. Yeah, McDonald's
took it too, I'm loving it. But now we changed
(05:48):
the word. Okay, we changed the word uh, the same
way Vanilla Ice took that Queen's. Remember he did get
sued though, yeah he did. Did he win? I don't know.
So let's put this in the historical context. The fancy
five dollar word for cannibalism is anthropopagy. And my girlfriend
loves their clothes, but I find them really overpriced in detention,
(06:11):
and they keep eating their customers, right, not cool. I
feel so worried about you every time you go into
that store. I try try to avoid it at all costs.
So here's here's the deal with cannibalism. For a long
long time, accusations of cannibalism have been used to dehumanize
(06:33):
groups of other people. Right Crystal Bala Cologne Street named
Christopher Columbus rationalized some horrific things he did to the
natives of the Caribbean by saying that he was bringing
Christianity to cannibals, or that he was, you know, stopping
their acts through somehow slavery and mass pillaging and rape.
(06:58):
But yeah, he also said that, uh, the native peoples
that he met when he landed the air Wak I
think his name of the tribe in North America, and
they they told him, or allegedly they told him that
there was another group it was outside of theirs, that
practice cannibalism, and hey, Christopher, you should be careful those guys.
Don't go near them. They were really doing a massala.
(07:21):
He really did not pay it forward. No, he said, great,
move new slaves. But there Yeah, but there was also
no evidence and there has been no evidence to show
that that was true. Right, so we see that cannibalism
is one of the ultimate accusations. Yeah, it certainly can
exist almost as like a specter where people are suspected
(07:42):
of doing a thing and you kind of like, there's
this lingering, you know, do they don't they Well we
heard they did, so we better steer clear, you know,
that kind of thing, or we our community is acting
in self defense rather than aggression. Legends of adjacent cannible
groups are across six of the seven continents, unless something's
(08:06):
going on in Antarctica that we are not aware of
at this time. But we do know that this great
debate is aside from that socio political context. We do
know that cannibalism does occur. As Matt pointed out, it
occurred repeatedly and often in ancient times. It also it
(08:27):
also occurs in the past and the recent past, recent
enough that people you know, including maybe yourself, depend on
when you were born, were alive when acts of cannibalism occurred.
And it also occurs in isolated incidents via individuals. So
our question today will be how prevalent is cannibalism, how
(08:51):
much of this stuff is a rumor, how much of
it is fact? And to do that we're gonna lean
on an article at our parent web site, How Stuff Works,
and you can check it out now. It's how Cannibalism Works,
written by josh Clark of Stuff you should know. Oh yeah,
that's right, Joshua, with this one. That guy's into some
freaky stuff, sure is. No, Hey, no, what's the first
(09:16):
type of cannibalism? Well, I'm glad you asked, Ben. It
just so happens. The first type of cannibalism is what's
known as survival cannibalism. So this is sort of a
Donner Party esque kind of situation, So consuming human flesh
in the hopes of surviving long enough to eat something else.
So not for funsies, not for funsies. Unfortunately, sometimes that
time for eating other things, delicious nuggets, chicken nuggets, whatever,
(09:39):
never comes, so you end up kind of you know,
exhausting your uh, your buddies in the form of you know,
digesting their flesh, and then you're left to starve and
also feel like a terrible, monstrous human person. Yes, here's
an example. In the eighteen hundreds, four men on a
(09:59):
yacht named Mignonette were sailing from England to Australia and
they were stranded in a lifeboat after the yacht sank
in the Atlantic. They were adrift for more than two months,
and they they captured one sea turtle and rationate as
they could. They eventually ran out of meat. One of
the men was a sailor named Richard Parker, and he
(10:22):
got so desperately thirsty that he drank seawater, and of
course his health declined more precipitously than his three surviving shipmates.
As he lingered between death and life with morbidity looming
in front of him, the shipmates said, will kill him
(10:45):
and eat him rather than waiting for him to die
of natural causes. And there's a brutal logic to that
as well that we can explore. I'm just gonna really
quickly point to me out here, and it just struck me.
Have you seen Life of Pie? Yes, I'm aware of that.
I've not seen anything. Isn't the tiger's name Richard Park? Yes? Huh?
(11:05):
And they're like stranded on a ship spoiler alert, it's
so much as like the whole movie. Yeah, alright, sorry,
but that's interesting and the Life of Pie, which is
a wonderful book, and uh, I was a fan of
the film as well. We see the shipwreck situation repeated
(11:26):
in fiction. Unfortunately, this fiction is based on fact because
for a very long time it was a code of
the sea. It was understood that if people were stranded
and the shipwreck, someone may well end up being consumed
by the other people. And oddly enough, another twist here
(11:49):
is uh for fans of Ed Grallan po and the paranormal.
Around the same time, roughly A. Grolland po wrote a
short story called The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pen. He
wrote that in eight thirty eight, And that's pen p
y m, which follows almost exactly the real life story
(12:12):
of Richard Parker. Is it synchronicity? Is it a young
Gian super consciousness? Is it? So? Did he hear about
it maybe and then wrote about it? Did he hear
about it before it happened? Or did he do it
to them? Did he somehow do it to them? But
speaking of the ritual, what is it the ritual of
the sea or the code of the code of the sea.
(12:35):
I've got three straws here, boys, I don't think we've
reached that place yet. We can find out, we can
find out who's gonna eat who you're gonna eat me?
Guys the same size. Well, they're got the short straw.
You have to kill him? Is there a hierarchy here
because you got the long straw? And wait, and you
(12:55):
brought the straws, brought the straws out. But hey, you chose.
There's a another example that happened more recently. And listeners,
this may have occurred in your lifetime. This may sound
familiar to you. There was a plane crash in nineteen
seventy two of forty two people included a Uruguayan rugby team,
(13:16):
which is what probably the reason you may have heard
of this before it got The story of this event
got turned into a movie called Alive. Also of a book. Uh,
there are several places where you can read about this
and a sweet Pearl Jam song. Yeah kidding, I don't
note there. So keep in mind it's minus thirty degrees
(13:36):
fahrenheit out there. That's super cold. Um. Now, you've got
a lot of people who didn't make it through the
initial crash. Their bodies are there. Um, you don't have
much to eat because you know, they had some supplies,
some wine and chocolate it was on the plane, but
it was very limited. There was also an avalanche that
(13:56):
they had to deal with and ended up killing eight
more of the surviving people that were killed. Half of
the survivors, eight of the sixteen. The bodies of some
of the people who were here that are frozen. Or
do we die? Do we all just decide to die.
That's a tough choice to make, and they made it
and they were ultimately rescued. Yes, they were driven to
(14:18):
desperation after seventy to seventy two days, and they took
a sort of a Hail Mary ten day trip to
find some sort of civilization and they ran into a
Chilean herder. I believe who brought them back. This kind
of cannibalism is uh, you know, it's frightening. And we
(14:43):
drew straws in ingest, but were the three of us
on a boat and in desperate circumstances, who knows what
would occur. And Matt, I think you're right. It is.
It is a tough decision, and I don't mean to
denigrate it at all, but also it's a decision that
I feel like, I know most people. Oh I know
(15:07):
what most people would decide. Very very few people, including
you vegetarians in the audience, would slowly starved to death.
And the worst part about this kind of cannibalism is
that it encounters rabbit starvation. Rabbit starvation is something that
happens when someone's diet is only lean meat. So when
(15:28):
people are driven to cannibalism in this sort of situation,
the person that they're consuming unless they were already dead.
If everybody was starving, and they just ate the first
one who expired from starvation or dehydration. Then the food
that they are eating from that body is not nutritious
enough to sustain them. There's no fat, so they will
(15:50):
continue eating while they are starving because their body has
enough lean meat. What it needs is some sort of nutrition.
So the worst part of this sort of cannibalism, unfortunately,
is that it doesn't help. And that is rabbit R
A B B I T starvation. Yes, yea. So we
(16:13):
talked about the we talked about the Code of the Sea.
I've talked about survival cannibalism in small groups, but it
has happened in large scale events as well, most notably
for history, buffs the Siege of Leningrad. Perhaps this was
(16:35):
a nearly three year siege. Eight hundred and seventy two days.
A million people died easily from various circumstances, right from war,
from hardship, from being abducted, butchered and eaten. The population
was slowly starving with no way to replenish the food supply.
(16:56):
Gangs of starving people roamed the street like fair old dogs.
The city had to dedicate an entire unit of its
dwindling law enforcement justified cannibalism, and people were arrested. Hundreds
of people yea. As a matter of fact, two hundred
and sixty people were arrested for cannibalism and the parents
(17:17):
kept their children inside at night for fear that they
would be abducted. Absolutely no. This shows us that people
will eat one another, not just in small isolated groups,
but entire cities can be driven to cannibalism under the
right circumstances. If this seems strange to you, ladies and gentlemen,
(17:38):
look around. Is there anyone in the room with you?
Are you outside? Is there anyone walking by? If there's
no one near you, think about the closest person. Think
about what would happen the next time you're trapped in
an elevator. Right, Think about what would happen the next
time you're stranded somewhere. How long would it take you?
What choice would you make? And we will ponder that
(17:59):
question and others when we returned from a quick sponsor break.
(18:19):
So our second type of cannibalism is what's called learned cannibalism,
essentially a socially reinforced form of form of eating human flesh.
And there are two types of this. Yeah, there is
endo cannibalism, and that's one that occurs within the group,
(18:40):
the social group in which you exist. And there are
several examples of this. Most of the examples we have
our tribes, tribes in Indonesia and New Guinea, several other
places like that. This is what you might describe as
ritualistic cannibalism, brand for sure. So like the Wari tribe,
practice is Indo cannibalism in the in the form of
(19:03):
UH mortuary cannibalism. UH. They're also known as the Paca
Nova and they are in Brazil, and so this sort
of cannibalism occurs when they So what happens is when
a when a valued member of the society dies, the
closest relatives hug embraced the deceased person. They leave the
(19:24):
body for three days approximately, and then they send out messengers.
So in the time between the death and the actual funeral,
it's an average of three days. But that's not a
hard and fast rule. And of course this is in
the Amazon, so decomposition sets in very quickly. It is
a hungry, hungry environment. And once they arrive, once all
(19:50):
the relatives arrive, they build a fire, they remove the
visceral organs. They roast the body and then they have
attendant relatives consume the flesh to a suadge to the
family's grief, because what what they thought. What they think
thought of this is that by ingesting this corpse, the
(20:14):
dead person is living on in some way in the
body of their family, transferring over and transferring the soul,
rather than being abandoned to wander the forest alone as
a spirit. So it's considered an act of compassion rather
than an act of desperation. And in its own way,
you know, the reasoning behind that is beautiful. And then
(20:38):
there is the Foray tribe in Papua New Guinea, which
you have probably heard of if you have looked into cannibalism.
So upon the death of a member of this community,
the women in the family, the maternal kin, dismember the corpse,
removed the arms and feet, stripped, the limbs, removed the brain,
cut open the chest and take out the organs. This
(21:01):
is where um, this is where you hear about kuru, Right,
I've heard of this, Yes, so kuru? Is this infection
you can get from consuming a human brain? Yeah? Is
this from the prions? Like um? Like mad cow? Yeah,
and so this, uh, the thing is that people who
(21:23):
died of kuru there was a bit of a positive
feedback loop because those people would die um quickly, right,
and they would have still have a layer of fat
on them that resembled fatty pork, so they would be
choice bites. And this this produced, um, you know, has
produced massive complications. There's also an X Files episode about
(21:46):
people transmitting couru to each other. Uh. And then there's
another tribe in Indonesian New Guinea. Yeah, this is the
coral I tribe and it the practices of the coral
I tribe in the path asked that that's what we're
talking about here. It appears that most of cannibalism within
this tribe has ceased. Um. But in the past, when
(22:08):
a member of the tribe died for some less than
obvious reason, let's say a disease, something internal that you
couldn't see. They didn't fall out of a tree, or
you know, die in battle or get attacked by an animal.
If this occurs, then it was believed that their death
was caused by a kakua or a witch man from
the nether world, which is pretty intense. I think that's
(22:31):
also a pokemon a kakua. I did not know that really. Listeners,
correct me if I'm wrong. Okay, but these kakua were
only believed to be able to inhabit the bodies of
a male another male, and when they did inhabit that body,
they magically ate the interior of the human. So, in
(22:53):
order to enact revenge on this witch man that is
eating the insides the core, I believed they had to
eat the body of the person who died. And you know,
there's this whole list here of how they prepared the meat,
which I kind of don't even want to get into,
but they basically steamed the body and chopped it up
in order to consume all the parts. And we have
(23:15):
a description here from an interview that Vice conducted with
someone who spent some time with this tribe that discusses
exactly how they prepared the human meat. Just for the record,
the pokemon is a cocuna. But here's the quote. They
steam everything with an oven made from leaves and rocks.
They treat it like they with the flesh of a pig.
(23:37):
They cut off the legs separately and wrapped them in
banana leaves. They cut off the head and that goes
to the person who found the cakua. They cut off
the right arm and the right ribs as one piece
and the left as another. Theyd everything except for the hair,
nails and the penis. Children under thirteen are not allowed
to eat this flesh. They believed the eating the cockua
(23:58):
is very dangerous, that their evil spirits all around and
the children are vulnerable. And again this is these are
practices that occurred in the past. It's thought that now
these practices are discussed as a way of getting people
to come and visit the tribes um but you know
(24:19):
that is unconfirmed currently. There's another one that's perhaps the
oldest practice of cannibalism, which is exo cannibalism eating a
member of another family, group, community, tribe, culture, at etcetera.
For instance, the Mienmen in Papua New Guinea again were
well known for practicing this. They would raid neighboring villages.
(24:43):
When an anthropologist questioned members of this community why they
carried off dead at Bullman's, an adjacent community, uh they
said they considered them good meat to this tribe. The
Miamens the at Ballman's, who existed outside their community weren't
people they were game. They were there to be hunted,
(25:06):
the same way that the Morlocks hunted the Eloi in
the Time Machine by she Wells, or the way Gary
Busey hunted Iced Tea in Most Dangerous, Most Dangerous Game. Well,
that wasn't what was the movie was just called it
was called Surviving the Game. Yeah, hunting a person, though,
is often referred to as the most Dangerous Game. There's
another example. There was a former secret society and Sierra Leone,
(25:28):
calling themselves the Leopard Society. They would kill people, they
would attack them with claw like weapons, and uh they
would take the human blood and fat of killed members
of other groups and they would mix it into a
potion called Borthena was consumed to attract wealth and power,
similar to a few of those isolated incidents amongst Narco religions. Yeah,
(25:56):
and uh, you know, of course, while we're in that
part of the world, while we're in South America, let's
let's look at the Azdec culture of Mexico and Central
America just a little ways north right. Uh, there were
large scale human sacrifices to appease the gods, to uh
(26:19):
attend the god's needs in hopes of gaining greater glory,
valuable harvest, and so on. Ritualistic sacrifice and harvesting is
something that we can examine in a later podcast. But
there was also cannibalism that occurred, and this is not
necessarily something from the bygone days of civilizations that have fallen.
(26:43):
In World War Two, when some of our ancestors, right,
we're traveling across the world waging war, When some of
our listeners today might have been traveling in one part
of a war effort or another, hannibalism occurred, especially in
the Pacific theater. And this is, um, this is recent,
(27:08):
this horrific. We see that wartime cannibalism is almost its
own thing, you know it. It can occur in survival
situations like the Siege of Leningrad, but we've categorized it
in a different way. When there is an attack in
military force as engaging cannibalism not because it needs to,
(27:31):
not because it is looking for nutrition, but because of
the madness of war. Yeah, it's called battle rage. In
a couple of places, um, specifically with Iroquois and Fiji cultures.
It's it's one of these awful things where people if
(27:54):
they were captured, they would be mutilated, like in front
of a crowd. Sometimes sometimes up and eating in front
of a crowd. People talking about taking suit like souvenirs
or trophies where someone will have like a necklace with
you know, severed ears on them or something like that.
You know. And while we're talking about this stuff, this
(28:22):
darker stuff, let's move to pathological cannibalism, which is the
maybe one of the It's difficult to make a hierarchy
for this, so I won't attempt it. But pathological cannibalism,
pathological cannibalism is what mentally disturbed individuals will do. And
(28:42):
for instance, well, let's name the elephant in the room.
We're talking about serial killers. We're talking about Albert Fish,
We're talking about Jeffrey Dahmer, who famously practiced cannibalism on
some of his victims. Uh and believe Eve tried to
conduct trap nation operations in order to create undead uh slaves. Well, yes,
(29:12):
and this this is the reason it's pathological is because
this is not a survival situation. This is not a
socially reinforced thing or a ritual or funereal. Right, you know,
this is a person who is disturbed acting out on
(29:34):
their own inner demons, right, acting out on the orders
of their own inner demons. And then there's another case here,
of course, that some of us may remember from two
thousand and one, which we have a quote here from
an advertisement very built men eighteen thirty who would like
(29:57):
to be eaten by me? This was an ad taken
out by a guy named Arman Males m E I
W E s uh. He was looking for someone to
consentually be consumed. He found a willing partner and year
old burned Urgan brands. This was a little bit different.
(30:18):
It's still pathological cannibalism, but but it was a consenting partner.
So over the next over the next few months after
they met, in the first eight pieces of this guy
uh his genitalia um. After they the genitalia, Arman put
(30:45):
the guy in a bath, was bleeding, slid his throat,
butchered him, and over the next few months eight uh
about forty pounds of his dead body. So it wasn't
really a crime, but it does lead us to or
in terms of in legal terms in German courts, this
(31:06):
wasn't who would make a law for that? Who saw
that coming? No one, that's a Shamalan move for sure.
This leads us to another form of cannibalism, which would
be auto cannibalism. Hey, ladies and gentlemen, do any of
you bite your nails? Do any of you, uh lists,
We're continuing to be a little crass engross with this.
(31:28):
Does anyone pick their nose or eat their boogers or
chew on the edge of their fingers or their hair? If, sir,
you are committing an active auto cannibalism. This makes me
think of a story um from I believe a Skelton
Crew collection of Stephen King short stories called Survivor type
where a doctor UM finds himself stranded alone on a
(31:49):
desert island and has his medical bag and anesthesia and
systematically methodically anesthetizes different parts of his body and um,
you know, cuts them off and eats them until he
has no limbs left. WHOA, that's that's great, Stephen King,
Thanks thanks for putting that in my head. And then
(32:11):
there's what in my opinion, and I wonder hear what
you think, folks. In my opinion, the most horrific form
of cannibalism is forced auto cannibalism, forcing someone to eat
themselves like that scene in Hannibal. Yes, all right, we're
entering a little bit of spoiler territory here. So if
anyone hasn't seen the movie Hannibal from what ten years ago? Um,
(32:34):
years fast forward about a minute and a half. There's
a scene in this film where um, Anthony Hopkins character
Hannibal lecter Um has isn't it has a brain open? Yeah? Yeah.
Raliotis character who's sort of his nemesis in the movie. Um.
He abducts him, lobotomizes him and cuts out little parts
(32:58):
of his brain and fry it up in a pan
and then feeds it him and stuff like this happens
in the real world. I want to warn you before
we continue, folks, that this may not be a pleasant story.
So if you would rather not hear it, this is
your chance to turn back. We'll keep it short. This
really happened, and it's important not to forget that these
(33:22):
things occur. In four in Jackson County, Florida, a group
around two thousand white Southerners intended to sacrifice a man
named Claude Neil, an innocent black man. They sent invitations
about this, they announced it in local newspapers. They castrated him,
(33:44):
and they forced him to eat his own testicles. And
then they tortured, further mutilated him, cut off other parts
of his body. Some saved his mementos similar to wartime cannibalism,
skinned him and burned him. This is what the human
species is capable of. Forest auto cannibalism is, in my opinion,
(34:10):
the most insane and disturbing part of of this entire thing.
And then, as a palate cleanser, let's go right to
one another one that a lot of people don't think
about newly discovered auto cannibals. Matt and I among you
nail biters, Right, there's another. There's another thing. And as
(34:32):
symbolic cannibalism, you attend a Christian mass Body of Christ.
Body of Christ. Yeah, this is something I can't remember
we've talked about on the show before, but it was
a new revelation for me. And I guess just because
I grew up in such a Christian centric environment that
I never thought twice about that ritual. Um, you know,
(34:55):
it is symbolic. Of course, you're not actually eating blood
or body, you of anything. But still, even though it's symbolic. Now,
some sects of Christianity. Do believe that it is the
actual body of Christ once it is transubstantiation. Yeah, I
mean it's mind blowing when you really think about it. Sure,
(35:18):
from an outsider perspective, it's it's got a sound, you know,
like cannibalism, and it just seems it's it's so strange
how things can normalize for people, you know what I mean. Sure,
it's like if we think back to individuals in a
human sacrifice oriented culture, then they would say, well, we
(35:39):
have to do this. Well, that's sort of the nature
of ritual, isn't it, Where you normalize the abnormal and
it becomes Of course, we do that. That's just what
we do. We've always always done that. We've always been
at war with East Asia, the Middle East or whomever.
So here's the here's the crazy part. This is a
brief check in because we're we're running out of time
(36:00):
today and we'll have to come back next week. Cannibalism
occurs in modern context. It occurs in West Africa. It
occurs in India. It occurs in Papua New Guinea. It
occurred in North Korea during the famine of the nineteen nineties.
Cannibalism is much much closer then you may think. It
(36:20):
is not just some old unfortunate happenstance with shipwrecks. It's
not just something that an isolated, disturbed individual would do
to innocent people. In times of crisis, people no matter
how well you know them, may change, and ultimately the
(36:41):
human goal, the thing we are built to do, is
to survive by any means necessary. Not all of these
forms of cannibalism that exists in the modern age are
necessarily bad or criminal. Right. There is ritualistic, spiritual cannibalism, right,
the propitiation of the dead in in other terms. For example,
(37:03):
in India, there's the a Gory tribe, and these are
cannibal monks. They feast on human flesh, they drink from skulls,
They live amongst the dead. But they are not um.
They're not going out and killing people. They will chew
the heads off live animals. They meditate on top of cadavers.
(37:23):
They live with death, you know what I mean. But
this is not necessarily criminal. Another thing that we see
is the allegations of cannibalism amongst the elite. There are
a lot of allegations of cannibalism among the elites. But
there is not. I haven't found anything that we can substantiate,
something that we can come forward and say, yes, absolutely,
(37:45):
this is happening. Um. There are allegations about Bohemian Grove
that you've probably read, where they are allegedly human sacrifices,
the creation of care through the cremation of care, where
there's a body. You know, it's believed to be just
a prop effigy and effigy. Yes, but you know there
(38:06):
are people who think otherwise. Who knows, I've never been there.
The only people I know have been there are presidents
and you know, some of the elites and Alex Jones.
So we are going to end it here today, Ladies
and gentlemen, on a question, would you eat someone's to survive?
(38:28):
Do you have the will power to let yourself slowly
starved to death rather than consume human flesh? How prevalent
do you feel cannibalism is? And what do you think
about the spiritual nature of consuming human body parts? Yeah?
Do you think there is power to be gained by
doing that? Somehow? Let us know. You can find us
(38:50):
on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram where conspiracy stuff on Facebook
and Twitter where conspiracy stuff show on Instagram and got
to the game kind of late, but you can see
a lot of behind the scenes things that you wouldn't
ordinarily see on our Instagram. If this podcast interests you,
you can check out a related content on our website,
Stuff they Don't Want You to Know dot Com, where
(39:12):
we have every single podcast we've ever created. And that's
the end of this classic episode. If you have any
thoughts or questions about this episode, you can get into
contact with us in a number of different ways. One
of the best is to give us a call. Our
number is one eight three three st d w y
t K. If you don't want to do that, you
(39:32):
can send us a good old fashioned email. We are
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