[Sca-cooks] Fw: Response to Crusades and cannibalism

[Phil Troy/ G. Tacitus Adamantius]

Also sprach Phlip:
>More from Paul Buell,

>  > Chinese sources, by the way too, like
>>  to point out that enemies and bad guys eat people meat, minced human liver
>  > being a particular delicacy, if we believe the Zhuangzi (Robber Zhi).

FWIW, the convicted American serial killer and cannibal, Albert Fish,
executed in the mid 1930's, claimed he got the idea of eating people
from a friend, one John Davis, who had been a deckhand on the U.S.
steamer "Tacoma". The claim is that in 1894 Davis took a trip to Hong
Kong and landed to find the entire country in a state of extreme
famine, that human meat was available for purchase from most
butchers, and that children under 14 were liable to be snatched off
the streets and sold.

Anyway, moving right along, I wonder where the question of insanity
enters into all this. Obviously some scholars in this field have
something of a vested interest in proving that cannibalism is either
nonexistent or an extreme aberration, and not really a cultural
thing. I'm inclined to accept some of this stuff as evidence that the
practice is/was a little more widespread than some would like to
believe; but where do accounts from the obviously deranged fit into
all this?

I mean, it is quite clear that Fish (BTW, related to the famous old
American family of statesmen, and originally bearing the given name
"Hamilton") was insane by just about any standard. Do some other
accounts of cannibalism under the stress of starvation or other
duress also need to be re-examined with an eye on their rational
acceptability? For example, could our Crusader accounts be some kind
of fantasy, albeit real beliefs of real people? It would be
comforting to think so, but then some forms of what we now think of
as insanity did have a way if slipping under the social radar: think
of Elizabeth Bathory, Gilles de Rais, and the Romanian National Hero,
Vlad Tepes, who was probably not a cannibal, but there are those who
feel that that is about the best thing one could say of him.

Just a point to bear in mind while we consider all this...

Adamantius