Cannibalism is a taboo line that many dare not to even think of crossing, even in hypothetical situations of extreme desperation or survival. Within it are plenty of moral, ethical, and downright sanitary dilemmas. Of course, that isn’t to say that it hasn’t happened, and even happened in ways that exceed our collective wildest imaginations. Below are 10 examples of cannibalism that would be beyond belief if they hadn’t been so well documented. 

10 Rudy Eugene

We’ve all heard of stories of “Florida Man,” but Rudy Eugene is proof that you cannot fathom the depths of depravity capable in a drug-fueled rage. On a beautiful sunny afternoon on May 26, 2012, in Miami, Florida, Rudy Eugene, 31 years old, crossed paths with homeless Ronald Poppo on the MacArthur Freeway. Eugene’s car had broken down on his way to a beach party, but he continued on foot, shedding all of his clothes along the way. First red flag.

After a short, apparently polite, greeting, Eugene lunged at Poppo, beating him into unconsciousness and removing his pants. He then proceeded to bite viciously at Poppo’s face, chewing off parts in the process. One of those parts was his left eye. Eugene was unresponsive to officers when they arrived on the scene, save an animalistic growl. He was then shot and killed. While postmortem toxicology reports were expected to turn up bath salts in his system, nothing definitive was found, save marijuana. 

9 Fore People, Papua New Guinea

It’s easy (and common) to foist the idea of cannibalism on the “less civilized” peoples isolated from modern civilization and balk at their customs, but that’s not what we’re here for. Ick factor aside, did you know the possible danger of consuming human flesh? The Fore people of Papua New Guinea didn’t. In the late 1950s, members of the Fore society were stricken with Kuru, a terminal wasting disease, at an alarming rate. Researchers discovered that a transmissible spongiform encephalopathy was to blame, akin to Mad Cow Disease. Prions (misfolded proteins) cause neighboring proteins to misfold (in a way currently not understood by scientists), creating plaques that turn your brain into Swiss cheese. This happens when an infected cow’s meat is ground up and served to unsuspecting burger lovers.

But the Fore People? It turned out they practice funerary cannibalism, where eating your loved one is a sign of mourning and respect; women and the young were most likely to consume the brains of the deceased. 

8 The Milwaukee Monster

Jeffrey Dahmer, aka The Milwaukee Monster, is a well-known serial killer active in the late ’80s and early ’90s who preyed on some of society’s most vulnerable: gay sex workers. He would often lure these men (ranging from ages 14-31) to his home on promises of payment for nude photos. Then he would spike their drink, strangle them, engage in acts of necrophilia, and then mutilate their bodies. He would “savor” those he was most attracted to by cooking up their flesh (Dahmer once mused that human tastes like filet minion). He then used their bleached bones as decoration in his apartment.

But did you know that the brevity with which he approached his crimes is what eventually would get him killed? In prison, Dahmer would often arrange his food into the shape of severed limbs with the final touch of a squirt of ketchup “blood” in order to antagonize his fellow inmates. This is what pushed inmate Christopher Scarver to bludgeon Dahmer to death in 1994, only a few years after his 16 consecutive life terms sentence.

7 Jamestown Starving Time

In history class as kids, we are often taught about the glorious coming-together of the pilgrims and the Indigenous people of America in what we now celebrate as Thanksgiving. Skimming over the actual genocide of their neighbors, everything wasn’t always hunky-dory for America’s first European settlers. In the winter of 1609-1610, due to a dry rainy season stunting crop growth, restricted access to clean water, delay in supplies delivery, and just too many mouths to feed, the people began to starve.

When horse, dog, cat, rat, or even shoe leather wasn’t available for meat, the few remaining settlers settled for humans. Scientific analysis of unearthed remains revealed that one 14-year-old girl was murdered and sectioned apart to be eaten, deduced from four shallow chop marks to her skull. All in all, the population of Jamestown went from roughly 500 to 61 over the course of this infamous winter.

6 Leonarda Cianciulli

If you’re any bit of a supplicant to the increasingly trendy mass fascination of “True Crime” (which, judging by your interest in this article, that’s quite likely), then you know that historically, female serial killers are rare. So here’s one for you: Leonarda Cianciulli. Leonarda was born in idyllic Southern Italy and was plagued with the fears that none of her children would survive into adulthood. This was due in part to fortune tellers, paranoia, and most reasonably, the available healthcare at the time. By 1938 some of her dread was warranted as only four children out of a total of 17 pregnancies had survived. When her eldest child wanted to join the army in preparation for WWII, well, that just wouldn’t do. Leonarda’s most logical solution to ensure his safety was with not one, not two, but three total human sacrifices.

The victims were three women from her community who trusted Leonarda, and we’ll let Leonarda reflect on how she mishandled that trust: “She ended up in the pot, like the other two…her flesh was fat and white, when it had melted I added a bottle of cologne, and after a long time on the boil, I was able to make some most acceptable creamy soap. I gave bars to neighbors and acquaintances.” As for the leftover blood: “I waited until it had coagulated, dried it in the oven, ground it and mixed it with flour, sugar, chocolate, milk, and eggs, as well as a bit of margarine, kneading all the ingredients together. I made lots of crunchy tea cakes and served them to the ladies who came to visit, though Giuseppe and I also ate them.”

5 North Korean Black Market

Even in 2021, North Korea remains an insular totalitarian state under the rule of their Glorious (late) Leader Kim Il-Song, stewarded by his progeny and their progeny, dedicated to complete rejection of any outside influence. While we may find their attempts to appear up-to-date, such as Kim Jong-Un’s love of Dennis Rodman and the fake props of actually-uninhabited buildings in capital Pyongyang, funny, what isn’t is the condition a majority of the North Korean people live in. What little we know is thanks to testimony by defectors who survived their escape into China and South Korea: the majority of people, excluding the elite and government officials, subsist off of very little to eat, now known as the “Hidden Famine.”

Enter the Black Market. In its darkest corners, you can find some conventional and other strange-looking meats. It’s also in these areas that children disappear. A specific account details the disappearance of two siblings last seen near a noodle shop… The owner would reveal that she offered the children a place near the fire and a bit of broth to warm themselves up. When they fell asleep, she murdered them, butchered them, then later served them up to eat.

4 The Man Who Ate His Own Foot

This story comes from Reddit user IncrediblyShinyShart and yes, before you ask, there are multiple interviews AND pictures to support its validity. Having suffered a debilitating foot injury in a motorcycle crash, this user agreed with the doctor’s decision to amputate. Now, apparently, a running gag in his friend group was eating human meat, so he thought, “I’ll just ask if I can bring my foot home.” Harmless, right? Now, back at home, foot in hand, after some casual goofing with friends, the group decided to salvage what foot meat they could, marinate it overnight, and pan-fry it up the next day alongside some veggies for tacos. Foot Tacos. 

3 Armin Meines

In the last entry, we asked the question: what if you could cannibalize yourself? In the case of Armin Meines, now known as the Rotenburg Cannibal or Der Metzgermeister (The Master Butcher), he wondered, “What if you could cannibalize someone else, but consensually?” You see, Meines fantasized about the truest form of intimacy: eating another person. They would therefore exist inside you, indefinitely. This desire possibly stems from perceived insecurity in familial bonds in his childhood, but to Meines, it became one of his greatest sexual desires. And he found a consensual partner in Bernd Jürgen Armando Brandes on the website The Cannibal Cafe. (Fair warning, this next part is gruesome.)

Together, on March 9, 2001, Brandes downed sleeping pills and cough syrup, and Meines cut off his penis, fried it in a pan with salt, pepper, wine, garlic, and Brandes’s fat, but much to Brandes’s dismay upon trying it, found it was overcooked. Meines was then moved to a tub to bleed out (while Brandes read a Star Trek book), stabbed in the neck, hung on a meat hook, and dismembered. This was all videotaped. Forty-four pounds of Meines was enjoyed by Brandes over the next ten months and was only caught when his search for his next partner online was alerted to authorities.

2 Joel Guy Jr.

This one technically doesn’t involve cannibalism per se, but the gruesome murder scene authorities would walk into on November 26, 2016, is enough to make anyone’s stomach turn. Joel Guy Jr. was unhappy to learn that after 28 years of not having a job, being entirely supported by his parents, that they were planning to retire soon, thus cutting him off. He planned to murder Joel and Lisa guy, burn the house down and somehow pin it all on his father in a tragic murder-suicide and rake in that sweet sweet life insurance money (valued at $500,000).

Instead, authorities were called in to perform a welfare check and discovered the following scene: Joel Sr. had been stabbed over 40 times, dismembered, mostly dissolving in a vat of decomposition stew except for his hands, which were found on the floor. Lisa received over 30 stab wounds and got mostly the same treatment, except her head was found in a pot on the stove, likely simmering for days. Yikes.

1 Issei Sagawa

Issei Sagawa, a Japanese-born student, studying in Paris in 1981, exacted a plan to lure classmate Renée Hartevelt to his apartment under the guise of dinner and poetry translation, killed her via a rifle shot from behind, then proceeded to mutilate, rape, and eat her corpse. He photographed her at each of these stages.

He was caught trying to dump her remains but was found legally insane in France. He was deported, and through legal loopholes, is now a free man. He’s widely known in Japan and has written books testifying to the twisted reasoning behind his crimes. At 4’9″, he felt inferior and weak and wanted to absorb Hartevelt’s beauty and strength. It just freaking sucks, doesn’t it?

Except in times of famine, cannibalism has very rarely been about food. In most cases, from the medicine-makers of Europe to the tribes of the New World and even psychopaths such as Armin Meiwes, cannibalism has been surprisingly meaningful to those who practiced it. Most of the peoples encountered by the Colonials in the New World after 1492 did not practice cannibalism.

Spanish soldiers were instructed (initially by Queen Isabella of Spain, and later by the Pope) to actively enslave or subdue either the cannibals of the Americas or any infidels who resisted conversion. Tribal cannibalism has most certainly occurred. But the horrors of man-eating in the “civilized world” have sometimes been equally bad.

Related: 10 Facts About Human Cannibalism From Modern Science

10 The Real Cannibals Were the Europeans

It’s true. From the Middle Ages to late Victorian times, Europeans swallowed just about every part of the human body as medicine. In fact, for most people in the time of Shakespeare or Charles II, the big question was not: “Should you eat people for medicine?” so much as “What sort of person should you eat for medicine?” It started off with Egyptian mummies. Medical trade in these human remains began in the fifteenth century. Later in the seventeenth century, when supply dwindled and Egyptian authorities clamped down on the plunder, certain merchants in North Africa baked up dead lepers, beggars, or camels into a “counterfeit mummy” to satisfy continuing demand.

By this time, science preferred new flesh. One recipe of 1609 advised you to “choose the carcass of a red man, whole, clear without blemish, of the age of twenty-four years, that hath been hanged, broke upon a wheel, or thrust-through, having been for one day and night exposed to the open air, in a serene time.” This flesh should be cut into small pieces and sprinkled with powder of myrrh and aloes before being macerated in wine. It should then be “hung up to dry in the air,” after which “it will be like flesh hardened in smoke” and “without stink.”

Among those making or taking various forms of corpse medicine were Emperor Francis I, Elizabeth I’s doctor, John Banister, Charles II, chemist Robert Boyle, the doctor and pioneering neuroscientist Thomas Willis, and a host of aristocratic ladies and gentlemen. For the poor, there was fresh blood: swallowed at beheadings in Austria, Germany, Denmark, and Sweden (though one wonders if this may be propaganda or outright fantasy). You could allegedly see this going on anytime from around 1500 to 1866, and it was used especially by epileptics. In Britain, people were illicitly obtaining skulls for medicine in and even beyond the Victorian age.^[1]

9 Famine Cannibalism

Until at least the eighteenth century, this was also grimly true in Europe. After the Reformation, the main reason was that the civilized people of the day were slaughtering each other on an epic scale in various wars. In 1590, with Paris besieged by Henri of Navarre, an emergency famine committee agreed that bread should be made from bones from the charnel house of the Holy Innocents Cemetery. It was available by mid-August, but those eating it apparently died.

In Germany in late 1636, in the village of Steinhaus, a woman allegedly lured a girl of twelve and a boy of five into her house, killed them both, and devoured them with her neighbor. In Heidelberg around this time, men were said to “have digged out of the graves dead bodies, and…eaten them,” while one woman “was found dead, having a man’s head roasted by her, and the rib of a man in her mouth.” Piero Camporesi tells of how, in Picardy during this conflict, the Jesuit G.S. Menochio saw several inhabitants so crazed with hunger that they “ate their own arms and hands and died in despair.” ^[2]

8 The French Traveler Who Probably Preferred to Live with Cannibals

In the 1550s, the French traveler Jean de Léry spent some time living with the Tupinamba cannibals of Brazil. All too often, once he was home in France, Léry must have wished he was safely back in Brazil with the ferocious cannibals. Beginning on August 24, 1572, in Paris, the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre ultimately claimed the lives of perhaps 5,000 Protestants—slaughtered by Catholics. And shortly after that (writes Frank Lestringant, an academic who admittedly combines allegory with facts), Léry saw a French Protestant executed by Catholics in Auxerre. The victim was not only ritually executed, but also had his heart “plucked out, chopped in pieces, auctioned off, cooked on a grill and finally eaten with much enjoyment.” Though given the extent to which people will lie to defend their position, it is probable that he made up the latter part of that tale.

Nor was this all. In 1573, Léry found himself in war-torn Sancerre, which endured an appalling siege and severe levels of famine. Lestringant tells of how, in one starving family, a small girl died. Soon after, the elderly grandmother persuaded the child’s parents to eat her. The grandmother was later condemned and executed. Having seen a good deal of cannibalism in Brazil, Léry found himself confronted with the dead girl’s butchered carcass. At this point, his whole body made its own judgment, and he spontaneously vomited at the sight.^[3]

7 Warring Christians Were Known to Eat or Drink Each Other

When the Spanish sacked the Dutch city of Naarden in Holland in December 1572, around a hundred citizens seeking to escape into the snowbound fields were overtaken by Spanish soldiers, stripped naked, and hung on trees to freeze to death. And it was here that the invading armies, “becoming more and more insane as the foul work went on,” were said to have “opened the veins of some of their victims, and drank their blood as if it were wine.”

In his unusually enlightened essay “On Cannibals,” the remarkable French thinker Michel de Montaigne insisted that eating a living person was more barbaric than one who was dead. He added that humans at that time had both read about and seen people roasted by degrees and “bit and worried by dogs and swine.” This was done while the victim was aware and alert—and indeed performed “not amongst inveterate and mortal enemies, but neighbours, and fellow citizens, and which is worse, under colour of piety and religion.”

In April 1655, the Protestants of the Piedmontese valleys were massacred by Catholic troops. A high-ranking French soldier, Monsieur du Petit Bourg, later told of soldiers eating boiled human brains, tricking their comrades into consuming “tripe” (in fact, the breasts and genitals of one of the Protestant victims), and roasting a young girl alive on a pike. The soldiers who killed Daniel Cardon of Roccappiata readily ate his brains after frying them in a pan. And having taken out his heart, they would have fried this also, had they not been “frighted by some of the poor peoples’ troops…coming that way.”^[4]

6 Much Supposedly “Savage Cannibalism” of the Americas Was Entirely Consensual

The best-known Christian accounts of “savage cannibalism—often with lurid images—tended to focus on violent man-eating: exo-cannibalism. But a great deal of tribal cannibalism was purely internal and consensual. For example, in funerary cannibalism (or endo-cannibalism), a tribe ate its dead as a form of mourning. Such rites were highly sober, complex, and essentially religious.

This is vividly clear in accounts of Brazilian Wari’ cannibalism given by anthropologist Beth Conklin. Wari’ funeral cannibalism took place relatively recently—perhaps as late as the 1960s—until stamped out by invasive Christian missionaries. The eating of the dead was part of a somber and elaborate ceremony: the corpse was painted with red annatto, and the firewood for cooking was decorated with the feathers of vultures and macaws. The mourners sang and burned the house of the deceased.

There was no question of simple appetite here. In fact, in the case of a dead tribal elder, the long mourning period meant flesh was probably putrid by the time it was consumed. Mourners might have to force down this rank flesh and even vomit but did so out of respect for the spirit of the deceased. Interestingly, the Wari’ were horrified by the notion of Christian burial, the imprisoning of a corpse in cold, dank earth—something which they considered to be polluting.^[5]

5 Like the Mafia or Academics, Savage Cannibals Only Killed Their Own

As for exo-cannibalism? Aggressive man-eating was practiced against rival tribes as part of a radical aggravation of violence and hatred. Thanks to another dauntless French traveler, André Thevet, we know how complex and religious this kind of cannibalism was. The Tupinamba would assemble the entire tribe to eat such a captive. After he was clubbed to death and roasted, every tribe member would eat something, leaving only a cleanly picked skeleton some hours after his death. But by this time, the captive victim had actually lived with his enemy hosts for a year. He had his own house and a new wife from the tribe and had even fathered a child. This child, too, would be eaten along with the father. The key to this strange puzzle is “incorporation.” In every possible way, the enemy captive was absorbed into the victors’ tribe: first socially and symbolically, and then quite literally.

Similarly, Peggy Reeves Sanday has emphasized the complex social and religious character of Tupinamba rituals. The aggressive participants might at one stage be “howling at the tops of their voices…their eyes flashing with rage and fury,” while at another, the watching Jesuits were struck by the fact that the torturers’ faces clearly expressed “gentleness and humanity” toward their tormented captive. Equally, the ceremony was very carefully controlled and prolonged, with the victim being intermittently revived so that he should not die before the appointed time.

Despite suffering pain and exhaustion seemingly beyond the limits of human endurance, their victim would essentially cooperate in the whole proceeding because he shared certain basic religious beliefs with his tormentors. He must, for example, show extraordinary courage, knowing as he did that, after the tortures at daybreak, he was being watched by the sun god.^[6]

4 Chinese Cannibalism (I): How much do you love your mother-in-law?

Surprisingly, until recently, China also had some startling examples of both consensual and violent cannibalism. Daniel Korn, Mark Radice, and Charlie Hawes explain how, for centuries, the traditions of filial piety known as ko ku and ko kan involved the daughter-in-law treating her sick, elderly in-law through cannibalism. If you ever have to do one of these yourself, choose ko ku. The “donor” takes a very sharp knife, slices off part of their upper arm or thigh, and mixes it into soup, which produces a miraculous recovery in the recipient.

Ko kan is a bit more serious. The donor cuts open their own midriff and (not without some effort) locates their liver. They then carve out a piece and feed it the same way to the ailing in-law. The authors noted that the liver has astonishing powers of regeneration so that donors may, in fact, have been able to survive this ritual. The recipient of these gourmet specialties was never supposed to know that they were not ordinary food.^[7]

3 Chinese Cannibalism (II): How much do you hate your class enemies?

And exo-cannibalism? Hawes reveals how, in the later 1960s, in the throes of China’s violent Cultural Revolution, hatred of new class enemies reached visceral intensity in a very short space of time. How bad was it? At a school in Wuxuan Province, students turned against their teachers. The Head of the Chinese Department, Wu Shufang, was condemned as a class enemy and beaten to death. Another teacher was forced to cut out Shufang’s liver, which was cooked in strips over a fire in the schoolyard. Before long, the cannibalism had spread until “the schoolyard was full of the smell of students cooking their teachers.”

In another incident, a young man was attacked and tortured because he was the son of an ex-landlord. While still barely alive, he was bound to a telegraph pole and taken down to the river. The attackers cut open his stomach and removed his liver; the cavity was still so hot that they had to pour river water in to cool it. Once again, the liver of the landlord’s son made a “revolutionary feast for the villagers involved.” In all, some 10,000 people are thought to have taken part in cannibalism in these episodes, with up to 100 victims being eaten. These fiercely guarded internal secrets were revealed by Zheng Yi, a former Red Guard member, now in permanent exile as a result.^[8]

2 And the Prize for the Nastiest Cannibals in the World Goes to…

Here are two strong contenders. The seventeenth-century French author, César Rochefort, claimed that “the inhabitants of the Country of Antis” in South America were crueler than tigers. When eating “a person of quality”:

These unmerciful people, having stripped him, fasten him stark naked to a post and cut and slash him all over the body… In this cruel execution they do not presently dismember him, but they only take the flesh from the parts which have most, as the calf of the leg, the thighs, the buttocks, and the arms; that done, they all pell-mell, men, women, and children, dye themselves with the blood of that wretched person; and not staying for the roasting or boiling of the flesh they had taken away, they devour it like so many cormorants, or rather swallow it down without any chewing… Thus the wretch sees himself eaten alive, and buried in the bellies of his enemies…

Once again, however, even this had a certain degree of honor involved—it was a person of quality who got the very worst treatment, and he was accorded respect by the Antis if he kept silent during his ordeal.

With this in mind, the top prize may go to the cannibals of the Solomon Islands. Earle Labor vividly describes the time Jack London and his wife Charmian spent there in the summer of 1908. A little more than a century ago, some Solomon Islanders still seemed to have been eating people and to have regarded them without any ritual or religious interest, but merely as tasty food. One recipe for “long pig”‘ (writes Labor) called for “breaking the bones and crushing the joints of victims…then staking them, still living, up to their necks in running water, often for days, until they were considered sufficiently tenderized for cooking.”^[9]

1 Cannibal Myths

As we have seen, potentially one of the biggest distortions in history across the past 500 years was the description of “savage cannibals” by those who were practicing it on an industrial scale back in Europe. The tendency to debase tribal peoples in this way prompted the historian William Arens to try and deny that cannibalism had ever been practiced by any tribe—a perhaps well-meaning attempt that has now generally been discredited.

What is also interesting is how cannibalism acted as a kind of imaginative whirlpool, sucking in other lurid transgressions or phenomena. So in 1688, we hear of the Chirihuana, a Peruvian people who not only devoured their enemies but allegedly “went naked, and promiscuously used coition without regard either to sisters, daughters or mothers.” For their part, however, the Chirihuana were equally contemptuous of the Spanish viceroy, Francisco de Toledo. Forced to flee the region and carried in a litter by Spaniards and Indians, Toledo departed with the Chirihuana shouting “curses and reproaches, saying, ‘throw down that old woman from her basket, that we may eat her alive.’”

Even darker still was the tale (recounted by Francis Bacon, among others) that at the siege of Naples by the French in 1494, certain “wicked merchants barrelled up man’s flesh (of some that had been lately slain in Barbary) and sold it for tuna.”^[10]

In 2022, cannibalism became a popular subject again for mass media purposes. First, there was the 2022 three-part series House of Hammer about disgraced actor Armie Hammer who was accused of sexual abuse and cannibalistic fantasies. Then there were shows like Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story and Yellowjackets as well as the movies Fresh and Bones and All.

Cannibalism is nothing new, though. Shakespeare even tackled the subject in Titus Andronicus. By and large, cannibalism involves one adult eating another. However, there’s a long, dark, and forgotten corner of history about cannibals eating children. This article examines some of the most terrifying cases from the medieval ages about filial cannibalism or the cannibalism of children.

10 The People of Lamuri

Odoric of Pordenone is a Franciscan friar who lived from 1286 to 1331 and documented his travels during the 14th century. Odoric’s reports were subsequently popularized and even later plagiarized by Sir John Mandeville, who is likely to have never left his abbey or dispensary.

The Travels of Sir John Mandeville are how great minds like Columbus, da Vinci, and Shakespeare first learned about the wonders of the ancient East.

One of the many places that Odoric visited was Lamuri, a kingdom in northern Indonesia that lasted until the beginning of the 16th century. The area is believed to be one of the earliest places where Islam arrived in the Indonesian archipelago.

During Odoric’s travels, he passed through Lamuri, which is derived from the medieval Arabic word for the area of Sumatra, where the population traded. The populace of Lamuri walked around without clothing and made fun of Odoric for his clothes. The people of Lamuri also did not believe in marriage, sharing all women among each other. Odoric, however, noted that the people of Lamuri had one “wicked habit”: children were bought if adequately “plump” or reared until they were bigger. The people of Lamuri commented to Odoric that child flesh was the “sweetest meat in the world.”^[1]

9 The Siege of Ma’arra

The Siege of Ma’arra occurred in late 1098 in what is now Syria during the First Crusade. After capturing Antioch, Crusaders moved to the south and began raiding and pillaging each town they found, which is where they encountered the city of Ma’arra on December 11, 1098. It was a peaceful city whose economy was based on the growth of olives, figs, and grapes. Ma’arra was subsequently devastated by the Crusaders, who killed thousands of people.

But Ma’arra was also the site of cannibalism. Radulph of Caen, who chronicled the genocide, observed that adults classified as pagans were boiled in pots while children were impaled on spits, then grilled and eaten. Fulcher of Chartres, another observer at the time, wrote that the Crusaders, driven by hunger, removed the buttocks from corpses found in the city, which they then cooked and ate mostly rare.^[2]

8 The Waldenses

The Waldenses began as a Christianity movement in France during the late 1170s. The group was named after its founder, Peter Waldo, who was a wealthy Lyon merchant. Waldo had heard a troubadour sing about St. Alexius, the patron saint of beggars and pilgrims. This song, combined with the loss that Waldo experienced at the sudden death of his friend, led him to believe that all his belongings were worthless. This led him to give away his property to the poor and begin street preaching.

The Waldenses were persecuted heavily throughout the 16th and 17th centuries. In 1655, the Duke of Savoy ordered the Waldenses to attend Mass or be removed from their homes. The Waldenses had twenty days to sell their land. The Waldenses chose to leave their homes and move to the upper valley, which required them to make a trek through the Alps in the middle of winter. The Duke sent his troops after the Waldenses and required the Waldenses to allow the troops into their homes, which gave the troops easy access to the group.

On April 24, 1655, a signal for a massacre was given, known as the Piedmont Easter. Writer Peter Liegé observed that children were separated from their mothers, clasped by their feet, and smashed against rocks or held between two soldiers and torn apart. During the Piedmont Easter, troops also cooked the arms and legs of people, including children. Other people were roasted alive.^[3]

7 The Ming Dynasty

The Ming Dynasty ruled China from 1368 to 1644, during which time China’s population increased substantially. The Ming Dynasty is remembered for expanding trade, creating long-lasting drama and literature, and making porcelain.

The Ming Dynasty popularized a practice that had become popular during the earlier Tang Dynasty. In the 700s, a physician, Ch’en Tsang-ch’I, became the first Chinese doctor on record to prescribe human flesh for various ailments. Three requirements were necessary before the good doctor prescribed human flesh. First, the act must be voluntary—the donor had to donate parts of themselves for this intended purpose. Second, the donor and the recipient needed to bear a close relationship, which often meant that the donor was a child or child-in-law. And finally, the recipient could not know they were consuming human flesh, so the flesh was disguised in ordinary food.^[4]

6 The Great Famine of 1315

In the 14th century, cold weather and famine in England led to the Great Famine of 1315 to 1322. Before the cold came, Europe pushed itself to the limits of its resources. Four centuries of mild temperature led the country’s farmers to grow crops on vast quantities of land that were previously not suitable for agriculture. This led to an increased food supply which led to a population explosion and tripled the number of people in Europe. When these lands stopped being able to produce food due to frosts and floods, millions of extra mouths needed to be fed. This led to civil wars and rebellions. Two harvest failures in 1314 and 1315 turned into years of famine.

While all of Europe was hit, Europe’s towns were where the Great Famine hit the worst. Corpses piled up in streets, bodies were flung into open pits, and countless stories abound of cannibalism and child abandonment. The cannibalism of children was so common during this time that the folk tale “Hansel and Gretel” was created.^[5]

5 The Tupinambá

The Tupinambá are a group of South American Indians who speak the Tupian language and live on the eastern coast of Brazil. In the past, the group lived in villages that ranged in size from 400 to 1,600 people who supported themselves by farming and fishing in the ocean. War among the Tupinambá was a common occurrence. The group was focused on war and is alleged to have practiced cannibalism.

Manuel de Nóbrega was a Jesuit priest who lived from 1517 to 1570 and founded the Jesuit mission in Brazil. Nóbrega wrote in his book Reports on the Lands of Brazil that the Tupinambá only waged war out of hatred for the enemy. Nóbrega wrote that the Tupinambá fought one another and that when enemies were captured, they were kept as prisoners. At the same time, their daughters were taken as wives, and the prisoners were then killed with great celebration. They smoked corpses in the fire and then ate them. If the enemies left children, these were eaten too.^[6]

4 The Caribs

The Caribs are indigenous people on the northern coast of South America. Today, the Caribs live in villages along the shores of Venezuela, Brazil, Guyana, and French Guiana and speak a language called Carib. Christopher Columbus was the first to report on cannibalism among the Caribs. Amerigo Vespucci wrote that the Caribs ate little meat except that which came from humans and that the Caribs ate all of their enemies, whether man or woman.

Observing the Caribs, Padre Augustin de Frias wrote that the Caribs from the Guarapiche/Guanipa area chose to eat young children instead of prisoners. The Caribs in this area also practiced a form of euthanasia in which the elderly were eaten so they would not have to face a lingering death. Some historians argue that these practices were merely the result of propaganda against Indigenous people, though, who resisted the Spanish.^[7]

3 The Aztecs

The Aztecs began sacrificing humans in the early fourteenth century. At first, sacrifices were uncommon but grew in number as time passed and the empire expanded. The Aztec sacrifice of humans was inspired by the idea that the human body contained energy that kept the sun in motion through the sky and subsequently renewed time, crops, and human lives.

During Aztec sacrifices, human hearts were offered to the sun, and blood was smeared on the walls to make sure Aztec temples were coated with energy. In addition to men and women, children were sacrificed too in the first quarter of the Aztec year. Children were purchased from their parents specifically to be sacrificed. Hernando Cortes’s man allegedly came across roasted babies, which the Aztecs carried as provisions but abandoned when they noticed the Spaniards.^[8]

2 The Korowai

The Korowai tribe of Papa New Guinea practices a type of revenge cannibalism that impacts children. The Korowai were in full swing during the Middle Ages and, for centuries, have believed in sorcery, witchcraft, and revenge on a widespread social level. Abnormal behavior among the Korowai can lead a person to be accused of participating in sorcery. Additionally, because the culture has had no breakthroughs regarding medicine and health, they have their own methods for explaining sicknesses.

Before someone passes away in the Korowai tribe, they might claim that they know who the sorcerer is. This might lead to a child being named. After the person’s death, the alleged sorcerer is then found, made to stand in a clearing, shot with arrows, cooked, and eaten. The alleged sorcerer’s body is then dismembered and placed on branches to warn others.^[9]

1 The Siege of Suiyang

China’s An Lushan Rebellion started in 755. The following year, the rebel Yan army had control of most of northern China. In 757, emperor An Qinxu ordered general Yin Ziqi to take control of Suiyang (which is the current day site of Shangqiu, Henan) because the city was situated between two major ones. Yin Ziqi’s 130,000-man army then took control of Suiyang while fighting against Zhang Xun and the Xu Yuan army of around 6,800 men.

Through clever tactics, Zhang Xun was able to kill around 5,000 Yan troops at first. Zhang Xun then killed general Yin Ziqi, which greatly disorganized the Yan army. In 16 days, the Yan army had lost around 20,000 men, which led Yin Ziqi to order a retreat. Yin Ziqi returned to take Suiyang later with 20,000 new men. The Xu Yuan and Zhang Xun had prepared for the battle by storing food inside the city of Suiyang. This was lessened when it was shared with neighboring kingdoms. Soldiers received very small rations. Zhang Xun was soon left fighting 1,600 soldiers who were starving and sick. The soldiers grew further desperate without outside help. Before long, Zhang Xun’s men were eating tree bark, tea leaves, and paper.

The dwellers of Suiyang during this time traded their children to eat and cook corpses. Zhang Xun even killed his concubine in front of his soldier and proceeded to cook and consume her flesh. When the woman was eaten, the troops ate the old and young. Before long, there were no more people to eat. Eventually, Suiyang fell to the rebels, and Zhang Xun was captured.^[10]