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

Hey

Speaker 1 (lower-pitched voice): everybody, this is Daryl Cooper, and you're listening to the Martyr Maid Podcast. You're about to hear How to Serve Man, an exploration of the nature and practice of ritual cannibalism. This

episode was

Speaker 1 (lower-pitched voice): inspired by my friend Daniele's History on Fire podcast series on the Spanish conquest of the Aztec Empire. If

you enjoy this

Speaker 1 (lower-pitched voice): series, or this podcast in general, please consider subscribing to my Substack page, where... You'll find supplemental writings and exclusive podcast episodes available only to subscribers for just $5 a month or $50 a year. It can be found at martyrmaid.substack.com

And to all of you who

Speaker 1 (lower-pitched voice): are already contributing, I really appreciate you allowing me to do this

Hope you guys

Speaker 1 (lower-pitched voice): didn't like this one. It's a little dark. Here we go. I'm

content to die for my

Speaker 2: beliefs. I'm

content to die for my beliefs. So cut off

Speaker 2: my head

And make

Speaker 3: me a martyr The people will always remember

it

Speaker 4: No They

will forget Hell

Speaker 5: does exist God is a thought God is an idea It

is a

Speaker 6: place It is somewhere Hell

Speaker 7: does exist

but its

Speaker 7: reference is to something that transcends all things. Why

must we tear ourselves

Speaker 8: apart for this small question of religion? One

of my very favorite authors

Speaker 9: of fiction

Speaker 10 (lower-pitched voice): Ursula Le Guin, has this wonderful little short story called The Ones Who Walk Away from O'Mellas

Le Guin begins

Speaker 11 (lower-pitched voice): her little story, it's just a few short pages, a beautiful little story, and she begins by describing

Speaker 12 (lower-pitched voice): the idyllic fictional town called Omelas and all of its joyful inhabitants as they're preparing for a festival when the story

opens up. Now in the

Speaker 12 (lower-pitched voice): town of Omelas, it's a utopian town, no one wants for anything, no one is oppressed

The

Speaker 13 (lower-pitched voice): families get along, and the families love one another. They love each other. The community is very cohesive. Everything works

The story

Speaker 12 (lower-pitched voice): opens. It's the festival of summer. It's just beginning. And so the seaside town is decorated for celebration. And all the men are working, you know, contentedly putting their hands to their tasks while mothers with babies smile and chat with one another in the park. Groups of

People

Speaker 12 (lower-pitched voice): dance and play instruments, you know, fill in the rest, however you want to fill it in. You know, people are dressed in bright colors and children are running, trailing streamers

Speaker 14 (lower-pitched voice): behind them

And yet, Le Guin

Speaker 14 (lower-pitched voice): writes to us, they were not simple folk, though they were happy. But

we do not say

Speaker 14 (lower-pitched voice): the words of cheer much anymore. All smiles have become archaic

Given a description

Speaker 15 (lower-pitched voice): such as this, one tends to make certain assumptions

Given a

Speaker 15 (lower-pitched voice): description such as this, one tends to look next for the king, mounted on a splendid stallion and surrounded by his noble knights, or perhaps on a golden litter borne by great-muscled slaves. But there was no king. They

did not

Speaker 15 (lower-pitched voice): use swords or keep slaves. They

were not

Speaker 15 (lower-pitched voice): barbarians. I do

not know the rules and

Speaker 16 (lower-pitched voice): laws of their society, but I suspect that they were singularly few. No

As they did

Speaker 12 (lower-pitched voice): without monarchy and slavery, so they also got on without the stock exchange, the advertisement, the

Speaker 15 (lower-pitched voice): secret police, and the bomb. Yet

I repeat that

Speaker 15 (lower-pitched voice): these were not simple

Speaker 12 (lower-pitched voice): folk. Not dulcet shepherds, noble savages, bland utopians. They

were not

Speaker 12 (lower-pitched voice): less complex

Speaker 15 (lower-pitched voice): than us. End quote. And then

Le

Speaker 15 (lower-pitched voice): Guin makes very plain to us

Speaker 12 (lower-pitched voice): that she's dealing in fantasy. She admits it in the story. She says that her illustration here of the town of Omelas, it might not suit every reader. And so she encourages us, the readers, to imagine the town and its people however we need to, to make the utopia the way our utopia would be. She encourages us to do that

And so

Speaker 12 (lower-pitched voice): as we follow the

Speaker 17 (lower-pitched voice): joyous procession of parade-goers and festival-goers

Speaker 16 (lower-pitched voice): near to its end, we're caught up in the reverie of no place, and we're almost wanting to willfully ignore the impossibility of this vision because it's so beautiful. When

Le Guin, the dark

Speaker 10 (lower-pitched voice): sorceress, turns it around on us and reveals her magic, this is why Le Guin is so good. Quote, Do

you

Speaker 18 (lower-pitched voice): believe? Do

you accept the

Speaker 18 (lower-pitched voice): festival, the city, the joy? No. no then let me

Speaker 15 (lower-pitched voice): describe one

more thing in

Speaker 15 (lower-pitched voice): a basement under one of the beautiful public buildings of omelas or perhaps in the cellar of one of its spacious private

homes there is a room it

Speaker 15 (lower-pitched voice): has one locked door and no window a little light seeps in dustily between the cracks in the board second hand from a cobwebbed window somewhere across

the cellar in one

Speaker 15 (lower-pitched voice): corner of the little

Speaker 19 (lower-pitched voice): room a couple of mops with stiff clotted foul-smelling heads stand near a rusty bucket

the

Speaker 20 (lower-pitched voice): floor is dirt a little damp to the touch

Speaker 12 (lower-pitched voice): as cellar dirt usually

is the room is

Speaker 12 (lower-pitched voice): about three paces long and two wide a mere broom closet or disused tool

room in

Speaker 15 (lower-pitched voice): the room a child is sitting

it could

Speaker 15 (lower-pitched voice): be a boy or a girl It looks about six, but is actually nearly ten

It is feeble-minded. Perhaps it

Speaker 15 (lower-pitched voice): was born defective, or perhaps it has become imbecile through fear, malnutrition, and neglect. It

picks its nose and

Speaker 15 (lower-pitched voice): occasionally fumbles

Speaker 11 (lower-pitched voice): vaguely with its toes or genitals as it sits hunched in the corner farthest from the bucket and the two mops. It

is afraid of

Speaker 21 (lower-pitched voice): the mops. It

finds them

Speaker 21 (lower-pitched voice): horrible

it shuts

Speaker 21 (lower-pitched voice): its eyes but it knows the mops are still

Speaker 22 (lower-pitched voice): standing there and the door is locked and nobody will

come the door

Speaker 22 (lower-pitched voice): is always locked and nobody ever comes except that sometimes the child has no understanding of time or interval sometimes the door rattles terribly and opens and a person or several people

are there one of them

Speaker 22 (lower-pitched voice): may

Speaker 13 (lower-pitched voice): come up and kick the child to make it stand

up The

Speaker 13 (lower-pitched voice): others never come close, but peer in at it with frightened, disgusted eyes. The

food bowl and the

Speaker 11 (lower-pitched voice): water jug are hastily filled, the door is locked, the eyes disappear. The

people at the

Speaker 12 (lower-pitched voice): door never say anything, but the child, who has not always lived in the tool room and can remember sunlight and its mother's voice, sometimes speaks. I will be good, it says. Please let me out. I

Speaker 13 (lower-pitched voice): will be good

They never

Speaker 13 (lower-pitched voice): answer

The child

Speaker 13 (lower-pitched voice): used to scream for help at night and cry a good deal, but now it only makes a kind of whining

Speaker 15 (lower-pitched voice): eha, eha, and it speaks less and less often. It

is so thin that

Speaker 15 (lower-pitched voice): there are no calves to its

Speaker 12 (lower-pitched voice): legs. Its belly protrudes. It lives on a half bowl of cornmeal and grease a day. It is naked

Its

Speaker 12 (lower-pitched voice): buttocks and thighs are a mass of festered sores as it sits in its own excrement continually

Speaker 23: They all know it is there, all the people of Vomelos

Speaker 17 (lower-pitched voice): Some of them have come

to see it

Speaker 17 (lower-pitched voice): others are content merely to know

that it is there

Speaker 17 (lower-pitched voice): They all know that it has

to be there

Speaker 17 (lower-pitched voice): Some of them understand why, and some do not, but they all understand

that

Speaker 17 (lower-pitched voice): their happiness the beauty

Speaker 12 (lower-pitched voice): of their city the tenderness of their friendships the health of their children the wisdom of their scholars the skill of their makers even the abundance of their harvest and the kindly weather of

Speaker 24: their skies depend wholly on this child's abominable misery this

is usually explained to children

Speaker 25 (lower-pitched voice): when they are between eight and twelve whenever they seem capable of understanding

And

Speaker 22 (lower-pitched voice): most of those who come to see the child are young people, though often enough an adult comes, or comes back, to see the child. No

matter how well the

Speaker 26: matter has been explained to them, these

Speaker 14 (lower-pitched voice): young spectators are always shocked and sickened at the sight

They feel

Speaker 14 (lower-pitched voice): disgust, which they had thought themselves superior to

They feel anger

Speaker 14 (lower-pitched voice): outrage, impotence, despite

Speaker 12 (lower-pitched voice): all the explanations. They would

like to

Speaker 12 (lower-pitched voice): do something for the child, but

there

Speaker 12 (lower-pitched voice): is nothing they can do

If the child

Speaker 12 (lower-pitched voice): were brought up into the sunlight out of that vile place, if it were cleaned and fed and

Speaker 25 (lower-pitched voice): comforted, that would be a good thing indeed, but if it were done, in that day and hour, all the prosperity and beauty and

Speaker 12 (lower-pitched voice): delight of Omelas would wither and be destroyed

Those are the

Speaker 12 (lower-pitched voice): terms

And to

Speaker 12 (lower-pitched voice): exchange all the goodness and grace of every life in Omelas for that single small improvement? To

throw away the

Speaker 27 (lower-pitched voice): happiness of thousands for the chance of the happiness of one? That

would be to let

Speaker 10 (lower-pitched voice): guilt within the walls indeed. The

terms are strict

Speaker 13 (lower-pitched voice): and absolute. There may not even be a kind word spoken to the child

often the

Speaker 12 (lower-pitched voice): young people go home in tears or in a tearless rage when they have seen the child and face this terrible paradox

they may

Speaker 12 (lower-pitched voice): brood over it for weeks or years but as time goes on they begin to realize that even if the child could be released it would not get much good of its freedom a little vague pleasure of warmth and food no doubt but

Speaker 16 (lower-pitched voice): little

more it is too

Speaker 16 (lower-pitched voice): degraded and imbecile to know any real

joy It has

Speaker 15 (lower-pitched voice): been afraid too long to ever be free of fear. Its habits are too uncouth

Speaker 25 (lower-pitched voice): for it to respond to humane treatment. Indeed, after so long it would probably be wretched without the walls about it to protect it

and

Speaker 12 (lower-pitched voice): darkness for its eyes, and its own excrement

Speaker 14 (lower-pitched voice): to sit in

Their tears at the

Speaker 14 (lower-pitched voice): bitter injustice dry when they begin to perceive the terrible justice of reality, and to accept it

Thank you. yet it is

Speaker 14 (lower-pitched voice): their tears and anger the trying of their generosity and the acceptance of their helplessness which are perhaps the true source of the splendor of their

lives theirs is

Speaker 14 (lower-pitched voice): no vapid irresponsible happiness they

Speaker 28 (lower-pitched voice): know that they like the child are not

free they

Speaker 28 (lower-pitched voice): know compassion

it is the

Speaker 28 (lower-pitched voice): existence of the

Speaker 14 (lower-pitched voice): child

and

Speaker 14 (lower-pitched voice): their knowledge of its existence that makes possible the nobility of their architecture the poignancy of their music the profundity of their science it is because of the child that they are so gentle with their

own children they know that if

Speaker 14 (lower-pitched voice): the wretched one were not there snivelling in the dark the other one the flute-player could make no joyful

Speaker 12 (lower-pitched voice): music as the young riders line up in their beauty for the race in the sunlight of the first morning

of summer

Speaker 29: Now, do you believe in them

Are they not now

Speaker 30 (lower-pitched voice): more credible? I love

Le

Speaker 11 (lower-pitched voice): Guin, and what's wonderful about a story like this is that it works at almost any level that you feel like playing

Speaker 12 (lower-pitched voice): at. You can read it psychologically, that's a pretty easy one. Every one of us has to subdue the free and naive children that we once were. in order to survive and remain presentable

Speaker 16 (lower-pitched voice): in the adult world, right

You can read it

Speaker 31: politically, because every society seems to

grease

Speaker 12 (lower-pitched voice): the skids of internal cohesion by projecting its collective hatred and hostility out onto an other

Speaker 11 (lower-pitched voice): either outside or at the bottom of their own society

Or you can read it culturally. Every

Speaker 11 (lower-pitched voice): culture

has

Speaker 11 (lower-pitched voice): skeletons

Speaker 12 (lower-pitched voice): hiding in plain sight which if you stripped them of the familiarity that we've developed for them over a lifetime of close contact and indoctrination

Speaker 21 (lower-pitched voice): they would appear to us as monstrous as they in fact

very often are Today, secular

Speaker 21 (lower-pitched voice): activists in the West are morally and ethically appalled at the Christian resistance to things like gay marriage and abortion, right? But almost nobody seems all that concerned about the fact that those Christians all gather on Sundays to worship a victim of torture and execution and then pretend

to eat his

Speaker 11 (lower-pitched voice): flesh and drink his blood. A

good part of

Speaker 11 (lower-pitched voice): Western civilization gets together weekly to... You can vicariously practice what is arguably the

Speaker 32 (lower-pitched voice): single most powerful taboo we still have in place, and everybody is fine with that part

They

Speaker 33 (lower-pitched voice): almost never mention it

And then, of course, you can keep going with

Speaker 12 (lower-pitched voice): it, because the psychological and cultural and political readings of the story are all interrelated and nested within one another

You know, just to

Speaker 12 (lower-pitched voice): take one example

So

Speaker 12 (lower-pitched voice): all parents have

Speaker 22 (lower-pitched voice): to suppress the early oral fixation in their young children, right? And this means breaking the child to a degree and forcing it to either repress its behavior or find some sort of more acceptable substitute. We're

Speaker 34: going

to get

Speaker 34: into this later, by the way. I'm just using it as an example now. If

you have a very

Speaker 35: very young child and he bites somebody, you know, we'll gently

Speaker 21 (lower-pitched voice): correct him. An older child is going to be punished or counseled. But an adult who bites, even in the middle of a fight, is going to be seen as just

Speaker 12 (lower-pitched voice): almost irredeemably uncivilized, right

In other

Speaker 12 (lower-pitched voice): words, you've got a psychological stage that's got to be overcome before we allow a person to enter into the political world of adult relations

And the degree to which

Speaker 11 (lower-pitched voice): we successfully repress or find substitutes to carry us past that stage

And

Speaker 11 (lower-pitched voice): what forms those substitutes end up taking

Speaker 36: it both draws from and creates the content of our culture

Think, for example

Speaker 11 (lower-pitched voice): just of how much effort we put in, especially when you think of the self-conscious

Speaker 12 (lower-pitched voice): mores of the upper classes or the middle classes who imitate them. Think of how much effort we put in to making eating a meal as unlike what it actually is as possible

And eating is

Speaker 21 (lower-pitched voice): what we're here to talk about. So we're here to talk about cannibalism. So let's

get into

Speaker 22 (lower-pitched voice): it. The first thing that I really need to do at the outset here is to define the scope of what it is I'm trying to do. This is not going to be a broad survey

Speaker 21 (lower-pitched voice): of every type and instance of cannibalism that's ever existed. I'm trying to go narrow and deep. We're not going to talk about cannibalism born out of desperation. We're not interested here in the aberrant acts of a few psychotics

You

Speaker 21 (lower-pitched voice): know, the fascination that stories about cannibalism from the Donner party or Hannibal Lecter, the fascination that those stories have for us does tell us something. There's information there, but the violation that they represent, the fact of the violation is part of the fascination

These aren't acts

Speaker 21 (lower-pitched voice): that enjoy general social approval

In these

Speaker 21 (lower-pitched voice): next two episodes, this one here on cannibalism and the next one on sacrifice, are about social violence

Speaker 11 (lower-pitched voice): institutionalized violence, that everyone or almost everyone in a society either accepts as legitimate or at least doesn't consider it worth

Speaker 22 (lower-pitched voice): energetically opposing

I have

Speaker 22 (lower-pitched voice): heard people raise the question whether something like car accident deaths in the modern world can be classified

Speaker 17 (lower-pitched voice): as a type of sacrifice to some abstract god of convenience or economics, since

You

Speaker 17 (lower-pitched voice): know, what they'll say is that we can predict with close accuracy how many people are going to die this year

Speaker 12 (lower-pitched voice): and the next year and the next year on into the future from car accidents. And

so if we

Speaker 12 (lower-pitched voice): know with apodictic certainty that about 30,000 people are going to die in vehicles next year and that highway driving is essentially a game of chicken where we all compete to see who's going to draw those 30,000 short straws, how is that not a

Speaker 21 (lower-pitched voice): sacrifice

And

Speaker 32 (lower-pitched voice): fine, whatever, I get the point. I guess it makes sense if you're interested in the statistics of it. But despite the best efforts of Ballard

Speaker 37 (lower-pitched voice): and Cronenberg, nobody's constructing a cultural system out of car accidents and their victims. Of

course, most

Speaker 12 (lower-pitched voice): drivers don't die in car accidents, just as most people in Mesoamerica were not sacrificed and eaten. And

when it does

Speaker 12 (lower-pitched voice): happen, in any case, it's the killers, not

Speaker 14 (lower-pitched voice): the victims

who

Speaker 14 (lower-pitched voice): actually remain behind to act in the world and to apprehend and interpret what they've done

but that's about where the

Speaker 38 (lower-pitched voice): parallels end between those two things i i get where they're coming from but i don't like it as an example

you

Speaker 34: know a modern person

Speaker 22 (lower-pitched voice): who kills another person in an auto accident might end up in therapy for years and even then is not likely to ever be completely whole again

But I'm

Speaker 22 (lower-pitched voice): not aware of any kings, torturers, or executioners ending up in therapy. Unless you count confession, which maybe we should, I suppose, but

that's a

Speaker 22 (lower-pitched voice): different

Speaker 21 (lower-pitched voice): episode. I'm

not aware of

Speaker 21 (lower-pitched voice): any tribesmen. Let's do this. I'm not aware of any primitive tribesmen ending up on a psychiatrist's couch

Speaker 22 (lower-pitched voice): talking about this. This is from Volume 3 of America's Featherman, Social History of the Races of Mankind. And he

well

Speaker 22 (lower-pitched voice): you'll see it's a description of the hurons of the great lake region the huron natives having returned with a captive

Speaker 14 (lower-pitched voice): after a revenge raid the captive selected as

Speaker 13 (lower-pitched voice): a trophy of war to gratify their vindictive spirit was subjected to the most inhuman

Speaker 12 (lower-pitched voice): and even more inquisitional torture the nails of their fingers and toes were torn off by force the three principal fingers used for drawing the bow were lopped

off

Speaker 12 (lower-pitched voice): the skull was denuded of its hairy scalp and coals of fire and hot ashes were heaped upon the bleeding head or hot seething gum was poured

upon it

Speaker 12 (lower-pitched voice): sometimes he was made to walk across a great number of fires with his body and feet entirely naked

Speaker 39: between two files of tormentors who struck him with burning firebrands and rubbed his legs with heated axes

At

Speaker 40 (lower-pitched voice): other times they threw hot water on his back to increase his pain "'and touched his fingers' ends and his sexual

Speaker 20 (lower-pitched voice): organs with burning cinders. "'Then they pierced his arm with a splint, "'drew out the nerves, and tore them away by force. "'The captive remained

Speaker 14 (lower-pitched voice): entirely composed amidst all these agonizing tortures, "'singing

Speaker 41 (lower-pitched voice): uttering threats against his fiendish executioners, "'and giving expression to his scowling hate by jeers, scoffs, and words

Speaker 20 (lower-pitched voice): of defiance

when the

Speaker 20 (lower-pitched voice): victim approached the death struggle he was placed upon a scaffold his head was cut off his bowels were torn out which were

Speaker 37 (lower-pitched voice): taken possession of by the children who tied them to a stick and exhibited them in passing through the village as trophies of

victory it is said

Speaker 20 (lower-pitched voice): that the body was properly dressed and cooked in a large pot and that the flesh was devoured with much relish at the public

Speaker 28 (lower-pitched voice): festival amidst universal merriment and rejoicing of the assembled

multitude end quote A story

Speaker 12 (lower-pitched voice): from Sierra Leone in West Africa, R.G. Berry wrote in the Proceedings of the Royal Irish

Speaker 20 (lower-pitched voice): Academy in 1912 about the leopards, which were a very prestigious society of warrior cannibals

Speaker 38 (lower-pitched voice): revered by their respective tribes, which their tribes were required to provide sacrificial victims to this leopard society. And

so once they

Speaker 22 (lower-pitched voice): received a victim, and as we go through this, no attempt through any of this is made to lessen his suffering

the sacrificer came forward

Speaker 19 (lower-pitched voice): dressed in a leopard skin and with the leopard knife cut open the victim's stomach from the centre towards the right side an assistant placed a pan

Speaker 15 (lower-pitched voice): under the wound and a third inserting his hand into the wound pulled out the liver and intestines which he placed in the

pan now

Speaker 15 (lower-pitched voice): came forward five

others the

Speaker 12 (lower-pitched voice): first placed his hand upon the wound and drew forth some fat and four others did the

same The pan

Speaker 12 (lower-pitched voice): with the

Speaker 15 (lower-pitched voice): intestines, liver, and blood was taken away to a house. The body of the victim was carried to the piazza of the late chief's house. It

now being

Speaker 15 (lower-pitched voice): midnight, they separated. No one was left with the victim, who was still alive and

Speaker 12 (lower-pitched voice): chained and remained alive for some hours." I was recently listening to a psychologist lecture about post-traumatic stress disorder, and he was talking about how people

Speaker 14 (lower-pitched voice): can... Just as easily be afflicted with PTSD after doing something horrific as they can from witnessing something horrific or

Speaker 11 (lower-pitched voice): having something horrific happen to themselves or to someone close to them

And now, obviously I'm

Speaker 11 (lower-pitched voice): not a psychologist

Speaker 42 (lower-pitched voice): but I think I can say with some confidence that there's some cultural relativity clearly at

Speaker 16 (lower-pitched voice): play here

You know, if

Speaker 16 (lower-pitched voice): a modern person, and not any person, but a volunteer soldier in a society that values

Speaker 12 (lower-pitched voice): and honors its soldiers and gives them a lot of leeway, as we do, for decisions that they make on the battlefield, if somebody like that can suffer from PTSD just because

Speaker 22 (lower-pitched voice): you know, he got too trigger-happy in a wild firefight and ended up taking out a civilian at a distance, and this does happen... People do get PTSD from things like that. You would expect pretty much every single society before

Speaker 21 (lower-pitched voice): about the 19th century, so the whole human species, to have just long ago collapsed into a post-traumatic stupor of incapacitated grief for its lost innocence

I

Speaker 12 (lower-pitched voice): mean, how did we ever get anywhere

just look

Speaker 12 (lower-pitched voice): at the world look at nature a quick look at every animal species right

Speaker 43 (lower-pitched voice): on up to our closest relative the chimpanzee take a look and one observation above all asserts itself the unabating and forever unabating forever and ever unabating visceral unhesitating violence of

the world just think

Speaker 21 (lower-pitched voice): of what life is Not this or that life form, but just life in general. Think about what it is, about how nature proceeded through the eons

And for a really, really

Speaker 21 (lower-pitched voice): long time, there was no life, right? It was just for most of the history of the universe, there's no life. It's just inert matter

Billions of

Speaker 21 (lower-pitched voice): years when just chemistry and physics matter. And if you'd have shown up back

Speaker 44 (lower-pitched voice): then and asked somebody about biology, they would not have known what the fuck you were talking about because there was no biology

Speaker 45: right

And then

Speaker 45: at some point

who knows

Speaker 45: why, some

Speaker 17 (lower-pitched voice): of that inert matter started self-organizing. At least, that's what I'm told by people who are way smarter than I am. And what did these little self-organizing proto-lifeforms

Speaker 46 (lower-pitched voice): start doing pretty much as soon as they existed? They looked around at each other and immediately

Speaker 12 (lower-pitched voice): started tearing one another apart, eating each other

and

Speaker 12 (lower-pitched voice): then using the energy that they absorb from eating each other to reproduce copies of themselves. And

then, for a

Speaker 12 (lower-pitched voice): really, really long time, that's all there was to it. That's what happened. That's just all there was. But over

Speaker 47 (lower-pitched voice): time, these little buggers kept inventing new ways to kill

Speaker 48: and eat each other, and new ways to avoid being killed and eaten

Now

Speaker 49: up here at the macro level of large mammals and other megafauna like

Speaker 12 (lower-pitched voice): ourselves, it's easy to forget sometimes what an absolute fucking nightmare life is at the microscopic level or in places like the ocean, for example. There's this really unbelievable

scene in

Speaker 21 (lower-pitched voice): Werner Herzog's documentary, Encounters at the End of the World, where he's talking to a biologist about

Speaker 12 (lower-pitched voice): Well, he and a biologist are talking about this subject exactly at a research station down in Antarctica. And the biologist is describing to Herzog what kind of creatures are found in the water under the ice and what life is like at the microscopic level down there

And this

Speaker 12 (lower-pitched voice): guy, this biologist, he's very serious as he's speaking. You know, he's not joking around. He seems

i almost

Speaker 12 (lower-pitched voice): said he seems disturbed but it's not it's not that uh he seems chastened he has the chastened look of a man who has seen something fundamental about the world that he would probably like to forget if he could but he can't the

creatures that are

Speaker 12 (lower-pitched voice): down there he says are like are like science fiction creatures they

range in the

Speaker 12 (lower-pitched voice): way i'm quoting him now

They

Speaker 12 (lower-pitched voice): range in the way they would gobble you up from slime-type blobs, but creepier than science fiction-type blobs. These would have long tendrils that would ensnare you, and as you try to get away from them, you

Speaker 21 (lower-pitched voice): just become more and more ensnared by your own actions. And then after you would be frustrated and exhausted

then this

Speaker 21 (lower-pitched voice): creature would start to

Speaker 22 (lower-pitched voice): move in and take you apart

When you

Speaker 22 (lower-pitched voice): watch him describe this, he's kind

Speaker 14 (lower-pitched voice): of looking away from the camera. And the look on his face, I swear to God, it looks like he's looking at the murder scene right in front of him. And so he goes on. Then

there

Speaker 12 (lower-pitched voice): are these other worm-type things with horrible mandibles and jaws and just bits

Speaker 21 (lower-pitched voice): to rend your flesh. It really is a horribly violent world that

That

Speaker 12 (lower-pitched voice): is obscure to us because we're encased in neoprene and we're much larger than that world. But if you were to shrink down

Speaker 22 (lower-pitched voice): miniaturize into that world, it would

be a

Speaker 22 (lower-pitched voice): horrible place to be. Just horrible. And

so this

Speaker 22 (lower-pitched voice): biologist is so caught up in this vision of brutality, you don't want to interrupt them. And I think Herzog is the only filmmaker alive who could probably keep the interview moving at this

Speaker 12 (lower-pitched voice): point

And

Speaker 12 (lower-pitched voice): so he asks the biologist, he says, and this world is a world earlier than the human world. Do you think that the human race and other mammals fled in panic from the oceans and crawled on solid land to get out of all this? And the biologist is already nodding his

Speaker 22 (lower-pitched voice): head. He says, yes, I think undoubtedly. Unquestionably, that is the driving force that caused us to leave the horrors behind, to grow

Speaker 28 (lower-pitched voice): and evolve into larger creatures, to escape what's horribly violent at the miniature scale

End

Speaker 22 (lower-pitched voice): quote. I love that

You know

Speaker 22 (lower-pitched voice): because there's truth in it

Life

Speaker 11 (lower-pitched voice): begins, billions of years ago, life begins and just immediately starts devouring itself

And

Speaker 11 (lower-pitched voice): evolution is

Speaker 12 (lower-pitched voice): the process of life running, screaming away from other life and hiding from it in any form that it can think of

And from our

Speaker 12 (lower-pitched voice): humble beginnings, you know, we stampeded through every exit we could find until one thing led to another and we've got ducks and platypi and duck-billed platypi and all types

Speaker 50: of shit running around

But no

Speaker 50: matter what happens, no matter what form they take

One

Speaker 50: thing remains

all of

Speaker 51 (lower-pitched voice): that matter that decided to start self-organizing and consuming energy to hold that pattern over time

all

Speaker 12 (lower-pitched voice): that stuff that is still subject to physics, even as it defies gravity to lift itself off the ground, that's still subject to all the laws of chemistry, even though

it has

Speaker 12 (lower-pitched voice): sort of begun to sidestep some of their consequences by incorporating them in

Speaker 25 (lower-pitched voice): specific combinations to create energy

All

Speaker 13 (lower-pitched voice): that stuff that we call life, with a few exceptions

Speaker 12 (lower-pitched voice): is pretty much a closed loop

You can't

Speaker 12 (lower-pitched voice): eat a rock. Life eats life, and that's all there is to it

More complex creatures

Speaker 12 (lower-pitched voice): like ourselves, think about what it takes just to keep us

moving. Think

Speaker 27 (lower-pitched voice): about how many cows and chickens and pigs, how many fish, how many pounds of wheat and rice and fruit and everything else. Think of how much it takes just to keep one human child

Speaker 17 (lower-pitched voice): from collapsing and dying of starvation and becoming a pile of rotting goo for just one year. It's incredible. The

earliest forms of life

Speaker 11 (lower-pitched voice): used chemical and

Speaker 12 (lower-pitched voice): photosynthetic energy to replicate themselves

And those

Speaker 12 (lower-pitched voice): replicas began eating each other, taking on more complex and clever forms to ensure that they were the eaters and not the eaten. And then

again, for

Speaker 12 (lower-pitched voice): billions of years, you know, like we said, that's how things went

You

Speaker 17 (lower-pitched voice): know, you've got a new set of laws, laws of evolutionary biology, but we're running

Speaker 12 (lower-pitched voice): according to law. And it's amazing. You know, we proliferate. You've got 130 foot

Speaker 21 (lower-pitched voice): long dinosaurs for a while

You

Speaker 21 (lower-pitched voice): know, plankton's been around for a really long time, so of course life has

Speaker 12 (lower-pitched voice): had plenty of time to figure out and evolve this big vacuum cleaner-like thing, like the blue whale that just swims around efficiently sucking it up. We've got crustaceans that haven't had to change much in a few hundred

Speaker 52 (lower-pitched voice): million years

But through it

Speaker 52 (lower-pitched voice): all, the essence of the thing never changes

see

Speaker 12 (lower-pitched voice): past the forms look behind the curtain behind all the disguises that life uses to hide from and ambush itself the entire production takes place in a butchery a slaughterhouse plants absorb sunlight from above and chemicals from below and then

Speaker 15 (lower-pitched voice): you've got a few chemotrophs here and there sucking up minerals that the earth gives off but other than the energy pouring into the biosphere from those two unconscious portals

Speaker 25 (lower-pitched voice): Everything else lives by killing and eating. Billions of years of just chasing each other

Speaker 12 (lower-pitched voice): down, tearing

Speaker 54 (lower-pitched voice): each other apart, breaking each other down, and saying, you know, you are no longer you, you are now a part of me. Killing

and

Speaker 25 (lower-pitched voice): eating is the first and the most complete form in which domination can be expressed

Okay. but then

Speaker 22 (lower-pitched voice): something else happened. One

of those

Speaker 22 (lower-pitched voice): creatures, for reasons that we will speculate

Speaker 12 (lower-pitched voice): about as the series goes on, one of those creatures began to wake up and look around. Because

see, there are lots of

Speaker 12 (lower-pitched voice): ways to be

dominant

Speaker 22 (lower-pitched voice): in this world, at least in various parts of it, right? If Velociraptors made a comeback

right

Speaker 22 (lower-pitched voice): before we split off

Speaker 12 (lower-pitched voice): from chimps and bonobos we might all be speaking dinosaur today but they didn't and so about six million years ago our species embarked upon an evolutionary journey that you know uses the energy that would normally go into things like skull crushing

Speaker 13 (lower-pitched voice): jaws or you know cheetah sprinting legs and instead put that energy into this

Speaker 55 (lower-pitched voice): big brain that can do things like calculate the trajectory of a spear in the wind

or

Speaker 12 (lower-pitched voice): build a habitat specific shelter or or, Or, you know, lay complicated ambushes adapted to the environment and the prey and the number of killers you've got available. And

so instead of

Speaker 12 (lower-pitched voice): being forced to adapt to every single change in our environment, we dampen those changes. And within certain constraints, we even make the environment adapt to us. If

velociraptors made

Speaker 56: a comeback tomorrow, I mean, we'd put them

all in zoos

Speaker 56: and take our children to see them

And the

Speaker 56: difference between animals and humans is

Speaker 57 (lower-pitched voice): that there's very little that

separates

Speaker 41 (lower-pitched voice): what an animal is from what it does

I mean a

Speaker 41 (lower-pitched voice): plant, a plant is what it does. It's a pattern of organic matter that uses photosynthesis

to

Speaker 58 (lower-pitched voice): manifest in a particular way. A plant is what it

does. But a fish is a

Speaker 12 (lower-pitched voice): little more complicated. It's a persistent pattern of organic matter with a series of reflexes and motor abilities to seek

out and

Speaker 12 (lower-pitched voice): incorporate its preferred energy sources. A lion is still a pretty well-oiled machine. It's pretty dialed in with pretty much every feature and bit of energy going into being a lion. But

Now

Speaker 12 (lower-pitched voice): you're

Speaker 21 (lower-pitched voice): starting to see a little something else going on, something you don't recognize in fish, and certainly not in plants. You

take a cat and you put it in the

Speaker 21 (lower-pitched voice): wild, and it's a pretty

Speaker 11 (lower-pitched voice): straightforward creature, which is understandable. A human in a famine becomes a pretty straightforward creature, too

Speaker 17 (lower-pitched voice): But if you give us or a cat a little bit of room to catch our breath, suddenly we're full of surprises, right

Because human

Speaker 17 (lower-pitched voice): beings are not really custom-made machines the way most animals are. There's a big space between what we are and what we do, between impulse and action. And that gap, I think, is maybe what we call consciousness. Okay, fine. So freedom isn't free, of course, though, right? And consciousness comes with a cost. And that cost is not negligible

We've

Speaker 12 (lower-pitched voice): constructed... entire cultures and civilizations to help us deal with the fallout from having stepped out of nature

and

Speaker 52 (lower-pitched voice): waking up into this nightmare. For one thing, we look around. Unlike any other animal, we have to look around and see what's been going on all this time while nobody but God

Speaker 59: was paying attention

You

Speaker 59: know, this is the vision of Job in the whirlwind, or of Arjuna's vision when Krishna takes on his infinite form in the Bhagavad Gita. You

know, those are

Speaker 12 (lower-pitched voice): two archetypes that help us illustrate a very basic human dilemma. Waking up to what kind of world it is that we've been thrust into, and coming to understand our own

Speaker 58 (lower-pitched voice): complicity in this ongoing mass murder. Right

in sam

Speaker 58 (lower-pitched voice): keene's introduction to ernest becker's great book the denial of death he kind of describes it well he says quote the world is terrifying

Speaker 60 (lower-pitched voice): mother nature is a brutal bitch red in tooth and claw who destroys what she creates

We live

Speaker 12 (lower-pitched voice): in a creation in which the routine activity for organisms is tearing others apart with teeth of all types, biting, grinding flesh, plant stalks, bones between molars, pushing the pulp greedily down the gullet with delight, incorporating its essence into one's own

Speaker 16 (lower-pitched voice): organization, and then excreting with foul stench and gases the residue

Now, many

Speaker 21 (lower-pitched voice): of us naturally have a few questions about the design of this whole

Speaker 12 (lower-pitched voice): thing and what exactly it's supposed

to be

Speaker 12 (lower-pitched voice): for. The psychologist R. D. Lange, Ronald Lange, in his book The Politics

of

Speaker 21 (lower-pitched voice): Experience, describes the experience of a schizophrenic with whom he was familiar. The schizophrenic patient

Speaker 17 (lower-pitched voice): had the absolutely subjectively certain experience

Speaker 22 (lower-pitched voice): sitting on his bed as his house burned around

him the house

Speaker 22 (lower-pitched voice): had two stories and then an attic above that and in the attic was God

and

Speaker 12 (lower-pitched voice): God was a madman always and forever screaming and raving because he alone had full knowledge of what the world really

was about in the Bible

Speaker 17 (lower-pitched voice): Job, we mentioned a second ago, Job is afflicted by various sufferings and tragedies despite being a righteous man

Coming out of a tribal

Speaker 42 (lower-pitched voice): honor

Speaker 21 (lower-pitched voice): culture, Job, even like many of us still today, expected that there should be some kind of reciprocity in his dealing with God or with the universe, if you like

I

Speaker 12 (lower-pitched voice): haven't done anything, he insisted. This is not fair. What did I do to deserve any of this? And so his friends come along and they

Speaker 42 (lower-pitched voice): sort of run through the various theological arguments that were being made at the time

They were all

Speaker 61: insisting that what happens to us in the world is always a result of our own righteousness or unrighteousness, that however it seems to

Speaker 21 (lower-pitched voice): us, God is just

And so there is

Speaker 21 (lower-pitched voice): this reciprocity to it. But of course, we already know

Speaker 33 (lower-pitched voice): what his friends don't know

That

Speaker 33 (lower-pitched voice): despite everything that's befallen him, Job is a righteous man, because the story told us so right up front. And

so Job, to his

Speaker 33 (lower-pitched voice): credit

Speaker 12 (lower-pitched voice): refuses to accept any of their arguments. He insists on his blamelessness, and

Speaker 62 (lower-pitched voice): he essentially demands an audience with God. He wants God to come before him so that he can make his case and get an explanation out of God for why all these terrible things

Speaker 33 (lower-pitched voice): have happened to him

He

Speaker 33 (lower-pitched voice): never curses God as his resentful wife implores him to do But he refuses to say what he does not believe is true That he somehow deserves all of this

And so finally, the end of

Speaker 12 (lower-pitched voice): the book After this ruined man, poor Job Is left covered in sores With a dead family All his cattle and sheep and goats and goods taken away Sitting in a pile of ashes where his house used to be

God comes

Speaker 12 (lower-pitched voice): on the scene in one of the great pieces of world spiritual literature

His message

Speaker 22 (lower-pitched voice): to Job, as spectacular and overwhelming as its imagery is, is very simple. He tells Job that he's right. He doesn't deserve any of this

But what gave

Speaker 52 (lower-pitched voice): Job, or anybody

The

Speaker 52 (lower-pitched voice): idea that deserve has anything to do with what happens to anyone or anything in this universe

God appears in a

Speaker 12 (lower-pitched voice): whirlwind. He takes Job up into the whirlwind. He says to Job, You've made demands and questioned me, and now it is I who will question you

What exactly do

Speaker 12 (lower-pitched voice): you think this place

Speaker 43 (lower-pitched voice): is, Job? Who

told you

Speaker 43 (lower-pitched voice): that this was a safe space

What, in all of

Speaker 63 (lower-pitched voice): your experience of this world

Made

Speaker 63 (lower-pitched voice): you think that that's how things work

Does the

Speaker 63 (lower-pitched voice): gazelle deserve

Speaker 64 (lower-pitched voice): to be ripped to pieces by a lion

Does it deserve to be

Speaker 64 (lower-pitched voice): ripped to pieces by you, for that matter

From the book of

Speaker 65: Job, God speaks, quote

Hast thou given the

Speaker 66 (lower-pitched voice): war horse his strength

Was it

Speaker 66 (lower-pitched voice): thee who clothed his neck with

Speaker 13 (lower-pitched voice): thunder

Canst thou make

Speaker 13 (lower-pitched voice): him afraid as a grasshopper

The

Speaker 12 (lower-pitched voice): fury of his nostrils is terrible

behold

Speaker 12 (lower-pitched voice): how he stampeth and paweth in the valley and rejoiceth in his strength charging on to meet the armed men he mocketh fear and is not affrighted neither turneth he

Speaker 67 (lower-pitched voice): back from the

sword the

Speaker 67 (lower-pitched voice): quiver rattleth against him the glittering spear and the shield he swalloweth the ground with fierceness and

rage

Speaker 68: neither believeth he that it is the sound of the trumpet he saith among the trumpets

ha ha and

Speaker 68: he smelleth the battle afar off, the thunder

Speaker 69 (lower-pitched voice): of the captains and the shouting. Doth the hawk fly by thy wisdom, and stretch her wings toward the south? Doth the eagle mount up at thy command, and make her nest on high

She dwelleth

Speaker 69 (lower-pitched voice): and abideth on

Speaker 21 (lower-pitched voice): the rock, upon the crag of the rock, in the strong place. From thence she seeketh prey, and her eyes behold afar off. Her young ones also suck up blood, and where the slain

Speaker 20 (lower-pitched voice): are... There is she, end quote. Everything in this

Speaker 70: world has been tearing and clawing and killing from the beginning of time

And

Speaker 21 (lower-pitched voice): what, Job? I'm just supposed to call the whole thing off? Because why? Because the process finally landed on your doorstep

She... does

Speaker 43 (lower-pitched voice): job have any idea how this works tell me all about it job were you there when i set the stars in motion and hung the earth in

Speaker 71: place no you weren't

Speaker 68: and you don't have any idea of the questions you're even asking me let alone what the answers to

them are and now today we

Speaker 72: might look at this and say well this is awfully mean of god but it's mean of the

universe you know

Speaker 72: this is life

If you've

Speaker 72: ever lost anyone close to you unexpectedly, you know

Speaker 73: what I mean when I say that there's a random inhumanity to this world. Our

minds are robust

Speaker 12 (lower-pitched voice): adaptable devices for making that chaos somewhat livable

People can

Speaker 12 (lower-pitched voice): say that

the

Speaker 12 (lower-pitched voice): ways that we do come up with to live lives of apparent order in a world of swirling ravenous chaos

Speaker 15 (lower-pitched voice): that it's all just human delusions or opiates of the masses and fine yeah fine there's something to that but it's also the glory

of our species that

Speaker 15 (lower-pitched voice): gazelle in

Speaker 43 (lower-pitched voice): the lion's mouth is just a piece of meat which is all any of us are when

Speaker 74: we're stripped

of meaning If you want an

Speaker 12 (lower-pitched voice): idea of what it's like to live that way, go read Lovecraft when he's at his best, or read Thomas Ligotti's Conspiracy Against the Human Race. Ligotti's

a horror

Speaker 12 (lower-pitched voice): author, a great horror author, in the vein of H.P. Lovecraft

but... His

Speaker 12 (lower-pitched voice): power to unseat and discomfort us comes not just from good, suspenseful pacing of his stories or from well-conceived

Speaker 43 (lower-pitched voice): monsters, but from his vivid and often emotionally devastating vision of what

life is

Speaker 43 (lower-pitched voice): when it's stripped of meaning

Speaker 12 (lower-pitched voice): In Conspiracy Against the Human Race, a nonfiction book that he wrote just to address some of these ideas directly

He

Speaker 12 (lower-pitched voice): describes how

Speaker 15 (lower-pitched voice): the most mundane and unthreatening objects can become uncannily horrific if you stare at them long enough to

Speaker 12 (lower-pitched voice): you know, let your attachments of meaning fall away. Kind of the way that repeating a word over and over and over and over soon

turns it

Speaker 16 (lower-pitched voice): into a meaning, you know, just a meaningless babbling of syllables. I don't

know if

Speaker 16 (lower-pitched voice): you've ever done that

This is

Speaker 15 (lower-pitched voice): Ligotti, quote

Speaker 15 (lower-pitched voice): even the most unexceptional things may cease to be seen the way we usually see them and come to be seen as something else something we may not be

able to name the

Speaker 75 (lower-pitched voice): unsteadiness of quality and meaning in something a puppet doll for instance repels our lasting inspection

of it for

Speaker 76 (lower-pitched voice): the longer this inspection goes on the more we become lost in a paradoxical state of knowing and not knowing

Speaker 12 (lower-pitched voice): what was once known and familiar and it is then that the question

Why

Speaker 12 (lower-pitched voice): should there be something, rather than nothing

may become

Speaker 16 (lower-pitched voice): lost in the inexplicable, even preposterous ambition to resolve it without losing our minds to the uncanny

Everyday objects seem

Speaker 20 (lower-pitched voice): curiously

Speaker 12 (lower-pitched voice): liable to being perceived as uncanny because we see them every day and know how they should be and should not be

One day those shoes on

Speaker 15 (lower-pitched voice): the floor of your closet

may attract

Speaker 15 (lower-pitched voice): your eye in a way that they never have before

somehow

Speaker 15 (lower-pitched voice): they've become abstracted from your world

Speaker 14 (lower-pitched voice): appearances you cannot place just lumps of matter without any fixed quality and

meaning you feel

Speaker 12 (lower-pitched voice): confused as you stare

at them what

Speaker 12 (lower-pitched voice): are they what is their

nature why should

Speaker 12 (lower-pitched voice): there be something rather than nothing

at all but before your

Speaker 12 (lower-pitched voice): consciousness can ask any more questions you dial it back so that your footwear seems familiar again and not uncanny in its being you select a pair of shoes to wear

Speaker 15 (lower-pitched voice): that day and sit down to put

them on it's then

Speaker 15 (lower-pitched voice): that you notice the pair of stockings you're

wearing

Speaker 14 (lower-pitched voice): and think of the feet that they

conceal and the

Speaker 14 (lower-pitched voice): rest of the body to which those concealed feet are

connected in the

Speaker 15 (lower-pitched voice): universe in which that body is roving about with so many other uncanny shapes

What

Speaker 28 (lower-pitched voice): now, a

voice from

Speaker 28 (lower-pitched voice): the other side of being seems to say. And

what if you should

Speaker 28 (lower-pitched voice): look at yourself, the most everyday object there is, and

feel at

Speaker 28 (lower-pitched voice): a loss to attach a quality and a meaning to what is being seen, or what is

Speaker 57 (lower-pitched voice): seeing it. What now indeed, end quote

See

Speaker 57 (lower-pitched voice): he's not looking at his

Speaker 15 (lower-pitched voice): leg or his foot as the limb of a human being with a family situated in a cultural context, in a historical moment, and so forth. Suddenly he's looking at that leg as, well

he's seeing it the

Speaker 57 (lower-pitched voice): way that a cannibal would see it

See, I remember where we

Speaker 57 (lower-pitched voice): were going with this. We're

going to

Speaker 28 (lower-pitched voice): get

Deep

Speaker 28 (lower-pitched voice): into the mythology and the theology that the Aztecs built around this stuff as we go through this series. But we can't start there. We've got to back up. All

that's very

Speaker 28 (lower-pitched voice): important

Speaker 12 (lower-pitched voice): and we're going to have to talk a lot about it to get an idea of how the Aztecs understood what they were doing. But it won't tell us why they were doing it

I mean, how

Speaker 12 (lower-pitched voice): could it

Like a growing

Speaker 12 (lower-pitched voice): child, human groups... Human groups are always already caught up in the world of action

before

Speaker 77: it ever occurs to them to have to explain any of it to themselves

The explanations

Speaker 12 (lower-pitched voice): that men come up with for something like ritual cannibalism vary within a few broad categories, but first we

Speaker 55 (lower-pitched voice): need to focus on the act itself

So, a lot of

Speaker 55 (lower-pitched voice): popular

Speaker 12 (lower-pitched voice): books that you'll find on cannibalism um, begin similarly with a survey of cannibalistic behavior and animals. And, you know, then they might spend some time asking what we really mean by cannibalism and whether, you know, I don't know, eating your boogers or some hippie chick frying up her after birth, you know, after giving birth counts. I don't care about any of that. I don't, I don't care what the Donner party did. I'm not going to talk about what happened in some famine. People trapped in the snow or stuck in a famine who eat human flesh, um, Those people find themselves in the world that Ligotti was just describing

Speaker 78: Crazed with

Speaker 13 (lower-pitched voice): hunger, meanings drop away, and suddenly a human leg is reduced just to its potential as a calorie-rich drumstick

Although, to

Speaker 28 (lower-pitched voice): be honest, even then I would bet that it takes a measure of ritual to turn the leg into a drumstick

You

Speaker 37 (lower-pitched voice): can imagine members of the Donner Party in a circle Praying for permission or forgiveness before the human

Speaker 21 (lower-pitched voice): could be reduced to meat

But even still, that's

Speaker 21 (lower-pitched voice): not what we're here to talk about. I'm talking about cannibalism as part of a cultural system. Practiced by people who are not starving in a manner that enjoys social legitimacy

Sacrifice and

Speaker 21 (lower-pitched voice): cannibalism are

Speaker 47 (lower-pitched voice): forms of

Speaker 12 (lower-pitched voice): institutionalized aggression. Aggression

This is one

Speaker 12 (lower-pitched voice): of the first things to know and understand, one of the foundations upon which any serious understanding of these acts can be

Speaker 43 (lower-pitched voice): approached. Do

not imagine

Speaker 43 (lower-pitched voice): that it is possible to cut into another

Speaker 47 (lower-pitched voice): living man's chest to extract his still beating heart except as an act of aggression. The

formality of the

Speaker 13 (lower-pitched voice): ritual structures, that structures the aggression, disguises it

But

Speaker 43 (lower-pitched voice): aggression is the rippling energy that drives that

Speaker 22 (lower-pitched voice): knife into the flesh. And

all societies have

Speaker 22 (lower-pitched voice): forms of institutionalized aggression because all societies are full of individuals who experience aggression all the time

Things like sexual and

Speaker 12 (lower-pitched voice): aggressive energies, these are primary human motivations that drive our individual and collective lives. But every society has got to find ways to manage

Speaker 21 (lower-pitched voice): aggression

the

Speaker 21 (lower-pitched voice): sexual and aggressive impulses of its members

Doing so

Speaker 21 (lower-pitched voice): is a big part of what makes us human

I mean, you

Speaker 12 (lower-pitched voice): think, like, all these years after an Iron Age tribe of desert nomads

Speaker 21 (lower-pitched voice): inscribed their Ten Commandments on some tablets, things like, thou shalt not murder, thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's wife, they still hold up pretty well, because in order to sustain certain modes of social

Speaker 60 (lower-pitched voice): life, People have got to figure out how, for example, to insure against stuff like

this

Speaker 60 (lower-pitched voice): this quote what

Speaker 79: follows is a matter of fact

Speaker 13 (lower-pitched voice): not fiction a matter of

Speaker 80 (lower-pitched voice): history not of legend princess luede was the niece of mutessa king of buganda 1856 to 84 buganda is um

Speaker 28 (lower-pitched voice): the largest kingdom discovered

Speaker 77: by the british around lake victoria and east africa it's like modern day uganda as you probably

Speaker 12 (lower-pitched voice): guessed so uh where am i yeah

she

Speaker 12 (lower-pitched voice): had been given as a wife to prime minister mocassa by mutesa as a reward for the minister's good services they had two children together one

day as was

Speaker 12 (lower-pitched voice): the custom with female members of the royal family princess luede paid a visit to princess sansanse

Speaker 76 (lower-pitched voice): a senior member of the family princess luede found the company being entertained by kalemba a comely youth who was amusing those assembled with

Speaker 13 (lower-pitched voice): music on

the harp

Speaker 13 (lower-pitched voice): The youth, his youth, the harp, his singing, were all too much for the only two-human princess. "'Prime minister's wife that she was

Speaker 12 (lower-pitched voice): and she became dangerously infatuated with Kalimba, "'regarding him as the most charming young man she had ever seen. "'Knowing nothing of Puritan restraint, Princess Luede confessed her need and desire to Princess Sansanze, "'who assured her cousin that arrangements would be made for the lovers to meet in

private.' We are not told

Speaker 12 (lower-pitched voice): of Kalemba's feelings, but presumably he could not refuse such an offer from a woman of high rank, and he must have known beforehand

Speaker 37 (lower-pitched voice): the risks and rewards of such beautiful singing and harp-playing. Several

days

Speaker 12 (lower-pitched voice): later, Princess Sansanze, with seven other women, and with the youth Kalemba dressed as a woman, all proceeded to the house of Princess Luide in the Prime Minister's compound. Each

of the visitors

Speaker 12 (lower-pitched voice): carried a parcel of food, that being the public purpose of the visit, overjoyed at the success of the stratagem princess luede sequestered kalemba in her hut and they spent several days obliterating the distinction between

day and night

Speaker 12 (lower-pitched voice): getting kalemba out of the prime minister's compound proved more difficult than getting

him in

Speaker 12 (lower-pitched voice): questioning one of luede's companions mukasa discerned the truth of the matter luede's house was pulled down after

most of

Speaker 12 (lower-pitched voice): the grass had been removed

Speaker 19 (lower-pitched voice): the harpist was found hiding under the last thin layer

both

Speaker 19 (lower-pitched voice): kalemba and luere were brought before the prime minister

Speaker 55 (lower-pitched voice): who was surrounded by followers sure to assent to whatever judgment

he gave luere confessed

Speaker 80 (lower-pitched voice): her fault asserting that she had been helpless in the face of the youth's exceptional

Speaker 15 (lower-pitched voice): beauty and asked for mercy kalemba however struck the arrogant pose of the conqueror who

Speaker 12 (lower-pitched voice): has himself been conquered he asserted that he had been perfectly aware of the risks he had hazarded and was prepared to take the consequences kalemba's arrogance infuriated mukasa he ordered the youth's head cut off and given to luede his blood was to be smeared all over her head and dress

there was

Speaker 21 (lower-pitched voice): no court to appeal such a verdict from the prime

Speaker 12 (lower-pitched voice): minister his executioners carried out the sentence the prime minister was so caught up in his own cruelty that at first he insisted luede carry her lover's head with her when she went back to her

Speaker 28 (lower-pitched voice): father the king although his subordinates prevailed upon him to forgo such a dangerous royal insult end quote that was that

was the author eli

Speaker 20 (lower-pitched voice): sagan's rendering of a first-hand account provided by british explorers so

Speaker 44 (lower-pitched voice): see that's why you gotta have rules about when aggression is

okay what

Speaker 44 (lower-pitched voice): types of aggression are okay, who should sleep with whom

Speaker 22 (lower-pitched voice): and under what circumstances. You've got to have rules like this. It's either that or Hieronymus Bosch. Those are the options

These rules are associated

Speaker 47 (lower-pitched voice): with more advanced forms of social life for a reason

And if it seems like

Speaker 47 (lower-pitched voice): high civilization exists, If it sometimes seems like high civilization has fewer

Speaker 12 (lower-pitched voice): rules than more primitive societies, that's only because most of the rules that we live our lives by aren't explicit. They're deeply embedded at the level of habit and custom and self-evident common sense, and you don't necessarily know where the boundaries are until you step over one

Speaker 12 (lower-pitched voice): all societies have forms of institutionalized aggression but the more direct and literal expressions of it are almost always found at very primitive levels of social development and throughout the rest of this series I'm not using primitive as a pejorative here I mean it in the

Speaker 17 (lower-pitched voice): sense that relates that word primitive

Speaker 21 (lower-pitched voice): to the word primary it's an antecedent stage of our advanced complex societies

One of the

Speaker 21 (lower-pitched voice): reasons that the Aztecs

Speaker 12 (lower-pitched voice): are so fascinating is that they maintained these

Speaker 15 (lower-pitched voice): bloody practices, just unbelievably bloody sacrifices and cannibalism and everything, long past the stage when most societies have given them up. There's

no evidence of

Speaker 15 (lower-pitched voice): institutionalized

Speaker 12 (lower-pitched voice): cannibalism in the ancient hieratic city-states of Egypt and Mesopotamia, for example

And the

Speaker 11 (lower-pitched voice): Aztecs were at least as advanced as those societies, very arguably more, but at least as advanced as them. On

the other hand, we

Speaker 12 (lower-pitched voice): have very extensive evidence of cannibalism throughout

Speaker 13 (lower-pitched voice): Africa, through the islands running from the Indian out into the Pacific Oceans, and all throughout the New World

And

Speaker 13 (lower-pitched voice): Polynesia actually provides a really interesting case study of sort of the general point I'm trying to make

Speaker 12 (lower-pitched voice): because in the pre-contact Pacific Islands, there were all these isolated societies developing kind of in their own way that were able to rank in terms of social complexity and political development from

Speaker 47 (lower-pitched voice): Stone Age tribes all the way up to the Hawaiians, which, you know, Hawaii was arguably a state and certainly seemed

Speaker 62 (lower-pitched voice): to be on its way to being a state at least

And

Speaker 62 (lower-pitched voice): what you find in those places, where European explorers encountered societies practicing

Speaker 75 (lower-pitched voice): cannibalism, the rule was that it was engaged in most directly and most frequently the lower down the

Speaker 17 (lower-pitched voice): scale of development you go. Now

as you go

Speaker 17 (lower-pitched voice): through the literature around cannibalism, one

of the

Speaker 17 (lower-pitched voice): inescapable facts that you realize

Speaker 75 (lower-pitched voice): right off the bat, very quickly, is that a human being... A human being can never be reduced entirely to meat

Try as we

Speaker 12 (lower-pitched voice): might to dehumanize and objectify other people. Some part of us always recognizes them

That's why it takes

Speaker 12 (lower-pitched voice): an act

Speaker 21 (lower-pitched voice): of aggression to hurt them

It doesn't

Speaker 81: take an act of aggression to step on an ant

It takes a

Speaker 81: little bit more to gut a fish

It

Speaker 81: takes enough

Speaker 22 (lower-pitched voice): aggression to strangle a puppy that if a kid does it, we send him to an army of psychologists and keep a close eye on him. It's usually a him. We are talking about aggression after all

And we do that

Speaker 73: because we know somehow, even if we haven't seen the statistics, that anybody can kill an ant, but

Speaker 15 (lower-pitched voice): it's not that much of a leap for somebody to ignore the

Speaker 46 (lower-pitched voice): panicked pleading cries of a puppy and for that same person to show a similar lack of empathy for you or me. At

Speaker 13 (lower-pitched voice): some level, we understand that. And yet, neither

of us had ants

Speaker 12 (lower-pitched voice): for breakfast this morning

Most of us in the

Speaker 12 (lower-pitched voice): last week have eaten something that, if we had to kill it up close ourselves

Speaker 15 (lower-pitched voice): by hand

would at

Speaker 15 (lower-pitched voice): least take a few minutes of mental preparation

Have you ever petted

Speaker 15 (lower-pitched voice): a lamb, a

Speaker 14 (lower-pitched voice): little lamb? They're freaking adorable. I mean, guess what

You

Speaker 14 (lower-pitched voice): know, they don't just lay lamb chops like chickens lay eggs. You know, you don't just walk around the lamb farm and find

Speaker 47 (lower-pitched voice): shanks and chops lying around all over the place. No, somebody had to grab that little guy and club him over the head or cut his throat, cut him open, rip out his guts, cut him to pieces, and send those pieces to your local supermarket

The hesitation that many of

Speaker 67 (lower-pitched voice): you would feel at one or another step in that process, that is a modern luxury

Until

Speaker 12 (lower-pitched voice): very, very recently, pretty much everybody had to be at least prepared to kill something. You're alive today because 10,000 generations of your human ancestors and an inconceivable number of your evolutionary ancestors did not hesitate. The

Tagarian people of New

Speaker 75 (lower-pitched voice): Guinea, they were a particularly nasty little bunch

Speaker 43 (lower-pitched voice): Savage, warlike

They

Speaker 43 (lower-pitched voice): were incredibly cruel. They were

Speaker 12 (lower-pitched voice): kind of like proto-Vikings, actually. They would terrorize more peaceful villages along the coast west of the Baxter River there in New Guinea, and what they would

do is they'd

Speaker 12 (lower-pitched voice): build these long canoes, and they would take them on expeditions along the coast and up the rivers

like

Speaker 12 (lower-pitched voice): vikings and they would just plunder and steal and slaughter people and take slaves and when

Speaker 17 (lower-pitched voice): they would take these slaves these prisoners they would keep them on the canoes with them because they would stay out on these raiding expeditions for months at a time without staying in one place and so they would keep them for food they would break their arms and legs and just leave them there so that they couldn't escape and

and

Speaker 17 (lower-pitched voice): yet they would keep them

Speaker 12 (lower-pitched voice): alive so that when they needed meat, they could just lop off an arm or lop off a foot or a lower leg from one of these mobile meat lockers that they kept. So

that's one end

Speaker 22 (lower-pitched voice): of it, right? That's one of the more primitive and non-symbolic looking examples of regularized cannibalism that you're going to find. But even here, even something just like that, where it

Speaker 54 (lower-pitched voice): looks like there's no difference between humans and any

Speaker 22 (lower-pitched voice): other

food

Speaker 22 (lower-pitched voice): that they happened to gather up even here the use of human meat was set about with taboos and superstitions and rituals that you had to perform before you could eat it and you know all these things rules

just very

Speaker 15 (lower-pitched voice): clearly they know

the difference

Speaker 15 (lower-pitched voice): and they're maintaining the difference ritualistically

And very often

Speaker 12 (lower-pitched voice): cannibalistic rituals would involve the entire community. And here's a Polynesian example provided by a Scottish missionary of women following their men into battle. And the women would go in as the men were fighting and they would stay just behind the battle line as the fighting raged. They pick

out the

Speaker 12 (lower-pitched voice): good bodies of the slain for the oven and throw the bad away. they tie up a captive to a tree dig a hole and kindle a hot stone oven for his body

Speaker 13 (lower-pitched voice): before his very

eyes the

Speaker 13 (lower-pitched voice): women go to battle they keep to the rear and attend to

the commissariat

Speaker 13 (lower-pitched voice): whenever they see one of the enemy fall it is their business

Speaker 20 (lower-pitched voice): to rush forward pull the body behind and dress it for the oven the hands are the choice bits sacred to the priests the priests go to the battle but sit in the distance fasting and praying for victory

if the

Speaker 20 (lower-pitched voice): body of a chief is cooked every one must

Speaker 13 (lower-pitched voice): partake down to the little child and before a gourmandiser proceeds to polish the bones he calls out have

all tasted if it is

Speaker 13 (lower-pitched voice): the body of a woman they eat only the arms and the legs on mare they devour all sometimes they

cook in

Speaker 12 (lower-pitched voice): joints and sometimes the whole body is doubled up in a sitting position with the knees to the chin put into the oven and served up so

as

Speaker 67 (lower-pitched voice): they squat around for their

meal their

Speaker 67 (lower-pitched voice): appetite for human

Speaker 80 (lower-pitched voice): flesh is never satisfied do

you mean

Speaker 80 (lower-pitched voice): to say that you will forbid us the fish of the sea why these are our fish

this is

Speaker 80 (lower-pitched voice): how they talk when you speak against cannibalism

Speaker 12 (lower-pitched voice): end quote very often institutionalized cannibalism contains a strong a strong element of vengeance

you

Speaker 53 (lower-pitched voice): know Killing another human being, actually let's talk about this for a second, killing another human being, especially

in

Speaker 15 (lower-pitched voice): societies where incurring a blood feud with his kinsmen was the only means of justice, it stays with a person psychologically. It

stays with a person

Speaker 57 (lower-pitched voice): similar to the way that leaving a lie outstanding stays with you

You know

Speaker 13 (lower-pitched voice): lying is devastating to the liar because it creates this

Speaker 12 (lower-pitched voice): internal tension that ends up expressing itself in unbidden thoughts and suspicions and fears and dreams. And psychologists and self-help authors and religious

Speaker 21 (lower-pitched voice): leaders who were actually doing their jobs figured out a long time ago that the way to discharge that

Speaker 12 (lower-pitched voice): tension and exercise that demon

that

Speaker 12 (lower-pitched voice): demon that parasitically attaches itself to the back of your mind to constantly remind you of your deception is to

Speaker 41 (lower-pitched voice): just confess it

Lying like

Speaker 41 (lower-pitched voice): killing is an act that

is

Speaker 13 (lower-pitched voice): fraught with ambivalence. Ambivalence is what I'm, what I'm trying to get at here with, with the analogy. It gets you out of trouble, right? I'm talking about a lie. A lie gets you out of trouble, or maybe it gets you

Speaker 15 (lower-pitched voice): something that you want in the immediate, in the immediate future. But over time

The

Speaker 15 (lower-pitched voice): costs of maintaining your deception become so onerous that, well, I

mean, people

Speaker 47 (lower-pitched voice): literally lose themselves in drugs and alcohol or break up their families or even kill themselves or other people just to escape the pressure of their lives without having to face the terror of

Speaker 13 (lower-pitched voice): telling the truth

You know, there's so much

Speaker 13 (lower-pitched voice): ambivalent energy in there, it tears people apart. Unless you're a psychopath, the main... The main

Speaker 15 (lower-pitched voice): product of all that ambivalence. Forget about the thoughts. Those are secondary. The feeling that gives rise to the thoughts is this vague, sort of dull

but

Speaker 53 (lower-pitched voice): somehow perfectly clear sense

that this is

Speaker 53 (lower-pitched voice): not over. There's something still outstanding

Speaker 82: There's something still out there

And killing is

Speaker 15 (lower-pitched voice): like that. Now, there's... So much ambivalent energy tied up in killing. There's the feeling of joy that comes with having defeated an enemy. There's the sublime animal power

Speaker 12 (lower-pitched voice): of having released that primal aggression. But then there's the recognition of yourself and the dying eyes of your victim

There's the

Speaker 12 (lower-pitched voice): fear of vengeance

Speaker 15 (lower-pitched voice): and there's so much more

All these

Speaker 43 (lower-pitched voice): ambivalent energies just pulling a killer in different directions, just threatening to tear him apart

Ritual

Speaker 43 (lower-pitched voice): and mythology, in part, function to

Speaker 13 (lower-pitched voice): structure these opposing feelings in a way that discharges the tension and frees the individual from that ambivalence. Psychologist

that we mentioned earlier, Eli

Speaker 12 (lower-pitched voice): Sagan, he's got this great little book on the psychogenesis of ritual cannibalism that I've

Speaker 28 (lower-pitched voice): drawn on very heavily for this, by the way. He wrote, quote

A great many

Speaker 63 (lower-pitched voice): tribes regard the slayer of the cannibal victim as being in great danger, and rituals are performed to ward it off. The danger does not

Speaker 83: come from any real threat. We may surmise that the slayer is not particularly vulnerable to revenge attacks from the enemy tribe

Speaker 12 (lower-pitched voice): since the ritual that is performed does not protect the slayer from harm from that quarter. The

danger has a

Speaker 12 (lower-pitched voice): supernatural source. sometimes it is spoken of as the dead man's ghost an answer given to the question of what threatens the slayer but

not really an

Speaker 41 (lower-pitched voice): explanation one method of protecting the slayer was to forbid the slayer himself to eat the

human meat

Speaker 12 (lower-pitched voice): yet this action might not be a sufficient protection therefore and

now he's

Speaker 12 (lower-pitched voice): quoting an anthropological report the killer or

Speaker 15 (lower-pitched voice): captor of the man who was to be eaten would go straight to his own

Speaker 13 (lower-pitched voice): hut and stay there for about a month living on roast taro and hot cocoanut milk his wife would continue to share his hut but must

Speaker 80 (lower-pitched voice): for that period sleep apart

from him he

Speaker 80 (lower-pitched voice): remains thus isolated in his hut because he is afraid of the blood of the dead man

and it is

Speaker 80 (lower-pitched voice): for

Speaker 67 (lower-pitched voice): this reason that he does not join his

Speaker 80 (lower-pitched voice): fellow warriors in partaking of the flesh

For if

Speaker 80 (lower-pitched voice): he were to do this, he believes his belly would become full of blood, and he would promptly die

Quick side

Speaker 84: note, that subquote that Sagan

Speaker 21 (lower-pitched voice): is quoting there, by the way, it's from a book on cannibalism and human sacrifice that I've not been able to get my hands on. Whenever there's a citation like that, I try to find and read the book in question, and usually I am able to do it, but sometimes not. And those of you who have donated to this podcast, by the way, you don't have any idea what a huge help it is because that's where it goes. It goes to books and papers. Anyway, I couldn't find this one. And so I'm not sure which people he's talking about, but the taro and coconut, you know, tells us somewhere it's out in the island. So end of side note

Speaker 12 (lower-pitched voice): Okay. Yeah, let

me get my

Speaker 12 (lower-pitched voice): bearings. Oh, so in addition to being in personal spiritual

Speaker 17 (lower-pitched voice): danger

a

Speaker 17 (lower-pitched voice): killer

Speaker 12 (lower-pitched voice): or a captor of a cannibal victim was also frequently felt to be a serious danger to the rest

of his own

Speaker 52 (lower-pitched voice): community sagan continues in maori so we're talking about new zealand now in maori

Speaker 13 (lower-pitched voice): the war party was met outside the village by the priestesses who danced a wakatama a dance of derision and sang

a song

Speaker 13 (lower-pitched voice): that asked the warriors whence they had

come "'They

Speaker 15 (lower-pitched voice): answered that they were followers of Tu, the war-god, and had come from taking vengeance. "'The

warriors were not

Speaker 15 (lower-pitched voice): allowed

Speaker 12 (lower-pitched voice): to mingle with the joyful people of the village "'until they had gone through the rite of Wakahoa, making common. "'They

proceeded to

Speaker 12 (lower-pitched voice): sit naked on the side of the stream

Speaker 67 (lower-pitched voice): while a naked priest offered to the god Tiki a pebble from the stream, "'a piece of fern root, and a piece of human flesh

the

Speaker 20 (lower-pitched voice): principal priests took portions of the locks of hair from the warriors and offered them to the war

god too the

Speaker 20 (lower-pitched voice): high priestess

Speaker 67 (lower-pitched voice): was given the ear of the first man killed to

eat it

Speaker 67 (lower-pitched voice): was the only occasion when a woman might partake of human

flesh the

Speaker 19 (lower-pitched voice): hearts of the slain were roasted a portion offered to two and the rest eaten by the priests the

Speaker 12 (lower-pitched voice): fighting men started dancing toward the village bearing fern stalks in their hands to which were tied the hair of their victims

The

Speaker 46 (lower-pitched voice): priests shouted spells that finally removed the blood curse and left the warriors hoa, common, free from taboo and able to enter the ordinary activities of the tribe. Sagan is drawing this account from Edward Trigger's book, The Maori Race. It's an old book. And it's a really

Speaker 21 (lower-pitched voice): interesting example because, you know, you go back to the beginning of the quote, the Maori villagers are already celebrating

Speaker 63 (lower-pitched voice): the successful taking of revenge by their warriors even as the warriors are being quarantined outside the village and enduring a dance of

Speaker 12 (lower-pitched voice): derision from the priestesses which you know that kind of reminds me of an earlier version of waiting for

Speaker 21 (lower-pitched voice): vietnam soldiers to get home and get off the plane so we can spit at them and call them baby killers or something it's like a it seems like there's some kind of an ancient ritual going on there

And even

Speaker 85: as the rest of the village is celebrating their victory, the killers have to go through a series of rituals to cleanse them

Speaker 17 (lower-pitched voice): of a curse. And

that ritual is very

Speaker 17 (lower-pitched voice): interesting because it carries a double meaning, right? Wakahoa, the ritual that allows them to be integrated back into the

Speaker 12 (lower-pitched voice): society, means making common. And

on the most

Speaker 12 (lower-pitched voice): basic level, it allows them to re-enter the common life of their people. But it also means

To

Speaker 12 (lower-pitched voice): make them common

Speaker 15 (lower-pitched voice): to bring them back down from the realm of the sacred

Many peoples all

Speaker 15 (lower-pitched voice): around the world

Speaker 75 (lower-pitched voice): certainly the Aztecs, experienced the

Speaker 30 (lower-pitched voice): inexplicable as opening portals to sacred power. Death, disease, natural disasters, the

Speaker 12 (lower-pitched voice): generative power of woman, the growth of plants. you know, these and other mysteries

were

Speaker 12 (lower-pitched voice): always set about with rights and taboos to control the unpredictable power that they pointed to from pouring uncontrollably into the world of everyday life

Today we know that

Speaker 12 (lower-pitched voice): war veterans who are unable to properly re-acclimate to the mundane world of civilian life

can

Speaker 17 (lower-pitched voice): suffer and sometimes even become a danger to themselves and others. Well, earlier peoples were not stupid

And

Speaker 17 (lower-pitched voice): they certainly didn't lack observational powers. They were limited only by their language and the conceptual framework that they had available to describe what they were

Speaker 86: seeing

And so they

Speaker 86: understood that men who came back from killing had changed somehow

And it

Speaker 86: was not a simple thing to successfully

take

Speaker 87 (lower-pitched voice): those men and re-involve them back into an everyday life that includes grandmothers and scurrying toddlers

Speaker 22 (lower-pitched voice): running around

it's

Speaker 22 (lower-pitched voice): just ambivalence ambivalence ambivalence i mean this this is the word it's the word to keep in mind at

Speaker 12 (lower-pitched voice): all times when talking about sacrifice and cannibalism ambivalence in fact if you lodge one word in your head to frame this in the next episode ambivalence is peewee's

Speaker 47 (lower-pitched voice): word of the day okay the killers are heroes they're cursed they're protectors

Speaker 60 (lower-pitched voice): they're dangerous they're they're triumphantly joyful they're regretful The

Speaker 47 (lower-pitched voice): killer himself glories in his victory, and yet he feels this unaccountable stain of corruption on him

He's closed his

Speaker 47 (lower-pitched voice): account with the other person, but he might have incurred a terrible

Speaker 27 (lower-pitched voice): blood debt with his relatives. And so again, the overwhelming feeling underneath whatever words and explanations

Speaker 15 (lower-pitched voice): we use to mythologize the experience, as long as there is unresolved ambivalence, the overwhelming

Speaker 12 (lower-pitched voice): feeling is that this is not over

so if

Speaker 12 (lower-pitched voice): it's not over the question is how to make it over how to

Speaker 15 (lower-pitched voice): end it and now you know with some of these last examples we've begun to see that structuring these ambivalent feelings relative to one another

Speaker 12 (lower-pitched voice): disentangling them in a way that allows their energy to be discharged again is a primary function of ritual and myth

another way to put it is

Speaker 16 (lower-pitched voice): maybe like this animals kill and

eat

Speaker 16 (lower-pitched voice): Right? But only humans sacrifice and feast

Animals are

Speaker 16 (lower-pitched voice): slaughtered. Only humans can be martyred. It

sounds

Speaker 12 (lower-pitched voice): strange to say, but there was a time when ritualized human sacrifice and cannibalism were a highly civilized and highly civilizing institution. In fact

I'll

Speaker 62 (lower-pitched voice): claim with confidence that without them, there would have been no path

Speaker 17 (lower-pitched voice): politically, sociologically, psychologically, whatever. There would have been no path forward to our modern world. Now

I get that I'm going to need to

Speaker 17 (lower-pitched voice): back that up. So next, we're going to go down to the borderlands of Ecuador and Peru, around the three rivers, Pastaza, Morena, and Upanto, Santiago. We're getting closer to Mexico. Be patient. I'm getting there

And we're talking

Speaker 17 (lower-pitched voice): about the Hibaro natives. The Hibaro that dominated the region, they were among the fiercest and most savage

Speaker 21 (lower-pitched voice): tribes in South America at the time of contact. And so as you'd expect, they never united beyond

Speaker 12 (lower-pitched voice): just small tribes that maintain themselves in an almost permanent state of total war with one another. The education of

Speaker 22 (lower-pitched voice): their young boys focused pretty much exclusively on raising fierce warriors here. Tribes were often dying out and merging with one another because

Speaker 12 (lower-pitched voice): wars of extermination happen all the time

And so going

Speaker 12 (lower-pitched voice): through the literature, I found this old piece about them from 1923 in the Smithsonian Archive called Blood, Revenge, War, and Victory Feasts among the Hibaro Indians

Speaker 75 (lower-pitched voice): of Eastern Ecuador. You got

to love the

Speaker 75 (lower-pitched voice): old days when the humanities actually got

Speaker 73: to the point

Here's a

Speaker 73: quote

the indian

Speaker 73: does not content himself

Speaker 67 (lower-pitched voice): with merely killing his enemy

he wants

Speaker 67 (lower-pitched voice): to shed as much blood as possible and delights in mutilating the body of the slain

enemy being

Speaker 67 (lower-pitched voice): especially anxious to

Speaker 20 (lower-pitched voice): secure his

head the

Speaker 20 (lower-pitched voice): scene of battle between hibaro indians therefore generally appears as a dreadful spectacle of savage lust of destruction and thirst for

blood along

Speaker 12 (lower-pitched voice): the back side of the head from the apex downward a long cut is made with a knife whereupon the scalp and the skin of the face is slowly and carefully

Speaker 80 (lower-pitched voice): drawn off from the skull in much the same way as is done with the hides of animals for stuffing the skinning of the face is said to be the most difficult part of this work for here the skin does not loosen merely by drawing it off but has

Speaker 88 (lower-pitched voice): to be cut from the flesh with a sharp

knife the

Speaker 88 (lower-pitched voice): skull and all fleshy parts that adhere to it are thrown away and the scalp

Speaker 52 (lower-pitched voice): obtained is further prepared Now when

we read

Speaker 52 (lower-pitched voice): that, especially the first part, they delight in mutilating

Speaker 21 (lower-pitched voice): and destroying their enemy as much as possible. You read that, and we're not thinking that these people are somehow too gentle or too civilized for cannibalism

Speaker 60 (lower-pitched voice): right? You read through the rest of that book, and you'll see that the Hibaro could and probably did do pretty much every

Speaker 12 (lower-pitched voice): horrific thing you can think of to their enemies. Except

For

Speaker 12 (lower-pitched voice): one thing, they

Speaker 13 (lower-pitched voice): never ate any part of the bodies. Why not

You know, if I had read

Speaker 13 (lower-pitched voice): that quote that I just read and then followed it up by telling you that then after that they finished up by cooking the corpses, it's not like you would have been terribly shocked

Speaker 39: by that

Especially when I

Speaker 39: tell you how they would speak to their worst enemies. Yutahe, they would say, which

Speaker 22 (lower-pitched voice): means, I will eat

you. and it was

Speaker 22 (lower-pitched voice): the equivalent of saying eat shit or fuck you in our culture, which is interesting in itself because, yeah, okay, I wasn't sure if I was going to talk about this. Let's talk about it for a second. It's interesting because it mirrors Freud's theory of psychosexual development

Speaker 75 (lower-pitched voice): Okay, so human infants, as you may know, are born very early. It's one of

the

Speaker 12 (lower-pitched voice): things that distinguishes us as a species. If alien zoologists

don't

Speaker 12 (lower-pitched voice): We're surveying the life on Earth. It's one of the first things that they would notice about the human species is that we're born very, very early

Speaker 17 (lower-pitched voice): too early

In fact, speaking about

Speaker 17 (lower-pitched voice): that, I keep going off on

Speaker 21 (lower-pitched voice): tangents, but we'll see how this goes. I remember watching this old Disney

Speaker 12 (lower-pitched voice): nature documentary one time. Joseph Campbell, I could talk about this. Anyway

it was

Speaker 12 (lower-pitched voice): on this beach

and an

Speaker 12 (lower-pitched voice): island somewhere where giant sea turtles would come every year

Speaker 17 (lower-pitched voice): to lay their eggs. Only now it was time for all the eggs to hatch. So the parents are long gone by now, and these turtles, these little baby turtles, start crawling up out of the sand where they'd been

Speaker 12 (lower-pitched voice): buried. And as soon as they became visible, bam, the birds are swooping down and scooping them up, right? And so these things immediately

Speaker 17 (lower-pitched voice): just make a beeline for the water. Which means going through crashing waves that toss

Speaker 89: around these little silver dollar-sized turtles all over the place

If they're

Speaker 66 (lower-pitched voice): lucky enough to make it through the birds, past the waves, and into the water

these

Speaker 21 (lower-pitched voice): ten-minute-old creatures have got to start looking for things to eat right away. And if they don't find something soon, and then consistently, they're as good as bird food

And yet, somehow

Speaker 60 (lower-pitched voice): there are still sea turtles. How

are there

Speaker 60 (lower-pitched voice): still sea turtles

there

Speaker 13 (lower-pitched voice): are still sea turtles because they come out of the gate you know they they they come out of the egg with most of what it takes to be a sea turtle

Speaker 63 (lower-pitched voice): already pretty much wired up

keep it

Speaker 60 (lower-pitched voice): simple keep it specific spit out a lot of them a few of them will make it through the gauntlet you got sea turtles right humans are very

very different as

Speaker 17 (lower-pitched voice): our brains got bigger the women's hips had to grow had to widen to accommodate the birth process with our big ass heads with our big ass brains

Speaker 12 (lower-pitched voice): but eventually you kind of hit this point of diminishing returns where eventually you get to a point where wider hips are becoming a greater liability than the bigger cranium

Speaker 17 (lower-pitched voice): was worth I guess and so we compensated for that by being born very very very early and doing a lot of our development outside of the

womb Those

Speaker 17 (lower-pitched voice): little

Speaker 64 (lower-pitched voice): turtles, they pop up out of the egg, crawl up into the sand, and they just make a run for the surf as soon as

Speaker 62 (lower-pitched voice): they're born. And when they get into the water, they know exactly what to do. But

you could, you know, this

Speaker 62 (lower-pitched voice): thing's, they're 10 minutes old. You leave a two-year-old little human on the beach, and it's just

Speaker 17 (lower-pitched voice): going to wander around like an idiot until it starves. I mean, you know, a newborn baby is really just, it's still a fetus in a lot of ways, basically

it's

Speaker 17 (lower-pitched voice): not just that we

Speaker 33 (lower-pitched voice): were born and we don't know how to do things yet. I mean, our early disabilities, they run way, way deeper than that

I mean

Speaker 33 (lower-pitched voice): think about it. Human infants, I mean, human

Speaker 86: infants are little worms for a long time

You know, when

Speaker 86: we're first born, and

for some

Speaker 86: weeks afterward, most of our nervous system isn't

Speaker 62 (lower-pitched voice): even finished being wired up yet. You

ever watch

Speaker 62 (lower-pitched voice): an infant try to move? It's ridiculous

Speaker 87 (lower-pitched voice): you know just the infant can suck on a nipple it can digest whatever it gets out of it and that is about it that's literally about all it can do the

muscles and

Speaker 76 (lower-pitched voice): the nerves of the mouth throat and digestive system those come out pretty much pre pre-made you know ready-made but nothing else even really works

yet so this is the

Speaker 22 (lower-pitched voice): oral stage of psychosexual development that freud described

Speaker 52 (lower-pitched voice): And it's kind of a human universal, even if you don't follow his exact theory of the way he handles it. This period is a human universal. In the beginning

Speaker 15 (lower-pitched voice): we all experience the world through the mouth. That is how it begins. Our first

knowledge of

Speaker 15 (lower-pitched voice): the world comes

Speaker 12 (lower-pitched voice): through the organ of the mouth and is understood in the vocabulary of tastes and textures defined by

the mouth. And the

Speaker 12 (lower-pitched voice): mouth is also the

Speaker 62 (lower-pitched voice): medium of our first social interaction. This is something that Jordan Peterson has really helped me understand. It's obvious when

Speaker 81: you think about it, but it's just so brilliant to think about how intensely social

of a thing

Speaker 81: that breastfeeding is. Infants

Speaker 46 (lower-pitched voice): can struggle. They bite. You know, if they're screaming, the mother has to calm them down first

And all of

Speaker 46 (lower-pitched voice): this has to be nonverbal. You know, all communication is nonverbal

Speaker 86: and at first it's non-visual. You

can't even look

Speaker 86: the thing in the eye or anything like that. It's purely through touch and maybe a little bit of sound to kind of coo at it and set the mood, but that's it

And that's

Speaker 86: all you have to kind of manage this insanely complicated and primal interaction

Okay. it's

Speaker 86: one of those mysteries that as a man I can only look at from the outside and marvel at but I definitely don't have access to it but it fascinates me

the mouth is also

Speaker 13 (lower-pitched voice): the first medium through which we have our first experiences of repression and frustration when a mother has to teach her baby in their secret little language not to do certain things she has to control its behavior it's

Speaker 17 (lower-pitched voice): also our first experience of alienation comes through the mouth in the sense that

The

Speaker 17 (lower-pitched voice): first time that we ever

Speaker 12 (lower-pitched voice): open our mouths to cry out so that the world can come and fill

Speaker 13 (lower-pitched voice): it up to satisfy our hunger, and that doesn't happen right away. There's a delay between our demand and its fulfillment that, you know, that delay sort of sets us down the path of realizing that, hey, you know, that age of warm, unified, amniotic bliss is over for good

This is very

Speaker 13 (lower-pitched voice): complicated stuff that we

Speaker 12 (lower-pitched voice): all have to go through

And so

Speaker 75 (lower-pitched voice): babies begin to grow, begin to ambulate, move around, and parents find themselves what? Repeating one phrase more than

Speaker 46 (lower-pitched voice): anything else. Don't put that in your mouth. Get that out of your mouth, right? Because kids at this age are putting everything in their mouth because

Speaker 52 (lower-pitched voice): it's still the primary means by which they experience and interact with the world. And why wouldn't it be? You're born that way. It's the first thing that you

Speaker 90: have. It's your whole world in a way at the very beginning. It's your whole world in a way

it's

Speaker 90: your it's your portal out into the rest of the world

Speaker 62 (lower-pitched voice): and you start to grow and your body starts to fill out and everything else starts to work and now you got to start to learn to use you know the rest of your body and everything to experience the world but but that's a process it's a process that we all have to mature into right

And as

Speaker 62 (lower-pitched voice): you can imagine, these things tend to go in order for a reason. There's a reason that it's very important to get kids past this stage pretty quickly where they're just putting everything in their mouth. You

want to

Speaker 62 (lower-pitched voice): get finished with that before you start toilet training, right? You know, occasionally parents are toilet training their kids and after they've had a little bit of practice, maybe you'll leave them in the bathroom to kind of try it themselves. And a lot of parents have this experience at some point where they walk in and find the kid you know, their little trainee making art on the walls with their waste products. But that's better than walking in and finding out that the kid is still caught up in the oral stage, right? You don't want to walk in and find that

And so it's

Speaker 62 (lower-pitched voice): very important. I mean, this sounds kind of silly, primitive or something. It's very important stuff. So when talking about

Speaker 86: this stuff

the

Speaker 86: thing to know and to keep in mind is that anything humans are forced to repress tends

to become a

Speaker 86: matter

Speaker 12 (lower-pitched voice): of intense fascination for us it's just how we're built we

first

Speaker 60 (lower-pitched voice): experience the world through the mouth and so the first attempts to civilize us and structure our behavior concerns what we do and do not do with our mouth and

you

Speaker 21 (lower-pitched voice): know right at the beginning not to bite the nipple that's

Speaker 12 (lower-pitched voice): the first thing but then it's don't put things in your mouth and

so on and so

Speaker 12 (lower-pitched voice): forth the next stage

of trying

Speaker 12 (lower-pitched voice): to civilize a little potential barbarian involves potty training him and you know in

Speaker 62 (lower-pitched voice): this stage intense attention is typically paid by the parents to controlling where and when and how the child

Speaker 12 (lower-pitched voice): does it and and what they do with the waste products afterwards right it's very important to most parents at least it should

be. And

Speaker 17 (lower-pitched voice): people get stuck sometimes in

Speaker 62 (lower-pitched voice): one or another of these stages of development due to trauma or some other set of causes sometimes, and it will mangle their personality. I mean, into adulthood, absolutely mangle your personality

Speaker 53 (lower-pitched voice): After

the oral and anal

Speaker 17 (lower-pitched voice): stages of psychosexual development, there's some other stuff in there. There's two other stages that we're not going to worry about right now. And finally, the genital stage. And this is the

Speaker 21 (lower-pitched voice): period where, you know, you... walking through target and you got to keep telling your little boy to take his hands out of his pants all the time parents

have to

Speaker 21 (lower-pitched voice): go through this stuff all

the time wait you

Speaker 91: mean that was just me

Speaker 21 (lower-pitched voice): never mind anyway the goal of each of these stages

is to come

Speaker 16 (lower-pitched voice): out of them having been properly socialized in the use of your mouth the elimination of your waste and in the management

Speaker 60 (lower-pitched voice): of your sex organs that's the

goal

Speaker 60 (lower-pitched voice): properly socialized in those, you know, in those incredibly important, you know, sort of functions, not only biological, but social

Speaker 62 (lower-pitched voice): functions. And

again, it

Speaker 62 (lower-pitched voice): sounds so incredibly primitive, but this is the foundation of all human social life. Although I do

want to

Speaker 62 (lower-pitched voice): be clear

Speaker 46 (lower-pitched voice): that, you know, I'm drawing out and simplifying aspects of this that I think are relevant to our topic. It's obviously much more complicated

Speaker 17 (lower-pitched voice): So, Depending on a child's natural tendency to be agreeable or rebellious, among other factors, it can be a real struggle to move the kid through these stages successfully on schedule. It can

Speaker 12 (lower-pitched voice): be. I mean, it's a big deal and it's not easy. And a lot of it has to do with the child's natural inclination. So not keeping

Speaker 41 (lower-pitched voice): up is an absolutely

Speaker 53 (lower-pitched voice): cataclysmic failure of socialization. It

Speaker 47 (lower-pitched voice): destroys lives

If

Speaker 47 (lower-pitched voice): you're still soiling your pants regularly, or even occasionally

Speaker 62 (lower-pitched voice): in third grade, this is very likely to set off a cascade of effects on

Speaker 13 (lower-pitched voice): that child's developing personality. They're going to lead him far away from the general run of social life to which he's supposed to be adapting

Parents try to

Speaker 47 (lower-pitched voice): socialize and prepare their

Speaker 21 (lower-pitched voice): children, but other children eventually take over the undone portions of that work, and kids are not gentle about it. Kids are brutal

You know, if

Speaker 62 (lower-pitched voice): you've got to soil your pants as a third grader, it's much better to do it on the way to school in front of your mother than it is to do it in the middle of class in front of your peers. And

if a kid

Speaker 62 (lower-pitched voice): continues to

Speaker 81: struggle with that, then suddenly school and all social situations with other

Speaker 90: children, all of this becomes charged with pressure. Other children might start to

Speaker 86: seem very threatening. Before you know it, you got a kid who avoids interacting with other kids, who never develops adequate social skills

Speaker 15 (lower-pitched voice): who, you know, perceives other people as sources of potential danger and so feels perpetually alienated because he was never firmly plunged into a social context in a way that really let him

Speaker 62 (lower-pitched voice): become comfortable in the world and with himself. I mean, this is what happens. This

Speaker 81: is serious stuff

So the

Speaker 81: pressure

to

Speaker 88 (lower-pitched voice): successfully traverse these stages, to be able to master impulse

Speaker 76 (lower-pitched voice): through the executive discipline of the mind

the

Speaker 86: pressure is so tremendous, just incredible pressure for a small child

whose

Speaker 81: very existence, certainly the affection of his parents to them, seems to the

Speaker 86: child to hang on whether or not he can master these things and become an acceptable social being for his age

And

Speaker 86: it's no wonder that many kids retreat from it, you know, and end up on a psychiatrist's couch at 40 years old crying about how they can't stop watching internet porn

Because that's the

Speaker 86: thing, right? Becoming moves in one direction. If

you aren't able to

Speaker 86: move through these stages on time, nobody's waiting for you. Nobody is waiting for you. Your peers are moving on and they will judge you harshly for being

Speaker 60 (lower-pitched voice): delayed in your progress. Your body keeps growing, which obviously alters your relationship to the world and starts introducing entirely new biological imperatives, sex and so forth. You keep learning new words and new skills

you

Speaker 60 (lower-pitched voice): know uh you start to look like and behave in many ways like an adult whatever your human

Speaker 62 (lower-pitched voice): mind is doing your animal body just stays the course right that thing is on tracks

your biology doesn't just hit the

Speaker 62 (lower-pitched voice): pause button until you figure out how to stop pissing your pants or putting everything in your mouth it just doesn't work like that

you know we

Speaker 62 (lower-pitched voice): give babies

Speaker 12 (lower-pitched voice): pacifiers sometimes to sort of help bridge the gap when we take away their primary oral reference the mother's breast

Yeah

Speaker 12 (lower-pitched voice): And sometimes small children, even, not just babies, but small children still require a helping hand, and so maybe for a while we

Speaker 63 (lower-pitched voice): allow them to do something like suck their thumb. But

what we need is

Speaker 63 (lower-pitched voice): we need some sign that you're making progress, right

Speaker 92: If you're

Speaker 63 (lower-pitched voice): three years old and

Speaker 12 (lower-pitched voice): still putting everything in your mouth, that's a problem, but we'll let you suck on your thumb as a substitute, at least for a while. But time waits for no man, so

You

Speaker 12 (lower-pitched voice): know, as three turns into four and four turns into five and so on, the

Speaker 21 (lower-pitched voice): child keeps growing and their social roles begin to change and become more complicated. And

so, you

Speaker 93: know, as this

happens, the

Speaker 60 (lower-pitched voice): society applies more and more pressure to send the signal that it's time to

Speaker 12 (lower-pitched voice): grow up. It's time to move on from the oral fixation

Now, you

Speaker 94: know, I

Speaker 12 (lower-pitched voice): mean

And

Speaker 17 (lower-pitched voice): it's amazing to me sometimes that anybody grows up and isn't completely insane. But this process isn't helped by the fact that most

Speaker 28 (lower-pitched voice): parents are completely clueless about any of this, except on a very

Speaker 21 (lower-pitched voice): dull, sort of basic level. I think in a lot of ways, culture destroys the natural wisdom of parents in a lot of ways. But

many exasperated

Speaker 21 (lower-pitched voice): parents who don't know what else to do just end

Speaker 33 (lower-pitched voice): up using threats or physical punishment to force the child to repress these impulses of a given stage. Because

I mean

Speaker 33 (lower-pitched voice): we're talking about small children, so we don't like hearing words like threat or

Speaker 62 (lower-pitched voice): physical punishment in the same sentence with them. But on the other hand, you have to understand what a parent is facing. A

parent knows full

Speaker 62 (lower-pitched voice): well what happens to

Speaker 81: children in public schools who still suck their thumbs or piss their pants or get caught fondling themselves in class. It destroys lives. It causes suicides

It

Speaker 81: creates adults who are never able to properly relate to their social world

And so you see this

Speaker 81: possibility for your child as a parent, and you don't know what to do, and nobody

Speaker 86: you know knows what to do. And anything you

have to

Speaker 86: do to force the child to stop

Speaker 62 (lower-pitched voice): that behavior seems better than allowing it to continue, right

I mean

Speaker 62 (lower-pitched voice): sometimes you'll hear about parents with children who won't stop sucking their thumbs, who put hot sauce on the thumb or something to, you know, condition the child like Pavlov's dog. And that's barbaric, but, you know, it's barbaric from one standpoint, but most

parents, they don't

Speaker 62 (lower-pitched voice): have the resources or the knowledge to deal with this kind of thing much better than the children do. And this is

And

Speaker 33 (lower-pitched voice): sometimes I think that the reason a lot of us don't remember our early childhood is not because we don't actually remember it, it's just because it

was so

Speaker 33 (lower-pitched voice): goddamn stressful that we don't want to remember it. I mean, this is stress that a child does not need and certainly

does not

Speaker 33 (lower-pitched voice): have the emotional resources or maturity to deal with, but they have no choice but to deal with it

And so forced into this

Speaker 62 (lower-pitched voice): situation by the collision of their biology with a complicated social world

the

Speaker 62 (lower-pitched voice): child faces the choice of either finding

Speaker 46 (lower-pitched voice): socially acceptable substitutes

Speaker 17 (lower-pitched voice): wherever it can

Freud, for

Speaker 17 (lower-pitched voice): example, thought that overeating and smoking and constant gum chewing were examples of adults who still had too much energy tied up in the oral stage, for example. I have some problems with that part of it, but anyway. Or if you can't identify

Speaker 60 (lower-pitched voice): and employ

adults

Speaker 60 (lower-pitched voice): substitute satisfactions you just have to repress whatever's left over just

Speaker 21 (lower-pitched voice): repress it just push it down just get it out of here but that again does not come without a cost and it's a significant

one not

Speaker 21 (lower-pitched voice): least because as we mentioned

Speaker 22 (lower-pitched voice): whatever we repress becomes a center of fascination right as our psyche sort of seeks ways to to work it out and give expression

to it

Speaker 21 (lower-pitched voice): now Now, aggression is often thought

kind of

Speaker 21 (lower-pitched voice): come in full circle now aggression is often thought by many people to only be a secondary emotional response to frustration or fear experiences like that and there's a case to be made for that perspective but

Speaker 17 (lower-pitched voice): um i don't think that way i think we come out of the womb built for war uh like which of the poetry the aztec god of war who was born fully armed and arrayed for battle i think that's human beings

You

Speaker 17 (lower-pitched voice): might have heard before that babies seem to have some natural sense of what to do when they're dropped in water, right? They know to close their eyes and hold their breath, for example. They also sort of move their arms

Speaker 42 (lower-pitched voice): and legs in a manner that looks like it's trying to stay afloat, but apparently that's not what that is, that's what I've heard. So the whole thing doesn't work very well, obviously, and they don't last very

Speaker 95 (lower-pitched voice): long, so don't go run an experiment with your baby in the ocean and tell the cops that Martyr Maid said it was cool. It's not

cool. But

Speaker 95 (lower-pitched voice): the

Speaker 17 (lower-pitched voice): point is that the reflex exists, and it seems to emerge very early. Similarly, if an insect or a spider

Speaker 12 (lower-pitched voice): crawls across an infant's face, the infant often seems to know to attack it

which at

Speaker 12 (lower-pitched voice): first just means to

Speaker 21 (lower-pitched voice): bite it if it can

Speaker 21 (lower-pitched voice): infants will bite anything so who knows what they're doing and fine but nursing mothers uh often find out

Speaker 12 (lower-pitched voice): that their babies will refuse the breast when they're not hungry by biting the nipple and some really strong-willed precocious little little bastards uh will actually let the mother know when they're ready to be weaned all together because

Speaker 22 (lower-pitched voice): they'll just start biting the breast all the time and refusing

to take it and i

Speaker 22 (lower-pitched voice): mentioned this to

Speaker 12 (lower-pitched voice): emphasize that aggression like All of a child's libidinal energies follows the path of psychosexual development

Speaker 22 (lower-pitched voice): that we were just talking about. Collecting around and seeking satisfaction through whatever the dominant stage is at the time

And that means that the

Speaker 15 (lower-pitched voice): first experiences and expressions of aggression in all human beings is oral aggression

Speaker 28 (lower-pitched voice): Aggression with the mouth

And people who engage in

Speaker 67 (lower-pitched voice): cannibalism are engaging in oral aggression

Speaker 47 (lower-pitched voice): Societies that do it are institutionalizing oral aggression. Ritualization is the

Speaker 12 (lower-pitched voice): first step toward achieving control over any given behavior, and the rituals of people with obsessive compulsive disorder, for example, are all about

establishing control. The

Speaker 12 (lower-pitched voice): Austronesian societies that I mentioned earlier, the island societies, they all grew up out of an identical cultural base, but they can be ranked by their level of relative social

Speaker 60 (lower-pitched voice): complexity and political development, we mentioned earlier

Speaker 60 (lower-pitched voice): Among the peoples that practice or refer to ritual cannibalism, the

Speaker 17 (lower-pitched voice): rule is that the more primitive societies eat with minimal hesitation and less ritual

Speaker 15 (lower-pitched voice): preparation, and as you move up the ladder of development and complexity, you start to see societies that engage in very limited and specific forms of cannibalism. For example

You

Speaker 15 (lower-pitched voice): know, eating only certain ritually significant parts

Speaker 21 (lower-pitched voice): or restricting the practice to a special cannibal society and the rest of the society just sort of vicariously shares in the experience

When those

Speaker 12 (lower-pitched voice): head-hunting Hibaro warriors shout, I will eat you! at their enemies, but don't eat them, but only take their heads as trophies, we're observing a substitute practice, serving as a bridge

Speaker 22 (lower-pitched voice): Just like the thumb-sucking or the pacifier for a society that's moving beyond the oral stage as its primary mode of experiencing and enacting

Speaker 12 (lower-pitched voice): aggression

There are a few tribes that

Speaker 12 (lower-pitched voice): practice both headhunting and cannibalism, but they are the exception. The overwhelming majority practice one or the other. And the ones that do both, they very clearly link them together. Sagan

Speaker 96: informs us

Speaker 13 (lower-pitched voice): quote, If

we think

Speaker 13 (lower-pitched voice): about the occasions for headhunting

They

Speaker 13 (lower-pitched voice): appear to be identical to those for cannibalism

Speaker 19 (lower-pitched voice): war, revenge, sadism, and proof of masculinity

The ritual of

Speaker 13 (lower-pitched voice): taboo and ceremony that surrounds headhunting activity is almost indistinguishable from that which is

Speaker 12 (lower-pitched voice): intimately associated with cannibalism

Just below the

Speaker 15 (lower-pitched voice): surface of the

Speaker 12 (lower-pitched voice): phenomenon, you get down beneath the disguise

of and

Speaker 12 (lower-pitched voice): the cannibal and the head-hunter seem to be doing something

like the same thing

Speaker 12 (lower-pitched voice): quoting again from

Speaker 97: the earlier source about the

hibaro it is a

Speaker 13 (lower-pitched voice): rule that when a victory has been attained over a foreign tribe the heads of the slain enemies are taken most hibaro warriors would consider any victory

Speaker 15 (lower-pitched voice): over such an enemy incomplete and the whole war expedition more or less a failure unless they returned with one or several head trophies

it

Speaker 12 (lower-pitched voice): of course not seldom happens that

Speaker 21 (lower-pitched voice): the hibaro is able to kill an enemy but not take his head because his comrades were

not able

Speaker 98: to secure the

Speaker 12 (lower-pitched voice): body in such a case there cannot be a victory

feast in

Speaker 12 (lower-pitched voice): most primitive societies male social status is determined by your ability to bring

Speaker 21 (lower-pitched voice): back food and share it with one's allies and family members and by your ability as a warrior

so obviously those two things are related in

Speaker 21 (lower-pitched voice): head-hunting

Speaker 17 (lower-pitched voice): societies head trophies take over that role and sort of combine them in a way they fulfill a very fundamental social function

sagan also writes in the

Speaker 73: solomon islands it was the general practice to take heads and preserve them as signs of power and success these heads were set out on stages or hung up under the

Speaker 82: eaves of the canoe

house when a

Speaker 63 (lower-pitched voice): chief had a man killed for an offense or murdered out of revenge or hatred or sacrificed he added

the

Speaker 13 (lower-pitched voice): head to his collection as a fresh sign of his power and greatness in nigeria a young man was considered no better than a girl and no one would marry him until he had obtained his head in a prescribed manner and his prowess

Speaker 12 (lower-pitched voice): had been celebrated by a public feast after the feast he was considered a man and a warrior

end quote

Speaker 12 (lower-pitched voice): real quick another sidebar

here

Speaker 12 (lower-pitched voice): Just, on behalf of all men, here's

Speaker 86: a public service announcement to all the women out there who are like, oh my god, why are men so violent and crazy? I don't know, ladies. Maybe because

Speaker 15 (lower-pitched voice): for a huge chunk of our history, none of you would marry any of us until we brought back a headhunting trophy or a cannibal feast

Could

Speaker 99: that have anything to do with it

Speaker 64 (lower-pitched voice): Maybe. Okay? Things have changed pretty quickly in the world, right? Give us a little bit of time to

Speaker 62 (lower-pitched voice): get our bearings, right

For

Speaker 62 (lower-pitched voice): most of our history, you've had us running around cutting off heads and eating human flesh, okay

Give us a

Speaker 62 (lower-pitched voice): little bit of time. We'll come around, but give us a break. Anyway, did I? Yeah, so I think I mentioned this. In societies where we do find both headhunting and cannibalism

you can

Speaker 62 (lower-pitched voice): almost see the baton being passed from one to the other, from cannibalism to headhunting

Speaker 53 (lower-pitched voice): Headhunting is taking over for cannibalism

Speaker 12 (lower-pitched voice): C.K. Meek, in one of the volumes of his Tribal Studies of Northern Nigeria, he kind of writes about this quote

The slayer rode

Speaker 67 (lower-pitched voice): around on his horse, brandishing a knife

Speaker 76 (lower-pitched voice): in his right hand

One of the first

Speaker 76 (lower-pitched voice): duties of the head-getter on reaching

Speaker 13 (lower-pitched voice): home was to go to the house of the priest who had charge of the head-hunting rights and receive a further dose of protective medicine consisting of two mouthfuls of palm and mahogany oil and a small piece of the flesh from the victim's skull

This

Speaker 13 (lower-pitched voice): rite of eating a small piece of flesh of the skull is of particular interest, I'm sorry, of peculiar interest, in proving one purpose, at least, of cannibalism, had the religious object of destroying the dead enemy's soul. End quote. In a similar vein, Sagan reports

Speaker 47 (lower-pitched voice): quote

Among the

Speaker 47 (lower-pitched voice): kagaro, the protective medicine included a few drops of blood from the captured head

The warrior

Speaker 13 (lower-pitched voice): spent the night in the priest's house covered with a cloth and fumigated by the smoke of branches of certain trees

this

Speaker 41 (lower-pitched voice): whole process was engaged in to ensure that the ghost of the slain victim would not pursue the head-taker

Speaker 100: in several cases sagan writes the priest

Speaker 47 (lower-pitched voice): ate part of the flesh to protect the head-getter but the head-getter himself did

not this

Speaker 47 (lower-pitched voice): flesh-eating was part of the ritual that protected the

slayer the

Speaker 47 (lower-pitched voice): chowai brought all captured heads to the chief priest the heads were boiled the priest ate a piece of

Speaker 13 (lower-pitched voice): the flesh and the skulls were then deposited in the sacred

hut the

Speaker 13 (lower-pitched voice): head-getter was anointed with a filthy-smelling mixture that included the intestines of a porcupine and he remained hidden during these purification rites afterward he rejoined the tribe was treated as a hero and drank beer with

the elders in the

Speaker 13 (lower-pitched voice): education of the young a small amount of cannibalism might be permitted by tribes who engaged in no other forms of eating human flesh

a father

Speaker 66 (lower-pitched voice): who has been on a successful head-hunt and returned with a coveted trophy should

Speaker 80 (lower-pitched voice): he have a son of five or

six years will

Speaker 80 (lower-pitched voice): take a small portion of the flesh from the head about the size of a pea and a drop of blood mix these with a little

Speaker 13 (lower-pitched voice): sago yam or taro or some other vegetable make it into a kind of pill and give it to the young child this is said to make the boy sero and nito fierce forever

end quote So it seems

Speaker 22 (lower-pitched voice): pretty clear to me, because there's a lot of other examples like this. I obviously don't

want to

Speaker 22 (lower-pitched voice): linger on it too long

Speaker 12 (lower-pitched voice): but there's so many examples that make it very clear to me that headhunting, which is such a strange practice to just invent ex nihilo, especially since it's one that we find all throughout the Austronesian Islands, Africa, and the Americas at the time of contact, is one that we find all

throughout the Austronesian

Speaker 12 (lower-pitched voice): probably around the world, if we go back far enough, I think, it's pretty clear to me that headhunting is a transition form used by people who are leaving behind the oral stage as the primary locus of aggressive motivation. And

as Raphael

Speaker 12 (lower-pitched voice): Karsten, who's our source for the Hibaro Indian headhunters, informs us, headhunting, just like cannibalism, is always a

Just

Speaker 12 (lower-pitched voice): as the transition from cannibalism to headhunting is always a religious process

Writing about how

Speaker 12 (lower-pitched voice): the Hibaro believed the spirits of their dead enemies whose heads they had claimed would be compelled to serve their killers as advisors

Speaker 47 (lower-pitched voice): or slaves and that they would work with loyalty to facilitate the success of their murderer

Speaker 88 (lower-pitched voice): Karsten wrote, quote

now

Speaker 101: according to the idea of the hibaro it is precisely the tzantza that is the

Speaker 63 (lower-pitched voice): preserved head which will cause the domestic animals and fields to grow and develop not only in the normal way but with an extraordinary force the hibaro do not find anything contradictory

Speaker 46 (lower-pitched voice): in the thought

Speaker 66 (lower-pitched voice): that the spirit of the slain enemy on the one hand entertains feelings of hatred and revenge against his slayer and always looks for an opportunity to harm

him and on

Speaker 66 (lower-pitched voice): the other hand, at the same time, as it were, plays a role as his friend and advisor

The latter

Speaker 66 (lower-pitched voice): it must be

Speaker 13 (lower-pitched voice): understood, he has become

under the

Speaker 13 (lower-pitched voice): influence of the magical conjuration through the ceremonies performed at the feast Sua Martiniu

The Tzansa of the

Speaker 12 (lower-pitched voice): Hibaro Indians, thus, is not a trophy in the common sense of the word, not exclusively a mark of distinction or a visible proof that an enemy has been killed

The

Speaker 13 (lower-pitched voice): Hibara warrior not only tries to take the life of his enemy, but above everything wants

Speaker 63 (lower-pitched voice): to secure control of his soul. The so-called Ainsupani is not merely a victory feast

Speaker 12 (lower-pitched voice): in the sense familiar to us, but at the same time, and first of all, a

Speaker 66 (lower-pitched voice): kind of mystery feast, which, when we

Speaker 13 (lower-pitched voice): are able to penetrate into its real meaning, throws an interesting light not only upon the social life of these Indians in general, and the ideas they connect with their wars but also upon their in some respect rather far-reaching religious

views the

Speaker 13 (lower-pitched voice): rule is however among the hibaro that a warrior who has captured a head should celebrate a feast the head feast for the hibaro opens the

Speaker 66 (lower-pitched voice): road to honor and fame to material wealth to new victories over enemies and a long

life It is

Speaker 73: the great mystery feast of the Hibaro Indians, as will presently be seen, it in part has a purely religious significance, inasmuch as

Speaker 63 (lower-pitched voice): the Hibaro, through the ceremonies thereby

Speaker 20 (lower-pitched voice): performed, believes he acquires the same benefits as most other savage peoples do try to acquire by cult actions of a different kind, end quote

Some tribes believe that

Speaker 12 (lower-pitched voice): their crops simply won't grow without the aid of taken heads. Many times... Their head-hunting expeditions are timed to coincide with planting or reaping

There's the

Speaker 12 (lower-pitched voice): example of the Bantok people of the

Speaker 21 (lower-pitched voice): Philippines who believe that every farm requires a new head for every planting season. This is around the world we find this kind of thing

And what's very

Speaker 102: interesting about it

is... The

Speaker 102: benefits that are supposed

Speaker 17 (lower-pitched voice): to accrue from the taking of a head are pretty much down the line exactly the same as the benefits that cannibals expect to accrue from their activities

Now, to come back to

Speaker 45: Freud, in Freudian terms

Speaker 12 (lower-pitched voice): this process that we're talking about here, this transition from cannibalism to headhunting, this process of employing a substitute to satisfy a more basic desire is called sublimation, and we all do

it

Speaker 12 (lower-pitched voice): and zombies are completely unsublimated human beings they're human beings without symbolic consciousness and when you strip that away all that's left is their appetite headhunting

is to us

Speaker 12 (lower-pitched voice): it's unimaginably barbaric right but somehow even to us it's

Speaker 62 (lower-pitched voice): somehow less barbaric than ritual cannibalism

And

Speaker 62 (lower-pitched voice): ritual cannibalism is somehow less barbaric than just chaotically attacking

Speaker 20 (lower-pitched voice): and tearing apart an enemy and eating his flesh without any rules or restrictions at all, like a zombie would do. Sublimation

is a

Speaker 20 (lower-pitched voice): term that I think

Speaker 17 (lower-pitched voice): Freud borrowed from chemistry. It refers in chemistry to the process by which matter passes from solid to gas without passing through the intervening liquid phase, and it's a brilliant reappropriation of that term. He uses it to Refer to the process by which a person satisfies an instinctual drive through symbolic means

He uses it to

Speaker 17 (lower-pitched voice): refer to

the

Speaker 47 (lower-pitched voice): process by which a person can satisfy an instinctual drive through symbolic means

a tribe

Speaker 47 (lower-pitched voice): that collects and preserves heads for the same purposes previously satisfied by

Speaker 12 (lower-pitched voice): devouring the flesh of their enemies has sublimated the oral aggressive drive through a symbolic substitute

a person

Speaker 47 (lower-pitched voice): who can extend his instinctual loyalty and desire to protect his biological

kin Who

Speaker 47 (lower-pitched voice): can extend that

Speaker 12 (lower-pitched voice): feeling to fans of the same sports team or to patriots of the same nation is engaging his capacity for sublimation. He's etherealizing a natural

Speaker 13 (lower-pitched voice): impulse, directing its energy toward a symbolic object

if that makes sense

Speaker 60 (lower-pitched voice): Sublimation always refers to a vertical substitution. It's not talking about the replacement of a sacrificial

Speaker 22 (lower-pitched voice): goat with a sacrificial sheep. That's no more

Speaker 21 (lower-pitched voice): psychologically significant than someone with an oral fixation switching from sucking on a pencil to sucking on a pen. Sublimation is taking place when

Speaker 12 (lower-pitched voice): we see the replacement of raw cannibalism for ritual cannibalism of ritually sacrificed victims

Or

Speaker 12 (lower-pitched voice): replacing that with human sacrifice with only symbolic cannibalism, like when people make a sacrifice and then offer the human flesh to their gods as food, right

Or

Speaker 21 (lower-pitched voice): from there to the sacrifice of animals, just like in the Bible when God stopped Abraham from sacrificing his son Isaac and gave him a ram to sacrifice instead

And then

Speaker 21 (lower-pitched voice): replacing

Speaker 12 (lower-pitched voice): that maybe with just, you know, effigies made out of dough and the shape of the animals, as they did in ancient Greece, and as you'll even still today

Speaker 35: see in many Anglican churches to commemorate St. George's slaying of the dragon. A

Speaker 13 (lower-pitched voice): society

that

Speaker 13 (lower-pitched voice): can satisfy its oral aggressive drive by eating a loaf of bread in the shape of a dragon on St. George's Day, that is a different kind of society than one that has to still satisfy it by eating the liver of its

enemies. Okay

Speaker 67 (lower-pitched voice): this is a process. And the question at every level, from the individual to the broader

Speaker 47 (lower-pitched voice): social context, is whether the mind can devise and the individual and the society can tolerate the replacement of a more direct and literal expression

Speaker 64 (lower-pitched voice): of an act with a symbolic, etherealized version. It's

through the long and

Speaker 13 (lower-pitched voice): painful history of this process that human beings who once sacrificed

Speaker 12 (lower-pitched voice): and cannibalized other people were able to leave that behind by sacrificing and pretending to consume the body

Speaker 15 (lower-pitched voice): and blood of Jesus Christ every Sunday in the Christian Mass

One of the

Speaker 17 (lower-pitched voice): most useful examples and extensive examples that we have of this

Speaker 37 (lower-pitched voice): process comes from the Kwakiutl tribes of the bountiful northwestern United States and Canada

Speaker 17 (lower-pitched voice): When the Kwakiutl were discovered by Europeans, excuse me, I've been talking too long. When the Europeans discovered the Kwakiutl. the Kwak Yudle had already developed a form of ritual cannibalism that was

Speaker 42 (lower-pitched voice): restricted to a special society of

sort of

Speaker 42 (lower-pitched voice): almost pseudo-holy men called Hamatsa

The whole

Speaker 103: Kwak Yudle society, all their

Speaker 60 (lower-pitched voice): tribes were divided up into these special societies like this, and they all had a special role in the ceremonial calendar. In the cannibal society, the Hamatsa were among the most prestigious of all the societies. The Hamatsa would... go out of their way to

Speaker 12 (lower-pitched voice): sort of put on a performance of being

Speaker 21 (lower-pitched voice): overcome with a ravenous desire for human flesh when the time of their festivals in the winter came. Or

it might not

Speaker 52 (lower-pitched voice): have been a performance, I don't know, it's hard to say with things like this. It might have been an identity that they took on and that once they took it on, shaped that

Speaker 12 (lower-pitched voice): person in a profound way once they were inducted into the cannibal society, who knows

but

Speaker 12 (lower-pitched voice): anyway a candidate for the cannibal society would be kept apart from everyone else for a period of months and

Speaker 17 (lower-pitched voice): then at the appropriate time he would start to poke around at the outskirts of his village

Speaker 104: whistling and and shouting hap hap

hap eating

Speaker 104: eating eating that's what hat means eating eating

Speaker 75 (lower-pitched voice): eating

and uh when

Speaker 75 (lower-pitched voice): the villagers would hear this

A

Speaker 75 (lower-pitched voice): certain designated female relative would come out to get him and bring him into the village for

Speaker 12 (lower-pitched voice): something to eat, and once he was in there, the cannibal would just rush around, whooping and shouting and screaming like a wild animal, biting pieces of flesh out of the arms and chest of the villagers

Speaker 12 (lower-pitched voice): uh members of the

Speaker 22 (lower-pitched voice): tribe who had died during his months-long separation they tried to preserve the corpses and they would use those to provide him with food and he

Speaker 17 (lower-pitched voice): could also just have slaves slaughtered on demand whenever he was hungry so a great deal of deference was given to this chaotic creature right the anthropologist franz boas

Speaker 12 (lower-pitched voice): reported uh one such instance he said quote a female slave was asked to dance for the

Speaker 73: hamatsa before she began dancing she said do not get hungry, do not eat me

She

Speaker 73: had hardly said so

Speaker 12 (lower-pitched voice): when her master, who was standing behind her, split her skull with an axe. She was eaten by the Hamatsa, end quote

Now what's

Speaker 12 (lower-pitched voice): interesting

Speaker 17 (lower-pitched voice): about this particular form, that is, of taking the activity of cannibalism and sort of splitting it off to

one

Speaker 21 (lower-pitched voice): special designated group, is how the rest of the tribe related to the cannibals

You would

Speaker 12 (lower-pitched voice): think that they would hate these people. You would think that they would despise this bunch of nut jobs running around taking bites out of random

Speaker 21 (lower-pitched voice): people, but it was not that simple. For one thing, they found

a way for

Speaker 21 (lower-pitched voice): just about everybody in the society to participate in the cannibal right one way

Speaker 17 (lower-pitched voice): or another, either in the killing, the preparation of the body

in the

Speaker 17 (lower-pitched voice): ceremony of the meal itself, something. Everybody had a role

Members

Speaker 17 (lower-pitched voice): of the Bear Dancer Society

Speaker 12 (lower-pitched voice): for example, after other people had cut up the body of a slave to be

Speaker 105: eaten, they

Speaker 12 (lower-pitched voice): would have the privilege of picking up the flesh with their bare hands and bringing it to the Hamazza. And as they would hand it to them to be eaten, they would growl like hungry bears

Another society

Speaker 18 (lower-pitched voice): within the Kwakiutl tribes had the job of keeping the cannibal calm and relaxed and soothed

And

Speaker 12 (lower-pitched voice): then another society had the task of taunting him with food and riling him up and making him as crazy

Speaker 13 (lower-pitched voice): as possible

The Hamatsa

Speaker 13 (lower-pitched voice): was supposed to be driven into

Speaker 63 (lower-pitched voice): a frenzy by certain words like ghost, skulls, and the word for decapitated heads would drive him crazy. And so the people would deliberately use these words in his presence

Speaker 60 (lower-pitched voice): or they would sing them in songs to drive the cannibal crazy. And if they were successful

in

Speaker 21 (lower-pitched voice): drawing out the

beast

Speaker 21 (lower-pitched voice): People would run for the exits if they were inside, and whoever got out there and was able to would try to shut and hold the doors closed so that whoever was trapped inside would have bites taken out of them by this frenzied cannibal, right? So this is like

it's very complicated. For

Speaker 62 (lower-pitched voice): all the chaos

that the

Speaker 62 (lower-pitched voice): existence of these people seems to have brought into the social life of the Kwak-Utl, these were highly revered and honored members of their societies

Speaker 17 (lower-pitched voice): And so

The

Speaker 17 (lower-pitched voice): obvious question, if cannibalism is so respectable, why doesn't everybody

Speaker 52 (lower-pitched voice): do it? It's meat, and so if there's nothing wrong with it, why would any of them give it up? And

the answer

Speaker 52 (lower-pitched voice): again, is that it's a sacred act. It's a religious

Speaker 81: act. It's not just a mere mundane munching of calories

There's

Speaker 17 (lower-pitched voice): something similar at play here, too, to what happened with the Maori war here earlier. They had returned from taking revenge as both honored guests and as people who

Speaker 106: were dangerously charged with sacred power. Something very similar. After they

have bitten

Speaker 47 (lower-pitched voice): people, and particularly after they have devoured slaves and corpses

Speaker 15 (lower-pitched voice): the cannibals have to observe many stringent rules before they are allowed to mix freely with other

people. as soon as

Speaker 13 (lower-pitched voice): they have eaten a corpse they swallow great quantities of salt water to make them vomit the bones of the body which they have devoured are preserved for four months the cannibals may not go out of the house by the ordinary door but must always use the secret door in the rear of the house

when they go

Speaker 13 (lower-pitched voice): back to the house they must raise their feet four times before they enter it with the fourth step they actually pass the door and go in right foot first

in the

Speaker 13 (lower-pitched voice): doorway they turn four times and walk slowly into the house they are not allowed to look

back further

Speaker 13 (lower-pitched voice): for four months after eating human flesh the cannibal uses a spoon dish and kettle of his own which are afterwards thrown away before taking water out of a bucket or brook he must dip his cup thrice into the water and he may not take more than four mouthfuls

at a time he must

Speaker 13 (lower-pitched voice): carry the wing-bone of an eagle and drink through it as his lips may not touch the brim of his cup

For

Speaker 13 (lower-pitched voice): sixteen days, after partaking of human flesh, he may not eat any warm food, and for four months he is not allowed to blow on hot food in order to cool it

For a whole year he

Speaker 13 (lower-pitched voice): must not touch his wife, nor gamble, nor work

When the

Speaker 13 (lower-pitched voice): dancing season is over, he feigns

Speaker 76 (lower-pitched voice): to have forgotten the ordinary ways of men, and has to learn everything anew. He

acts as

Speaker 76 (lower-pitched voice): though he were hungry all the time. End quote

And

Speaker 76 (lower-pitched voice): so now I think we start to see what seems to be happening. The

entire society

Speaker 12 (lower-pitched voice): participates in Hamatsa cannibalism vicariously by being somehow enlisted in one or another part of the ritual, allowing

them

Speaker 13 (lower-pitched voice): to partially experience the act without taking on to themselves the dangerous taboo involved

The

Speaker 12 (lower-pitched voice): Hamatsa

is

Speaker 12 (lower-pitched voice): revered as the one who takes the sins of the community upon himself and then endures the period of penance required to purge it

And I want

Speaker 12 (lower-pitched voice): to be very

Speaker 37 (lower-pitched voice): clear, sin and penance and very, very imprecise words here. These people would not have recognized the Christian concepts that we would mean by those terms

Speaker 12 (lower-pitched voice): But I'm using them

because I

Speaker 12 (lower-pitched voice): don't have a better one. There's unquestionably some kind of a similar dynamic at play, I think

You

Speaker 12 (lower-pitched voice): know, we, the people, no longer wish to take on the negative effects of engaging in cannibalism, and yet we're not ready to give it up. You people will do it for us, and we will experience it through you, and

we will serve

Speaker 12 (lower-pitched voice): and revere you as you recover from the consequences of that. The Kauk-Utl, they

Speaker 47 (lower-pitched voice): provide some of the best illustrations of this process of sublimation and action

because Kauk-Utl, they provide some of the best illustrations of this process of sublimation and action

Speaker 47 (lower-pitched voice): because Kauk-Utl, they provide some of the best illustrations

of this process of sublimation and action, You

Speaker 47 (lower-pitched voice): know, a lot of it took place before our

Speaker 12 (lower-pitched voice): eyes. You know, like parents placing sanctions on their children, European settlers came in and saw what was going on and forced the Kwakiutl against their will to give up many of these more barbaric practices

You know, we see

Speaker 12 (lower-pitched voice): the process of substitution take place in real time. And we even see that the Kwakiutl themselves were perfectly aware of what they were doing

You know, when the

Speaker 86: Europeans arrived... Kwakiutl tribes were aggressive and warlike, and they

Speaker 46 (lower-pitched voice): engaged not only in limited cannibalism, but also in headhunting, incessant warfare

Speaker 17 (lower-pitched voice): and vendettas. They're famous for a form of symbolic combat called

Speaker 12 (lower-pitched voice): the potlatch, where two combatants, two rivals, would compete for status by seeing who was willing and able to waste or destroy the most of his own property, including sacrificing slaves

And so

Speaker 12 (lower-pitched voice): when Europeans began to settle the region, they weren't going to abide cannibalism and human sacrifice next door to them. And so they forced the Kwakiutl to knock it off. And what happened next

I mean, it sums

Speaker 12 (lower-pitched voice): up the whole process of progressive sublimation almost perfectly. They would destroy blankets and food, and important men would compete by destroying these decorated pieces of copper that they called coppers

That

Speaker 12 (lower-pitched voice): were the

Speaker 60 (lower-pitched voice): most valuable items in the whole Kwak-Uda world. One good copper would often be worth hundreds of blankets

And so

Speaker 12 (lower-pitched voice): the aggressive nature of this kind of symbolic combat, it was right out in the open. And it was recognized by everybody

This is a

Speaker 42 (lower-pitched voice): passage reported about an interaction that involved one of the white settlers named Charles Wilson. And he threw

the

Speaker 76 (lower-pitched voice): copper on the ground, saying, You

We

Speaker 76 (lower-pitched voice): have also heard that you are another one who doesn't want our nephew to change his position

And here

Speaker 52 (lower-pitched voice): is another copper for you, and I am giving it to you to make you shut up

They put these

Speaker 52 (lower-pitched voice): two coppers together, and he says

Speaker 13 (lower-pitched voice): to the young men to take these out to the deep water there and drown them

That means

Speaker 13 (lower-pitched voice): that they want to drown old Wannock and Charlie Wilson

That was why I warned

Speaker 13 (lower-pitched voice): you not to come near my house and wake the baby up. But since you have wakened him up, today I am going to break this copper for you two that have been making all the noise

And

Speaker 13 (lower-pitched voice): he cut half the top off and another corner from the bottom and gave one part of each to

Speaker 12 (lower-pitched voice): Mamalelacala chiefs that threw their coppers into the water. Then he says

Speaker 107: End quote

Speaker 108: So after the settlers arrived and began to pressure the natives

Speaker 12 (lower-pitched voice): to stop all this... Even the Cannibal Society modified its own behavior, and they did it themselves. Instead of taking bites out of people, they would lift up a bit of the skin with their teeth and slice a tiny piece of skin off. And instead of swallowing it, they would put it behind their ear and then run around all crazy like they

Speaker 21 (lower-pitched voice): do. But then later on, they would come and give the piece of skin back just to let the person know that they weren't going to work any magic using it or something like that. So these

things are evolving, I

Speaker 21 (lower-pitched voice): mean, right in front of Western anthropologists. Franz Boas reported that the destruction of property was not only used against a person to harm the prestige or take revenge on another person, but it was also used

Speaker 42 (lower-pitched voice): as a replacement for other instances when sacrificing human beings normally would have taken place. This is done

mainly at the

Speaker 76 (lower-pitched voice): time when houses are built, when totem poles are erected, or when a son has been initiated by the spirit presiding

Speaker 13 (lower-pitched voice): over the secret society of his clan

it seems

Speaker 12 (lower-pitched voice): that in olden times slaves were sometimes killed and buried under the house posts or under totem poles later on instead