Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 26.djvu/224

212 dead for the oven, while the bad were thrown away. If it was a woman, they ate only the arms and legs. On Maré they devoured all. Their appetite for human flesh was never satisfied. "'Do you mean to say that you will forbid us the fish of the sea? Why, these are our fish!' This is how they talked when you spoke against cannibalism."

When white men first landed in Australia the degraded natives received them with the greatest respect; they considered them to be the embodied spirits of their own dead. The Australians were, and still are, in the less-known northern parts, habitual cannibals, and always eat their own dead, for fear of wasting good provision. The black bodies being scalded, when being prepared for the oven, became white as the black cuticle came away. Thus, when Europeans first presented themselves to their astonished visions, they simply and reverently received them as the materialized spirits of their scalded ancestry.

Among the Indians of America the custom does not ever seem to have been a universal one, although it was general among certain tribes. Schoolcraft relates, in his great work on the "Indian Tribes," that the Sioux will eat the heart of an enemy, and that all the war party will try to get a mouthful, believing, with the Maoris, that they gain courage thereby. Back, too, in his "Arctic Expedition," tells of a Cree Indian who had killed and eaten his wife, daughter, and two sons, and would have killed the youngest, a boy, and fed upon him also, had he not come upon Back's encampment. But this can hardly be cited as a case typical of the cannibal instincts of that tribe, as it was only brought about by the direct famine. In Terra del Fuego the otherwise unreasoning natives show a spirit of intelligent economy by always eating, in times of great distress and want, the oldest women of the tribe, as being of much less value than their dogs, which they will not kill until all the grandmothers are consumed.

But one of the strangest phases of cannibal lore has yet to be touched upon, that, namely, with which all the greatest thaumaturgists and necromancers have been accused from the days of Hadrian, who is known to have sacrificed many young lives in the prosecution of his unholy inquiries, to our own. There is some foundation for this belief in the fact that for some of the deeper and wilder mysteries of the black art an innocent life had to be offered up, from the emanations of whose spilled blood the disembodied spirits of the invoked dead could materialize themselves, and answer the queries of those daring seekers who stopped at nothing to gain their unhallowed ends. It is related that the necromancers of Thessaly added the blood of infants to that of black lambs in their incantatory rites, that the evoked spirits would render themselves objective from the exhalations of the blood. In the present day Hayti is charged with being the home of a secret sect of devil-worshipers, the Voodoos, who practice most mysterious and impious solemnities, in which children are killed and offered up, and the bodies eaten by the adepts as part of the awful ceremonial. The