Guidebooks warn of many dangers that may await travelers in a particular country. But no one warns about cannibalism. Surprise! Cannibalism is still practiced in some tribes such as India, Cambodia and West Africa. And here are 7 countries where tribes are still not averse to feasting on people.

South East Papua New Guinea

The Korowai tribe is one of the last on Earth that regularly eats human flesh. They live along the river, and there have been cases when they killed random tourists. Healers also considered warm brains a real delicacy.

Why do they eat people? When someone in the tribe dies for no apparent reason (illness or old age), they consider it an act of black magic and, in order to protect others from harm, must eat the person.

Interesting fact: In 1961, Michael Rockefeller (son of New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller) disappeared while collecting artifacts about the tribe. His body was never found.

India

The North Indian Hindu sect of Aghori eats volunteers who bequeath their entrails. However, in 2005, Indian television crews conducted an investigation and learned that they also eat decaying corpses from the Ganges (a local tradition), and also steal organs from crematoria.

Why do they eat people?

Aghori believe that this prevents aging of the body.

Interesting fact: They make really nice jewelry out of human bone and skulls.

Fiji

Formerly known as "Cannibal Island". Until now, local residents cannot restore order, and there are still those who eat human flesh, but not all, but only those of enemy tribes.

Why do they eat people? This is a ritual of revenge.

Interesting fact: Fijian cannibals are not animals at all - they eat with cutlery and collect rare things left over from their victims. You can find examples of such collections at the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archeology and Anthropology.

Brazil

The Wari tribe ate pious and religious dead until 1960, and after that some government missionaries slaughtered almost the entire tribe. However, poverty levels in Olinda's slums have been prohibitively high since 1994, and outbreaks of cannibalism still occur.

Why do they eat people? Poverty and hunger.

Interesting fact: In 2012, information appeared from researchers who interviewed local residents, and they claimed that they heard voices that told them to kill this or that person.

West Africa

The Leopard Society of Active Cannibals has been eating people since the last century. Until the 80s, human remains were found in the vicinity of Sierra Leone, Liberia and Cote d'Ivoire. The tribe is usually dressed in leopard skins and armed with their fangs.

Why do they eat people? The tribe believes that eating people makes them stronger and faster.

Interesting fact: They have a following - the Human Alligator community, which does similar things.

Cambodia

Journalist Neil Davis reported that cannibalism in these regions gained momentum during the wars in Southeast Asia (in the 1960s and 1970s). Nowadays, manifestations of cannibalism are occasionally observed.

Why do they eat people? The Cambodian troops had a ritual - eating the liver of the enemy.

Interesting fact: Many people in cities and villages were under the control of the Khmer Rouge organization, which strictly controlled all food in the area and artificially created famine in the country.

Congo

There are known cases of cannibalism in the Congo, and the latest were recorded not so long ago - in 2012. They reached their maximum during the Congolese civil war (from 1998 to 2002).

Why do they eat people? During the war, rebel groups believed that enemies should be eaten, especially the heart, which was cooked using special herbs.

Interesting fact: Congolese still believe that the human heart gives special strength, and if there are people, this will scare away enemies.

Have a nice adventure! :)

In recent years, from time to time the public has been shocked by reports of acts cannibalism (cannibalism, anthropophagy). Most often, this is criminal cannibalism, that is, associated with committing crimes, usually murders, followed by eating parts of the victim’s body, drinking her blood, etc.

There is, of course, non-criminal cannibalism, for example, when a leg amputated by a surgeon is eaten. Criminal cannibalism is more often associated with sexual crimes, i.e. committed on sexual grounds and in connection with sexual experiences.

In the modern period, criminal cannibalism first attracted serious attention in connection with the crimes of the notorious Chikatilo, who killed 53 people (women, girls and boys) for sexual reasons over 15 years and was exposed in 1990.

He was a pathetic personality, a life and sexual failure, a passive homosexual and impotent, but he became a formidable and inexorable killer when he gained power over the victim.

He lived in some kind of his own world, in his own altered reality, where no one had access and which was divided into ordinary life at home, at work and during those hours when he lured and killed the victim. Having killed her, he dismembered her, chopped her up, cut out pieces of her body, usually associated with sexual life, and often ate them: in boys he ate the contents of the scrotum.

Chikatilo's cannibalism can be explained in different ways, but I believe that what basically needs to be kept in mind here is the following: 1) eating the intimate parts of a woman's body on a symbolic level had the meaning of possessing her, since in real life he, an impotent man, could not do this; 2) the eating of boys’ genitals could have occurred in order to acquire their male sexual strength, which he sorely lacked.

I believe that if he could kill a grown man, he would probably do the same thing. Thus, Chikatilo’s cannibalism had a purely sexual meaning and was generated by his pathetic and unsuccessful attempts to gain biological male status, to assert himself in intersexual relations, at least on a psychological level, thereby ensuring self-acceptance.

The latter was extremely important for him, since constant failures in the sphere of these relationships caused him very painful psychological trauma. He generally considered himself a failure in life, a man persecuted by fate. Therefore, in conversations with me, he spoke a lot on this topic, listing in detail all the insults and insults inflicted on him, especially from women and related to sexual failures.

I deliberately do not dwell in detail on Chikatilo’s crimes, since they were covered in more detail in the press and other media. Here you need to pay attention to the fact that this killer is a sex offender and the acts of cannibalism, as I tried to show, were also committed on sexual grounds. Eating the male genital organs, which give sexual power, shows how effective and efficient the archetypal mechanisms and the collective unconscious discovered by K.G. Jung.

The belief that eating the corresponding parts of a person’s body leads to the fact that the cannibal acquires the desired abilities that the victim possessed was preserved from ancient man in the collective unconscious and manifests itself in the actions of modern people. This phenomenon is well known to ethnologists.

Along with Chikatilo, the cannibal killer gained worldwide fame Dzhumagaliev, whose actions and personality stand out even among other necrophiliac serial killers. What these two monsters have in common is that their crimes took place on a sexual basis and were closely connected with sexual experiences generated by a catastrophe in intersexual relations.

Dzhumagaliev, 30 years old, killed seven women in Kazakhstan in 1979. In the first five cases, as a hunter, he waited in ambush for his victims at night and immediately stabbed them with a knife, killing the rest at home.

The first victim was A., he dismembered her corpse, took parts of her body home and ate it for a month, made dumplings, fried it, boiled it. A few weeks later he killed K. and drank the blood from the corpse. Soon after this, he attacked L. and Ya., but did not drink their blood or eat their meat, as he was prevented.

The next victim was V., the killer drank her blood and buried parts of her body in the ground, but did not eat them, because he intended to melt the fat from her body in order to cover his grandfather’s grave with it. This was followed by the murders of two more women; he dismembered their corpses and drank their blood, cut off their heads, and ate their brains. In one of them, he made a hole in the lower abdomen with a knife and performed sexual intercourse through it.

This is a brief list of Dzhumagaliev’s absolutely monstrous acts. A psychiatric examination of this supermonster showed that he had a burdened heredity: his paternal aunt was strange, withdrawn, and her older sister had something wrong with her psyche. He grew and developed normally and did not lag behind. Selectively sociable, more reserved; hardworking, loved order and justice, and especially travel and animals.

At an early age he began to go hunting with his peers and with his grandfather, whom he revered very much, and then more often alone. Little by little, the love for animals became excessive, overvalued, I thought a lot about their defenselessness and was indignant at the attitude towards them. While hunting, he began to shoot past game and nursed wounded animals. He believed that animals understood him, and he understood them.

He became interested in girls at the age of eight; from the age of 16 he periodically met with them, but did not attempt sexual intimacy. The stories about animal and human sacrifices made a great impression. In 1970 he graduated from the railway school and worked in his specialty for some time.

While serving in the army, at first everything was fine, then my mood noticeably decreased and I began to drink; After demobilization, he tried to go to college twice, but nothing came of it, which led him to think that he was a failure. He went to the mountains and lived in caves for a long time. From 1974 to 1977, he traveled around the country and worked in various organizations, then returned to the state farm to his parents.

With women he was reserved and shy. Since 1975, he began to have visual images of various naked parts of the female body and internal organs, while experiencing sexual arousal. I had sexual intercourse mainly with random women; I became infected with syphilis, and then with trichomoniasis.

Upon returning to his parents, he began to live permanently with a certain Ya., however, this cohabitation was more than strange; He beat her, at his request she entered into intimate relationships with friends, and at the same time he believed that Ya was behaving incorrectly, and constantly instructed her.

Gradually, he began to be disgusted by sexual intercourse, he did not receive complete satisfaction, but the craving for the female body remained, the influx of “transparent”, often severed parts and organs of the female body, as well as entrails, intensified. He discovered the dominance of matriarchy and “accurately” assessed its danger, therefore deciding that women needed to be feared (I carefully studied his handwritten notes, which contain these thoughts). There was a desire to drink their blood in order to receive the gift of prophecy, and came to the idea that by eating female flesh, he would reduce his attraction to them.

After each murder, he noted with satisfaction that debauchery had decreased, women began to respect men more, and they began to fear. Once, during sexual intercourse with a random woman, he choked her, punched her in the stomach, pinched her breasts and legs, and declared that she drank his blood. At the same time he looked pleased and smiled.

He told expert psychiatrists that he prepared for every murder and hunt for women as if it were a solemn event. He developed an aversion to meat and ordinary sexual intercourse; there was only a passion for the dismembered female body and a desire to have sexual intercourse through a puncture wound on the stomach. Dzhumagaliev’s surviving handwritten notes say that the human meat eaten led to an increase in “independent train of thought.”

He became an extraordinary person. His contribution will benefit society and will be appreciated in the future, and in order to better record this, after all the murders, he should have gone to the mountains and written an instructive scientific work. He awaits his execution with interest in order to “catch the impulse of the transition from life to death and understand the meaning of life.”

Dzhumagaliev was diagnosed with schizophrenia. However, this does not free us from the need to answer the most difficult question: what is the internal, personal meaning of what Dzhumagaliev committed, what pushed him to such monstrous acts. Undoubtedly, he was distinguished by cruelty, absolute insensitivity towards people, and necrosadism.

There is also no doubt that this is a deeply alienated person, almost completely lost contact with the outside world, hating women, whom he regards as the source and focus of evil. However, these correct statements, as well as the presence of schizophrenia, do not bring us very close to uncovering the reason why he killed women and, most importantly, why he ate the bodies of those killed.

The important fact that Dzhumagaliev killed women, not men or children, requires explanation. It seems to me that the answer may be the following: with women he was reserved and shy, that is, most likely, he feared rebuff from them, and therefore they seemed to him a hostile force: he cohabited only with random, easily accessible women, in other words, the choice of sexual the partner was completely unpersonalized for him, which ultimately is also associated with the fear of being rejected by others; from such connections he became infected with dangerous venereal diseases; Dzhumagaliev did not have a proper relationship with Y., with whom he cohabited for more or less a long time.

By pushing her into intimate relationships with his acquaintances, he thereby pushed her away from him and at the same time convinced himself of the danger of women, these malicious creatures. It is especially significant that this cannibal wanted to perform sexual intercourse in the wounds on the stomach and in fact performed them - this also indicates the rejection of the woman, concentrated in this case on the genital organ, he does not seem to notice it, does not want to have anything to do with it.

Dzhumagaliev’s hostile attitude towards women is a particular manifestation of his absolute disadaptation to the modern world. With good reason he can be called a “primitive” man. Thus, hatred of women and, above all, the action of the collective unconscious in the form of a return of cannibalism powerfully stimulated the unprecedented actions of this man.

Dzhumagaliev, as insane, was sent for treatment to a psychiatric hospital in Kazakhstan, where he stayed for over 10 years and was then discharged. According to reports, he then fled. I don't know how effective the cannibal's treatment was, but there is no certainty that he no longer poses a danger.

In terms of his psychological characteristics, Dzhumagaliev differs little from other criminals similar to him. Like them, he is a necrophilic, extremely aggressive person, closed, autistic, maladjusted. He constantly lives in another world, not only psychologically, but also physically, the latter due to psychological reasons. So, he left the alien world of people for the mountains and lived for a long time in a cave, felt a special closeness to animals and believed that he understood them. His maladjustment is also manifested in his extreme hatred of women, due to his sexual failures and isolation, as well as the fact that he suffered from syphilis.

It is very important that Dzhumagaliev is interested in the moment of his own execution in order to “catch the impulse of the transition from life to death.” As a person belonging to different worlds, he quite naturally pays special attention to the line that separates life from death, and thinks that this would help him understand the meaning of life, which, in general, is not without reason.

Regarding Dzhumagaliev’s special closeness to animals, I consider it necessary to cite some interesting considerations by M. Eliade: “...Acquiring friendship and at the same time power over animals within the framework of archaic thought (Dzhumagaliev’s behavior should be explained primarily from archetypal positions, as discussed below) does not mean no regression to a lower biological level. Since, on the one hand, animals are endowed with symbolism and mythology, which are of great importance in religious life, then communicating with animals, speaking their language and becoming their friend and master means gaining a spiritual life that is much richer than the life of a mere mortal. And on the other hand, the prestige of animals in the eyes of “primitive” man is very great: they know the secrets of life and nature, they even know the secrets of longevity and immortality.”*

It is worth noting that the first sign of the re-creation of paradise life is the establishment of dominance over animals, and it was not by chance that animals were ordered to be given names, and this was equivalent to the ability to command them.

In mystical tales, animals sometimes obeyed the saints, who fed them like pets. Friendship with wild animals and their voluntary acceptance of human domination have long been considered clear signs of the return of a paradise state and even paradise times. It is possible that this primitive man - Dzhumagaliev - manifested a desire to return to the original time.

For some reason, the numerous crimes of the Novokuznetsk sexual murderer and cannibal Spesivtsev turned out to be little known. Meanwhile, this is undoubtedly one of the most bloodthirsty killers of our time. Probably, the media, which are usually very keen on such matters, paid little attention to him. I will provide data about him from the press, but, unfortunately, they suffer from significant incompleteness.

In the summer of 1996, pieces of children’s bodies and skulls began to be found in the Lbe River in Novokuznetsk. It was firmly established that they were dismembered at home. At the same time, children began to disappear in the city, usually from disadvantaged families.

The search was carried out on a large scale, during which attention was drawn to the family Spesivtsevs, has long been known to the police. By that time it consisted of three people: mother Lyudmila, daughter Nadezhda and son Alexander (then he was 22 years old); the father, allegedly an alcoholic, was kicked out of the house and lived separately.

It was a family alienated from others, but very united, and cohesion especially manifested itself at the antisocial level, that is, any offense of a family member was immediately taken under its protection, and the guilty person justified himself in front of others by any means - the family acted as a united front.

So, all three could spit in one gulp at a person they didn’t like and call him obscene words, but it is equally important to emphasize that the mother defended her son in everything, even more than the daughter, and the daughter always stood up for her brother. The mother stole, little by little and often, the son constantly stole and committed many petty hooligan acts. However, they somehow got away with everything, I think, in no small part thanks to the cohesion of the family, the resourcefulness of each of them and deceit, the ability to stand up for themselves individually and together.

In 1991, Alexander, who was distinguished by his frail physique and reticence, met a certain Zhenya, and many believed that things were heading towards marriage. But when Zhenya decided to break up with him, he locked her in the apartment and tortured and beat her for almost a month. When the police finally arrived, they saw a dead girl lying huddled on the sofa, as if trying to keep warm. She was wearing only a robe over her naked body, she was completely dry, looked like a twelve-year-old child, and there were many sores on her body. She was scalped, but her head was neatly tied with a scarf.

Spesivtsev was able to avoid criminal liability because he was declared insane and sent for compulsory treatment to the Oryol psychiatric hospital. However, three years later they decided that he had recovered, and the criminal returned home.

As the newspapers reported after his arrest, he began to take revenge on everyone both for the “psychiatric hospital” and for all the insults; neighbors allegedly heard terrible screams from his apartment: something was being chopped, the only strange thing was that proper measures were not taken.

Spesivtsev was exposed, as often happens with us, by accident. Plumbers carried out heating maintenance. Spesivtsev did not open the door, he said that he was being kept locked up as a mentally ill person. When, together with the local inspector, they broke down the door, a heavy cadaverous smell came from the apartment. In the bathtub lay the body - a stump, in a huge saucepan - the remains of the body, the head. In one of the rooms they found a girl wounded in the stomach, with a broken arm, completely naked; she died a few days later in hospital.

During the preliminary investigation, it was established that Spesivtsev killed 19 people, including boys, but 82 sets of clothes with traces of blood were found in his house; their owners, as far as can be judged, could not be identified, which suggests that no one was killed. 19 people, and much more.

Spesivtsev himself killed, often after mocking the victim; sometimes he took Polaroid photographs of his victims in the nude. He butchered and dismembered the corpses together with his mother, she cooked pieces of the body, he ate it and forced those victims who were still alive to eat.

The dog, a diver, had long been eating only human meat. Sometimes Spesivtsev, without leaving the apartment, spent three or four days with the dead (there were sometimes 3-4 people at once). Then the mother came, they cut up the corpses, and she always took them away. All this continued for a long time: he killed, dismembered human bodies, sometimes ate pieces of bodies, fed them to the dog, tortured the victims, prolonging their torment, and constantly inhaled the smell of corpses.

He had long been engaged to death, even from those days when he gradually, day after day, killed the unfortunate Zhenya; he lived next to death, not at all embarrassed by its proximity, since it was close, understandable, and therefore for many days, without leaving the house, he was in a vile, dense corpse evaporation, probably living on this evaporation. And death also provided the opportunity to take revenge on the hated world, which is why it, death, was so necessary. Because of this, he, like many necrophiliac murderers, killed easily, without regret, never repented, on the contrary, he received great satisfaction from depriving others of their lives.

The general motivation for Spesivtsev’s crimes is clear - he took revenge on all of humanity, killed, realizing his enormous brutal potential. There are many frail, skinny, sickly people in the world, but only a tiny fraction of them will dare to raise a hand against another.

It was precisely his high aggressiveness, which initially found expression in violence against neighbors and other loved ones, that gave him the opportunity to commit the first murder - Zhenya, and then kill again and again, without hesitation and without fear of anyone or anything. I believe that death itself added considerable strength to him, which existed right there, nearby, helping him, but also demanding new victims. He brought them, in the powerless hope of finding satisfaction for the hatred that burned him. Why was Spesivtsev still involved in cannibalism?

I think that the motives for cannibalism here are similar to those that pushed Chikatilo to similar actions - Spesivtsev ate pieces of a woman’s body and thereby took revenge for his sexual failures and, in particular, for the fact that Zhenya pushed him away. Apparently, the eloquent fact that the killer’s dog ate human flesh also needs explanation.

One can assume here cannibalism “by someone else’s hands,” or psychological cannibalism: the dog acted as a psychological continuation of the Novokuznetsk monster, and the fact that it ate human flesh also gave a sweet feeling of revenge to people.

Spesivtsev's mother Lyudmila deserves special analysis. First of all, she is an accomplice to murder and cannibalism, and I want to emphasize that complicity is not only a criminal legal category, but also a moral category. She is an accomplice in the criminal legal sense because she deceived the victims into the house so that her son would kill them; he always hoped for her help, namely, that she would take away the corpses and hide the traces of the crime. She is an accomplice in cannibalism, since she dismembered the bodies of the dead, boiled them, gave them to the dog to eat, and her son also ate them - this is from a moral point of view.

In general, Lyudmila Spesivtseva is a typical necrophiliac personality, a man of death, since she actively contributed to the murders committed by her son, she felt the death of many people at his hands as the only way out of the life situation in which Alexander found himself, many murders were committed in her presence, she dismembered corpses and cooked pieces of human meat, feeding them to the dog.

However, her criminal help to her son was not simple maternal support - in this way she atone for a deeply disturbing feeling of guilt: from her womb came this frail, frail, pathetic, weak, always sick little man who did not enjoy any success with women and had no friends. Nobody needed him at all. Except her.

It is among serial killers, and according to my data, cannibals are now predominantly found among them in our country, in this regard, Dzhumagaliev is especially characteristic, and to a lesser extent Chikatilo. One might think that in some context drinking the blood of a victim is also cannibalism.

The following types of causes of cannibalism as a phenomenon in general are currently known.

1. Cannibalism for reasons of acute hunger, which in modern conditions occurs quite rarely and usually in extreme circumstances, more often in groups cut off from the rest of the world (for example, in the taiga, after a shipwreck, etc.). There are much more cases of cannibalism during mass famine, as happened in the USSR in the early 30s and in Ethiopia in the late 70s and early 80s.

2. Cannibalism, which can be called symbolic or ritual, and whose origins lie in ancient times. It has been established that primitive man ate other people not only because of hunger and gastronomic impulses, but also in order to acquire strength, intelligence, courage and other important qualities that he believed the victim possessed. People then believed (modern savages still believe) that the repository of these enviable qualities were individual parts of the human body.

Cannibalism was also part of primitive religion, for example the Fijians, whose gods are considered great hunters of human meat.

The mythological and symbolic sides of cannibalism seem quite complex. M. Eliade notes that at the primitive stage of culture we encounter ritual cannibalism, which is ultimately the spiritually determined behavior of a “good” savage. The cannibal's greatest concern seems essentially metaphysical - never to forget what happened in "time immemorial." Research has shown that by killing and eating pigs during celebrations and the first fruits of the root crop harvest, a person, according to M. Eliade, eats divine flesh in the same way as during the cannibal festivals.

Pig sacrifice, "skull hunting" and cannibalism symbolically mean the same thing as harvesting. An edible plant is not provided by nature. It is a product of murder because that is how it was created at the beginning of time. "Skull hunting", human sacrifice, cannibalism - all this was adopted by man to ensure the life of plants. Cannibalism is a type of behavior characteristic of a given culture and based on a religious vision of the world.

Before we condemn cannibalism, we must always remember that it was ordained by the deities. They laid the foundation for it so that man could take responsibility for the cosmos, to put him in the position of overseer of the continuation of plant life. Consequently, cannibalism had to do with responsibility of a religious nature*.

These thoughts seem to me more than controversial and, in any case, unproven. It is completely false, of course, that an edible plant is not provided by nature, but if there are mythological data about this, the author should have pointed them out. But even if such plants are not provided by nature and they are the product of murder, it is still unclear why one should eat one’s own kind because of this - this does not follow from the texts of M. Eliade.

It is even more unclear how cannibalism ensures plant life, if you follow this author. Meanwhile, the research of ethnologists indicates that human sacrifices for the sake of crops or other benefits were sometimes actually accompanied by cannibalism.

But, as one can assume, there is a different meaning and a different mechanism here than those analyzed by M. Eliade. Perhaps this is a joint meal with the gods (god), which made them psychologically closer and more accessible, which means that their help in growing plants, increasing livestock, etc. would be more realistic. It is possible that by eating people during ritual sacrifices, ancient man at the same time simply satisfied his hunger. This seems to be justified because the need for any savage sacrifice would be unnecessary if the people were not in danger of starvation. Finding food is his most pressing concern.

If the gods, as, for example, among the Fijians, were considered great hunters of human flesh, then cannibalism made it possible to get quite close to them, acquiring new power. The gods were especially active at the beginning of time, and this period is very holy for primitive man; Constantly returning to it, such a person draws his strength from him. For the reason mentioned, cannibalism was also very possible.

At the same time, there is no doubt that cannibalism, as M. Eliade notes, is a type of behavior characteristic of a given culture and based on a religious (more precisely, pre-religious) vision of the world. Meanwhile, I would like to clarify that culture should be understood not only as religious, spiritual and moral development, but also as the state of the productive forces.

One should not think that such wild ideas existed and still exist only among primitive peoples. The fact is that such views are preserved in universal human unremembered memory and, through the mechanisms of the collective unconscious (the corresponding theory was created by C. G. Jung), return to people living not only in the countries of the so-called third world, but also in completely civilized ones. This is confirmed by the analysis of criminal cases of serial sexual murders.

It allows us to conclude that these ideas continue to live today among those who did not know about the significance of cannibalism in ancient times and therefore did not evaluate the corresponding acts in such a quality. Sexual killer Chikatilo bit off and ate the nipples and uteruses of murdered women, that is, those parts of the body that are associated with sexual life. This can be interpreted as an attempt to symbolically master the woman, since he, being impotent, could not do this in reality.

The same criminal ate the tips of the tongues and testicles of boys, which can be explained by his desire to take from them male sexual power, which he, an impotent man, did not have. Such symbolic cannibalistic actions can be observed in some other sexual killers, including Dzhumagaliev, who, according to him, the eaten female body endowed with the gift of prophecy and led to an increase in “independent train of thoughts.” In other words, he allegedly acquired qualities that he had previously been deprived of.

3. Symbolic cannibalism is closely intertwined with that variety of this phenomenon as a whole, which can be called ritual, when a person is sacrificed to a deity or some secret powerful forces in order to appease them and obtain the desired benefits, but at the same time, individual parts of the body are eaten by the killers themselves in order to master the qualities and abilities of what you eat. Since the savage gave part of the victim’s body to the deity, and consumed the other himself, he, as noted above, thereby created a common meal with the deity, that is, he psychologically approached him as much as possible, and this promised him great benefits.

It seems that the presence of ritual motivation among modern cannibals should in no case be ignored. The fact is that in our country, unfortunately, the most barbaric beliefs, which have nothing in common with civilized religion, have become dangerously widespread. Therefore, cannibalism on such mystical grounds is by no means ruled out. The fascination of persons suspected of relevant crimes with ancient secret teachings may serve as a sign indicating the presence of the named motive.

Let me remind you that Dzhumagaliev was very interested in animal and human sacrifices. His intention to smear his grandfather’s grave with the fat of a murdered woman can be regarded as an attempt at sacrifice, but this is not an act of cannibalism, which interests us in the first place, especially since the sacrifice was made not to God, but to his grandfather.

4. Cannibalism of persons who kill and eat other people, treat acquaintances with human meat or sell it, but their actions do not reveal the motives characteristic of cannibals from the first three groups. It seems that the cannibalism of representatives of this type is generated by an unconscious sense of themselves as a biological being that does not belong to the human race, completely outside the boundaries of this race, not connected with it either socially, psychologically, biologically, much less morally. Acts of cannibalism may be accompanied by erotic, sadistic or mystical fantasies, which can also be observed among representatives of the first three groups.

Among this group of cannibals, one can distinguish those who, by eating other people, assert themselves in the eyes of a small antisocial group, showing themselves to be a superman. Cannibalism can also act as a way of self-affirmation, when a person seeks to prove to himself that he is able to overcome all prohibitions and norms, acting only as he himself wishes.

5. In ancient times, at the stage of transition from animals to humans, cannibalism was generally common, and the human body was eaten as food, like animals and plants. This was the most wild era, when man had not yet completely isolated himself from the animal world, much less from among his own kind, which, apparently, was preserved for a long time among the most archaic tribes. Many primitive people even believed that certain animals were not only superior to them in their physical strength, but also smarter, more cunning, and more resourceful than them. I think that not separating oneself from the animal world, not feeling oneself as a person, much less autonomous, is the main reason for cannibalism in so-called prehistoric times.

The eternally modern myth of a lost paradise, a noble savage, a most beautiful land and magnificent landscapes, an ideal state (for example, pre-Columbian), etc. completely ignores the fact that all these previously supposedly existing “goods” and “beauties” in almost all cases, in significant numbers, were associated with cannibals and cannibalism. But the fact is that the cannibal savages, in turn, have their own ideas about the lost paradise, about the original immeasurable happiness, when man was immortal and directly communicated with God (gods), he did not need to work, since he was “easy” fed by nature or fabulous agricultural implements that worked like automata.

It would seem that one might think that his idleness in those blissful times was expressed in the fact that he did not grow cereals, did not hunt or raise livestock: it was enough for him to go to war with another tribe or capture an unwary neighbor in order to provide himself with an excellent dinner or dinner.

In any case, despite all its disgusting and dangerous nature, cannibalism has deeply rooted itself in human consciousness, and although civilization has achieved undoubted success since its widespread spread, it manifests itself again from time to time and in different forms. But, of course, one should not exaggerate the scale of this phenomenon and associate it only with difficult socio-economic phenomena or a decline in morality.

This would be primitivization: as shown above, the causes and mechanisms of the phenomenon under consideration are quite complex and ambiguous. However, the individual acts of cannibalism that occur produce a deafening impression, and those people who directly encounter them usually come into a state of shock.

It can be assumed that cannibalism, but in a completely different form (it can be called psychological), was also accepted by Christianity. Thus, during the Last Supper, Christ established the sacrament of the Eucharist, or communion, as a grace-filled means of uniting believers with Christ - communion of His body and blood as a true lamb. During the supper, “Jesus took bread, blessed it, broke it, and gave it to the disciples, saying: Take, eat: this is My body. And taking the cup and giving thanks, he gave it to them and said, “Drink from it, all of you, for this is My Blood of the New Testament, which is shed for many for the remission of sins” (Gospel of Matthew 26:26-28). Of course, the communion of His body and blood, despite all the differences in the understanding of the Eucharist by different branches of Christianity, is always symbolic.

Another, no less serious, hypothesis is the assumption that the sacrament of the Eucharist is a relic of the ancient totemic custom of god-eating (geophagy), in which participants in the mysteries ate the meat of a sacred animal and drank its blood. Later, images of animals and gods began to be used for such sacrifices. J.J. Frazer noted that “the custom of killing a god in the person of an animal arose at a very early stage of human culture. Tearing apart and devouring alive, for example, bulls and calves, was apparently

personal feature of the Dionysian cult. If we take into account the custom of depicting God in the form of a bull and generally giving him features of resemblance to this animal, the belief that in the form of a bull he appeared before believers in sacred rites, as well as the tradition that he was torn to pieces in the form bull, then we will have to admit that by tearing apart and devouring the bull at the festival of Dionysus, the cult participants believed that they were killing the god, eating his flesh and drinking his blood. J.J. Frazer gives numerous examples of eating God from the life of primitive tribes.

The killing of a representative of God (according to J. J. Frazer) left a noticeable mark, for example, in the Condon sacrificial rites. So, the ashes of the slaughtered Mary were scattered across the fields; the blood of a Brahmin youth was sprinkled on crops and fields; the flesh of the killed naga was placed for storage in grain bins; Sioux girls sprinkled their blood on the seeds. The identification of the sacrifice with the bread, that is, the idea of ​​it as the embodiment or spirit of the bread, makes itself felt in the conditions which were applied to establish a physical correspondence between the spirit and the natural object serving as its embodiment or representative. The Mexicans, for example, sacrificed children to young shoots, and old people to ripe ears of corn.

So, there are two versions about the origin of the Eucharist, which, as I suggested above, on a symbolic level is generated by cannibalism. Which of them is more true, or both are true and do not contradict each other; did not “simple” cannibalism precede the Eucharist, that is, anthropophagy of theophagy? It is possible that in different areas of the world life itself solved this issue differently, but, most likely, the first preceded the second, but not vice versa, or they existed simultaneously, which is most likely.

Let's return to criminal cannibalism.

Dzhumagaliev’s cannibalistic actions could in no way be dictated by hunger or the desire to establish himself as a superman in someone else’s eyes or in his own. He resorted to cannibalism in order, in his own words, in this way to acquire certain qualities that he really needed, that is, he followed his long-gone ancestors in this - I mean the mechanisms of the collective unconscious. It seems, however, that not only this motivated the behavior of this cannibal, but more his unconscious desire in general and completely to return to wild antiquity. That is why he lived for a long time in caves, in other words, he practically led the existence that the first people on Earth had.

An overvalued attitude towards animals can also be regarded as an attempt to return to the animal world, but on a psychological level. There is reason to assume that schizophrenia became the mechanism that contributed to the creation of the necessary prerequisites for the formation and implementation of all these trends.

In other words, schizophrenia created some internal conditions for the formation and manifestation of cannibalistic tendencies in this person, but in itself in no case can be considered as the cause or source of such actions. Schizophrenia is only a medical diagnosis and not a complete explanation for socially dangerous behavior.

We can talk about the presence of various degrees and forms of cannibalism. Kirsanin, for example, having killed I. in 1944, who had somehow offended him, immediately after the murder, according to witnesses, began to drink his blood from a wound on his neck. When the strangers left, he used the handle of a shovel to remove the skin from the face, head and neck, mouth and nasopharynx. Not once after his arrest, nor later, including in a conversation with me, could Kirsanin explain why he did all this: “I did everything as if in a dream, something guided me, I did everything mechanically; I didn’t want to, but I did it with my hands, my head went dark. Then I buried this skin, I don’t remember where.”

He worked as a meat deboner at a meat processing plant, became addicted to the blood of slaughtered animals, and found satisfaction in it. After leaving the meat processing plant, when there was no blood, he began killing dogs and drinking their blood. He also drank human donor blood. He says that “if necessary, I’ll crush you again.”

The above allows us to assert that Kirsanin is a dangerous cannibalistic person with vampiric tendencies. He weakly controls his desires and needs, the implementation of which is not mediated by social and moral norms. It is characteristic that he does not remember well what he did, everything happened as if in a fog, in a dream, he does not know what motivated him.

Investigators have not obtained irrefutable evidence that Kirsanin ate parts of the victim’s body, but certain circumstances suggest that this is exactly what he did. First of all, it remains unclear why he removed the skin, and cannibalism seems to us a more likely assumption. The skin of the murdered man was never found, and the culprit himself could not explain where he put it. The fact that he drank the blood of animals psychologically prepared him for cannibalism.

Yu.Zh. Antonyan from the book "The History of Cannibalism and Human Sacrifice"

Cannibalism occurs among many peoples at different stages of history. Its roots are most likely in eastern civilizations. For example, some cuneiform tablets confirm cases of people eating human flesh. Rituals associated with this took place in Mesopotamia and Phenicia. Often the victims were children or lovers.

In Ancient Greece, cannibalism took place. He found his reflection. They ate their own children there. This was done for the reason that it could prolong youth, give power and strength. Semitic tribes did not shy away from anthropophagy. The Canaanite tribe involved human sacrifice.

In one of his satires, Juvenal talks about the enmity of two Egyptian cities - Omba and Tentira. In one of the episodes, the victors eat the prisoners. What characterizes them as particularly wild is that they eat their meat raw.

Herodotus described the cannibalistic practices of the inhabitants of Issa. Otrov off the coast of Dalmatia was inhabited by the Scythian-Massaget tribes. They practiced the deliberate killing of the elders of their tribe for subsequent consumption.

In the Mysteries of Mithras, a boy was chosen for the sacrifice. His body was then eaten by everyone present. The Aztecs of Mexico also had a religious custom of eating the god, who remained for a year in the form of a handsome youth. Later, eating God is replaced by eating an animal dedicated to him or, which is sometimes given a humanoid form (as is still the case in some places in Europe after the harvest, from the first threshed bread).

The establishment of Roman rule in the Mediterranean ended cannibalism. The Zhou tribal union in China destroyed the entire Shang state for this reason. There, human sacrifices took place on a massive scale. She also categorically condemned the human sacrifice of the Jews.

Scientists believe that cannibalism has several reasons:

As part of a religious ceremony;
- as an element of magic;
- a consequence of starvation.

Among the inhabitants of Tierra del Fuego, the cause of cannibalism was considered to be hunger and lack of meat. At the same time, there were peoples who ate only plant foods. History knows when the savages of Australia were forced to starve. But even in this case, they did not even eat enemies who were killed during clashes in search of game.

The cannibalism of many modern savages is of a religious nature. As a rule, it occurs at night. The mediator is a shaman or priest. To satisfy this need, prisoners are taken from neighboring tribes.

The phenomenon is that once you have tasted the taste of human flesh, you cannot stop. There are known cases of mass gluttony of cannibals.

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There are few topics that would cause a person more disgust than cannibalism.

Eating meat from your own kind is a disgusting and immoral phenomenon.

If you adhere to our value system.

Incredibly, cannibalism remains a reality in remote parts of the planet. In some tribes, dishes made from human flesh have not so much nutritional, but rather ritual significance. No matter how terrible it may sound.

Did you know that cannibalism is deadly for the cannibals themselves?

Bloody background to cannibalism

Cannibalism existed in prehistoric times, when our ancient ancestors ate the meat, hearts and other organs of their enemies or fellow tribesmen.

To satisfy their hunger, to absorb their strength and courage, to appease cruel spirits.

This practice continued for many thousands of years.

Even in the 20th and 21st centuries, in times of need and despair, people often resorted to cannibalism in order to survive and save their children from starvation. Cases of cannibalism were recorded during the famine in North Korea in 2013, in besieged Leningrad in the 1940s, in communist China in the 1950s, in the Volga region in 1932-33.

Even earlier, in Europe at the beginning of the 18th century, parts of human bodies could be purchased as medicine. They used bones, blood, hearts, and human fat. The nobility and even the clergy did not hesitate to improve the health of human beings. It was used to treat gout, epilepsy, nosebleeds, and headaches.

In some cultures, after the death of a loved one, it is customary to eat their remains.

By the way, this is where the expression “become a part of someone” comes from. Dead relatives literally became part of their hungry fellow tribesmen. It sounds terrible to the civilized mind, but our distant ancestors would have been no less shocked to learn that we bury the dead in the ground to feed worms.

I don't want to hurt anyone's feelings, but how far have we come from cannibalism?

For example, some less cultured representatives of the human race still eat their nails and gnaw the skin off their fingers. And Hollywood divas use the placenta after childbirth to preserve beauty and youth.

The boundaries between us and our cannibal ancestors are much thinner than it seems at first glance...

But the purpose of our article is not to delve into the roots of cannibalism, not to rant about ethical and religious prohibitions, but to inform the reader about the potential health hazards of eating human flesh.

Mysterious Cannibal Disease

American experts claim that eating human flesh is much more dangerous than other types of meat.

The most dangerous part - which, by the way, is not recommended to eat in animals either - is considered to be the brain.

Until recently, the small 20,000-strong Fore people of Papua New Guinea practiced eating their dead relatives. It was this isolated group of people that helped researchers discover the fatal health effects of cannibalism.

Kuru (spongiform encephalopathy) is a disease of the nervous system with 100% mortality.

The disease is very close to mad cow disease, but is associated with a slightly different pathogen. In kuru, an abnormal glycoprotein known as prion protein (PrP) accumulates in the brain.

Prion proteins originate naturally in the nervous system. Their role is not fully understood, but there is a version that PrPs are involved in the development of neurodegenerative diseases, Alzheimer's disease.

The Fore people were the first human community on Earth to experience a Kuru epidemic. This epidemic, which brought many local cannibals to a painful end, peaked in the 1950s.

The word "kuru" in the local dialect means "to shake"; Kuru is sometimes also called the “laughing disease” because of the pathological attacks of laughter in patients. The first reports of kuru were brought to us by Australians who explored the wild islands. Later, scientists realized that the cause of the disease was the use of prions.

“The first signs of imminent death are general weakness and the inability to stand on one’s feet. The victim is taken into the home. There she can still eat, but suffers from severe tremors throughout her body. Then he can’t even eat, and subsequently dies,” a certain W. T. Brown described the picture of kuru.

At the peak of the Kuru epidemic, local residents, one after another, fell ill with unprecedented symptoms, and slowly, in terrible agony, faded away. The disease predominantly affected children and women; in some villages the female half of the population disappeared altogether.

There were several reasons for the gender difference: Fore men believed that eating human meat during civil strife weakened their bodies, so the dead were mostly eaten by women and children. In addition, the weaker half of the population was responsible for skinning and preparing meat, and prion infection was even transmitted through wounds. This is truly the curse of the cannibals.

Interesting fact: prions remain dangerous even after years of storage in formaldehyde!

Symptoms and consequences of kuru disease

Kuru disease is characterized by a long incubation period when a person does not have any symptoms: this asymptomatic period lasts 5-20 years, so it is simply unrealistic to associate the disease with some kind of suspicious meal.

In some cases, the incubation period can last up to 50 years, and the person manages to die a natural death without ever learning about the disease.

The physical and neurological symptoms of kuru are divided into 3 phases:

1. Initial (outpatient) stage of kuru: headaches and joint pain, tremors, imbalance, speech impairment and progressive movement disorders.

2. Second (sedentary) stage of kuru: loss of the ability to move independently, severe impairment of coordination and movement, increasing tremors and emotional instability (depression, laughter).

3. Terminal stage of kuru: patients are unable to sit without support, there is practically no coordination of movements, there is no speech, urinary and fecal incontinence develops, swallowing becomes difficult, and later the reaction to others disappears, bedsores and ulcers appear.

Death under kuru is inevitable; Patients go through the entire path from the first symptoms to death within 2-25 months. Death usually occurs as a result of pneumonia or soft tissue infections.

Thank God, kuru has practically disappeared. Back in the 1960s, Australian colonial authorities and Christian missionaries helped eradicate cannibalism in Papua New Guinea. The practice of eating human flesh has not completely disappeared, but its scope has been significantly reduced, and prion disease no longer spreads among the Fore people. Single casualties were recorded in 2005.

Although kuru disease has never been a serious problem for Western civilization, recent outbreaks of mad cow disease (Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease) have revived the interest of scientists around the world in the mysterious disease of cannibals. Kuru remains the only human prion infection in history.

CANNIBALISM(from fr. cannibale), 1). the practice of some animals eating members of their own species, 2). the practice of people eating human flesh. The word cannibalism comes from the French words "cannibale" or "caribal", which are variants of the name of the Caribbean tribe of the West Indian islands in which this custom was first discovered. An earlier scientific term was anthropophagy or "cannibalism." Cannibalism is commonly associated with tribes in the West Indies, neighboring South America, the South Seas, and western and central Africa. In early historical eras, cannibalism apparently existed among Europeans. There is some evidence of this custom in Bronze Age Bohemia and Austria, among the early Neolithic populations of Switzerland, and even among the much earlier Upper Paleolithic people of central Europe. Isolated cases of cannibalism are found even in modern developed societies among the declassed, criminal elements or people with mental disabilities.

The Greek historian Herodotus wrote about the existence of anthropophagy northeast of the Caspian Sea. This custom may well have been one of the earliest among people. Primitive people so often equated people and animals in their worldview that they might not consider human meat to be significantly different from other food products. There seems to be no instinctive aversion to its use; the horror exhibited by civilized and many primitive peoples on this occasion was the result of conventions, as is the case in cases of aversion to eating foods considered unconventional, unclean, or unfit for human consumption.

For example, among some peoples, pork or dog meat are considered unclean products, and the disgust experienced towards them is a deep emotional feeling not dictated by biological necessity. Cannibalism often arises under the pressure of extreme circumstances, hunger, or, as in the case of shipwrecked people, the lack of other resources. But even when cannibalism was a common practice, eating fellow tribesmen was rare.

Human meat has never been a part of the daily diet, although it was often enjoyed by some tribes of New Guinea and West Africa. The purpose of this practice was sometimes religious in connection with sacrifices or, in more common cases, the flesh of the enemy was eaten to acquire qualities such as courage or magical power. In some cases, it was believed that the complete destruction of a corpse through consumption achieved the complete destruction of the location of the enemy’s spirit.

Cannibalism is very diverse both geographically and in nature. In America, its center was the Antillean-Amazonian region. In North America, cannibalism was concentrated along the Gulf Coast and was one of the pagan rites of the northern Pacific coast.

Africa shows the same variations: cannibalism was a common practice in the Congo and west of the northern Gulf of Guinea, but was almost completely absent on the upper Nile and only slightly observed in southern Africa. In West Africa, members of the Leopard Society, who wore the skins of this animal and thus perceived its habits, killed their victims for ceremonial consumption. Among the Bagisu people in Uganda, the peculiarity of cannibal feasts in honor of their dead relatives was to eat their corpses. In central Nigeria, the bodies of victims were eaten at shrines, and among the Ovimbundu people (southwest Africa) such eating was a ritual before setting off a caravan on a long journey. In the equatorial forests, cannibalism was much more widespread.

According to one observer, the peoples of the middle Congo basin "were not ashamed of cannibalism, preferring human flesh." The cannibals of the Fang people in Gabon even sold human meat in markets, and in the Congo slaves were specially fattened for this purpose. In Malaysia, cannibalism was not common, although its existence there was reported as a limited practice among the Bataks of Sumatran. Cannibalism was also common in eastern New Guinea and Melanesia, where belligerence and hostility towards outsiders were the dominant characteristics. In some regions, ritual rules established restrictions such as a ban on a person eating what he himself had killed, but in the Fly River basin in the southern part of New Guinea, cannibalism was not limited in any way, and human meat served as common food. The fate of weak tribes here was extermination, since they were considered a “natural” source of food for their stronger neighbors. Human flesh was highly prized, especially female body parts, and the corpses were usually eaten whole after being roasted with sago.

On the other hand, cannibalism was relatively rare in Micronesia and central Polynesia, where the Hawaiians and Community Islanders regarded it with horror, although they sometimes practiced human sacrifice. Cannibalism was common in western Polynesia close to Melanesia, Fiji, Tonga and New Zealand, and was common as far east as the Marquesas Islands, Easter Island and the Cook Islands. The Fijians were notorious cannibals: they not only ate the meat of their enemies, but also sacrificed their commoners for this purpose. Human meat was prepared separately from other food. Wooden forks were used to eat it, which was considered taboo for other purposes. The Maori of New Zealand considered the meat of enemies the most desirable target of military action. Throughout Polynesia, the practice of cannibalism was motivated by revenge, since eating the body of an enemy was an expression of the highest degree of contempt.