Articles Cannibalism: The Dark Side of Humanity by Christopher Fain

Torchwood is, at its heart, a show about humanity, more so than the alien artifacts, phenomenon, and beings encountered by the Cardiff team.  It is only fitting that the topic of cannibalism should be stripped back to the metaphorical bone; according to the morality code of humankind, cannibalism is among the darkest acts we are capable of and is considered a taboo unlike any other.  If there's anything Torchwood is good at, it acknowledges the primitive and savage Id in us, from sex in all its colors to the comfort found in simple relationships to preying on one another for no apparent reason.

Cannibalism, unlike incest, is a topic that can be approached in the media without deeply divided censure, and Torchwood gives us a different sort of view, coming at the idea with dread and retribution against the murderous villagers who could commit such acts of barbarism against fellow humans.  In its way, the episode "Countrycide" is a portrait of sociological demonization which is revealed to be, in this instance, justified. 

It was not so very long ago that civilized societies claimed their enemies to be cannibals even when there was no evidence to offer as proof.  The individual who lives in an isolated region could be seen as odd and dangerous; there are horror movies based in just such a set-up, several of which are cannibalism stories.

The earliest civilizations seemed to fall on either side of the anthropophagic coin.  Either you were a man-eater, for whatever reason, or you had laws and ethics in place that forbid such behavior, suggesting that you recognized the existence of cannibalism in practice.

Cannibalism, also called anthropophagy, is the ingestion of human flesh by other humans.  It isn't a new practice; humans have apparently been eating each other since prehistoric times.  Early human laws set down the taboo or sanctions for such activity, suggesting the existence of this behavior was well-known and either regulated by ritual or forbidden as a barbaric trait to be avoided. 

In societies where culture is divided among more than one single group and there was an enemy to avoid or hate, the enemy was often viewed as a cannibal among other reprehensible and disgusting things.  Cannibalism is found in folklore, legend, and fairytales, usually as an attribute of evil characters or as punishment for severe wrong-doing. 

Stories which come from famine times across the world often include warnings and admonishments about eating other humans.  Some of these tales include "Hansel and Gretel", "Beowulf", the Lamia of ancient Greece, vampire legends, Baba Yaga of the Slavic traditions, the wendigo of Algonquin tribes in North America, biblical myths such as that of Solomon and the two mothers, and the Greek legends of Tantalus and of Kronos, the father of the Olympian gods. 

There are many others, of course; the list goes on and on and expands once you realize that tales of cannibalism were, in later times, often white-washed or disguised as other, less socially-threatening crimes.  The tale of Little Red Riding Hood, for example, could easily be a story of a man-eating stranger who preyed first on Red’s grandmother and then lay in wait for the younger, tastier morsel to appear.

Cannibalism falls into three categories: sexual, opportunistic, and survival-nutritional.  This suggests that a primal part of the human mind, one connected to the Id, is involved in the choice to eat another human's flesh, whether as the result of accidental death during a starvation period, murder for food, or as a sexual fetish. 

While it is a terrible fact that starvation will make humans eat each other, necro-cannibalism is a forgivable activity in such conditions.  We don't like to think about it, but there are very few of us who wouldn't resort to such a behavior when the figurative chips are down and survival is on the line.  We simply don’t know what we would do, in the most drastic of situations.  Most countries of the world have no direct law against necro-cannibalism, partly---perhaps---for this reason; again, there is no proof of why cannibalism in itself isn’t considered a crime.  Sexualized or murder-based opportunistic cannibalism, however, is seen as a crime against humanity because it usually involves murder and murder is the crime being punished in those cases, not the cannibalism itself.

There is some archaeological evidence which suggests that humanity has been cannibalizing each other for ritual or survival purposes since the Paleolithic era; a few scientists in the anthropological field believe that the eating of human flesh and organs may have been what saved us as a species and that we possess a gene which protects many of us from diseases which arise from the consumption of our own kind. 

Historically, the stories of cannibalism are linked to famine, natural and man-made.  During the Middle Ages, European society experienced several famines which led to the rise of fairytales about evil witches and evil step-parents who ate children; often, these dark characters were described as being Jews or other outsiders, a form of xenophobia and prejudice used to convince children to behave and stay away from strangers.  But, the fact remains that Christian people who were good and moral and just during non-famine times were more than capable of killing and eating their own families during times of extreme hunger brought on by several years of failed crops.

During the First Crusade, there were tales of opportunistic and murderous cannibalism; several written sources claimed that Christian soldiers who took the Islamic town of Maarat (in present day Syria) after a long siege, ate the dead Muslims because the countryside could not produce enough foodstuffs to feed the army.  These stories may be exaggerated, however, as a result of propaganda on both sides of the conflict.

In the 1600s, the people at Jamestown, an early English colony in North America, were forced to commit cannibalism as a survival method against starvation.  They dug up corpses for food and there were prosecutions against murders that were committed in the interest of putting meat on the table.

Starvation while stranded in the wilderness is linked to numerous cases of cannibalism across the centuries; from shipwrecked sailors to the Donner Party, humans have proven that they will eat the dead and kill one another for sustenance. 

There are societies where cannibalism is ritualized as part of the culture; they eat their own dead as a funerary rite or devour the dead of their enemies slain in battle.  Among these cultures who have practiced cannibalism are the Maori of New Zealand, the Fore of Papua New Guinea (only one of several tribes to do so), the Wari' of Brazil, the Atakapa (also only one among other cannibalistic aboriginal tribes) of the southeastern United States, and the Issedones of the southwestern slopes of the Altay mountains in central Asia. 

In a tribal system, there are two types of cannibalism recognized as being practiced.  A tribe or band might engage in endocannibalism or exocannibalism.  Endocannibalism is the eating of the dead among your own people as a funerary rite while exocannibalism is/was practiced as the cannibalism of your enemy's dead, usually taken through battle.  In both cases, cannibalism is used as a form of taking energy or power from the dead, either as protection against the enemy or as a way of keeping and preserving the memory of the family.

In modern society, cannibalism is seen as a mental health taboo and a method of shocking the public.  Artists such as Rick Gibson make the news with staged acts of cannibalism while psychopath Peter Bryan was caught with human brains fried up in butter and a dismembered corpse in his flat.  While the shock artist can be arrested for public indecency, he won't be arrested for the act of cannibalism itself if the victim gives permission for the behavior.  Those who murder and eat others and are caught are put on trial for the murder but not the cannibalism itself.

Cannibals who kill to eat and/or sexualize the experience are usually viewed as being mentally ill, but there is no formal listing in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders for cannibalism being linked to any one disorder or syndrome.

One such case is that of James Douglas, the 3rd Marquess of Queensberry, who reportedly killed and roasted a boy in 1707.  He was already in the process of eating this meat when he was caught; according to the story, Douglas was only ten years old at the time and already notorious for being an imbecile and violently insane.  He spent his youth under lock and key, kept so by his family.  After being caught in the act, he was removed from his societal position and imprisoned.

In the United Kingdom, there are stories of historical cannibalism linked to isolated regions and insular families.  Research suggests that few if any are based in fact.  The legends of Sawney Bean and Christie Cleek may have developed as a way of demonizing a group of people; the English story of Sawney Bean with his murderous and incestuous clan of cannibals could be nothing more than a way to make the Scottish sound like inhuman monsters.  The same could be said of Christie Cleek, who supposedly fed his starving companions from the body of a deceased human during a period of famine, among other cannibalistic crimes.  There is no historical record for either case even as the Bean clan was supposedly punished at the Tolbooth in Edinburgh.  It would seem that the folklore holds forth, deriding the outsiders as those who would act against human decency.

Sweeny Todd of London is another such story; a fictional character, Todd was said to kill visitors to his barber shop and then gave the meat to be used in pies and pasties.  This tale could be based in some honest concern; unregulated, a pie-maker could use any meat filling and while human flesh might not have been actually employed, there are stories of other non-traditional animals being used.  However, in many places of the world, there have been substantiated stories of suspect meats being sold to butchers for sausages and pies.  In some cases, this use of human flesh was proven as part of a murder inquiry.

Which brings us back to Torchwood.

In the first series' episode "Countrycide", written by Chris Chibnall, an isolated village of insular people in the Brecon Beacons area of Wales, went way beyond the usual ideas of harvest season. 

Brecon Beacons is a mountain range in South Wales, automatically putting this story into an area where the inhabitants are seen as isolated and different.  Said to be named after the ancient practice of lighting beacon fires on mountaintops as a long-distance communications method used to warn of invaders, the region is remote, forbidding, and visually stark in many places.  It is an area that is known to have been inhabited during the Neolithic period of human development as seen by many hillside burial cairns and Iron Age hill-forts. 

The Cardiff Hub's team makes the journey to this area of Wales on the idea that a series of missing persons' reports might be linked to Rift activity.  Seventeen people have gone missing in the same twenty-mile radius and this doesn't sit well with Jack Harkness.  Upon deciding to camp near the point where the last person went missing, they find a corpse in the woods and their vehicle is stolen.

Tracing the Range Rover to a nearby village, the team moves in to investigate and separate into two groups with the understanding that they might have been lured in by the responsible parties.  Gwen, Jack, and Owen search the village pub while Toshiko and Ianto look for their missing vehicle.  Things quickly go bad when two more corpses are found and then Gwen is shot by a frightened young man who believed she was one of 'them', who would come looking for him. 

Toshiko and Ianto are snatched up by the unseen villains and awake in a cellar, where they discover a refrigerator full of human meat and piles of cast-off shoes and clothes.  Realizing they are meant to be killed for food, they don't have time to come up with a plan for escape before they are taken out of the cellar by a woman who is one of the villagers; she lulls them into going along quietly by convincing the pair that she's unable to stop what's happening.  The village, every ten years, commits a Harvest; this involves the capture, killing, and processing of anyone unlucky enough to travel through, near, or to the village, which isn't given a name in the episode.

Tosh escapes only to be recaptured and, with Gwen and Owen, are returned to the slaughter area, where Ianto awaits his death.  The villagers whom we meet seem to see this Harvest as just a normal part of their life; they treat the team like animals for the table.

Meanwhile, Jack has shot someone trying to get into the locked pub through its cellar and then questions the man to get answers.  He arrives to save the others just as it seems Ianto is going to get his throat slit.

When questioned, the villager named Evan Sherman tells Gwen that he does this (harvesting other humans for meat) because it makes him happy, thus proving that a human can be darker still than any alien they might encounter within Cardiff's environs.  The effect this has on Gwen Cooper is devastating; perhaps until this moment, she had not realized what Jack has always known: humans can be monstrous and their behaviors might exceed even what we could expect from an invasion of aliens.

Here is where Torchwood shines.  The story is one of human monstrosity and deals with the darker side of what we are capable of, but rather than punish the foes with death or amnesia---a common theme in Torchwood episodes---the human enemy is handed over to the authorities for the administering of human justice.  While an isolated community like this one might, in historical context, have been suspected of such behaviors without evidence for the sake of segregation, Jack and his team have found the real deal and the resolution brings no peace to those involved. 

If anything, it leaves Gwen Cooper with a new awareness of what might be lurking just out of sight in even the most innocuous of environments.

Picture Sources:

Saturn Eating His Children; Francisco Goya. http://arthuride.files.wordpress.com/2011/09/franciscogoya-saturn-eating-cronus.jpg