"..in the anguish and bewilderment of flesh..." (p. 51)
- but will not mind waiting a couple of days!
The bones are used oracularly. Arnanak, an initiate of the Three, does not believe any of this stuff but leads the sacrifices anyway for good soldierly reasons. I just do not remember any of this about the dead from previous readings and it is turning my stomach a bit.
I am glad to attend a ceremony tonight where we offer incense, water and biscuits on the altar, then eat the biscuits.
7 comments:
There are reasons cannibalism is (mostly) regarded with horror by human beings; not least, it reduces the conceptual gap between humans and animals.
And, of course, there are practical reasons too. You can catch any disease a human has by eating their flesh.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
There were exceptions, of course. The Aztecs, with their penchant for mass human sacrifices to their abominable demon gods, had to somehow dispose of all those bodies--which they did by eating them. And the Carib Indians ate men because they liked eating them.
Anderson made similar points about cannibalism in "The Sharing of Flesh," with the twist being that men on Lokon had to eat men if they were to attain puberty and be able to beget children.
Ad astra! Sean
Sean: the pre-Columbian Americas had singularly few infectious diseases for humans because the "bottleneck" of small migrant founding populations eliminated a lot of them. Any disease needs a certain density of population to sustain itself.
(And there were fewer human diseases prior to agriculture, too, for the same reasons.)
You get the same thing in sub-Saharan African disease environments and non-African ones; there are more diseases of humans there in Africa and they're worse, because that's where we evolved.
That's been muted by the spread of African diseases (falciparium malaria, for example) in the post-1492 period, but it's still there.
BTW, the longer survival of the megafauna in Africa is for the same reason; they co-evolved with us.
If you trace when human beings arrived in an environment, you'll note that the further from Africa and the later the initial human migration, the more the large fauna become extinct.
NB: farmers had more diseases because not only did they have denser, less mobile populations, but because they commonly lived in close association with domestic animals, providing more opportunities for bacteria and viruses to "jump species".
This was (one) reason farmers could supplant hunter-gatherers; we sneezed on them and they died.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
I mostly agree, with one caveat: some of the Amerindians, like the Aztecs, Mayans, Incas, etc., became agricultural peoples. Shouldn't some diseases have become endemic among them?
Not just sub-Saharan Africa, southern China seems to be a nexus of diseases which spread to the rest of the world. Such as small-pox, bubonic plague, the common cold and many types of influenza. With many jumping from domesticated animals in agriculture to humans.
Yes, outside Africa, most places with megafauna soon had them being hunted to extinction by human settlers.
Ad astra! Sean
Post a Comment