I posted Lukas’ sketch of our vampire as a bulletin on the other day — and MySpace kindly deleted it for us.

“We had to remove an image (or images) from your account because they violated our Terms of Use,” said the message they sent us. “Our site is for people as young as 14, so we can’t have certain kinds of pics (nude/sexually explicit, violence, material protected by copyright).”

Of course, they left the copy that was in our Photos section. And I reposted the bulletin, and they didn’t touch it. Honestly, I feel like we, as a horror comic, are on the right track if a sketch we post of a guy who has too many teeth gets deemed “too violent.”

While we’re on the topic of MySpace — !

I thought I’d post another in the series of blogs I’ve written on Warren Ellis’ Whitechapel forum collecting interesting tidbits I’ve learned in researching demented real-world illnesses and animals for Witch Doctor. This one’s entitled, “I eat you.” And it’s all about cannibalism.

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I eat you.
Last night I turned off the lights and lay down for a little before-bed reading about cannibalism.

New Guinea is really rather fascinating. It’s the second-largest island on earth (after Greenland), and it’s home to more than 800 distinct languages — around half the total languages in existence. And of course, there used to be cannibals there.

When people think of cannibal societies, they’re thinking of what’s called exocannibalism — eating people who aren’t part of your social group, often as part of warfare. But the Fore people of Papua New Guinea were endocannibals — them ate their own dead as part of the funerary rite.

The North Fore would just cook the entire body whole in a steam pit with vegetables. The South Fore liked to cut the body up instead, and cook the pieces inside bamboo tubes along with vegetables, ginger and salt. They ate the entire body, everything but the gall bladder. Even the bones, which they’d char to soften them up and then crumble them up in the cooking tubes. Even the feces. They’d cook that with vegetables.

It was something you’d do for your loved ones. A sign of respect. (Fore women would also carry the severed heads of their dead husbands in a bag on their backs for months, showing how much they mourned by putting up with the worsening stink.) One of the Fore’s greetings translates as, “I eat you.”

It was actually a pretty new custom when white folks showed up on the island. The Fore told an anthropologist their first reaction after eating person:

“This is sweet! What is the matter with us, are we mad? Here is good food and we have neglected to eat it. In the future we shall always eat the dead, men, women, and children. Why should we throw away good meat? It is not right!”

Mortuary cannibalism was something women and children did; the men got to eat pork instead. And that’s why the women and children were the ones who got kuru — a condition that started with tremors and weird emotional responses, laughing and frowning at random, and ended with paralysis and death. The Fore thought kuru was a curse put on the women and children by male sorcerers.

But no. Kuru was a prion disease, an illness caused by malformed proteins like Mad Cow. And the women and children got it from eating the brains of dead kuru victims. They didn’t eat people who died of other diseases — but since they thought kuru was caused by a curse, and because kuru gave body fat the nummy texture of pork, kuru dead were fair game.

Did you know raw human brains have the consistency of soft scrambled eggs?

(Further reading: Richard Rhodes Deadly Feasts.)

Tags: cannibalism, endocannibalism, kuru, Mad Cow Disease, MySpace, research blog, sick stuff

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