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Friends of
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OF CANNIBALS 11/20/01
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OF
CANNIBALS (1575 ano domini)
by
Michel Eyguem De Montaigne
I am afraid our eyes are bigger than our bellies, and that we
have more curiosity than capacity; for we grasp at all, but
catch nothing but wind. […]
I find that there is nothing barbarous and savage in [the cannibal-ridden
lands that became Brazil] by anything that I can gather, excepting,
that every one gives the title of barbarism to everything that
is not in use in his own country. […] Neither is it reasonable
that art should gain the pre-eminence of our great and powerful
mother nature. We have so surcharged her with the additional
ornaments and graces we have added to the beauty and riches
of her own works by our inventions, that we have almost smothered
her; yet in other places, where she shines in her own purity
and proper luster, she marvelously baffles and disgraces all
our vain and frivolous attempts.
Et veniunt hederae sponte sua melius;
Surgit et in solis formosior arbutus antris;
Et volucres nulla dulcius arte canunt.
[tr. 'The ivy grows best when it grows wild, and the arbutus
is most lovely when it grows in some solitary cleft; birds sing
most swetly untaught.' Propertius, I, ii, 10.]
Our utmost endeavors cannot arrive at so much as to imitate
the nest of the least of birds, its contexture, beauty, and
convenience: not so much as the web of a poor spider.
All things, says Plato, are produced either by nature, by fortune,
or by art; the greatest and most beautiful by the one or the
other of the former, the least and the most imperfect by the
last.
These nations then seem to me to be so far barbarous, as having received
but very little form and fashion from art and human invention, and consequently
to be not much remote from their original simplicity. The laws of nature,
however, govern them still, not as yet much vitiated with any mixture of
ours: but 'tis in such purity, that I am sometimes troubled we were not sooner
acquainted with these people. […] It is a nation wherein there is
no manner of traffic, no knowledge of letters, no science of numbers, no
name of magistrate or political superiority; no use of service, riches or
poverty, no contracts, no successions, no dividends, no properties, no employments,
but those of leisure, no respect of kindred, but common, no clothing, no
agriculture, no metal, no use of corn or wine; the very words that signify
lying, treachery, dissimulation, avarice, envy, detraction, pardon, never
heard of. […]
The whole day is spent in dancing. Their young men go a-hunting after
wild beasts with bows and arrows; one part of their women are employed
in preparing their drink the while, which is their chief employment.
[…] Valor toward their enemies and love toward their wives, […]
all their ethics are comprised in these two articles, resolution in war,
and affection to their wives. […]
They have continual war with the nations that live further within the mainland,
beyond their mountains, to which they go naked, and without other arms than
their bows and wooden swords, fashioned at one end like the heads of our
javelins. The obstinacy of their battles is wonderful, and they never end
without great effusion of blood: for as to running away, they know not what
it is. Every one for a trophy brings home the head of an enemy he has killed,
which he fixes over the door of his house. After having a long time treated
their prisoners very well, and given them all the regales they can think
of, he to whom the prisoner belongs, invites a great assembly of his friends.
They being come, he ties a rope to one of the arms of the prisoner, of which,
at a distance, out of his reach, he holds the one end himself, and gives
to the friend he loves best the other arm to hold after the same manner;
which being done, they two, in the presence of all the assembly, despatch
him with their swords. After that they roast him, eat him among them,
and send some chops to their absent friends. They do not do this, as
some think, for nourishment, as the Scythians anciently did, but as a representation
of an extreme revenge; as will appear by this: that having observed the Portuguese,
who were in league with their enemies, to inflict another sort of death upon
any of them they took prisoners, which was to set them up to the girdle in
the earth, to shoot at the remaining part till it was stuck full of arrows,
and then to hang them, they thought those people of the other world (as being
men who had sown the knowledge of a great many vices among their neighbors,
and who were much greater masters in all sorts of mischief than they) did
not exercise this sort of revenge without a meaning, and that it must needs
be more painful than theirs, they began to leave their old way, and to follow
this. I am not sorry that we should here take notice of the barbarous horror
of so cruel an action, but that, seeing so clearly into their faults, we
should be so blind to our own. I conceive there is more barbarity in eating
a man alive, than when he is dead; in tearing a body limb from limb by racks
and torments, that is yet in perfect sense; in roasting it by degrees; in
causing it to be bitten and worried by dogs and swine (as we have not only
read, but lately seen, not among inveterate and mortal enemies, but among
neighbors and fellow-citizens, and, which is worse, under color of piety
and religion), than to roast and eat him after he is dead. […]
We may then call these people barbarous, in respect to the rules of reason:
but not in respect to ourselves, who in all sorts of barbarity exceed them.
Their wars are throughout noble and generous, and carry as much excuse and
fair pretense, as that human malady is capable of; having with them no other
foundation than the sole jealousy of valor. Their disputes are not for the
conquest of new lands, for these they already possess are so fruitful by
nature, as to supply them without labor or concern, with all things necessary,
in such abundance that they have no need to enlarge their borders. And
they are moreover, happy in this, that they only covet so much as their natural
necessities require: all beyond that, is superfluous to them: men of the
same age call one another generally brothers, those who are younger, children;
and the old men are fathers to all. These leave to their heirs in common
the full possession of goods, without any manner of division, or other title
than what nature bestows upon her creatures, in bringing them into the world.
If their neighbors pass over the mountains to assault them, and obtain a
victory, all the victors gain by it is glory only, and the advantage of having
proved themselves the better in valor and virtue: for they never meddle with
the goods of the conquered, but presently return into their own country,
where they have no want of anything necessary, nor of this greatest of all
goods, to know happily how to enjoy their condition and to be content. And
those in turn do the same; they demand of their prisoners no other ransom,
than acknowledgment that they are overcome: but there is not one found in
an age, who will not rather choose to die than make such a confession, or
either by word or look, recede from the entire grandeur of an invincible
courage. There is not a man among them who had not rather be killed and eaten,
than so much as to open his mouth to entreat he may not. They use them
with all liberality and freedom, to the end their lives may be so much the
dearer to them; but frequently entertain them with menaces of their approaching
death, of the torments they are to suffer, of the preparations making in
order to it, of the mangling their limbs, and of the feast that is to be
made, where their carcass is to be the only dish. All which they do,
to no other end, but only to extort some gentle or submissive word from them,
or to frighten them so as to make them run away, to obtain this advantage
that they were terrified, and that their constancy was shaken; and indeed,
if rightly taken, it is in this point only that a true victory consists.
Victoria nulla est,
Quam quae confessos animo quoque subjugat hostes.
[tr. 'They say that the Gascons prolonged their lives with such food.' Juvenal
XV, 93.]
[…] These prisoners are so far from discovering the least weakness,
for all the terrors that can be represented to them that, on the contrary,
during the two or three months they are kept, they always appear with a cheerful
countenance; importune their masters to make haste to bring them to the test,
defy, rail at them, and reproach them with cowardice, and the number of battles
they have lost against those of their country. I have a song made by one
of these prisoners, wherein he bids them "come all, and dine upon him, and
welcome, for they shall withal eat their own fathers and grandfathers, whose
flesh has served to feed and nourish him. These muscles," says he, "this
flesh and these veins, are your own: poor silly souls as you are, you little
think that the substance of your ancestors' limbs is here yet; notice what
you eat, and you will find in it the taste of your own flesh:" in which song
there is to be observed an invention that nothing relishes of the barbarian.
Those that paint these people dying after this manner, represent the prisoner
spitting in the faces of his executioners and making wry mouths at them.
And 'tis most certain, that to the very last gasp, they never cease to brave
and defy them both in word and gesture. In plain truth, these men are very
savage in comparison of us; of necessity, they must either be absolutely
so or else we are savages; for there is a vast difference between their manners
and ours.
The men there have several wives, and so much the greater number, by how
much they have the greater reputation for valor. And it is one very remarkable
feature in their marriages, that the same jealousy our wives have to hinder
and divert us from the friendship and familiarity of other women, those employ
to promote their husbands' desires, and to procure them many spouses; for
being above all things solicitous of their husbands' honor, 'tis their chiefest
care to seek out, and to bring in the most companions they can, forasmuch
as it is a testimony of the husband's virtue. Most of our ladies will cry
out, that 'tis monstrous; whereas in truth, it is not so; but a truly matrimonial
virtue, and of the highest form. In the Bible, Sarah, with Leah and Rachel,
the two wives of Jacob, gave the most beautiful of their handmaids to their
husbands; Livia preferred the passions of Augustus to her own interest; and
the wife of King Deiotarus, Stratonice, did not only give up a fair young
maid that served her to her husband's embraces, but moreover carefully brought
up the children he had by her, and assisted them in the succession to their
father's crown. […]
[Three barbarians visiting Montaigne's France] said, that in the first place
they thought it very strange, that so many tall men wearing beards, strong,
and well armed, who were about the king ('tis like they meant the Swiss of
his guard) should submit to obey a child, and that they did not rather choose
out one among themselves to command. Secondly (they have a way of speaking
in their language, to call men the half of one another), that they had observed,
that there were among us men full and crammed with all manner of commodities,
while, in the meantime, their halves were begging at their doors, lean, and
half-starved with hunger and poverty; and they thought it strange that these
necessitous halves were able to suffer so great an inequality and injustice,
and that they did not take the others by the throats, or set fire to their
houses. […]
And putting the question to [one of them], whether or no [a barbarian chief's]
authority expired with the war? he told me this remained: that when he went
to visit the villages of his dependence, they plained him paths through the
thick of their woods, by which he might pass at his ease. All this does not
sound very ill, and the last was not at all amiss, for they wear no breeches.
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