ABSTRACT
Cannibals were deliberately invented without justification. The most basic division in the realm of man-eating is that between ritual and famine cannibalism. Like corpse medicine, ritual cannibalism is emphatically not a question of hunger or of food. Accordingly, it is ritual forms of man-eating which will concern people. Francis Meres also impies that the eating of any raw meat was worse than consumption of human flesh: those barbarous people called cannibals feed only upon raw flesh, especially of men - this diet being so habitual that if they happen to eat a piece of roasted meat, commonly they surfeit of it and die. In the case of Fijian cannibals, they believed that the spirit of a body clung to a corpse for four days after death. In the New World, the raw cannibal could act as the strangeness, which ranged from civilised Protestant Christendom of increasing wildness. Before modern medical science, few people could afford to be so easily disgusted.
