Europe's inner demons

What was the reality behind these stories? It is true that cults involving the killing and devouring of children or adolescents are not wholly unknown to history or to anthropology. There are grounds for thinking that the cult of Dionysos as originally practised in Thrace may have involved the devouring of an infant as representative of the god. It is certain that in our own century, in Sierra Leone, the secret society of “human leopards” killed and ate young people. None of this, however, has any bearing on our stories. If children ever were devoured as part of the Dionysian cult, it will have been done in a state of frenzy — just as animals were torn to pieces and eaten raw. As for the human leopards of Sierra Leone, their cannibalism seems to have been a form of magic, performed for the purpose of increasing their own virility and prosperity.^** Our stories point in quite a different direction. In each case the murder and the cannibalistic feast form part of a ritual by which a group of conspirators affirms its solidarity; and in each case the group’s aim is to overthrow an existing ruler or regime and to seize power. There is no evidence that such murders and feasts really took place — on the contrary, save in the dubious case of the Egyptian Bucolics all the stories either concern the remote past, or else can actually be disproved. But even if it could be shown that groups of conspirators really did sometimes indulge in such practices, that would not affect our argument. Ritual murder and cannibalistic feasts belonged to one particular, traditional stereotype: the stereotype of the conspiratorial organization or secret society engaged in a ruthless drive for political power.

Apion tried to fit this stereotype on to the Jews. As with his story of the donkey-god, he harked back to the exploit of Antiochus Epiphanes. He tells how when the Greek king penetrated into the Temple he found there an imprisoned Greek, who revealed the terrible secret of the Jews. Once a year the Jews would take a captive into the woods, where they would kill him as a sacrifice to their god. Then they would taste of their victim’s entrails and swear eternal enmity against the Greeks. The captive Greek was himself about to be sacrificed when Antiochus arrived and liberated him.⁽²⁴⁾ But this story of Apion’s failed to convince: in the ancient world Jews were not believed to practise ritual murder or cannibalism. Though the pagan Romans might regard Judaism as a bizarre religion, they also knew that it was a religio licita— an officially recognized religion which deserved at any rate that respect which Romans paid to all ancient institutions. Above all, it was impossible to regard Jews, who were a very visible and active element in all the provinces of the Empire, as a secret society.

It was quite another matter with the obscure, unauthorized sect known as Christians. As we have seen, Christians were very widely believed to practise both ritual murder and cannibalism; which means that they were very widely regarded as a body of ruthless, power-hungry conspirators.

As it happened, there was one feature of Christian ritual which could easily be interpreted as cannibalistic: the Eucharist. The earliest known account of the Eucharist, which is that of St Paul in I Corinthians, shows that originally the faithful assembled periodically in a church and ate together, sharing their provisions. The high points of the meal consisted in the breaking and eating of a single loaf and the sharing of a cup of wine. Behind the ceremony lay the tradition which Paul claimed to have received from Jesus: “. . the Lord Jesus the same night in which he was betrayed took bread. And when he had given thanks, he broke it, and said, Take, eat: this is my body, which is broken for you: this do in remembrance of me. After the same manner also he took the cup, when he had supped, saying, This cup is the new testament in my blood: this do ye, as oft as ye drink it, in remembrance of me.”⁽²⁵⁾ Although several Fathers during the first three or four centuries tried to spiritualize the Eucharist, so that Christ’s flesh and blood could be taken to mean simply the Word, this was not the view taken by most Christians. For many the Eucharist already possessed the meaning which it now possesses for all Roman Catholics. Few of the early Christians would have demurred at the authoritative definition which the Council of Trent was to give in the sixteenth century and which remains binding today: “If any one. . shall deny that wonderful and singular conversion of the whole substance of the bread into (Christ’s) body and of the wine into his blood… let him be anathema.”⁽²⁶⁾