CANNIBAL FANTASY

CANNIBAL FANTASY

It's been some time since I took my Post at the very edge of an Eastern Border, I would like to tell you a story you have never heard. But before that I want to share some of my thoughts on the subject that is a taboo for many of us.

If this World is a Theatre, then the very stage of it is soaked with blood. These lands have seen much of poverty, bloodshed, famine, wars, where cruel rulers were the only way to survive the oppression of Empires. Forged in war, united out of shattered pieces of lands it has many dark corners and untold stories to tell.

Philosophy was once the art of asking extreme, dangerous questions. The task of the philosopher is not simply to argue, as much of contemporary academic philosophy would want us to believe, but also to convince, to move, to stir and, eventually, to shake us to the core. This is the point where the cannibal enters the scene.
What would happen to a society if all the rules would vanish? What is the natural state of a being? Is there something Supreme, with absolute rules that keep us away from falling into a chaos?

Far from popular novels, where demonic blood sucking creatures roams forests, the pages of our history undeniably relate to our nature. It’s been documented that some of the oldest human remains found in Europe, the actual first known Homo sapiens dates to 34,000 years ago were found at Pestera cu Oase in Romania. Among the human remains on archeological site were found the jewelries made out of human bones, an evidence of early cannibalism. As I move forward in time to the year 1940, it is easy to find cases of cannibalism on the very hills I am dining. In the very recent past, only a few years ago, a collection of photos from World War II was declassified. These pictures were so extreme that they had been kept in a vault at the Finnish Ministry of Defense for more than sixty years. Among the atrocities frozen in time by the camera are images of cannibalism in the ranks of Soviet soldiers.
As it might seem civilization polished our nature, yet many of us eat the Body of Christ every Sunday. Perhaps it is my fueled imagination talking, but as much as I do not want to think of it, humans are scavengers, and will remain so in body and mind in times of a great struggle, and those times have nowhere near been over.

As I sit comfortably in a restaurant visited many times over the past years I found this place most suitable for thinking, a place where the secret tunnels were dug, spreading like a second subterranean life form of a city. Sitting quietly in my far corner I overheard the story a fairy tale, perhaps. Let the cannibal tell his story…

The Innkeeper.

Once there was a poor orphan girl who worked as a servant at the house of a rich man. Her dearest companion was a little dog that her parents had given her before they died. One day the chieftain of a robber band, disguised as an ordinary servant, came to the rich man's house and asked the girl to marry him. Sensing something sinister about him, the girl rejected the suitor's advances, so, with the assistance of his fellow robbers, he carried her away by force.
Now a prisoner in the robber's house, the girl still refused to marry him, in spite of his friendly words, his threats, and his abuse.
Finally he gave up his attempts to win her love, and sold her to a wild and cruel innkeeper. This innkeeper would rob travelers, kill them, cut them into pieces, and serve their cooked flesh to his other guests. He terrorized the poor girl by showing her the valuables he had stolen from his victims, the room where he murdered them, and the weapons he used for his wicked deeds. Then he locked her and her little dog in an adjoining room.
Soon afterward he brought in a little boy whom he had captured in the woods gathering berries. He cut off the boy's head and cut him into pieces. Then he forced the girl to cook the boy's flesh and serve it to the innkeeper's guests.

Sometime later the innkeeper brought in a very old woman, ugly and wrinkled, and nothing but skin and bones. Perhaps wanting to fatten her up for later, he locked her in the room with the girl and her dog. After their captor had left, the old woman told the girl that the cannibal innkeeper was her own son, and that she, disguised so well that he could not recognize her, had come to punish him for his wickedness.
Skilled in witchcraft, the old woman told the girl how she could escape. She would first have to kill her little dog and eat a piece of its heart. The girl did this, and then the old woman rubbed some ointment all over the girl's body, which transformed her into a duck.
A little later the wild man opened the door, and the duck flew over his head, escaping into the open. The innkeeper ran from room to room looking for the girl, and his mother uttered a magic curse that caused the house to collapse upon him, killing him at once.
The girl turned around and saw the heap of ruins, but as the old woman had not told her how she could again become a human being, she has remained a duck to this very day.