“Mmm! The pungent smell of roasting pigmeat wafting across the park on a perfect afternoon as spring gives way to summer. Must be Memorial Day! All hail our fallen heroes, and pass the bratwurst!” -typical American quasi-cannibal indulging in watered-down ritual sacrifice
“I’ve been to rice boilings and I’ve been to pig stickings, and the rice boilings had better vibes.” Stephen Gaskin’s celebrated aphorism influenced the hippie generation and helped inspire the trend toward vegetarianism. It made a big impression on me when I was going through my teenager vegetarian phase in the 1970s.
But what is it, specifically, about the “pig stickings” that gives off a noxious odor of bad vibes? Here’s a clue: The most memorable “pig sticking” line in literature occurs in Lord of the Flies: “Kill the pig! Bash her in! Kill the beast! Cut its throat!” The frenzied gang of filthy boys, shipwrecked on a proverbial desert island and reverting to savagery, ritually intones the bloody chant before slaughtering pigs…and then sacrificing humans, beginning with a plump young bespectacled nerd nicknamed Piggy.
Lord of the Flies insists on the connection between pig-stickings and human sacrifice. Its Pacific Island setting reminds us that Native Hawaiians traditionally made the same connection: The word for human flesh in the ancient Hawaiian language is “long pig,” because human flesh, as cannibals universally attest, tastes almost exactly like pork. (Having no interest in verifying this personally, I am happy to take the cannibals’ word for it.)
But don’t blame Hawaiians—it wasn’t just their ancestors. If evolutionary scientists are right, even “roughly in the ball park” right, the ancestors of pretty much all present-day humans were periodically eating human flesh for tens if not hundreds of thousands of years. Why? Because those who ate the flesh of enemies, sacrifice victims, and starvation victims would have a better chance of surviving famines to reproduce and bequeath their “long pig” loving genes to posterity. The tendency to revert to cannibalism when you are starving periodically crops up in modern civilized humans, most famously in the cases of the Donner Party and Uruguayan Flight 71, suggesting that atavistic cannibal proclivities can bubble up to the surface in the right, or wrong, circumstances.
In cultures that practice it, eating “long pig” generally occurs after ritual human sacrifice. In one common form that occurs in both Africa and the Pacific Islands (the two most unrelated genetic groups on earth) the ritual sacrifice can happen on the battlefield, where the greatest enemy warrior is killed so his heart or liver may be eaten in hopes that the eaters will partake of his courage. This common form of sacrificial cannibalism drives the plot of Herman Melville’s autobiographical novel Typee.
Keeping the above in mind, I don’t think it is a coincidence that Americans collectively raise a thick pungent cloud of roasting flesh, no doubt pleasing to the nostrils of Yahweh, as their way of honoring their fallen warrior heroes. They are symbolically devouring those heroes’ charred and mangled bodies—partly in hopes of partaking of their courage, but mostly as a schadenfreude-laden celebration whose unconscious guiding idea is: “I’m sure glad it was those other guys who died on the battlefield and not me; it sure is nice to be here with my family having a backyard barbecue and saluting somebody else’s human sacrifice!”
(Note: If you would like to further explore the ideas briefly sketched in this essay, check out the work of the late, great French-American thinker René Girard.)
Dr. Kevin Barrett, a Ph.D. Arabist-Islamologist is one of America’s best-known critics of the War on Terror.
He is the host of TRUTH JIHAD RADIO; a hard-driving weekly radio show funded by listener subscriptions at Substack and the weekly news roundup FALSE FLAG WEEKLY NEWS (FFWN).
He also has appeared many times on Fox, CNN, PBS, and other broadcast outlets, and has inspired feature stories and op-eds in the New York Times, the Christian Science Monitor, the Chicago Tribune, and other leading publications.
Dr. Barrett has taught at colleges and universities in San Francisco, Paris, and Wisconsin; where he ran for Congress in 2008. He currently works as a nonprofit organizer, author, and talk radio host.
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A small correction (if I’m right), offered in humility:
As far as I remember — having read “Lord of the Flies” only once and fourty years ago — the boys were evacuees en route or saling from UK to USA or Europe to the Americas. They thus hardly can have landed on a Pacific Ocian iceland.
Also, I know no Pacific Ocian island that is a “desert island”- and pigs do not exactly thrive in deserts, where they could only drink salt water.
The term “long pig” for human flesh meant to be eaten meseems to remember has mostly been reported from the great isle New Guiny (north of Ausralia — not the one just north of France!). Never heard of it mentioned by researchers of the cultures of the lesser archipelageos of the Pacific ocion (except from Easte island during its ecologic crisis plus minus the eigiteenth century).
I enjoy pork. The best pork I’ve eaten outside Máo times in China I got at Christian-managed restaurants in Qairo in Egypt. The worst in big hotels in Egypt where the pork was imported from kibbuzes in ‘Israël’.
At each orthodox christian Yuletide, Russian brides in al-Quds/Yerushalaïm used to drive to Bethlehem to buy quality pork. Hardly evokong any “human sacrifice cannibalism rite” — it was not Easter foodtsuff, when all the others always would eat sacrificial lambs in memory of the slaughter of all other firstborn sons in pharaonic Egypt.
Kevin, I appreciate your menton of Steven Gaskin.
Reminds me of his wife’s classic book “Spiritual Midwifery”.
I delivered my two daughters, after her counsel to my inner monkey.
Had all the facts right at the moment that I need them, delivered healthy children. I have taught them all the
delights of pork.
Eat the rich
If I tried to explain why pigs are thought of as evil, it would sound like gibberish. As all things are rooted in the study of time, the concept came from misinterpretation and failed amalgamation of cultures.
But I will say this, in the event one person who knows the bible was stolen, but is missing this piece,..is here. “And the Lord smelled a sweet savour” is directly speaking about Kan, and an age old thing where the hunter is honored for feeding the village. Kan is worldwide , a word for male ruler or leader of the pack. It’s a carnivore thing. But the smell of cooking meat, is strictly a human thing. Not spirit.
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