Maurice,
"Does your wife eat enemy slaves?"
Sometimes, on special occasions. <grin>
When the Spaniards arrived there, fresh from their conquest of Mexico, they were very favorably disposed toward the Filipino tribes, as compared to the Mexican Indians. Among the lowland Malay tribes there was some ritual cannibalism, but Spanish accounts of it are rare. The hill tribes, the Negrito Igorots and the rest were cannibals and there are rumors that they are not beyond enjoying a little "long pig" even today, but as the Malays had chased them into the highest mountains hundreds of years earlier the Spaniards had very little contact with them.
But what appalled the Spaniards in Mexico was the ritual human sacrifice that they observed in operation on an almost industrial scale. Truly, the very saddest thing I think I have ever seen in my whole life, is that when you open a Mississippian mound burial, and I mean Late Mississippi at the time of Spanish Contact in Georgia, what you find there along with the bones of the old chieftain or witch doctor, are the bones of a whole bunch of little children with their skulls smashed. You also find bunches of river pearls, game stones, unfired clay pots and pipes. But the bones of the little children, that really gets to you.
What they did, and the Spaniards observed this first hand, was that when the old devil died they would ritually murder a whole bunch of little children and place their bodies, very carefully, in the mound with his. And this is the US, where the southeast tribes were only a pale shadow of the real devils down in Mexico.
Slagle |
