PJ Vogt

There's actually another complicating story here.

The whole time the Europeans are obsessed with cannibalism, they're practicing cannibalism, just like in a slightly different form.

So the thing they were accusing the cannibals of doing was ritual cannibalism.

It's like...

I eat you because I won in combat, because it symbolizes something, because I think that I get strength from doing it.

What the Europeans had been doing was medical cannibalism, which is when you eat people or body parts because you think there's a medical benefit to it.

So there had been a trend from the 11th century through the 17th century in Europe of eating something called mummia.

Which was a material made from ground-up powdered mummies, which was supposed to be good for you.

Yes.

Are these ethically sourced mummies?

These were not ethically sourced mummies.

These were deeply unethically sourced mummies.

They were robbing mummies from Egyptian graves.

So it is a valuable product, and it quickly becomes a problem, which is that they exhaust the finite supply.

Did they call it peak mummy?

No, they just pretended like they had more mummies and started finding other recently dead people.

That sounds... I don't want to go on a limb.

That sounds bad.

It was bad.

So they had recipes to speed up the mummification process of corpses.