The
brain was someone’s baby but if you don’t have a soul, do you count? Catholic
animals don’t have souls*, which I learned at a catholic christening for a real
baby with a soul, sin, correct amount of feet and all. But the church was the
next day and I didn’t know about the soul thing when I was sautéing the brains,
thinking about babies.
On p.314 in De Dikke van Dam under
‘brain’, Johannes van Dam says that in Papua New Guinea, fathers used to have
to kill a man they knew the name of and eat his brain on the baptism of their
child. He says that on the (Dutch) colonists’ suggestion that they stop, they
were dismayed. How were they name their young?
This
would have been too good to be true, however, and is also wrong. The brains
were for funerals only. The girls and women of the Fore tribe would eat
relatives’ brains when they died. The men, the rest of the body.
But
everyone has their own rituals, even the Catholics. I was surprised that we
were in church to be told that the only one of us there that was sure not to have a devil inside of him was, in fact, full of devil as the
devil himself. Talk about a ceremonious kick when you’re down and unable to
defend yourself at two months old. But that’s why we have Samaritans. And concrete
church infrastructure to save your soul. If this were the real world though,
like the one in which we pay taxes and have to get up early on Mondays,
wouldn’t we think it a little strange that the only institution that can see
the devil is also the only one that can protect you from him?
Oh
wait.
And
we thought cannibals were bad.
*According to many. Others contest this.
