Abstract
In mythology, religion, and literature, there are many examples of cannibalism that have been passed down over the centuries and which do not strike us as shocking as long as they remain fixed in a symbolic context. Things only become problematic when cannibalistic impulses are taken literally and put into practice. Apart from situations of extreme emergency in which this rare phenomenon might enjoy a certain sympathy, it also occurs within the context of serious sexual offences. Recently, in Germany, there was the case of a man who used the internet to find a person who wanted to have himself eaten. The victim’s consent unsettled not only the public at large, but also the judiciary, which at first did not know how the case was legally to be appropriately assessed. In a first trial in January 2004, the man was sentenced to a comparatively short prison term of only a few years, a sentence that was lifted by the Federal Supreme Court. In a fresh trial in May 2006, he was sentenced to life imprisonment for murder. In this essay, I discuss to what extent mythological, religious, and artistic models of cannibalism express something fundamentally anthropological and how concrete examples should be assessed against this background.
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Acknowledgments
Paper read in German at the international conference “Metamorphosen des Sinns: Un-Vernunft, Unsinn, Wahnsinn, Lichtsein,” held September 21–23, 2006, by the Lithuanian Academy of Culture and the Goethe-Institute of Riga, Lithuania. The English translation will be included into the proceedings of this conference. The author thanks the Lithuanian Academy of Culture and the Goethe-Institute of Riga for the permission to also publish the text in Archives of Sexual Behavior. Translated into English by William Adamson.
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An erratum to this article can be found at http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10508-008-9352-y
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Pfäfflin, F. Good Enough To Eat. Arch Sex Behav 37, 286–293 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10508-007-9227-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10508-007-9227-7