I. 2, 45); whilst Empedocles, in
verses ascribed to him by Diogenes Laertius, claims power to communicate
like secrets of potency: -
"By my spells thou may'st
To timely sunshine turn the purple rains,
And parching droughts to fertilising floods."
(See Cathay, p. clxxxvii.; Erdm. 282; Oppert, 182 seqq.; Erman,
I. 153; Pallas, Samml. II. 348 seqq.; Timk. I. 402; J. R. A. S.
VII. 305-306; D'Ohsson, II. 614; and for many interesting particulars,
Q. R. p. 428 seqq., and Hammers Golden Horde, 207 and 435 seqq.)
NOTE 9. - It is not clear whether Marco attributes this cannibalism to the
Tibetans and Kashmirians, or brings it in as a particular of Tartar custom
which he had forgotten to mention before.
The accusations of cannibalism indeed against the Tibetans in old accounts
are frequent, and I have elsewhere (see Cathay, p. 151) remarked on some
singular Tibetan practices which go far to account for such charges. Della
Penna, too, makes a statement which bears curiously on the present
passage. Remarking on the great use made by certain classes of the Lamas
of human skulls for magical cups, and of human thigh bones for flutes and
whistles, he says that to supply them with these the bodies of executed
criminals were stored up of the disposal of the Lamas; and a Hindu
account of Tibet in the Asiatic Researches asserts that when one is
killed in a fight both parties rush forward and struggle for the liver,
which they eat (vol. xv).
[Carpini says of the people of Tibet: "They are pagans; they have a most
astonishing, or rather horrible, custom, for, when any one's father is
about to give up the ghost, all the relatives meet together, and they eat
him, as was told to me for certain." Mr. Rockhill (Rubruck, p. 152,
note) writes: "So far as I am aware, this charge [of cannibalism] is not
made by any Oriental writer against the Tibetans, though both Arab
travellers to China in the ninth century and Armenian historians of the
thirteenth century say the Chinese practised cannibalism. The Armenians
designate China by the name Nankas, which I take to be Chinese
Nan-kuo, 'southern country,' the Manzi country of Marco Polo." - H. C.]
But like charges of cannibalism are brought against both Chinese and
Tartars very positively. Thus, without going back to the Anthropophagous
Scythians of Ptolemy and Mela, we read in the Relations of the Arab
travellers of the ninth century: "In China it occurs sometimes that the
governor of a province revolts from his duty to the emperor. In such a
case he is slaughtered and eaten. In fact, the Chinese eat the flesh of
all men who are executed by the sword." Dr. Rennie mentions a
superstitious practice, the continued existence of which in our own day he
has himself witnessed, and which might perhaps have given rise to some
such statement as that of the Arab travellers, if it be not indeed a
relic, in a mitigated form, of the very practice they assert to have
prevailed.
