On eating gods and other transgressions – Nick Groom in TLS:

‘In twenty essays (or “travelling tropes”) under four headings (“Architecture & Form”, “The Lie of the Land”, “The Gothic Compass” and “Monsters”), Luckhurst writes with supreme confidence across epochs and continents (or time and space, as the Lovecraftian might have it). The effects are audacious, contentious and impressively knowledgeable. No one will come away from this book without a reinvigorated sense of gothic forms and possibilities in the twenty-first century.
Typical of Luckhurst’s approach is his essay on ruins, which mixes Piranesi and Turner with twentieth-century photographs of the derelict penitentiaries and dilapidated asylums that now attract dark tourists, “place hackers” and horror film crews – “the most evocative modern ruins are those of institutions that once promised social transformation”. Elsewhere, this laureate of corridors (the subject of a book he published in 2019) ponders the labyrinth, observing that the “contemporary space most imbued with the Gothic sensibility of the maze is not real, but virtual: the video game”. Then there is the apocalyptic “Grey Goo” hypothesis concerning nano-technology running out of control and consuming the Earth’s biomass. This leads Luckhurst to consider atmospherics, peasoupers, invisible radioactive clouds and the disappearance of more explicitly physical monsters. “Risk society” itself “becomes the monster, and that paranoid feeling of persecution by malignant forces, so typical of the Gothic, reaches its peak exactly as the monster vanishes completely from the screen”.’ (…)

‘Kevin Wetmore’s Eaters of the Dead shares Luckhurst’s global perspective as well as his fascination with Lovecraft, but it focuses on a single, unnerving element. Any book on corpse-eating is likely to be replete with nauseating details, and Eaters of the Dead does not disappoint – notably in Wetmore’s account of the Aghori, a tiny ascetic sect of Hindu Holy Men who live among, and off, corpses. The Aghori achieved some notoriety in 2017 when the American academic and broadcaster Reza Aslan featured them in his CNN series Believer (they ate some cremated human brains), but the predictable outcry overlooked the fact that the deliberate exposure to impure, contaminated bodies is a prophylactic phenomenon that connects with religious rites and folkloric customs (not to mention vaccination programmes) across the world. In the 1700s, for example, suggested protections against vampires included eating earth from vampire graves, smearing oneself with a vampire’s blood, and pulling out the teeth of infected victims and sucking their gums.
There are also wider theological aspects to the consumption of bodies. In medieval Western iconography, Hell is often depicted as a mouth and the damned are often gnawed. Further afield, Wetmore discusses the sky burials of Zoroastrianism, where corpses are placed in roofless “Towers of Silence” to be consumed by vultures; in Tibet this is known as taking bodies to the mountains or “giving alms to the birds”. Such practices have developed through necessity in areas where there is insufficient soil for burial or no resources for cremation, or because predators are likely to seize and devour corpses. They also hint at transcendence. Eating the gods is behaviour on a spectrum that seems to run from Bacchus to the Christian Eucharist – “the dying and rising god who must be eaten”. But if the spectre of cannibalism haunts transubstantiation, it is worth remembering that, symbolically speaking, Christ is not dead, and that the rise of Communion should perhaps bring to mind Adam Phillips’s definition of kissing as “aim-inhibited eating”. Other faiths are demonized through accusations of cannibalism, meanwhile: one thinks, most obviously, of the blood libel made against the Jews.’

(…)

‘Finally, Wetmore discusses human cannibals, and gives various reasons for humans eating humans – extreme food scarcity, the exercise of political power, transgressive criminal behaviour. He describes the terrible case of the Donner Party, an all-American settler tale of cannibalism that stalks Cormac McCarthy’s novel The Road. Besides these circumstantial aberrations, purely criminal tales of cannibals such as the serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer are apt to sound stale. But what of Jack the Ripper, who ate a victim’s kidney? Or Keith Richards: did he really snort his father’s ashes? Or George Psalmanazar, the pretended Formosan and cannibal friend of Samuel Johnson? Fictional characters such as Hannibal Lecter and Patrick Bateman receive less attention than The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974), while both Byron’s calamitous account of maritime cannibalism in Don Juan and Peter Greenaway’s film The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover (1989) are unfortunately ignored.
Reading this grisly material, my mind turned to the Yorkshire anthem “On Ilkla Moor Baht ’at”. A lover visits his paramour. The silly man has no hat. He dies from cold, is duly buried, and eaten by worms. “Then ducks’ll cum and eat oop t’ worms … Then we shall go an’ ate oop ducks … Then we shall all ’ave etten thee.” That’s the churn of life. Despite all the weirdness of the cosmic ether, the most positive thing that we might do to help sustain this earth might be a little more straightforward: resign ourselves to our own putrefaction.’

Read the article here.

So, eating the dead can be seen just as just a prophylactic phenomenon.

And in general we should concentrate more on our own putrefaction. A good idea, but most people cannot stand their decay.

Culture is not only a big strategy to overcome the fear of death, but also to postpone decay and make decay less horrific. Yes, your body is in decay, but your wisdom is blossoming as never before.