When Lydia Fairchild was called in by Washington State social services in 2002, she assumed it was just a routine interview for the welfare support she had requested since separating from her partner, Jamie Townsend.9 The meeting turned out to be an interrogation and the beginning of a nightmare – truly something out of a Gothic horror story. Both Lydia and her partner were required to provide samples for DNA analysis to prove they were the parents of the children. When the results came back, Jamie was indeed the father, but Lydia was not the mother. At first Lydia thought that there must have been a mix-up, but she recalled a social worker saying to her, ‘Nope. DNA is 100 per cent foolproof, and it doesn’t lie.’ The authorities treated her as a criminal. They suspected a scam. Fairchild, pregnant with her third child, faced prosecution for benefit fraud and child abduction despite the fact that there were hospital records to prove that she had given birth to her two children. Prosecutors called for her children to be taken away into care, and when she was due to deliver her third child, the court ordered that a witness be present. Fairchild’s world was collapsing.
Luckily, someone else’s nightmare would be her salvation. Four years earlier in Boston, fifty-two-year-old Karen Keegan received a letter with the results of blood tests that she hoped would be an answer to her prayers.10 Karen was in need of a kidney transplant, and her family had undergone compatibility tests to see if any of them would make a suitable donor. Instead, she got quite a shock. The letter told her outright that two of her three sons could not be hers. They did not share her DNA and must have come from another woman. Suspicions were raised. Had there been a mix-up at the hospital? How could two of her sons have been swapped at birth? Karen knew she had given birth to all her boys. It is not something you forget easily or are likely to make up. Only after two years did doctors discover the answer. Karen was a chimera. The chimera is a mythological, fire-breathing, monstrous creature made up of the body of a lion and the body of a goat, fused together with a snake for a tail. However, in biology a chimera is an individual that hosts more than one source of unique DNA. How could this happen? The truth is stranger than any horror writer could imagine.
Early in her pregnancy, Karen’s mother had twin embryos developing inside her. She would have given birth to twin daughters, but something changed, and the two became one. Karen had absorbed her twin sister. Karen possessed two sets of separate genetic code in her body. Biologically, she is two people. When they repeated the tests, they found the other set of DNA that matched that of her two boys. The results of this amazing case were published in the New England Journal of Medicine in 2002.11 Luckily for Lydia Fairchild, when Karen Keegan’s case came to light, prosecutors realized that they had made a terrible mistake. Further genetic tests were undertaken and, to Lydia’s relief, she too was found to be chimeric. The case was dropped, but so was the request for support benefits. Lydia and Jamie got back together again soon after the nightmare.
Rare cases of individuals who are biologically two people challenge our view of what it means to be a unique individual. We think of them as two people because our concepts of unique persons, or males and females, require that two individuals occupy two separate bodies. They cannot occupy the same body. This would be unacceptable for a mind designed to categorize individuals. And yet these individuals have only one body and one mind. This is why we are so perplexed.
Similarly, hermaphrodites and mosaics challenge our fundamental understanding of what it is to be a human being. They may be rare, but they are not supernatural. They are simply natural variations that occur in the random genetic crap shoot of life. But our intuitive biology simply does not readily allow for such exceptions to the rule. We treat these individuals as freaks because they violate our natural order. If identical twins look alike, then they must be telepathic. If some unfortunate sufferer has a skin disorder that makes him look like an alligator or an elephant, maybe he also behaves that way.
Ironically, the same intuitive biology that leads us to confusion when categorizing individuals readily leads us to beliefs about individuals that would be supernatural if true. We may treat others as unique because they occupy separate bodies, but essentialism also leads us to think that individuals have essential properties in their bodies that we can absorb into our own. This is no more dramatic than in the cases where we literally incorporate another person into our own body.
THE STRANGE TALE OF ARMIN MEIWES
The idea that you can absorb someone’s essence is a recurrent theme in explanations of cannibalism. However, cannibalism is a controversial topic among academics, who argue about whether it has really existed and why it may have been practiced.12 The claim that it never existed seems undermined by research on the human prion disease Kuru, which is a variant of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, the human version of ‘mad cow’ disease.13 Kuru was particularly common among the Fore tribe of Papua New Guinea, where the word ‘kuru’ means ‘trembling with fear’. It is now thought that the disease was transmitted through the cannibalistic practice, up until the 1950s, of eating rather than burying dead relatives. Unfortunately, the most digestible but also most heavily contaminated portion of the deceased was the brain, which was prepared especially for women, who then easily transmitted the disease to their young children and babies. Women and children became the most vulnerable victims. Even though the cannibalistic practice was outlawed fifty years ago, the incubation period of Kuru is such that there were still new cases up until the 1990s, indicating that the disease had lain dormant in those children.14
The case for cannibalism is further strengthened by Richard Marlar, who has being going through the ‘motions’ of the ancient Puebloan Indians of the American Southwest known as the Anasazi. The motions are the poo that archaeologists found around campsites where the charred remains of human bones were found in cooking pots dating from around the twelfth century, which led to a controversy about whether the Anasazi had practiced cannibalism. This was resolved by biochemical analysis of the post-meal turds found at the campsite, which were shown to contain human protein. The only way that protein could have gotten there was if it had been eaten.15
So cannibalism was practised, but whether the idea was to absorb another’s essence is less straightforward, as the reasons for the practice varied. It also depended on whether the consumed were enemies or relatives and on how much of them was eaten. The Wari tribe of South America would eat tribe members as a funerary ritual, whereas the Kukukukus tribe of Papua New Guinea preferred to eat their enemies but smoke their relatives.16 When an enemy prisoner was captured, the men broke his legs with clubs so that he could not escape and then let the children play at stoning him to death. He was then chopped up, wrapped in bark, and cooked with vegetables in a traditional pit oven. If the victim was young, the muscular parts were given to the village boys to eat so they could absorb his power and valour. In contrast, deceased relatives were placed in their hut, where a fire was lit and the body was gradually smoked over the course of six weeks. In their belief system, the spirit was still present, and the survivors behaved accordingly, treating the leathery corpse as if it were still alive.