The symbol then often becomes under our new science the means of recovering the love one felt as a child for one's own mother. The author may not be aware that this use of the symbol is being made by him. He uses the earth to-day, as man from time immemorial has used it, as a symbol of the mother, when he exclaims he wants to die and go back to mother earth. The researches of scholars have established, then, the connection between love and symbolic expressions thereof, and it will be the task of future critics to discover the author's unconscious expression of his love life by symbols. Just as the horse shoe, the mandrake and the four-leafed clover, which are signs of good luck among superstitious people, were originally symbols of fruitfulness, so other objects described in books will be seen to have a sexual origin through a study of anthropology. CHAPTER XII CANNIBALISM: THE ATREUS LEGEND I It will be probably a shock to many people to be told that the cannibalistic instinct still is part of our unconscious. It appears in that pathological state known as lycanthropy where the patient often has a craving for human flesh. It is occasionally revived in cases of starvation and shipwreck, when men are driven to eat human flesh. There should be nothing strange about this, for we are descended from people who were cannibals. And we know that men of the old stone age in France were cannibals and it was practised in Greece in earliest times. It has not yet been exterminated in parts of Africa and Polynesia. Cannibalism figured considerably in ancient literature. It is not my purpose to go into the question of its origin, or the ceremonials connected with it. There are good articles on the subject in the _Encyclopædia of Religion and Ethics_ by J. A. MacCullouch and in the _Encyclopædia Britannica_ by Northcote W. Thomas. I shall, however, touch on instances where men ate human flesh at sacrifices. Cannibalism to-day has chiefly a historic and a literary interest. The subject is worth taking up because of the attention paid to it in literature. We have tales about it to-day. Conrad has given us in his _Falk_ a story of cannibalism. Falk was the survivor on a wrecked ship and was driven by hunger to feast on the bodies of sailors, thus saving his life. The memory of the event is of course horrible to him. The young lady he loves marries him despite his experience. One of Jack London's stories of cannibalism is "The Whale Tooth" in his _South Sea Tales_. It tells how a missionary who went out to convert some Fiji cannibals was betrayed by Ra Vatu, a heathen about to embrace Christianity. The savage desired the missionary's boots to present to a chief. In spite of his acceptance of the religion of Christ he was willing to have his benefactor made a victim of cannibalism. In the same story London refers to a chief who ate eight hundred and seventy-two bodies.