#tantalus atreus cronos etc and paternal cannibalism

[orangerosebush]

CW DISCUSSION OF ABUSE

I am trying to find papers on the subject of fathers who consume (knowingly or unknowingly) their children in myth. Although writing on mothers who consume their children has already explored the monstrous inversion of birth/pregnancy present in those stories, there's certainly an analogous tenor to stories that instead feature fathers with murderous appetites, and I want to see what has been written on that note. Parental cannibalism in these stories is particularly interesting to me as a way of exploring certain kinds of abuse (e.g., sexual), as the violence of these acts is symbolically so close to incestuous abuse. To elaborate on why I see there being a connection, I return to why cannibalism in myth within families is a kind of double cannibalism. Parental cannibalism is cannibalism, of course, in the sense that one is eating a member of one's community, of one's community. Yet the act is cannibalism in another sense: in the sense that the cannibalism is occurring within a family unit (i.e., not just transgressing the boundary of eating someone of the same species, but of the same species and bloodlines). Furthermore, just as the comestible line we must not cross is drawn at the boundary of species, so too is the line drawn sexually transgressed in the context of incestuous abuse.