Getting High the Tsalal Way, Hunter S. Thompson, Playboy Magazine, 1975

Getting High the Tsalal Way, Hunter S. Thompson, Playboy Magazine, 1975

The thing that frightens everyone, the thing that gives the screaming heebies and keeps you up all night, wishing it wasn't true.

Is it true?

Yes. You can get on a plane tomorrow morning and fly down to the south pole, and go to the lands of Yag, and there you can look into the eyes of hard cruel men who have had carnal knowledge of the dead. And they will look back in your eyes, without shame, without regret, with a quality as relentless and uncaring as a shark.

You can do it. But I wouldn't recommend it.

These sorts of stories, these sorts of truths, have made the Tsalal cultures infamous in the rest of the world.

But if you spend a bit of time examining histories seamier side, what you find is that it isn't all that unique. There's a certain kind of warfare that brings out the worst in people, that breeds atrocities like maggots on rotting meat. Look at the accounts of some of the good old American boys that came back from the Phillipine Insurrection, or some of Sy Hersh's seamier stories from the Vietnam war, or some of the more brutal paramilitaries in Latin America, and there's a kind of rancid familiarity to it all. Rape, torture, unspeakable brutality, the defilement of corpses, even necrophilia. Historically, the Romans, the Persians, the Mongols, even the Spaniards did things just as bad and as often far worse.

In 1945, Mussolini was hung from a lamp post, and then his body was pulled down to be mutilated by the people he'd ruled. Women lifted their skirts to urinate on his corpse. 1945 in the heart of civilization. We didn't come very far in 2000 years.

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To understand the Yag, you have to understand geography. Like Mespotamia, like Egypt, like the unfortunate low countries of Europe, their heartland is essentially a flood plain. It's all low country, surrounded by high country.

In Mesopotamia and Egypt, that meant that after the first glorious blush of civilization, every wandering barbarian tribe would overrun them. The Hittites and the Hyksos, the Assyrians, the Persians and Greeks, the Romans, the Arabs and Ottomans, even the British.

The Yag were in the same boat. A low country of disunited, quarreling city states with no geographical barriers or defenses, surrounded by hungry barbarian nomads in the highlands on all sides. And did they invade? Yes they did, from Ptahr, from Shadowlands, from Azul and Wang Gash, Tshorle, Zhudan and even Tsalmothua.

Antarctica is a brutal continent, there's less forgiveness there, everything is closer to the edge. In 1200 the Mongols made a pyramid of severed heads from the citizens of Baghdad. For Antarctica, that's just a regular day.

For the Yag to survive, they had to be harsh. They had to be ruthless. In a land of terrifying peoples, the Yag are generally accorded as the scariest motherf***s around.

And necrophilia is part of that carefully cultivated reputation.

Go to an average Yag, he's probably never had sex with his mother's corpse. Like most of the rest of us, he's horrified by the notion. But deep down, he's also proud, proud of the ruthlessness that would take that dark step and never look back.

The Yag are indifferent cannibals. Like other nations, they seem to have picked that up from Tsalmothua and the Tcho Tcho. When the Tcho Tcho made thae tradition from subsistence and famine to civilization and eating regularly, cannibalism ceased to be necessary, but for whatever reason became a social institution, though not a regular practice. They're more literal about their sacrament. It's the influence of Tcho Tcho culture that extends the institution to other societies. The Yag do it, but they're not particularly chauvinistic about it. This isn't to say its not in their history, but left to themselves, it would have probably faded away and become just a story of the bad old days.

But the necrophilia? That's particular and unique to the Yag. I'm sure anthropologists and sociologists have an explanation for an obscene practice that turns into a cultural rite.

Or rite of passage. Among soldiers, among warriors and police, it is a rite. It is the price of admission, a severing of your ties with ordinary humanity. To be a soldier or warrior of the Yag, and once you are set on that course, there's no getting off, you either die or you pass through, you are required to do it, and do it in front of your peers.

Best not to ask where the corpse comes from, nor how realistic the performance is. But to be part of the Yag fraternity of war, it demands a step that literally separates you from the rest of the human race. That makes you unspeakable.

One night in a bar, I sat with a group of soldiers. My interpreter was shit scared, practically urinating himself. But I was loaded with two bottles of the fermented juice that passes for wine and some powerful local hallucinogens, and a saturday night special brought all the way down from Texas and concealed in my boot.

How much of that night was real, I can't say. But there is one part that I remember, and which I'll swear as to the veracity of.

The subject of necrophilia came up, and I pressed it with all the boldness that only the chemically altered can achieve. At first, they were reluctant, even forbidding. But my recklessness won them over, and since I kept buying drinks, they loosened up.

One of the soldiers described it as 'liberating.' Not sexual, not obscene, not unspeakable. But liberating. The interpreter had a hard time keeping up. But the gist was that once you had done something like that, nothing was beyond you, everything was possible, that there were no limits.

He grinned, and used a word that the translator rendered as 'glorious.'

I still remember that crowded bar, the hushed conversation. But in my mind's eye, that soldier stands alone on a vast abyssal plane, grinning like a skull. He has not looked upon the abyss, he has become it.

How widespread the practice is in Yag society is hard to say. Mostly, officially, it's confined to soldiers and war. And officially, its a rite, not a recreation. But that night in the bar hints were dropped. The Yag are a secretive society, full of orders and hierarchies, and while the common people are likely to be safe enough, there's the suggestion that anyone of any significance has probably literally or symbolically, and most likely literally, knelt before cold unfeeling flesh.

The other hint was, that though it may be a rite of passage into unholy ground, some kind of start to like it. Maybe a bit too much. I remember laughing with that group of soldiers, and deep down, some cold and clinical part of my mind was thinking that if I got on the wrong side of these sons of bitches, I wouldn't wait for them to make a move. I'd shoot five and save the last bullet for myself.

Sometimes, they told me, they're not quite dead when they start.