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From the Greek for ‘people-eater’, an anthropophage (plural anthropophagi) belonged to a mythological race of cannibals first described by Herodotus (c.440 B.C.). The word first appeared in English around 1552.

William Shakespeare brought these cannibalistic fairies into British public awareness in his plays The Wives of Winsdor and Othello. In Othello (Act I, scene iii), he famously described them as follows:

And of the Cannibals that each other eat,

The Anthropophagi, and men whose heads

Do grow beneath their shoulders.

In popular culture, anthropophagi are often described as headless, with their mouths in the center of their chests. This is likely due to a misinterpretation of the line about men whose heads grow beneath their shoulders, which in fact refers to a separate mythical race called Blemmyes. However, the popular picture of the anthropophagi as headless cannibals with faces on their torsos has endured. According to Naturalis Historia, one of the world’s earliest encyclopedias, the anthropophagi were in the habit of drinking out of human skulls, and placing the scalps, with the hair attached, upon their breasts, “like so many napkins.”