What do you think?
Rate this book
The Beginning Was the End
Man came into being through cannibalism—
intelligence can be eaten
intelligence can be eaten
240 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1971
7 people are currently reading
433 people want to read
About the author
Oscar Kiss Maerth
2 books5 followersOscar Kiss Maerth (8 October 1914 - 1990?) was a British writer living in a Buddhist monastery in Hong Kong. In his most famous book, “The Beginning Was the End”, he declared that modern man devolved from a species of brain-eating monkeys.
Oscar Kiss Maerth tried to initiate a non-violent world revolution against the power of technology.
He and his philosophy inspired the American rock band Devo.
Oscar Kiss Maerth tried to initiate a non-violent world revolution against the power of technology.
He and his philosophy inspired the American rock band Devo.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 14 of 14 reviews
May 31, 2017
I can't remember where I first heard about this book. The premise intrigued me, but used copies of it are pretty expensive. I was able to get it easily through interlibrary loan though.
Maerth's thesis is that modern man came into being from cannibalistic apes that ate the brains of other apes. The reason they ate brains, and why they were able to reproduce so much, is because brains acted as an aphrodisiac and increased sexual pleasure. What they didn't know is that eating brains caused their intelligence to increase and caused them to lose their body hair. The problem is that it made their brains expand so much, it smooshed the brain against their skulls, damaging their brains. This resulted in mental sickness and a loss of the ESP natural to all living beings. This is why modern humans are so miserable and sick in the head.
Yes. He's entirely serious about this.
The first chapter is actually a very well written diatribe about the human condition and discontent with the modern world. In chapter two, it immediately takes a hard turn into kooksville, claiming intelligence can be eaten and that ape brains are an aphrodisiac. The evidence he provides is sketchy at best, things like discussing the importance of head and skull symbolism in many cultures, and ridiculous at worst. One of his claims is that different races evolved from different types of apes, with some races remaining in earlier stages of development than others. His evidence for this a collage of different people of races juxtaposed with different types of monkeys.
Also, there's aliens, because of course there is.
He claims that people like Jesus, Buddha, and so forth were born without brain damage which is what made them such wise men. His solutions to the problem of human's damaged brains are a vegetarian diet, meditation, and trepanation. Okay, not quite. He does argue that trepanation was an early means of relieving pressure in the head and that genetic engineering to expand the skull would be beneficial.
I'm not sure if I should be surprised or not that this book got little attention. The only contemporary review I could find was from Kirkus where the reviewer was obviously shocked by the book. Maerth apparently had a few disciples, but as far as I can tell, a brief pamphlet was the only thing he ever wrote after this. The book does have some notoriety from being an inspiration to the band Devo. They even named one of their short films after the book.
This book is a fine example of crackpottery, but I can see why Devo was inspired by it. It comes up with a pretty original story for humanity's origin and it's a pretty entertaining one. I'd recommend picking this up if you're into oddball theories. Used copies are pretty expensive, but you can get it pretty easily from a library or online.
Maerth's thesis is that modern man came into being from cannibalistic apes that ate the brains of other apes. The reason they ate brains, and why they were able to reproduce so much, is because brains acted as an aphrodisiac and increased sexual pleasure. What they didn't know is that eating brains caused their intelligence to increase and caused them to lose their body hair. The problem is that it made their brains expand so much, it smooshed the brain against their skulls, damaging their brains. This resulted in mental sickness and a loss of the ESP natural to all living beings. This is why modern humans are so miserable and sick in the head.
Yes. He's entirely serious about this.
The first chapter is actually a very well written diatribe about the human condition and discontent with the modern world. In chapter two, it immediately takes a hard turn into kooksville, claiming intelligence can be eaten and that ape brains are an aphrodisiac. The evidence he provides is sketchy at best, things like discussing the importance of head and skull symbolism in many cultures, and ridiculous at worst. One of his claims is that different races evolved from different types of apes, with some races remaining in earlier stages of development than others. His evidence for this a collage of different people of races juxtaposed with different types of monkeys.
Also, there's aliens, because of course there is.
He claims that people like Jesus, Buddha, and so forth were born without brain damage which is what made them such wise men. His solutions to the problem of human's damaged brains are a vegetarian diet, meditation, and trepanation. Okay, not quite. He does argue that trepanation was an early means of relieving pressure in the head and that genetic engineering to expand the skull would be beneficial.
I'm not sure if I should be surprised or not that this book got little attention. The only contemporary review I could find was from Kirkus where the reviewer was obviously shocked by the book. Maerth apparently had a few disciples, but as far as I can tell, a brief pamphlet was the only thing he ever wrote after this. The book does have some notoriety from being an inspiration to the band Devo. They even named one of their short films after the book.
This book is a fine example of crackpottery, but I can see why Devo was inspired by it. It comes up with a pretty original story for humanity's origin and it's a pretty entertaining one. I'd recommend picking this up if you're into oddball theories. Used copies are pretty expensive, but you can get it pretty easily from a library or online.
September 8, 2017
I don't even know where to start with this other than I found it utterly confusing and way over my head that's for sure. What I did understand I didn't agree with but that was maybe because I wasn't really understanding it. Who knows. Anyway this was a serious chore for me. I would read the words but nothing was computing. The words were rattling around in my brain (if you can call it that) and the letters were falling and being mixed up and I was wondering if it was time to put the kettle on to have a cup of coffee and 5 pages were gone. Phew!
This book was nearly the end of me. Appears that I need to eat brain to become more intelligent. Any readers of my reviews want to sacrifice themselves? Don't all rush at once will you.
This book was nearly the end of me. Appears that I need to eat brain to become more intelligent. Any readers of my reviews want to sacrifice themselves? Don't all rush at once will you.
November 14, 2020
Possible one the most misanthropic books ever written, according to which humanity is nothing more than the offspring of brain eating cannibalistic apes. Which is not only responsible for all the ills of the modern world but will lead to our destruction when these desires show themselves again. Read this book as work of fiction similar to the Cities of the Red Night by William Burroughs, The fake history of Jorge Luis Borges, fans of the band Devo lyrics and the Crossed Comic book Series. The later two of which this was most definitely an influence on
August 12, 2018
Absolute five-star work of genius. Nothing can match the scientific rigour and imaginative power of this perfect book. I don't know who Devo is, but I can see why he/she/they like(s) this book - it's a goddamn literary and academic masterpiece. I would rate it twenty-three stars out of five if I could, because that's just how good it is.
March 24, 2023
I rarely enjoy books this much. This is the most accurate, level-headed, academic, intelligent piece of writing I have ever encountered.
LOL just kidding. Full review here.
LOL just kidding. Full review here.
September 9, 2018
Absolute schizo-core. Loved it.
August 13, 2018
It's awful, but entertaining nonetheless. He does have very interesting and thought provoking ideas about philosophy and morality, but it is overwhelmed by pseudoscience and bizarre hypotheses that have no basis in science or logic.
He has particularly interesting perspectives on race. At time his vehement protestations against many common racist ideas are phrased in no uncertain terms, then they are juxtaposed against even stranger and more illogical concepts of race and human development.
Is good for the lol, but you're mentally deficient if you really take any of it seriously.
He has particularly interesting perspectives on race. At time his vehement protestations against many common racist ideas are phrased in no uncertain terms, then they are juxtaposed against even stranger and more illogical concepts of race and human development.
Is good for the lol, but you're mentally deficient if you really take any of it seriously.
June 24, 2013
Read it in 2 days, it's worth a re-read with a pen to comment along-side.
November 19, 2017
Essential for Devo fans but one f**ked up book to be sure. Pretty messed up and potentially harmful.
February 28, 2021
This is a complete one-of-a-kind book that earns a read for a single-minded commitment to the author's bizarre theories. Most of these ideas are pseudo-scientific at best, actively harmful at worst, and totally idiosyncratic.
The central claim is that human consciousness emerged from a cult of cannibalistic brain-eating that spread across the continents, triggering the different primate species it reached to transform into humans, because as we all know eating brains makes you smarter, more virile, and causes you to lose all your body hair and gain a bipedal spinal posture. Over 40,000 years the brain eaters of the world unite and take over, before evolving a sense of shame and cutting it out. However rather than a positive thing this was a disaster. Maerth is a pessimist about human civilization and our concept of our own 'intelligence', which he asserts is merely the myopic feedback loop of hypertrophied neural networks which we mistake for an objective perception of reality. He runs down a basic overview of human cruelties throughout history, the ecological and social ramifications of industrialization, and says we need to return to monke, reject brain-eating. Like Freud, Maerth believes that ancient events have left evolutionary traces of trauma in the human condition, accept instead of oedipal struggles this was the growing awareness of how wrong the brain-eating cult was, how cursed the "gifts" it had given humans were, and the subsequent awareness, necessarily repressed, that humans are deformed and doomed creatures because of it. I always enjoy alternative grand narratives of human history like this, even though they rarely convince, like Velikovsky's planetary collision theory and Girards scapegoat theory. This is only the tip of the iceberg, Maerth has things to say about a variety of loosely-relevant topics like veganism, parapsychology, drowned continents, psychic powers and even ancient aliens at one point.
Maerths assertion that different 'races' were the result of different primate species undergoing humanization events in different times and places as the brain-eater cult spread may seem like a relic of Victorian 'race science' but it's worth noting that the polygel theory of human evolution was still a lingering presence in institutional anthropology when Maerth was writing in the early 1970s. Carleton Coon was still being taught in universities, even if his 'Origin of Races' (1962) was mostly recognized as patent pseudoscientific racism. His students to a lesser extent helped to keep alive the tradition of polygel race theory well into the 20th century.
Maerth assumes that the transition from miscellaneous primate to human was a linear process that occurred at different times, leaving some races stranded at "lower stages." And women, being excluded from the brain-eating cult, are also naturally less intelligent.
"Likewise, a woman is a fully valid human being as long as she remains as a woman in her family and does not want to operate as a ship's captain, a mechanical engineer or even a philosopher."
(p.68).
As a kind of backhanded compliment/apology, Maerth suggests that women are more in touch with the extra-sensory powers of animals "simple natural truths" and fill a vital role in restraining man's delusional cannibalized intelligence.
After all, "no group of apes was ever led by a female." (69).
I guess Maerth never met a Bonobo matriarch.
Patently unscientific propositions like this are presented as common-sense truths throughout the book. For instance, how long would it take women to develop the level of intelligence achieved by man through brain eating? Exactly 100,000 years of brain-eating would be required, Maerth states confidently, as the daughter can only inherit cannibalized hereditary knowledge from her mother, just as the son can only gain his from the father. Again, no sources for this "fact", which Maerth presents as a fundamental biological truth. The crux of Maerths entire argument about the intelligence-granting powers of eating brains is glossed over in exactly this way;
"When an animal eats the fresh brain of its own kind its sexual impulses increase. It will lead a more active sex-life and experience more sensations of pleasure. There is no need to be clever or to subscribe to any belief or superstition to realize this." (44).
"[T]hey discovered also that eating brain caused the intelligence to grow permanently and that this lasting effect then became hereditary." (45).
There never comes a point where Maerth provides evidence, citations, or any other sort of research review. He only says that once one has eaten the fresh brain of their own kind they will need no further evidence for his claims. Throughout he implies that he has eaten fresh human brains and gained much of his insight this way and more or less suggests the only way to falsify his claims is to follow his lead and eat a brain. He also prescribes trepanation at one point. You see, the brain's neural structure is the result of the rapid intelligence increase prompted by brain-eating. As this structure became more and more convoluted and the brain more and more bloated with forbidden knowledge it became pressurized inside the confines of the skull. So Maerth recommends punching a few holes in it from time to time to relieve the pressure and get a bit of nice fresh air on your brain. I have to hand it to Maerth, despite his deeply toxic views, his balls-out confidence in his own philosophy never falters, and following his bizarre train of thought is an exhilarating roller coaster ride.
And again I must note that although trepanation, like polygenism, was at best a fringe area by the 70s it had never fully vanished from popular consciousness and Maerth was not the only one around suggesting it. For a thorough overview of the different trepanation enthusiasts active at the time check out the 'Heartbeat in the Brain' essay in Feral Press' 'Apocalypse Culture', 2nd ed. If it needs saying, from what I've read the few eccentrics who did actually undergo trepanation in the 60s and 70s all say the effects were pretty underwhelming so please seek professional medical advice before trying it yourself.
Another way of looking at the book is to consider it a work in the canon of cosmic pessimism. Another reviewer called this "one of the most misanthropic books ever written" and I fully agree. Though I don't buy a word of it Maerths all-encompassing vision of a species deformed and slowly imploding thanks to the ancient sin of cannibalistic ritual is delivered in total earnest and conveys a dread of the insouciant forces of reality, evolution, and deep geological timespans, of civilization as geological ephemera of no major importance. Is Maerths undisguised misogyny and racism all that dissimilar to canonical authors in the cosmic pessimist library like Schopenhauer (who also believed in polygel race theory, and who wrote the infamous "On Women" screed), Nietzsche, and Cioran? If modern progressive thinkers can recuperate the useful ideas of these authors, why not Maerth? The problem is Maerth refuses to meet reality halfway. While he suggests a vegetarian diet, meditation, social isolation (and, uh, trepanning) as healthy lifestyle choices, and while he asserts some ole fashioned hierarchical gender roles and racist progressivism, his thesis is mostly self-contained and because Maerth doesn't use citations or link the work to any outside data it is hard to find a middle ground between Maerths ideas and any social prescription outside of blatant eugenics.
So who was Oscar Kiss Maerth anyway? He is a very mysterious and poorly known figure for a bestselling weirdo. Despite claiming to be Hungarian-born, (some sources say Romanian) British-raised and having lived with cannibals in PNG, Australia, and South America, esthetics in South East Asia, and Buddhist monks in Hong Kong and Tibet among other exotic locales it seems likely he fled Germany in WW2 and moved throughout Europe where he raised six children with his wife, settling in Italy. Rumors that he was a Nazi are rife but cannot be substantiated by anything except his own promotion of eugenics and human hierarchies in this book. In a short article for Sunday magazine by Steve Braunias many years ago, Braunias attempted to find out more about Maerth but could substantiate little outside of his last being seen in Lake Como, Italy (although others say he ended up in California). A lot of websites claim he died in 1990 but where this comes from I don't know. I could find no online death records or any print references to this. There is one filmed interview within Maerth available to watch on YouTube, part of a German documentary which sadly has no English translation. If you know anything more about the author please message me I'm fascinated to know more about him and his life.
Overall I thoroughly recommend this book purely as a singular oddity. The racist and sexist ideas are so nonsensical as to be parodic and I doubt anyone would take them seriously, however, note that these gross viewpoints are present.
The central claim is that human consciousness emerged from a cult of cannibalistic brain-eating that spread across the continents, triggering the different primate species it reached to transform into humans, because as we all know eating brains makes you smarter, more virile, and causes you to lose all your body hair and gain a bipedal spinal posture. Over 40,000 years the brain eaters of the world unite and take over, before evolving a sense of shame and cutting it out. However rather than a positive thing this was a disaster. Maerth is a pessimist about human civilization and our concept of our own 'intelligence', which he asserts is merely the myopic feedback loop of hypertrophied neural networks which we mistake for an objective perception of reality. He runs down a basic overview of human cruelties throughout history, the ecological and social ramifications of industrialization, and says we need to return to monke, reject brain-eating. Like Freud, Maerth believes that ancient events have left evolutionary traces of trauma in the human condition, accept instead of oedipal struggles this was the growing awareness of how wrong the brain-eating cult was, how cursed the "gifts" it had given humans were, and the subsequent awareness, necessarily repressed, that humans are deformed and doomed creatures because of it. I always enjoy alternative grand narratives of human history like this, even though they rarely convince, like Velikovsky's planetary collision theory and Girards scapegoat theory. This is only the tip of the iceberg, Maerth has things to say about a variety of loosely-relevant topics like veganism, parapsychology, drowned continents, psychic powers and even ancient aliens at one point.
Maerths assertion that different 'races' were the result of different primate species undergoing humanization events in different times and places as the brain-eater cult spread may seem like a relic of Victorian 'race science' but it's worth noting that the polygel theory of human evolution was still a lingering presence in institutional anthropology when Maerth was writing in the early 1970s. Carleton Coon was still being taught in universities, even if his 'Origin of Races' (1962) was mostly recognized as patent pseudoscientific racism. His students to a lesser extent helped to keep alive the tradition of polygel race theory well into the 20th century.
Maerth assumes that the transition from miscellaneous primate to human was a linear process that occurred at different times, leaving some races stranded at "lower stages." And women, being excluded from the brain-eating cult, are also naturally less intelligent.
"Likewise, a woman is a fully valid human being as long as she remains as a woman in her family and does not want to operate as a ship's captain, a mechanical engineer or even a philosopher."
(p.68).
As a kind of backhanded compliment/apology, Maerth suggests that women are more in touch with the extra-sensory powers of animals "simple natural truths" and fill a vital role in restraining man's delusional cannibalized intelligence.
After all, "no group of apes was ever led by a female." (69).
I guess Maerth never met a Bonobo matriarch.
Patently unscientific propositions like this are presented as common-sense truths throughout the book. For instance, how long would it take women to develop the level of intelligence achieved by man through brain eating? Exactly 100,000 years of brain-eating would be required, Maerth states confidently, as the daughter can only inherit cannibalized hereditary knowledge from her mother, just as the son can only gain his from the father. Again, no sources for this "fact", which Maerth presents as a fundamental biological truth. The crux of Maerths entire argument about the intelligence-granting powers of eating brains is glossed over in exactly this way;
"When an animal eats the fresh brain of its own kind its sexual impulses increase. It will lead a more active sex-life and experience more sensations of pleasure. There is no need to be clever or to subscribe to any belief or superstition to realize this." (44).
"[T]hey discovered also that eating brain caused the intelligence to grow permanently and that this lasting effect then became hereditary." (45).
There never comes a point where Maerth provides evidence, citations, or any other sort of research review. He only says that once one has eaten the fresh brain of their own kind they will need no further evidence for his claims. Throughout he implies that he has eaten fresh human brains and gained much of his insight this way and more or less suggests the only way to falsify his claims is to follow his lead and eat a brain. He also prescribes trepanation at one point. You see, the brain's neural structure is the result of the rapid intelligence increase prompted by brain-eating. As this structure became more and more convoluted and the brain more and more bloated with forbidden knowledge it became pressurized inside the confines of the skull. So Maerth recommends punching a few holes in it from time to time to relieve the pressure and get a bit of nice fresh air on your brain. I have to hand it to Maerth, despite his deeply toxic views, his balls-out confidence in his own philosophy never falters, and following his bizarre train of thought is an exhilarating roller coaster ride.
And again I must note that although trepanation, like polygenism, was at best a fringe area by the 70s it had never fully vanished from popular consciousness and Maerth was not the only one around suggesting it. For a thorough overview of the different trepanation enthusiasts active at the time check out the 'Heartbeat in the Brain' essay in Feral Press' 'Apocalypse Culture', 2nd ed. If it needs saying, from what I've read the few eccentrics who did actually undergo trepanation in the 60s and 70s all say the effects were pretty underwhelming so please seek professional medical advice before trying it yourself.
Another way of looking at the book is to consider it a work in the canon of cosmic pessimism. Another reviewer called this "one of the most misanthropic books ever written" and I fully agree. Though I don't buy a word of it Maerths all-encompassing vision of a species deformed and slowly imploding thanks to the ancient sin of cannibalistic ritual is delivered in total earnest and conveys a dread of the insouciant forces of reality, evolution, and deep geological timespans, of civilization as geological ephemera of no major importance. Is Maerths undisguised misogyny and racism all that dissimilar to canonical authors in the cosmic pessimist library like Schopenhauer (who also believed in polygel race theory, and who wrote the infamous "On Women" screed), Nietzsche, and Cioran? If modern progressive thinkers can recuperate the useful ideas of these authors, why not Maerth? The problem is Maerth refuses to meet reality halfway. While he suggests a vegetarian diet, meditation, social isolation (and, uh, trepanning) as healthy lifestyle choices, and while he asserts some ole fashioned hierarchical gender roles and racist progressivism, his thesis is mostly self-contained and because Maerth doesn't use citations or link the work to any outside data it is hard to find a middle ground between Maerths ideas and any social prescription outside of blatant eugenics.
So who was Oscar Kiss Maerth anyway? He is a very mysterious and poorly known figure for a bestselling weirdo. Despite claiming to be Hungarian-born, (some sources say Romanian) British-raised and having lived with cannibals in PNG, Australia, and South America, esthetics in South East Asia, and Buddhist monks in Hong Kong and Tibet among other exotic locales it seems likely he fled Germany in WW2 and moved throughout Europe where he raised six children with his wife, settling in Italy. Rumors that he was a Nazi are rife but cannot be substantiated by anything except his own promotion of eugenics and human hierarchies in this book. In a short article for Sunday magazine by Steve Braunias many years ago, Braunias attempted to find out more about Maerth but could substantiate little outside of his last being seen in Lake Como, Italy (although others say he ended up in California). A lot of websites claim he died in 1990 but where this comes from I don't know. I could find no online death records or any print references to this. There is one filmed interview within Maerth available to watch on YouTube, part of a German documentary which sadly has no English translation. If you know anything more about the author please message me I'm fascinated to know more about him and his life.
Overall I thoroughly recommend this book purely as a singular oddity. The racist and sexist ideas are so nonsensical as to be parodic and I doubt anyone would take them seriously, however, note that these gross viewpoints are present.
March 5, 2019
While the book is full of pseudoscience, it is written in a way that is compelling and pleasurable. Many of the ideas also come off as fresh and exciting. If you don't put much stock in the science involved, it's an interesting glimpse into an alternative perspective.
June 8, 2022
This book was published as non-fiction; but in today's world this book is definitely fiction.
The author proposes that certain male apes began to cannibalize other male apes but only consumed their brains. He claims they did this for increasing sex drives. And the second side effect of consuming brains; is gain of knowledge. The cannibal apes then raped females from an ancestral ban of apes and this became modern man. He theorizes that "humans" brain are defective; our brain grew too quickly and it's compacted in our skulls. Of course he makes these allegations; loosely ties it to the story of creation; has no proof how he came to these conclusions.
I can't believe a publishing company would have published such disjointed information. And the author definitely appears racist and very sexist.
Now -- some of the concepts were interesting and quite frankly could be made into a sci fi fiction very easily.
In closing the reason we don't see many Bigfoots/Yeti - is that these apes finally stopped consuming brains; after they realized they almost became extinct.
I cannot recommend this book to anyone.
The author proposes that certain male apes began to cannibalize other male apes but only consumed their brains. He claims they did this for increasing sex drives. And the second side effect of consuming brains; is gain of knowledge. The cannibal apes then raped females from an ancestral ban of apes and this became modern man. He theorizes that "humans" brain are defective; our brain grew too quickly and it's compacted in our skulls. Of course he makes these allegations; loosely ties it to the story of creation; has no proof how he came to these conclusions.
I can't believe a publishing company would have published such disjointed information. And the author definitely appears racist and very sexist.
Now -- some of the concepts were interesting and quite frankly could be made into a sci fi fiction very easily.
In closing the reason we don't see many Bigfoots/Yeti - is that these apes finally stopped consuming brains; after they realized they almost became extinct.
I cannot recommend this book to anyone.
September 16, 2021
Better living through cannibalism. Everything you've heard about this notorious treatise is true. Yes, the author's name really is Kiss (Yugoslav-born). This mind-blower is what inspired the 70s punk rock band Devo. (Incidentally, the founder of the band went to my university). And now for the thesis: anthropoid apes turned into humans by eating the brains of the other apes they defeated in battle. Our ancestors thus enlarged their brains and birthed intelligence, but also an appetite for war. I found my copy in a now-defunct New York City bookstore but you should grab one wherever you can.
July 1, 2018
Absolute garbage. Utter, utter, pseudoscience, showing an absolute ignorance of any real scientific knowledge at all, and racist and sexist to boot. If I could have given it no stars I would have done so. I can only agree with what one reviewer said when it first came out - how was this allowed to be published?
Displaying 1 - 14 of 14 reviews