The imagery of cannibalism and its persistence over the centuries are investigated from an interdisciplinary and transcultural perspective, which brings together Literature, visual Arts, Anthropology and Psychoanalysis. Especially from Montaigne’s enlightening Des cannibales, and on till the 20th century, the anthropophagic motif, while combining repulsion and attraction, oscillates between the ancestral horror of its own dissolution and the pleasure of inescapable communion and appropriation. As a founding experience of initiation and metamorphosis, it declines the dynamics of critical-artistic-literary creation.