The Roots of the Christmas Tree (Another Very Historically Blind Xmas!)

The podcast this holiday season was somewhat overshadowed by a few grim realities, but also by the dark and grisly subject matter that precedes this post. It is pretty difficult to transition from a series on Jack the Ripper to a festive episode. In some way, then, the podcast can be likened to Whitechapel and really all of London in December of 1888, with the awful reality of the horrific murders and the uncertainty over when the killer would strike again still hanging over the city like a pall as many attempted to make merry. There is, though, I think, one interesting connection between the story of Jack the Ripper and the topic of Christmas and its origins, and that is the figure of Charles Dickens. The great Victorian novelist died in 1870, almost 20 years before the Ripper murders, and yet he is inextricably linked to them through his depictions of the East End. In his earlier fiction, he writes about the East End, and even Whitechapel, as a genial and romantic place, the bustling and exciting setting of comedies like The Pickwick Papers. But later in his career, he depicted it as “a jungle of decaying slums housing a starved, feral people,” a squalid and crime-infested district from which, as Madeleine Murphy, author of Dickens and the Ripper Legend states, he suggested “some unknown beast will spring.” Dickens, then, by this view, anticipated the emergence of the Ripper. And he also anticipated the emergence of Christmas, or at least, its most lasting and popular iteration, which hearkens back to Victorian England, when many of the traditions and iconography that persist today began to take definite shape. Dickens is almost synonymous with Christmas. As I write these words, my wife is watching one of the many film adaptations of his classic story, A Christmas Carol, the one starring Patrick Stewart as Ebenezer Scrooge, and within the week, we will be enjoying ourselves at the Dickens Fair here in California, where they attempt to recreate Victorian London, celebrate all things Dickens, and engage in eggnog-fueled holiday revelry for a full month between Thanksgiving and Christmas. There at Dickens Fair the mythology of Dickens is on full display. In some ways, he is responsible for constructing the public conception of Victorian England. Most depictions of Victorian England in fiction and film are perhaps more Dickensian than historical. And he is further credited as the man who invented Christmas. This is no exaggeration. A film by that very name appeared in 2017, based on a book published in 2008, but the notion goes all the way back to an early Dickens scholar, F. G. Kitton, who wrote an article by that name in 1903. What Kitton remarked on, however, was not really the invention of the holiday, or any of its traditions, but rather its resurgence. It is true that the bubonic plague, the collapse of the feudal system, and the Puritan war on Christmas merriment had reduced the holiday to a more sedate and private affair than it had previously been in England, and it is further true that the enormous popularity of Dickens’s A Christmas Carol did much to popularize the holiday again in England, or as fellow novelist William Makepeace Thackeray put it, the novella “was the means of lighting up hundreds of kind fires at Christmas time; caused a wonderful outpouring of Christmas good feeling; of Christmas punch-brewing; an awful slaughter of Christmas turkeys; and roasting and basting of Christmas beef.” There is even a case to be made for Dickens being the person responsible for associating Christmas with snow, since when he wrote about the holiday, he associated it with the bitterly cold winters of his youth, when the River Thames would freeze over, which became a lot less common after the end of the Little Ice Age in the early 19th century. But this too is a dubious credit, since the holiday, even in antiquity, has always been tied to the end of the year and winter solstice, the shortest day, after which come the coldest days. Surely, then, Dickens was not the first to associate the holiday with snow and ice. Perhaps the element most associated with a Victorian and Dickensian Christmas, indeed the tradition and image most associated with the holiday today, second only, it can be argued, to Santa Claus, is the Christmas tree, and this too, it can be said, was popularized by Dickens, who wrote an essay about them in 1850, describing the Christmas tree as a “pretty German toy,” a very new tradition that was then catching on in the English speaking world, and which Dickens used as a metaphor to wax nostalgic about childhood and the lessons of life. Here we find Dickens again at the forefront of a Christmas tradition for which he can’t really be given credit. He was not the first nor even the most effective champion of this tradition, and just exactly how new it really was in the mid-19th century, and where it came from, remains one of the most complicated and debated topics related to Christmas. So join me now, around our tree, so brightly festooned with glittering ornaments and lit tapers, as I welcome you to yet another Very Historically Blind Christmas, this one all about the Christmas tree and its roots.

*

I have spoken on the topic of Christmas trees and their origin before. In my very first holiday special, all the way back in 2018, talked about it in a couple of paragraphs, and it came up again last year, in my patron exclusive about the bizarre mushroom theory of Christmas, but it is a topic that proves far more complex and full of uncertainty and mystery than I managed to show in those brief mentions. As I said back then, there are a great many notions, perpetuated by social media meming, that the Christmas tree is some sort of very ancient pagan practice, and that Christians are somewhat foolish in thinking it’s not a pagan survival that they co-opted. One bible verse typically thrown in their faces is Jeremiah, Chapter 10, verse 3 and 4, “For the customs of the peoples are false: a tree from the forest is cut down..they deck it with silver and gold….” What is typically omitted or glossed over is the part that says the felled tree is “worked with an ax by the hands of an artisan,” and that in the context of the actual verse, it is talking about the carving of wooden idols plated in silver and gold and fastened to a wall with nails, not a tree hung with ornaments. It is a blatant misconstruing of the scripture to attack Christians, and that’s just bad form. Really, we don’t need to rely on falsehoods to reveal the hypocrisies of many Christians. In truth, the Christmas tree, as we today recognize it, did not really appear until the 19th century, and in a narrow way, the Dickens movie, The Man Who Invented Christmas, gets it right. In it, the actor Dan Stevens, who plays Dickens, has a decorated tree in his parlor and remarks that “The Germans call it a Tannenbaum. It's a tree for Christmas. A Christmas tree, I suppose. Now the royal family have got one, it'll be all the rage.” Now, it’s wrong to suggest that a tannenbaum is a Christmas tree, or that the song O Tannenbaum can be accurately translated as O Christmas tree, as is common in English. In truth, a tannenbaum is just a fir tree, and the subject of the 18th century song was a living evergreen, persisting through the bitter cold and remaining alive. To associate it with a tree that we cut down for decorative purposes rather misses the point, but that is exactly what happened in the 19th century, when the song was first rewritten to take on a more festive seasonal symbolism and then was translated into English as referring explicitly to a Christmas tree. The film is right, however, in ascribing a German origin to modern day Christmas trees, and in crediting the British royal family for popularizing them. The film is referring to Queen Victoria, or more specifically to her German consort, Prince Albert, who in 1840 imported some spruce trees from Bavaria to uphold his German Christmas tradition in England. It is not entirely accurate that the tradition would have spread to the Dickens home by 1843, the year he published A Christmas Carol, as the film depicts, however, because it did not really take off as a popular tradition until some years later, when the press publicized it as a yearly tradition in the royal household. In 1848, the Times and the Illustrated London News both published stories describing the royal christmas tree, along with engravings illustrating it, and by the following year, the tradition had taken hold, and the same newspapers were printing stories with recommendations on how Londoners might decorate their own trees. Hence the 1850 essay in which Dickens effused about the newfangled German Christmas tree. But as new as it may have seemed to the English public in 1848, there was, indeed, as many have claimed, a longer history to this practice.

An pretty edition of the Dickens essay on the Christmas Tree.

Even within England, the practice was not unknown. Queen Victoria herself reminisced about a Christmas season from her youth, in 1833, during which she remembered “trees hung with lights and sugar ornaments.” It may be, then, that the decoration of a tree at Christmas was only a tradition at court before Victoria and Albert popularized it, for as is frequently pointed out, there is record of an earlier British royal putting up a tree. In 1800, George III’s wife Queen Charlotte apparently put up and decorated a yew tree with wax candles and clusters of fruits and nuts to delight the children attending a holiday party in the Queen’s lodgings. This appears to have been the beginning of the trend among the upper classes in England. The fact that in previous years, Charlotte had only put up and decorated a single bough of a yew tree, as was common practice in the German duchy of Mecklenburg-Strelitz, where Charlotte was from, has led some to speculate that she was the Christmas tree “inventor,” that she was the first to innovate the decoration of a whole tree rather than just a branch. Supporting this is a description of the tradition in Mecklenburg-Strelitz as observed by the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge in 1799: “On the evening before Christmas Day, one of the parlours is lighted up by the children, into which the parents must not go; a great yew bough is fastened on the table at a little distance from the wall, a multitude of little tapers are fixed in the bough ... and coloured paper etc. hangs and flutters from the twigs. Under this bough the children lay out the presents….” However, while in this particular duchy the tradition was the decoration of a single bough, it is clear that elsewhere in Germany, the tradition was to bring in and decorate a whole tree, in some places a yew, in others a box tree, and elsewhere a fir tree. The first mentions of these German trees extends much further back, especially around Strasbourg, on the Rhine in the Alsace region in what is eastern France today. In the middle of the 17th century, theologian Johann Konrad Dannhauer wrote about “the Christmas- or fir-tree, which people set up in their houses [and] hang with dolls and sweets,” and like many a historian and theologian since, he too was baffled by the origin of the tradition, saying, “Whence comes the custom, I know not.” By his time, it had firmly taken root, it seems, but at the very beginning of that century, in 1605, an anonymous writer had described the same tradition in the same place, “They set up fir trees in the parlours at Strasburg and hang thereon roses cut out of many-coloured paper, apples, wafers, gold-foil, sweets, etc.” And it appears that the practice of cutting down trees for Christmas was widespread even midway through the previous century, as in Upper Alsace, in 1561, a limit on the number and size of pines that people were allowed to cut down was imposed. 

According to one legend, the tradition originated some 500 kilometers from Strasbourg, in Wittenberg, on the other side of Germany. It is claimed that the German church reformer Martin Luther took a winter stroll one night and admired the stars shining through the evergreen canopy of the trees overhead. According to this tale, Luther cut down a tree and brought it home, hung lit candles in its branches to simulate what he had seen, and turned it into a sermon for his family about the Christmas star. This story just sounds totally false, and sure enough, it is entirely unsupported by any historical documentation. There is a far better case to be made that Martin Luther originated the Christkind or Christkindle traditions of a Christmas giftbringer who could be likened to the Christ child, wanting to take emphasis away from the Catholic Saint Nicholas, but this claim about the Christmas tree seems bogus. It does appear to be the case, however, that Christmas trees were largely a Protestant tradition when the custom did take root. In fact, they came to be called Lutherbaum, or Luther trees, and by the 19th century, Catholics derisively referred to Protestantism as the “Tannenbaum religion.” However, the first confirmed Christmas tree in Wittenberg, where Luther supposedly invented them, would not appear until a couple hundred years after Luther’s death in 1546. And since, about a hundred years after Luther died, the aforementioned Lutheran theologian Johann Dannhauer still had no idea where the custom had originated, it seems very unlikely that Martin Luther invented it. In fact, all signs point to Strasbourg, in the Franco-German Alsace, as the birthplace of Christmas trees. Strasbourg today boasts that it is the capitale de Noël, the Capital of Christmas, as its Christmas market was held as far back as 1570, and its annual raising and decoration of a Christmas tree in the Strasbourg Cathedral is said to have taken place as far back as 1539. Going further back, into the 15th century, the Strasbourgian town clerk Sebastian Brant attempted to forbid the cutting down of trees around the end of 1494, so widespread was the practice of bringing felled trees into the home. And in 1419, a record from a Fraternity of Baker’s Apprentices in Freiburg, just south of Strasbourg, mentions a tree inside the Hospital of the Holy Spirit that was decorated with gingerbread, wafers, tinsel, and apples. This is what we find when searching for the invention of the Christmas tree—each time we think we find its “inventor,” Queen Charlotte, Martin Luther, when we look further back we find still the Christmas tree standing and shining, the beacon of a festive winter holiday.

Queen Victoria and Prince Albert popularizing the Christmas tree.

Now we’ve traced the Christmas tree back to the tail end of the Middle Ages, to Alsace in the Rhineland, then a part of the Holy Roman Empire, and the earliest of descriptions we can find, in Freiburg, has them decorated with bright red ornaments, such as apples, and other edible ornaments, including wafers. One idea for the medieval origin of the Christmas tree has to do with various legends surrounding trees and plants miraculously blossoming around Christmastime. According to one 1430 account, an apple tree in Nuremberg “bore apple blossoms the size of a thumb on the night of Christ’s birth,” causing citizens to keep vigil around it. This lone incident could not have been the origin of Christmas trees, since we have already seen the tradition in earlier reports, but this one corresponds generally to many traditions about miraculous blooming in midwinter, most of them having to do with plants that, strangely, bloomed or bore fruit in this unusual season, most of which are now largely associated with Christmas, like holly, mistletoe, the poinsettia, also called the Christmas Star, and the hellebore, or Christmas Rose. Indeed, there is a story out of the Middle Ages of the miraculous blooming of actual red roses associated with Christmas. It is said that St. Francis of Assisi discovered a rosebush miraculously in bloom in the snow at Christmastime. There are different versions of this legend, which helps to demonstrate its mythological character. In one, Francis is leaving a convent in San Damiano and tells the sorrowful nuns there that they will see him when the roses bloom again, whereupon they see the miracle of the winter roses. Another version has it that he laid down on the thorns of a barren rosebush one night in order to feel the pain that Christ felt, and in the following days the roses bloomed. The simple fact, though, is that a miracle having to do with roses was quite common in hagiography. Often it was the transformation of other things into roses, but in the case of Saint Elizabeth of Hungary and Our Lady of Guadalupe, the appearance of fresh roses in winter became an established motif. While there is little evidence to support that these legends evolved into a tradition of cutting down evergreen trees and adorning with red ornaments to represent a miraculous blooming, there is some clear sign that these miraculous blooming traditions contributed to other Christmas customs, such as bringing cuttings from certain trees, including hazel, linden, cherry, plum, and apple trees, into the warmth of the home and placing them in water so they would bloom unseasonably around Christmas. These not being evergreens, though, it would seem an entirely separate tradition from Christmas greenery and Christmas trees, with perhaps the crossover being the common Christmas tree decoration of paper flowers that we later see. 

While these miracle blooms of apple blossoms gets us closer to the trees hung with apples, it is another theory on the origin of the Christmas tree tradition that takes us all the way there, one which I and most scholars find the most convincing. In the Middle Ages, in Germany and elsewhere in the Holy Roman Empire of Central and Western Europe, there was a predecessor to the nativity play we usually associate with Christmas time. These were called Paradise Plays, or Genesis Plays, and they reenacted the events of Adam and Eve’s original sin and banishment from Eden. During the height of the scribal system, when many could not read and books were a luxury possession of the church, read and copied by monks, and of royals tutored in Latin, such mystery plays were a common vehicle by which to teach the public about major scriptural narratives and doctrinal points. These plays in particular, depicting the Biblical Creation myth, Satan’s temptation of Eve, and the Fall of Man, may seem like an odd play to stage on Christmas Eve, but it must be remembered that December 24th was the Feast of Adam and Eve. In focusing on the story of original sin just before Christmas Day, Christians of the Middle Ages were reminded of why Christ was born, about the need for redemption that he fulfilled. So though it may seem an entirely unrelated story, it was not viewed as such. This much can be clearly discerned in medieval art, in which the Christ child is commonly seen accepting an apple from Mary. As you might imagine, these Paradise Plays had reason to depict an apple laden tree in the garden, the fruit of which Adam and Eve were forbidden to eat. The problem was, apple trees were bare, their fruit having been harvested already. Nor would it have been practical to cut down a healthy, fruit-bearing tree to serve as a prop. This being wintertime, it was therefore common to cut down a fir tree for these productions and adorn them with apples. According to the current best guess of scholars, Germans kept this tradition past the Middle Ages, bringing these Paradise trees into their homes, adorning them not just with apples, but with eucharist wafers to further represent Christ’s atonement for Original Sin. Parallel to this tradition was one that arose out of the Ore Mountains in Western Germany of having a so-called Christmas pyramid, or wooden carousel of shelves lit with candles and decorated with Christian scenes, like the Nativity. Originally, this was called a Lichtergestelle or “light-stand,” and was meant to brighten spirits during dark and cold months. It was adorned with evergreen cuttings to further raise spirits. As near as most scholars can discern, then, somewhere in the murky Middle Ages, in the homes of common Germanic folk in the Holy Roman Empire, the custom of raising a Paradise tree and of making a Christmas pyramid merged, and the Christmas tree was born, lit with candles to ward off the dark, decorated gaily with bright and colorful baubles—something like apples or miraculous winter blooms—and with edible treats to raise spirits—something more tasty than the eucharist wafers of old—and eventually the origin of the tradition was forgotten. 

A depiction of Martin Luther celebrating with a Christmas tree.

             Or at least, this is current scholarly consensus, lacking definitive evidence of the custom’s step by step evolution but making perfect sense chronologically, geographically, and culturally. So that’s the end of it, right? Not quite. Many are the claims that the origin of the Christmas tree stretches much further back, deriving from ancient pagan customs, and therefore serving as an example of pagan survival within Christianity. I am open to such theories, as I have indicated in previous episodes on Christmas, but I am also very critical of them when they lack evidence and logic, as was the case, for example, in the mushroom theory of Christmas, which attributes everything Christmasy to the practices of Siberian shamans and their use of psychotropic mushrooms. So let’s look at these theories. The most widespread is that the Christmas tree is some sort of Scandinavian tradition derived from pagan Norse belief. At first blush, there is some weight to this in that Scandinavian peoples are Germanic, and there was cultural and ethnic migration, such that traditions could have been transplanted from Northern Europe to Central and Western Europe. Relatively early evidence of Christmas trees does extend northward from Germany, as well. In Latvia, for example, a merchant guild’s records indicate the appearance of a Christmas tree as early as 1510. This is indeed early, but not as early as other records I’ve discussed, making their claim that it was the first Christmas tree relatively easy to refute. North of there and 70 years earlier, other records suggested a decorated Christmas tree was put up for a dance. Some of these records are questionable, however, as the brief descriptions don’t indicate whether it was an evergreen tree with foliage or more of a stripped tree decorated as in maypole traditions. Looking at the actual pagan beliefs of the Norse, it is clear that, after their conversion to Christianity, their festive winter solstice traditions, yule, have made a big impact on Christmas traditions, and several of them are indeed comparable to the Christmas tree custom. First, decoration with greenery was central to yuletide celebration, and several of the specific plants sacred to the Norse have since become deeply associated with Christmas, including holly, ivy, and mistletoe. Indeed, one of the central ceremonies of yuletide related to the cutting down of a tree and bringing it into the home. But it wasn’t an evergreen, and they didn’t put it up and decorate it. It was likely a birch or oak, and they stripped it, treated its wood, and burned it slowly over the twelve days of yuletide. More than that, the Yule log custom did not noticeably change to become some other tradition, for it remained a tradition of warming the home with a single slow-burning log, although elsewhere in Europe it came to be called a Christ log or Christmas log. 

A depiction of the Tree of Life that indicates its similarity to Christmas trees.

Perhaps the most tempting connection to make between yule and the Christmas tree is the idea of sacred or holy trees and that the Norse worshipped them. The most prominent tree in their belief system is the World Tree, Yggdrasil, the meeting place of the gods, its roots and canopy uniting the heavens and the Earth. But why is Yggdrasil correlated with Christmas trees according to this theory? It’s never depicted as a fir tree, but more as an ash, and it’s not decorated. It cannot just be because they are both trees. By that logic, any mythological tree could be claimed to be the inspiration of the Christmas tree. Is it logical to claim that the sacred cypress that was said to have grown from a branch Zoroaster carried back from Paradise was the inspiration for the Christmas tree? Or that the Christmas tree was meant to represent the oracular Oak of Dodona from Greek myth? No, and the claim of Yggdrasil being its inspiration is equally untenable. But the myth of Yggdrasil may have spawned the common worship of numerous real trees by other Germanic pagans, such as the Irminsul, sacred to the Saxons, the tree at Uppsala in Sweden, and Donar’s Oak, also called Thor’s Oak and the Oak of Jove, worshipped by the pagan predecessors of the Hessians. All of these were destroyed by Christian missionaries, making it an odd claim that they would have incorporated tree worship into their own religion when they went to great lengths to stamp out the practice. But one account, that of Donar’s Oak, as told by proponents of the pagan survival view of Christmas trees, claims that St. Boniface cut down the pagan oak tree and in its place a young fir tree miraculously sprouted, converting all the pagans to Christianity. The implication, of course, is that Christmas trees originated as a remembrance of this miracle. First of all, all of these claims really rely on the notion that Christmas trees are worshipped, which an uptight iconoclast might make but which I find unconvincing. Second, even if this miracle story were true, which it obviously isn’t, being just another exaggerated tale about a saint told by a hagiographer, it doesn’t really explain why this symbol would afterward be cut down, brought home, and decorated. And third, if we actually check the source, the hagiographical Life of St. Boniface, written by an 8th century bishop named Willibald, it is not even true. According to the source, when Boniface notched the tree, struggling to actually fell such a massive tree, it suddenly “burst into four parts” and fell. There is no mention of a young fir tree sprouting in its place. It afterward says “four trunks of huge size, equal in length, were seen,” but whether this refers to new trees is not clear, as it seems to only be describing the four parts into which the original oak had burst. Regardless, after the incident, they didn’t start worshipping what was left; they used the wood, it says, to build a new structure, an oratory dedicated to St. Peter from which Christianity could be preached. So we find that the only feasible evidence for the idea that pagan Germanic tree worship transformed into a Christmas tree tradition is a completely embellished and revised version of an already dubious hagiography, a genre of literature known for its fantastical invention and lack of reliability as historical source material.

If the idea that Christmas trees originated in yule traditions is unsupported and lacking any strong evidence, this does not bode well for all the other theories of Christmas trees as pagan survivals, which are even weaker. Some claim it can be traced to Egypt in 3000 BCE, when palm branches were brought into the home to honor Isis, mother of Horus, who like Christ was said to have been born on the solstice. Yet no thought is given to how the tradition might have migrated to Europe or why it reappeared without precedent there thousands of years later. Also I saw claims that Druids decorated oak trees with golden apples and candles to honor Odin, but Druids did not worship Scandinavian deities. Some have attempted to draw comparisons between their pantheons, but to say they honored Odin or Woden as I saw repeated time and again is just patently false. Also, I saw no evidence for the claims about the decoration of trees by druids. It certainly wasn’t mentioned in the earliest writings about Druids by Julius Caesar. In Pliny the Elder, their religious ceremony surrounding an oak is described, which involved the veneration of mistletoe, which is at least a bit Christmasy, but nothing about golden apples and candles. So until I can find real support for this, and please send it if you have it, I have to consider it a frequently repeated myth. Myths like this about the pagan origin of Christian traditions get made up one time by unscrupulous writers and then live on, repeated in perpetuity as if they are fact. This is the case with many misconceptions about the origin of Easter iconography and traditions, which originated in the poorly researched purposely misinformative book The Two Babylons by Alexander Hislop, written as an attack on Catholicism, which I spoke about in an old episode. Well, as it turns out, Hislop contributed to the Christmas tree confusion as well. Based on an illustration of a coin depicting a snake wrapped around what looks like a tree stump, Hislop spins a fanciful story about King Nimrod’s wife deifying her dead husband. According to him, she said a young tree grew in place of a dead stump, symbolizing her husband’s rebirth, and that Nimrod came back to life every year on his birthday, which happened to be December 25th, and would leave gifts beneath that tree. This, it was claimed, was the origin of both the Yule log and the Christmas tree. No citations or sources are cited for this claim. Only the image of the coin with a snake around a stump, or maybe it is a ruined pillar? The coin also pictures a palm tree and a sea shell and reads “Tyriorum,” indicating some connection to Tyre, but no provenance or context whatsoever is provided. The illustration is labeled only “The Yule Log,” and a source is given: “MAURICE'S Indian Antiquities, vol. vi. p. 368.” This is Thomas Maurice’s Indian Antiquities, or Dissertations on Hindostan, published 1812, and the coin does not appear in it. It is quite apparent that Hislop, as he did in so many other claims, was just making stuff up. Yet in the 1980s, a pioneer of televangelism, Herbert Armstrong, founder of the Worldwide Church of God, promoted this misinformation in a booklet called “The Plain Truth about Christmas,” and now you can find it parroted on social media, along with a lot of other nonsense made up by Hislop, such as that Easter is really about the Mesopotamian goddess Ishtar, and you see it popping up on every major liturgical holiday. The reality of the survival of pagan traditions in modern Christianity is far more nuanced. Are there elements of paganism in the Christmas tree tradition? Insofar as the traditions of decorating one’s home with greenery is a custom with long pre-Christian roots, sure, but at a certain point, it’s impossible to differentiate what was pagan custom and what was simply a human habit. Some promoters of pagan survivalism in Christmas tradition will claim that singing is a pagan custom, and feasting, and bells, and lighting candles and fires, when in reality, people just sing and feast when celebrating, and since the invention of bells, it is common to ring them. Winter solstice is the longest night of the year, after all, marking the start of the coldest season. Can we really call the lighting of candles and the kindling of fires in the hearth a pagan tradition, when it is also just a way to stave off the dark and the cold? There is mystery and cultural heritage behind the Christmas tree tradition, but that doesn’t mean that we can trace it back through endless iterations to the furthest antiquity. 

A depiction of St. Boniface chopping down Donar’s Oak.

Further Reading

Barnes, Alison. “The First Christmas Tree.” History Today, vol. 56, no. 12, Nov. 2006, https://www.historytoday.com/archive/history-matters/first-christmas-tree. 

Barth, Edna. Holly, Reindeer, and Colored Lights: the Story of Christmas Symbols. Seabury Press, 1971. 

Brunner, Bernd, and Benjamin A. Smith. Inventing the Christmas Tree. Yale University Press, 2012. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt5vkr9c. 

Tille, Alexander. Yule and Christmas: Their Place in the Germanic Year. David Nutt, 1899. 

Jack the Ripper - Part Two: Ripperology

During the height of Jack the Ripper’s murders, from September to November 1888, the police and news agencies received thousands of letters regarding the case. Those most well known, of course, were those signed with the name Jack the Ripper, and others purporting to be from the killer himself, such as the “From Hell” letter, but those were just the tip of the mail pile. The majority were from Londoners who had become obsessed with the case. While at first, women in Whitechapel and elsewhere were terrified to go out of doors at all, unless they were in a group, eventually, talk of Jack became so common that women tended to joke that they would be “the next for Jack” when they were going out at night. Whitechapel had become a tinderbox, ready to erupt in vigilante violence at any moment. On one occasion, when a policeman pursued a local ne’er-do-well on foot, someone shouted that it was the Ripper, and the next thing you know, a mob joined the pursuit, shouting to lynch the man, who was actually only wanted for throwing a brick at a policeman. And it wasn’t just the residents of the East End that thought of little else but the Ripper. Letters came in from all over, many suggesting ways that the police might be able to catch the murderer. Some insisted the police should dress as women, while other proposed elaborate safeguards be worn by potential victims, like ring mail shirts and steel plates around the throat, or even rudimentary tazing devices designed to deliver electric shocks to those who grasped someone’s neck. Every suspicious piece of bathroom graffiti was reported, and even the visions that were had in dreams and the messages received in seances were dutifully forwarded to the authorities, many pointing the finger at actual people and overwhelming the police with a glut of suspects and useless leads. Some speculated that he must be diseased, perhaps a syphilitic, and that his affliction had caused him to lose the use of his manhood, thus prompting him to take out his frustrated and perverted sexual desires in a destructive way. Suddenly everyone was an alienist and a detective. One woman insisted that the crimes had been perpetrated by an escaped ape who ripped the victims and then made his escape by bounding over walls and returning to his cage. Clearly she had taken the notion from a popular story by Edgar Allan Poe, “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” in which a detective deduces that a pair of murders was committed by an orangutan. Many were the East End poor who believed the murderer, who many had become convinced was a doctor, must be some rich and morally bankrupt West Ender coming to the slums to prey upon the disadvantaged, while many wealthy residents elsewhere believed it could only a debauched resident of the East End could sink to performing such terrible crimes. Likewise, it was claimed, over and over, that an Englishman could never do such things. When it wasn’t a Jew being blamed, some letters suggested it must have been some other foreigner. The superstitions of Chinese and Malays, some letters claimed, might lead them to remove organs for their folk medicine. Likewise it was said the Hill tribes of Northeast India made use of the generative organs in their rites, and other Indian tribes used poison needles to induce instant death, which could explain the quickness with which Jack was able to overcome his victims. Some even suggested that Jack might be one of the Thuggee highway killers of India, claiming his murders were actually cult sacrifices to Kali, which as I have discussed at length was itself a total myth about the bands of stranglers called Thugs. So voracious was the appetite for theories and claims about the identity of Jack the Ripper that some even made a career from cooking them up, even back then. One such was the grandstanding psychiatrist L. Forbes Winslow, who claimed in an interview published in newspapers that he had evidence proving the identity of the Ripper and that if the police would but lend him six constables, he could catch the killer. When a Chief Inspector actually showed up to question him, though, Winslow suggested the newspaper had misquoted him and said he never intended to suggest he knew the killer’s identity. It turns out Winslow’s only leads, about an escaped lunatic and a lodger who talked to himself and said disparaging things about prostitutes, were both thoroughly investigated by police and found to lack any merit. But L. Forbes Winslow continued to agitate the public in regards to his theories on the Ripper case, claiming for years afterward that it was actually his activism that had forced the Ripper to cease his murders and leave Britain. His persistent injection of himself into the narrative actually led police to consider him as a suspect at one point. And he serves as a very good analogy for many other researchers and writers who through the years have named their own suspects, based on frequently dubious evidence, in order to sell books and make a name for themselves as not only an expert—a Ripperologist—but as the person who finally solved the Ripper murders.

Lest it be presumed that the police were so useless they had to rely on outlandish theories suggested by letter writers, it should be emphasized that the police did have their own suspects. In fact, they had several, all along. After the Leather Apron/John Pizer debacle, they of course had to tread more lightly and keep their suspicions closer to the vest, but from the research of Ripperologists, we have come to better understand who the police were actually looking into. For example, one early suspect was Jacob Isenschmid. He was Swiss, and thus a foreigner. He was a butcher, and thus possessed of enough anatomical knowledge to fit the profile. He was known to have violently attacked several women in Whitechapel, resulting in his being committed and diagnosed with psychiatric disorders. Just days after the Annie Chapman murder, two doctors suggested him as a suspect to police, and when questioned, his own wife also thought him capable of the acts, reporting that he was always out of the house with no explanation and carrying large knives when he didn’t need to, and that he had more than once threatened to murder her. However, like some previous suspects, Isenschmid was in the hospital when the Stride and Eddowes double murder occurred, which eliminated him as a suspect. While the police were derided in the press as ineffective, and a commissioner was even driven to resign in disgrace, the fact of the matter is that they simply did not have irrefutable evidence or any strong leads. More than one victim had been seen with a man shortly before their murders, and while some of these witness descriptions seemed to line up, others did not at all. Some had Jack wearing a long coat, others a short cutaway coat. Some had him wearing a deer stalker while others had him wearing a sailor’s cap or other headwear entirely. More importantly, since clothing can be changed, some said he had darker skin while others said his complexion was “fair,” meaning white. There was even disagreement over how many murderers they might be looking for. While most of the pathologists who had examined the corpses of the Canonical Five led the police to think one maniac was responsible, others, such as Dr. Bagster Phillips, believed that more than one killer was active, attributing the Stride and Kelly murders to some other murderer. While the handwriting on the various Dear Boss and From Hell letters were generally thought not to match, and even today to any with even an untrained eye they do not seem consistent, leading police to view most of them as hoaxes and all of them as unreliable, some, like Dr. Thomas Dutton, became convinced that they were almost all written in the same hand, and that even the Goulston Street graffito’s message had been written by the same man. Dutton’s supposed opinion on matters should be taken with salt, though, as we will later see. There was also dispute among the pathologists over the level of anatomical expertise the killer must have had. Some said he must have been an expert physician or anatomist, something that the writer of the Dear Boss letters made a point of laughing at, but others suggested that the removal of organs was not so precise, with some often only being partially removed, and the violence of the wounds pointed more to a butcher or even someone who had little to no professional knowledge or education in anatomy. There was the further possibility, then, that it may have been a resurrectionist, someone who, like Burke and Hare, hoped to earn money by killing and selling the dead to an anatomist. This wouldn’t really make a great deal of sense, though, since the bodies had been so terribly mutilated and left where they’d been killed, but a certain pathological museum associated with a medical school did reach out to the police with an explanation. They revealed that a mysterious American had come around offering 20 Pounds sterling for specimens of the human uterus. Apparently, he was publishing some anatomical document and intended to provide a uterus specimen with each copy, which meant he needed a great many. Although the museum turned him away, saying there was no way to acquire so many uteri, he kept pestering them and began making similar inquiries at other institutions. Since the Ripper frequently took that organ from his victims, this may have provided some clearer motive for the murders, but it changes little. Whoever the Ripper was, even if he profited by his bloody trophies, he was still compelled to mutilate his victims in heinous ways. And some were not missing their uterus, showing that the act could not have been purely about that. It would seem, then, that despite this lead, the police were left in the same position. Nevertheless, even with all this uncertainty, some compelling suspects did emerge.

A sensational article by L. Forbes Winslow.

Frederick George Abberline was an Inspector First-Class at Scotland Yard who, after the murder Mary Ann Nichols or Polly, the first Ripper victim, was transferred back to Whitechapel due to his knowledge of the district, having previously served in the area with the Metropolitan Police. His chief suspect in the Ripper murders was one George Chapman, also known as Ludwig Schloski, a Polish immigrant whose real name was Seweryn Kłosowski and who had settled in Whitechapel just before the murders began. During the course of Abberline’s many interviews with Whitechapel residents, he spoke with Kłosowski’s wife, who told the inspector that her husband went out at night for hours at a time, without explanation given. This of course is not proof of anything, but 15 years later, Kłosowski was convicted of murdering three women, his mistresses, and Abberline wrote to the arresting officer to congratulate him, claiming, “You've got Jack the Ripper at last!” In reality, though Kłosowski was known to beat up the women in his life, there is hardly anything to suggest he was capable of the Ripper crimes. His murders were poisonings, which is about as different as can be from the mutilations perpetrated by Jack. Nevertheless, Abberline liked him better than other suspects. He personally interrogated Joseph Barnett, the lover of Mary Jane Kelly, in the aftermath of the Miller’s Court slaying, and though some later writers like Barnett for at least Kelly’s murder if not the others, Abberline cleared him. One witness who had supposedly seen Kelly enter her room with a man who might have been the Ripper, and who would later be suspected as the Ripper himself, George Hutchinson, was likewise interviewed by Abberline, and the inspector believed his account. Perhaps Abberline was too trusting. After all, he put little stock in the theory that Montague John Druitt was the Ripper, and there is an argument to be made that Druitt was one of the prime suspects of the crimes, and certainly a favorite of later investigators, such as the Assistant Police Commissioner Sir Melville Macnaghten, who investigated the crimes a few years afterward. Indeed, Macnaghten started his investigation of the case hearing rumors about Druitt, whose family, it was said, believed him to have been the Ripper. Macnaghten, an Eton graduate, had some upper crust connections that gave him an insider advantage while investigating Druitt. However, it remains clear that Macnaghten also had some major misconceptions about Druitt. In his report, he described Druitt as a doctor, which would have fit the profile of the Ripper, but in reality Druitt had been a barrister, or lawyer. Macnaghten also called Druitt “sexually insane,” and while mental health problems did run in Druitt’s family, other researchers have suggested that Druitt may have only been gay, and that this is what led to his ostracism and melancholia. Really the only concrete reason for suspecting Druitt was that he committed suicide shortly after the last of the Canonical Five murders, after which the killing ceased, but that is not really evidence at all, and in fact, his not living in Whitechapel and records of his playing cricket in Dorset, some 130 miles from Whitechapel, the very day after the first murder, does seem to exonerate him.

Despite the fact that Macnaghten was not involved in the initial investigation and his report contains factual errors and dubious assumptions, after it came to light in 1975, it became something of a bible for Ripperologists. It is because of the Macnaghten Memoranda that the notion of the Canonical Five victims is so prominent today. In it, he discusses some of the other murders being attributed to the Ripper at the time—Martha Tabram, Alice McKenzie, and Frances Coles—and he indicates that they don’t seem related. He even insinuates that James Thomas Sadler, who had been arrested on suspicion of the latter murder but was released for lack of evidence, may have been responsible for McKenzie’s death as well as Coles’s, but was likely not the Ripper. Besides Druitt, the other two suspects Macnaghten named in his memo also still remain prime candidates for Jack, indicating how influential the memo has been in Ripperology. One of these was Russian Michael Ostrog, a petty criminal known for swindlery and theft. He had been released from prison early in 1888, the year of the Ripper murders, and was considered a known threat because a Police Gazette article suggested that he remained dangerous. Among the many lies that this con man told about his past was that he had formerly been a surgeon in the Navy, and since the police were looking for doctors that could be suspects, this falsehood came back to bite him. However, there was never any sign of violent tendencies in his record, despite Macnaghten claiming he was “detained…as a homicidal maniac,” and more recently, a Ripperologist named Philip Sugden totally exonerated him, proving that Ostrog had been jailed in France during the murders. That leaves only one more suspect named in the Macnaghten memoranda: a Polish Jew named Kosminski whom he said “became insane” and “had a great hatred of women, specially of the prostitute class, & had strong homicidal tendencies.” The name Kosminski was also written down as a potential suspect by another Chief Inspector in the margins of a memoir written by an assistant police commissioner just next to a passage that talked about a witness identifying a certain Polish Jew as being the person he had seen with a victim. However, that passage is very vague, there is no other record of such an identification, Macnaghten states explicitly that no such identification occurred, and the name Kosminski may have been written into the margins there as a guess, based on Macnaghten’s naming of the suspect. The fact is that no one really knows anything about this Kosminski because no one knows who he was. Since Macnaghten claims he was committed to an asylum in March 1889, some search was made of asylum records in later years, and one Aaron Kosminski, a Polish Jew from Whitechapel, was institutionalized around that time, but he was non-violent, a paranoid with auditory hallucinations, perhaps schizophrenic but not homicidal, as Macnaghten claimed. The same Ripperologist who tracked down the name Aaron Kosminski suggested Macnaghten had confused the name and may have actually meant another, more violent patient named David Cohen who, he claimed, was one and the same as another Whitechapel resident named Nathan Kaminski. However, his argument is pure speculation, presuming that Cohen, a tailor, and Kaminski, a bootmaker, were actually the same person, asserting without evidence that he was actually Leather Apron, and relying on an elaborate mistaken identity explanation to assert that he was a main suspect even though his name was never recorded by police as a person of interest.

A caricature of Melville Mcnaghten.

Macnaghten’s Memoranda were actually written in order to refute a theory then being promoted in London newspapers that Jack was a certain medical student named Thomas Cutbush, who a few years after the murders was declared insane after stabbing some women. Macnaghten was emphatic in denying that Cutbush was the Ripper, pointing out that Cutbush’s mental health troubles were owing to his contraction of syphilis, and making it clear that Cutbush’s crimes, which entailed stabbing two women in the buttocks, were likely inspired by some other similar attacks a couple years earlier and were nothing like the Ripper crimes. He states, “It will be noticed that the fury of the [Ripper] mutilations increased in each case, and, seemingly, the appetite only became sharpened by indulgence. It seems, then, highly improbable that the murderer would have suddenly stopped in November ’88, and been content to recommence operations by merely prodding a girl’s behind some 2 years and 4 months afterwards.” The struggle between police and the media had long been an issue. While the police had been developing their suspects through quiet house searches and interrogations, the newspapers loudly proclaimed one suspect after another. One favorite was Dr. Thomas Cream, an abortionist who had served ten years in prison in America for poisoning the husband of his mistress and afterward moved to London, where he began murdering women. Dubbed the Lambeth Poisoner, the marked difference in his method of killing should alone have eliminated him as a suspect, as should the fact that he was actually still imprisoned in America during the Ripper crimes, but a rumor that at his hanging, his final words were “I am Jack the…” before the scaffold fell and silenced him was just too juicy not to print. Later writers would make the baseless claim that Cream had a double, and that the two were both murderers, each covering for the other and providing each other alibis. It would not be the last unsupported claim about Ripper doubles. Equally sensational and cooked up to sell newspapers was the theory, put forward by one Robert Donston Stephenson that the killer was an occultist and black magician. Stephenson, a journalist, was himself interested in the “occult sciences” and took a keen interest in the murders. He would eventually write an article for the Pall Mall Gazette that named a certain doctor at London Hospital, Morgan Davies, as Jack the Ripper. The hospital was less than 200 yards from the location of the first murder, and Stephenson claimed that, while convalescing in the hospital during the murders, Dr. Davies had discussed the murders with him in suspicious detail. Rather than make Davies a suspect, however, his efforts only had the effect of making Stephenson himself a suspect. But as Stephenson had checked himself into the hospital during the murders, and as the ward in which Stephenson was housed would not allow him to leave and return, much as other suspects who were in some sort of custody at the time of the murders, Stephenson too had an airtight alibi.

Even American newspapers got in on the action when in November 1888 New York papers reported that one Dr. Francis Tumblety had been arrested for indecency and questioned in relation to the Whitechapel Murders, and had thereafter jumped bail and returned to America. Tumblety was of particular interest to American readers because more than two decades earlier, in 1865, he had been arrested on suspicion of being involved in a conspiracy to assassinate President Abraham Lincoln. He had been released after three weeks as there was no evidence to connect him to with Lincoln’s murder, but his reputation would thereafter always be tainted. And in some ways, Tumblety made good sense as a Ripper suspect. He was a doctor, he was an apparent misogynist known to express his disgust and hatred of female sex workers, and he owned a collection of uteri in jars that he said came from “every class of woman.” This last detail even suggested he might have been the American who was going around London museums offering cash for uterus specimens. However, he was a known pederast, with more interest in adolescent boys than in women, and he was less of a doctor than a quack, known for peddling cure-all elixirs. Certainly he could not have committed the Mary Jane Kelly murder, which occurred while he was in police custody, and the authorities did not seem all that interested in him as a suspect, showing little concern that he had skipped bail and fled the country. Regardless, American law enforcement and press hounded him for much of his life, and no further evidence of his being a murderer was ever uncovered. But this did not stop him from being featured as the chief suspect in books and documentaries that would appear in the 1990s. And this is typical of many Ripperologist theories. They resurrect some old suspect long exonerated, whom law enforcement at the time had little reason to believe was the killer, and dig deeper to insinuate there might have been more there. So Charles Allen Lechmere, the market porter who discovered the first victim, was transformed into a Ripper suspect because of research that, while he claimed to have only been with the body for a few minutes, the route he typically took suggested he was with her around nine minutes, as if people can’t have a poor sense of time or consider less than ten minutes to be a “few minutes.”  And cases of mistaken identity often lead Ripperologists to new suspects. Take for example, the Leather Apron debacle, which led to two different cases of mistaken identity already mentioned in part one, Pizer and Piggott. Ripperologists took this further. The name of Macnaghten’s escaped lunatic, Kosminski, led Ripperologist Martin Fido to conclude that Macnaghten had meant David Cohen, whom he imagined was actually the false name of another person named Kaminsky, and that this was the real Leather Apron. And if that weren’t convoluted enough, over the course of Fido’s research, one red herring was another Jew who had been institutionalized named Hyam Hyams, and though Fido eliminated him has a suspect, later Ripperologists latched onto him as Jack the Ripper. It is a cannibalistic process, where Ripperologists pore over the extensive literature looking for figures that haven’t been focused on recently in order to build new theories and sell books. In a way, these Ripperologists are like the Ripper themselves, stalking these dark and well-trod avenues for victims of their own.

Colorful Ripper suspect Francis Tumblety.

As the murders and the murderer faded into the past but refused to be forgotten, the field of Ripperology was born, and Ripperologists and their theories had credibility issues from the start. Mostly those who wrote about Jack the Ripper were journalists and police who had worked the investigation and wrote about their theories in later memoirs, but arguably the first Ripperologist proper was Leonard Matters, an Australian-born British politician. In his 1929 book, The Mystery of Jack the Ripper, he told a story he had supposedly learned while living in Buenos Aires about a West End surgeon whose son had visited a number of sex workers and come down with a venereal disease that caused him to deteriorate and die. This surgeon, which Matters gave the pseudonym Dr. Stanley, apparently then committed the Ripper murders to enact vengeance for his son’s fate, and after he killed Mary Jane Kelly, he fled to Argentina, where he would confess everything on his deathbed. Matters presents the story as a rumor and one he cannot confirm, using no real names, but claims that his inquiries turned up some corroborating evidence for it, such as the confession being printed in a Spanish-language newspaper. Others who have tried to investigate this story, however, have turned up nothing, and the consensus is that Matters made it up to sell his book. It was the first such book to present a novel solution and suspect, and this would end up being a common, even an expected feature of future Ripperologist works, many of which would not shrink from falsifying their theories. Take, for example, the theory that a Liverpool cotton merchant, James Maybrick, was Jack the Ripper. This individual lived and died having never been connected to the crimes. The only thing of note about his life was that his wife slowly poisoned him to death with arsenic. But about 50 years later, an unemployed Liverpudlian made headlines when he came into possession of Maybrick’s diary, in which he confessed to being Jack the Ripper. Suspicion of a hoax was immediate, since the story of how he’d come into possession of the diary kept changing. Tests of its ink did not immediately prove it a fake, but later tests for a certain preservative did indicate its ink was more modern. Moreover, skeptics pointed to factual inconsistencies in its contents proving its inauthenticity, and document experts came to believe the handwriting style was inconsistent with Victorian norms. Finally, two years later, its owner confessed to having forged it in order to make money. Nevertheless, 8 years later, in 2003, a Ripperologist still had no qualms about relying on it as evidence that Maybrick was not only the Ripper, but also the Servant Girl Annihilator, an Austin, Texas serial killer, and in 2015, yet another Ripperologist relied on this known forgery in a book claiming Maybrick’s brother was the real Ripper. So we see that Ripperologists are a parasitic kind of researcher. Rather than practicing true empiricism, building on what has been genuinely learned in previous investigations, they recycle again and again long disproven theories, tweaking them to create new suspects, casting doubt on facts and muddying the waters entirely.

More than one theory, in fact, has rested on documents that appear to be hoaxes. In 1923, a French journalist, William Le Queux wrote in his memoirs that he had seen an unfinished manuscript written by Rasputin about “Great Russian Criminals,” in which Rasputin named a certain Dr. Alexander Pedachenko, revealing that he was actually an agent of the Russian Secret Police living undercover in London, and that he had committed the Ripper atrocities for the sole purpose of creating unrest and discrediting Scotland Yard, which if it were true was definitely accomplished. However, it turns out that the source of this information, named in the manuscript, was a known liar and Russian provocateur who had only been three years old when the murders took place. As in other cases, however, the unreliability of this manuscript did not stop later Ripperologists from weaving elaborate theories around it. In 1959, historian Donald McCormick wrote his own Ripper book, claiming to have confirmed aspects of the Pedachenko story, suggesting that this Russian spy was actually a double or doppelganger for the other well-known suspect, Seweryn Kłosowski, and occasionally assumed that suspect’s identity. However, his sources were dubious, especially his principal source, the purported papers of Dr. Dutton, the aforementioned individual who claimed to have matched up the Ripper’s handwriting. In fact, the manuscript of Dutton’s book on Jack the Ripper, which was McCormick’s principal source, is now lost, if it ever existed, surviving now only in what McCormick claims to have read in it when he was supposedly allowed to examine it in 1932, and it appears, based on historical inaccuracies and anachronisms, that McCormick’s claims about it were a fiction. Indeed, much of his career was tainted by accusations of fraud and hoaxes cooked up to sell his books. And this too muddies the waters, making it hard to separate fact from fiction in the case of Jack the Ripper. For example, McCormick’s claims about Dr. Thomas Dutton affect numerous other theories. Many theories about the killer surround the handwriting of the letters signed Jack the Ripper, and the From Hell letter, for example. I can look at these letters myself and see quite plainly that they do not match, the From Hell letter being nearly illegible, the letter to the medical examiner who studied the kidney mailed with it more legible but blocky and awkward, and the two previous correspondence, the original Dear Boss letter and the Saucy Jack postcard, not matching in a very obvious way in that the cursive letters of the former mostly flow together and connect while that of the latter are mostly written as separate characters. Yet the idea of the handwriting matching largely persists because McCormick claimed Dutton had determined it did, through microphotography. He even claimed that Dutton believed the Goulston Street graffito matched and that he had photographed it as well, even though there is no evidence of such photographs ever being taken before the message was erased. And the simple fact that microphotography didn’t exist at the time seems to prove that all of these claims are totally apocryphal.

William Le Queux, originator of the Pedachenko story.

The Pedachenko story was not the only dubious Jack the Ripper theory that descended into baseless conspiracy claims, either. Many were the theories that there must have been some kind of cover-up for the murders not to have been solved. For example, there was James Kelly, who had murdered his wife in 1883 and then escaped from Broadmoor Asylum early in 1888. Police took an early interest in him as the killer but eventually eliminated him, and more than one Ripperologist claims that this could only be a cover-up, that the police were hiding the killer’s known identity for fear it made them look incompetent. This seems hard to believe, though, since they already looked incompetent, and revealing that they knew the identity of the killer might actually have made them look more competent, even if they were unable to capture him. Similarly, Thomas Cutbush, whom newspapers were suggesting was the Ripper and which theory Melville Macnaghten wrote his memo to argue against, was the nephew of a police superintendent, leading Ripperologists to again cry police cover-up. Then there is the Masonic conspiracy theory, which centered around the Goulston Street graffito, which again, we only have conflicting reports about since, despite what McCormick claims, no known photographs exist of it. It centered on the reported spelling of the word “Juwes,” which of course was odd. One claim had it that this was the Yiddish spelling, and thus it further implicated the Jewish community in Whitechapel. But that was untrue. Other claims had it that there was no language or dialect in which this was a typical spelling, and this would lead to the claim that it was actually a reference to Masonic lore, in which three apprentice masons names Jubela, Jubelo, and Jubelum murder the legendary Master Mason Hiram Abiff. To further corroborate this theory, it was pointed out that the victims’ mutilations, the cutting of the throat, the disembowelment, and even specifically the placing of the viscera over the victims’ shoulders, was exactly the same as the secret penalties of Freemasonry. In Masonic ritual initiation, one swears that if they betray the order, there will be “the penalties of having their throats cut from ear to ear” and of having their “vitals…thrown over [their] left shoulder.” Well, this sounds quite damning until you look at it more closely. First, it is a stretch to identify the word Juwes with Jubela, Jubelo, and Jubelum. A more rational explanation is that it was the French word for Jews, “Juives,” and the “I” and “v,” joined together perhaps in cursive, looked like a “w.” Second, the Masonic initiation ceremony also talks about the ripping out of tongues, which wasn’t done to the victims, and in fact, it speaks of the “left breast [being] torn open” and the “heart and vitals [being] taken from thence” to be thrown over the shoulder, so it doesn’t appear to be referring to disembowelment at all. Lastly, it just doesn’t make sense as a coherent conspiracy. This penalty was symbolic, first off, and it would not have been enacted against some random sex workers. Women weren’t allowed to be Freemasons, and thus weren’t subject to the penalty, which again, was just a ritual symbol. Freemasonry was so common and popular among men in the late 19th century that, actually, knowledge of its lore and rituals was not really “secret,” per se, and even if the killer was using some Masonic symbolism, it really only indicated that the police should be searching for a maniac who had some passing familiarity with Masonic ritual. It would not have been evidence of a Masonic conspiracy.

The theories of Ripperologists are too numerous for me to address in a single episode. Indeed, the principal supporter of the Masonic conspiracy, Stephen Knight, who has named specific Masonic conspirators who, embarrassingly, weren’t actually Freemasons, is also responsible for a far larger conspiracy theory surrounding the Ripper murders than just this Masonic theory. His “final solution” goes all the way to the top, to a royal cover-up, and implicates numerous individuals, all of whom have been named themselves in derivative Ripper theories by other Ripperologists. It's so convoluted that I won’t delve into it here, but patrons of the podcast on Patreon will hear a full exclusive about the theory. Ripperologists go to sometimes ridiculous lengths to find new and interesting suspects. For example, one claim names Oscar Wilde’s lover as the Ripper, asserting that Wilde knew it and that his classic story, The Picture of Dorian Gray, revealed the truth. Another theory had it that Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland author Lewis Carroll was the real culprit. Yet another accuses Vincent Van Gogh. And no matter how unlikely their theories might be, as we have seen with the various forgeries and hoaxes they produce, these authors will not shrink from concocting evidence for their books. Sometimes it even has the cast of legitimate science to it. For example, one suspect highlighted by the hoaxer Donald McCormick, and later folded into the conspiracy theories of Stephen Knight, was Walter Sickert, a German artist about whom I’ll be speaking in detail in the forthcoming patron exclusive. In the early 2000s, popular crime novelist Patricia Cornwell claimed that using a DNA profile supposedly taken from the Ripper letters, which again, were probably not even written by the killer, she was able to match his DNA to that of Sickert, using a profile likewise taken from one of his letters. Scholarly analysis of her claims casts doubt not only on the legitimacy of the DNA profiles she acquired and their comparison, but also on the suspect of Sickert, based on evidence that he wasn’t even in England at the time of the killings. In the end, every single suspect put forward can be either irrefutably eliminated or the case against them suffers from a distinct lack of concrete evidence, relying only on circumstance, opportunity, and rumor. So despite what many Ripperology books may claim, nothing has been solved, and this, perhaps the most famous murder mystery in history, is still as shrouded in uncertainty as ever.

Further Reading

Begg, Paul. Jack the Ripper: The Uncensored Facts. Robson Books, 1990.

Jack the Ripper. Edited by Maxim Jakubowski and Nathan Braund, Castle Books, 2005.

Odell, Robin. Ripperology: A Study of the World’s First Serial Killer and a Literary Phenomenon. The Kent State University Press, 2006.

Rumbelow, Donald. The Complete Jack the Ripper (Fully Revised and Updated). Penguin, 2004.

Sugden, Philip. The Complete History of Jack the Ripper. Carroll & Graf. 2002.

Jack the Ripper - Part One: The Canonical Five

19th-century London was no stranger to the concept of gruesome murder. As I’ve just recently been discussing, they had been reading about it for some time. From the cannibalistic highwaymen said to haunt rural roads to murderous innkeepers and the demon barber, Sweeney Todd, the stories of arch-killers filled the popular penny dreadfuls. And while these were largely fiction, there was no shortage of real violent crime either, especially in the slums of the East End. Many were the daylight robberies, the assaults, the drunken rapes committed in this seedy underbelly of a city and society transformed by the industrial revolution, and murder was a known scourge there. In 1811, a family living in tenements near the Ratcliffe Highway was entirely annihilated by an intruder. The violence of the attack was shocking. Even the children had been brutally slain. A bloody maul that appeared to be the murder weapon was found at the scene. Twelve days later, another family was likewise slaughtered, and the suspect found guilty of the murders “cheated the hangman” by taking his own life. At the time, this murder case was one of the most notorious. Seventeen years later, the case of Burke and Hare took the limelight. William Burke and William Hare were body snatchers, also called “resurrection men,” providing cadavers under the table for anatomical study. As Scottish law limited the human remains that could be used for such purposes, and graveyards had taken to securing their dead in iron cages called mortsafes, there was something of a shortage of specimens, which of course encouraged the illegal procurement of such cadavers. Burke and Hare were very much like the murderous innkeepers of penny blood stories, and indeed may have inspired such stories, as before their killing spree, they sold the body of a lodger who had died naturally to an anatomist. Thereafter, when another lodger was ill, they didn’t wait for her natural death, but rather killed her and likewise sold her remains. In all, Burke and Hare killed sixteen people, suffocating them and profiting by the sale of their corpses. Perhaps most horrific were the murders of Amelia Dyer, the so-called Ogress of Reading, a baby farmer who adopted unwanted infants for a living and strangled many of them so that she would not have to actually care for them. She is suspected of killing 400 or more babies, making her potentially the most prolific serial killer in history. As horrifying and mind-boggling as all these crimes were, there was a shared motive that could at least be comprehended. They all appear to have been committed by financially struggling individuals for the purposes of acquiring money—they were economic murders. Dyer killed babies to enable her to adopt more, each of whom she was paid to take. The financial motivation of Burke and Hare is quite clear; once they had been paid for the body of the first, each lodger came to represent a financial temptation to them, worth more dead than alive. And the Ratcliffe Highway killer, it was believed, had broken into the rooms of those families and brutally killed all of them with the intention of burglary, as the first had occurred on a pay day, and a watch was missing from the second scene. Murder itself was something Victorians could wrap their minds around, so long as there was an understandable motive. Domestic murders too existed, of course, with husbands killing wives, and wives killing husbands. Crimes of passion were not difficult to understand, nor were crimes for economic gain. It was certainly shocking when a killer took numerous victims, like the killers mentioned, but if they had done it for some clear benefit, the public could at least move on from the unfortunate incidents. The fact that such heinous acts were perpetrated for money was at least comprehensible and pointed to the societal evils of hardship and inequality being at least partially to blame, and the culprits being caught certainly helped them move on as well. Soon, however, a new sort of murderer would appear, there in the dark and dirty corners of London’s East End. This killer too would claim numerous victims, with shocking and stomach-turning violence, but what made this killer different was that there was no comprehensible motive. It was the dawning of a new era of maniac killers, and this one would be remembered forever, for he was never caught.

As I have previously argued, to understand a killer and their killings, rather than resorting to unhelpful notions about pure evil, we should instead consider the environment as a factor. Surely genetic predisposition might play a role in the development of pathologies, but nurture must be accounted for as well as nature, so we cannot truly understand the Ripper murders without some understanding of the terrible place in which they occurred: the aforementioned slums of the East End, and specifically Whitechapel. As is almost always the case, the wealthy and privileged claimed a specific quarter of the city while the poor were relegated to another, and in times of great inequality, slums like these become overcrowded, unable to contain the growing number of those who are poverty stricken. Mid- to late-19th-century London was one such time, and the slums of the East End were full to bursting. It was called “outcast London,” and it was the shame of British society. With poor sanitation and drainage systems, the streets of these slums were filthy, which brought terrible vermin problems, from rats to roaches, but to privileged Victorians, the human beings in these slums were themselves vermin. Those who worked were dock laborers, costermongers or handcart merchants, butchers struggling to find meat, and tailors who toiled in sweatshops. England’s Poor Laws, intended to help employ and house the poor, resulted in the Victorian workhouse, where children were forced into hard labor and endured terrible abuse and neglect. Family dwellings were crowded, but more crowded still were the common lodging houses, or dosshouses, in which “dossers” paid nightly for a place to sleep—typically a mattress swarming with vermin, but sometimes even just a rope to lean on for the night. Alcoholism was rampant, and when dossers took casual day work, they often spent their earnings on drink before they secured their bed for the night. With even fewer work opportunities than the men, the women in these slums often earned their drink and doss money by prostitution. At mid-century, one estimate had it that 1 in every sixteen London women was a prostitute, but those 1 in 16 were concentrated in the slums, and those with no rooms to take their patrons to, plied their trade in the streets. So few were the lampposts in these slums that, at night, many a street and alley were entirely dark, giving these women plenty of places to do their business, but this darkness, in addition to the abject poverty of the area, also encouraged rampant crime. Though police did patrol these neighborhoods, there were streets down which even police officers dared not venture unless in groups. In 1875, in an effort to address the overcrowding of East End slums, the city and its Metropolitan Board began to buy slum property and force out residents, which displacement, of course, only resulted in far worse overcrowding and homelessness in the remaining slums, like Whitechapel. In 1887, just a year before the Ripper murders, the economic hardships reached a boiling point, and a mass protest against unemployment took place at Trafalgar Square. The demonstration erupted into violence; 75 were injured and 400 arrested. It became known as Bloody Sunday. It was in this atmosphere, among fears of an uprising of the poor, criticism of the ineffectuality of the police, and disgrace over the degraded conditions of many London residents, that in the slum of Whitechapel, someone began to brutally murder and mutilate the very dosshouse prostitutes who were acknowledged to symbolize the most pressing social problems of the age.

An illustration of the violence on Bloody Sunday, a demonstration over economic conditions in London a year before the Whitechapel Murders.

The first murder attributed to the Ripper, though perhaps not actually his first victim, as we will see, was discovered my market porters on Buck’s Row on the morning of August 31st, 1888. Only one lamp illuminated this street, and it stood far off at the opposite end of the road. As it was still dark, they could not see the blood, but the policeman they fetched, with his bullseye lantern, was able to discern that the woman was not just sleeping off a drunk but dead, her throat cut twice in such a vicious manner that the wound went all the way back to her spine. The ensuing medical examination showed bruising around the jaw, perhaps from being throttled, and terrible mutilations of the abdomen and genitals. She had been disemboweled and stabbed in the vagina. Her name, it was later learned, was Mary Ann Nichols, “Polly” colloquially. She had for years been estranged from her husband and children because of her drinking. Indeed, on the day before her murder, she had earned enough money to sleep in safety three times over, but had spent it all on drink. That night, turned away for having no doss money, she remarked that she would have it soon enough, boasting about “what a jolly bonnet I’ve got now.” Her limbs were still warm when she was found. It seems the killer had left her there only a half hour before her discovery. Then, a little more than a week later, on the morning of September 8th, a second victim was discovered: Annie Chapman, called “Siffey” and “Dark Annie,” another woman who had separated from her husband and children and had for years been living in dosshouses, earning her lodgings taking on crochet work, selling flowers, and, more occasionally, sex work. A year and a half earlier, she had sadly learned that her husband passed and her children had been sent off to various institutions. Her body was found by the back doors of her lodging house, less than half a mile from the site of the previous murder, and this time the killer seemed to have taken his time. As before, Annie’s throat had been cut with a jagged, two-stroke, back-and-forth motion, nearly severing her head, but this time the murderer seemed to be playing with her viscera. He did not just cut across her belly, he removed the skin of her abdomen in flaps. He took out her small intestines and placed them over her right shoulder. He then carefully removed the uterus, with such precision that the doctor who would thereafter examine her remains concluded that her murderer must have had some anatomical expertise. The killer also removed her rings and what meager coins she carried and set them at her feet, as if to make clear that this had been no robbery. Unlike the previous murder, Annie was actually seen alive only a half hour before her body was discovered with the person who presumably murdered her. Here we have the first potential eye-witness description of Jack the Ripper: He was said to be dark or swarthy, meaning essentially not a white man, perhaps not an Englishman. He was around 40 years old, genteel in his apparel though somewhat shabby, and wearing a brown deer-stalker hat, which many today know better as the Sherlock Holmes style of hat. With this second murder, and a pattern emerging, so too did theories about the killer’s identity arise.

One early theory after Polly’s murder was that there was a gang of men going around robbing prostitutes and killing those who refused to surrender their money. There was good reason to believe this. During April of that year, another sex worker had been attacked by four robbers not far from where Polly had been found, and she had been treated at the hospital for similar wounds, such as having been stabbed in her genitals. She afterward died from an infection. Then, earlier in August, another woman had been found with 39 stab wounds, and it was believed that this gang was active again, but Polly had no money to kill her over, so this theory made little sense, and the purposeful laying by of Dark Annie’s rings and coins seemed designed to signal to the public that these were not robberies. Almost immediately, among the crowds that gathered around Annie’s body, some began to suggest that a Jew must have done it and to harass Jews in the streets, and there was a sizable population of Jewish immigrants in the East End and Whitechapel specifically at the time, such that, a few years later, the Sunday Magazine called it “the Jewish colony in London.” Of course, when it was learned that a witness had seen Annie with a “dark” foreign-looking figure, that only exacerbated the rumors, and newspapers were only too happy to amplify this speculation. The East London Observer asserted “that no Englishman could have perpetrated such a horrible crime, and that it must have been done by a Jew.” The theory that Jack the Ripper was a Polish Jew continues to thrive, even today, and at the time, with press coverage like that, it threatened to throw Whitechapel further into lawlessness. But newspapers of the day didn’t much mind stirring up controversy and spreading false information. Another rumor they spread was that the handkerchief tied around Dark Annie’s neck was not her own and had been put on her by the murderer. This turned out to be false. And another rumor that made the rounds was that the murderer had left a message on a nearby wall that read, “Five; fifteen more and then I give myself up.” No such message was left, but that didn’t stop it from being repeated in newspapers as far away as San Diego that autumn. For a long while, the newspapers did not have a catchy name for this killer. When it was clear that a lone killer was stalking unfortunate victims in the slums, they called him the “Whitechapel murderer,” or for more flavor, they called him the “Whitechapel maniac” or the “Whitechapel fiend.” But early on, some ventured to call him “Leather Apron,” based on another rumor.

An 1888 newspaper illustration depicting the suspicion and paranoia that gripped London in the wake of the Whitechapel Murders.

After Polly’s death, the initial inquiries of police turned up not only the rumor about a gang robbing and stabbing prostitutes, but also the lead that a certain man who wore a leather apron had been mistreating prostitutes, to the point that he was feared and avoided. They all called him Leather Apron, since they didn’t know his name, and they said he also sometimes wore a deer-stalker hat. Like the rumored gang, this fellow was said to be demanding money from the sex workers he harassed and beating them if they failed to comply. When the body of Dark Annie was discovered, a wet leather apron was also found close to a nearby water spigot, as if it had been washed and left there. Was this the murderer’s leather apron, and had he been forced to abandon it while in the act of washing blood from it? When the eyewitness description of the man last seen with Annie mentioned a deer-stalker, it seemed they had a suspect, and one police sergeant was certain that this character, this Leather Apron, was none other than Jack Pizer, a local bootmaker who, as a Polish Jew, further fit the burgeoning profile of the killer, misguided as it may have been. Eventually they found Pizer hiding in the home of some friends because he had been named by newspapers as the Whitechapel fiend. They also found long knives that might have been the murder weapons among his belongings, knives he used in his bootmaker’s trade. However, the leather apron found at the scene was later identified as belonging to someone else who wore it while working in a nearby cellar workshop, and the owner’s mother stated that she had washed it and left it there by the water tap. Then it was discovered that Jack Pizer had alibis for both murders, having been in a lodging house during Polly’s murder and having actually been talking to a policeman while watching a fire at the docks during Annie’s murder. In the end, Pizer, who claimed that he had only been identified as Leather Apron by the police sergeant because of a personal grudge between the two, was cleared of charges and he successfully sued one newspaper for libeling him in calling him the killer.

At the same time that Pizer was arrested, though, a second suspect, William Piggot, was also arrested for his resemblance to the Leather Apron character. He had been discovered in a pub, covered in blood, with possible defensive wounds on his hands, and when questioned, his behavior was erratic. His rambling explanation of his wounds was that he had tried to help a woman who was having a fit and she’d bitten him. But it had also been discovered that he was carrying a bundle of blood-stained clothing and had recently wiped blood from his shoes. The fact that Annie Chapman’s body had been discovered at 6am less than half an hour after her death had suggested that the killer must have walked down the street in the clear light of day while covered in blood, and this led to much criticism of the police. How had they not caught this boldfaced killer? Of course, the tools of their trade at the time, which mostly consisted of catching a criminal in the act or fleeing from a scene, or relied on the testimony of informers, did not help them much with this new sort of lone skulking predator. Areas were policed on foot. With no radios for getting in contact with other officers, they relied on whistles. Crime scene investigation consisted mostly of a medical examination of the deceased’s wounds. Fingerprinting was not an accepted science, and even blood typing was not a known technique. Forensics were rudimentary. The police presence in Whitechapel would be increased, but it was not until Annie’s death that the reality of the situation really set in and investigations were taken more seriously. As for the idea that a person covered in blood walking the streets of Whitechapel should have been easy to spot, this was a notion held by those who did not understand the reality of the slums. As I explained in my recent patron exclusive about the story of Sweeney Todd, the streets of the East End slums were sometimes flooded with blood and with discarded animal corpses because of the overcrowding and the demand for cheap food, such as the pies from the Sweeney Todd story. Butchers transformed their cellars into makeshift slaughterhouses, cutting up horses and other animals, and cat’s meat men pushed handcarts full of the chopped up remains from these butchers through the streets, typically trailed by stray cats. And with the lack of sanitation and the poor drainage systems, blood and animal matter sometimes choked the gutters, such that many boots were covered in blood. And with the frequency of drunken brawls in these slums, the fact was that it just wasn’t uncommon for people to have blood on them. Nevertheless, Piggott was suspicious enough to be arrested, and his unhinged behavior while in custody led to his being locked away in an insane asylum, and it must have seemed like the police had actually caught their maniac. However, a little more than 2 weeks after the arrests of Pizer and Piggott, after the former was exonerated and while the latter remained institutionalized, two more murders occurred, on the same day, proving that Piggott was not the culprit.

Contemporary newspaper illustration depicting the discovery of the first Ripper victim

The first to be discovered was Elizabeth Stride, in a court off Berner Street, and even as that scene was being examined by a policeman, news reached him that a second body had been found, that of Catherine Eddowes in Mitre Square. Both had their throats cut in the typical Ripper manner, but Stride had not been disemboweled. Because of this, some suggest Stride was not a Ripper victim, but most researchers who study the crimes contend that the only reason for this double event was that the murderer was interrupted before he could finish his ritual and had to flee. The notion that he was driven by compulsions to see his bloody deed out to its grisly conclusion further explains why he took so many risks with Eddowes, whom he killed in a square with three entrances and nearby warehouses with night watchmen making their rounds and right across from the home of a policeman. Despite these risks, he concluded his act with Eddowes, not only cutting her throat but also eviscerating her, cutting her from rectum to ribcage and removing organs as trophies—the uterus and the left kidney this time. But there were new mutilations as well, as the killer cut of her nose, split her eyelids, and gouged triangles into her cheeks beneath her eyes, transforming her into a kind of gruesome clown. Both women were, like the other victims, what would have then been called “unfortunate women,” living in poverty, with former husbands and partners from whom they had become estranged, now subsisting by performing honest work where they could, such as cleaning, and further relying on prostitution to get by. With this escalation, it seemed that the killer was growing bolder, perhaps even throwing his crimes in the face of the public and the police who had failed to catch him. And there is some further reason to believe this, for on the night of the double murder, the killer appears to have possibly left a message behind, scrawled on a wall as he was previously rumored to have done. Less than half a mile from the Eddowes murder scene in Mitre Square, on Goulston Street, a blood-stained piece of her apron, which had been cut away, was found near a staircase, on the wall of which was written, according to varying reports, either “The Juwes are not the men that will be blamed for nothing,” or “The Juwes are the men that will not be blamed for nothing.” First, even if this graffito was discovered near a genuine piece of Eddowes’s apron, it is not certain that the two were related. For example, Eddowes herself may have removed the piece of her apron, used it as a sanitary napkin and dropped it herself. Second, the confusing double negative of the graffito raises the question of whether it was meant to defend or accuse Jews of the murders. If it was left by the murderer, then was he revealing that he was a Jew or that he wasn’t? This strange message has led some to hypothesize that the Ripper murders were an elaborate frame-up all along, meant to stoke public anger and violence against the Polish Jew immigrant community. And an anti-Semitic riot is certainly what police feared when they found the Goulston Street graffito, which is why they erased it.

There was further reason for the police to believe the Goulston Street graffito was unrelated to the case, though. That reason was that its writing did not match that of another apparent message from the killer that had been received. Days before the double murder, when some had begun to hope that the killings were done, a letter was received by the Central News Agency and forwarded to Scotland Yard only a day before the Stride and Eddowes killings. It was addressed “Dear Boss,” and it mocked the police efforts to find “me,” especially the entire Leather Apron debacle. The letter was written in red ink, and the author explained that he had saved his victims’ blood and intended to write it with that, but that it “went thick like glue,” so he had to make due with red ink. The playful tone of the letter led the news agency to believe it was a hoax, but they forwarded it to Scotland Yard because it specifically said he would clip the next victim’s ears off and send them to police. The letter writer said he “shan’t quit ripping them” because he was “down on whores,” and it was signed “Jack the Ripper.” Though news agencies thought it a hoax, they published anyway, and the name stuck, and thereafter, another correspondence was received using the name. A postcard was sent to the news agency dated the day that Stride and Eddowes were discovered, which said, among other things, “Double event this time” and mentioned the first, Stride, had “squealed a bit” so that he “[c]ouldn’t finish straight off.” This was given as an excuse for why ears were not removed and sent to the police, as previously promised. Since some of these details would not have been public knowledge that morning, it was first thought the postcard might have been genuine and might prove the veracity of the original letter as well. However, the card was postmarked the next day, when these details were publicly known, and the fact was that the handwriting of the letter and postcard didn’t even clearly match. Another letter appeared a couple weeks later, this one not signed Jack the Ripper, but only with the statement that it had been sent “From hell.” Enclosed in a box delivered with the letter was a piece of a kidney. The letter said, “I send you half the Kidne I took from one women preserved it for you tother piece I fried and ate it was very nise.” So the specter of cannibalism entered the story. A doctor afterward analyzed the kidney and determined it was human, and that it was from the left side, which corresponded to the fact that Catherine Eddowes’s left kidney was taken. However, the doctor seems to have given contradictory opinions on the kidney, and the fact that it had been preserved in spirits meant that it could have been taken from any anatomist’s lab or anatomical museum to play a gruesome prank. Indeed, after the doctor examined it, he too received a letter signed by Jack the Ripper, whose handwriting again didn’t match the others. As important as the letters may have seemed to the case, in the end, they may only be evidence of how obsessed the public had become with the murders, and of how much public opinion was turning against the police, who were more and more seen as ineffectual.

Handwriting comparison, courtesy Rumbelow.

Indeed, even the authorities themselves would have agreed that their response to the murders could have been improved. Their investigation was fragmented because it was being undertaken simultaneously by numerous divisions—the Criminal Investigation Department of the Metropolitan Police, the City of London Police, and the Central Office of Scotland Yard—and they did not coordinate or share information as they should have, which the Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir Charles Warren himself complained about. But it was Warren who would end up being the scapegoat for the public’s ire over the continued failure to capture the murderer. Warren refused to seek money for a reward, which many thought would bring the killer to justice. His reason was that offering rewards for the capture of criminals frequently led to conspiracies to frame innocent men in order to collect the rewards. These were called Blood Money Conspiracies, and there had been famous scandals about them in London about 60 years earlier. With the police refusing to put up rewards, a group of local tradesmen formed a Vigilance Committee and began not only seeking money to put up their own reward but also petitioning for Commissioner Warren to be removed from his position. In what came to be called the War on Warren, they leveled numerous accusations of neglect against him: he had not brought the full strength of the Metropolitan police to bear in the search for the killer, he had transferred inexperienced investigators with no local knowledge to districts where they were useless, and he had never changed up old beat patrols, making it easier for the killer to predict when it would be safe to carry out his crimes. It is certainly true that there were police missteps, and that Warren was himself responsible for some of them. He was too hesitant to buy and use bloodhounds, for one. For another, he was negligent with some crime scene investigations—it was on his orders that the Goulston Street graffito was erased. Nevertheless, he was also being maligned unfairly in many respects. He was the face of the investigation, after all, for better or worse. More than a month after the double murder of Stride and Eddowes, with only conflicting witness descriptions of people seen with the victims and few suspects but no strong evidence, Sir Charles Warren finally resigned in disgrace. The very next day, the fifth and final canonical victim of Jack the Ripper was found, indoors rather than out in the streets, in the most horrific condition imaginable.

Like the previous victims, Mary Jane Kelly was a poverty-stricken woman who lived in the East End, had previously been married and had until recently been living with a man but was then making her own way, working in brothels. Unlike the other victims, she was only 25 years old, and she wasn’t staying in a lodging-house. She was not out prostituting herself to earn money for a bed in a dosshouse. She had her own place, Number 13 Miller’s Court, a 12-foot square room, formerly a parlor that had been partitioned off as a rental. This meant that Kelly had somewhere to take her clients; therefore, it also meant that, when she had her fatal assignation with Jack the Ripper, he had privacy to perform his heinous mutilations. Whereas, in the streets, it was estimated that he only took five to seven minutes ripping his victims, he spent something like two hours on Kelly, and it showed. Like the others, he cut her throat down to the vertebrae, disemboweled her, and placed her viscera around her. Whereas in the other killings he tended to set the victims’ intestines near their head, this time he spread them around, putting some at her feet, some on a bedside table, and some beneath her head like a pillow. This time he also removed her breasts, and he even cut the meat away from one thigh, denuding it like a butcher, leaving the bone visible. While in the past he had done some mutilation to his victims’ faces, there was actually nothing left of Mary Jane Kelly’s face. While twice before the murderer had taken a victim’s uterus with him, and parts of other organs were sometimes missing as well, a kidney here, a bladder there, from Mary Jane Kelly he took her heart. Some have suggested that Mary Jane Kelly may not have even been a victim of the Ripper. The differences in not only the circumstances but also the wounds inflicted are enough to suggest that it could have been a crime of passion or done for some other reason, and that it may have just been made to look like a Ripper slaying, in other words, a copycat. In 1939, one author suggested she had been murdered by an insane midwife who was performing an abortion on her, an entirely theoretical murderer he called “Jill the Ripper.” A more recent author has suggested, because of the evidence that something had been burned in the fireplace there , that the murderer had made some ritual sacrifice, which certainly would not match the Ripper’s modus operandi. Nevertheless, she is largely considered the fifth and final victim of the so-called “canonical five,” even if there is good reason to suspect that she, and perhaps Elizabeth Stride, who only had her throat cut, may be apocryphal additions to the Ripper’s kill count.

Contemporary newspaper illustration of the discovery of Kelly’s body in her Miller’s Court room.

Regardless of whether Kelly was a Ripper victim, just as there is disagreement over whether Polly was the first victim, there is further debate over whether Kelly was the last, for murders in Whitechapel would continue to occur in the aftermath. One of these was a strangling and clearly unlike the Ripper murders, but the wounds of a few others were brutal and reminiscent enough of the killings the previous fall that some continued to believe the Ripper was still active. While some have thought that the privacy Mary Jane Kelly’s room provided, and the time he took in the act of killer her, might have somehow allowed him to sate his compulsions, and that taking her heart may have somehow been symbolic of the finality of this last murder, forensic profilers typically suggest that serial murderers rarely just cease their habits, which are psychological rituals they become compelled to enact. More likely, if Kelly’s was the final murder, then the murders only ceased because the murderer had traveled elsewhere, was institutionalized or imprisoned, or had died. But just because the murders stopped did not mean that the investigation stopped as well. Scotland Yard and the police had their suspects, and in the years that followed, other suspects would emerge. As the Ripper case became the stuff of legend and literature, clever writers and independent researchers also wanted in on the action, digging up old leads and naming new suspects. Today, these enthusiasts have invented their own field of study, Ripperology, and there are numerous books published, often putting forth a new suspect, proposing some unlikely conspiracy theory, or dredging up an old suspect to make a case for why they were always the best suspect. They have titles like The True Face of Jack the Ripper, Naming Jack the Ripper, and Jack the Ripper, the Final Solution. In the second and final part of this series, I will consider the proposed culprits and endeavor to demonstrate why, no matter what these book titles claim, the identity of the Whitechapel Murderer remains unknown.

Further Reading

Begg, Paul. Jack the Ripper: The Uncensored Facts. Robson Books, 1990.

Crone, Rosalind. “From Sawney Beane to Sweeney Todd: Murder Machines in the Mid-Nineteenth Century Metropolis. Cultural and Social History, vol. 7, no. 1, 2010, pp. 59–85. Taylor & Francis Online, doi.org/10.2752/147800410X477340.

Jack the Ripper. Edited by Maxim Jakubowski and Nathan Braund, Castle Books, 2005.

Odell, Robin. Ripperology: A Study of the World’s First Serial Killer and a Literary Phenomenon. The Kent State University Press, 2006.

Rumbelow, Donald. The Complete Jack the Ripper (Fully Revised and Updated). Penguin, 2004.

Sugden, Philip. The Complete History of Jack the Ripper. Carroll & Graf. 2002.

Devil Books and Murder Ballads: The Myth of the Arch-Killer

When we have come to recognize that witches, werewolves, and vampires are nothing but myths, we begin to look elsewhere for monsters. Much as explorers who failed to find dog-headed people nevertheless came to believe that the indigenous people they encountered must also engage in the same monstrous acts attributed to the creatures of their imagination, in the absence of true monsters, people who are thought to commit evil acts prove handy stand-ins, and there are none more monstrous in our eyes than those who commit murders, and particularly those who perpetrate many murders. Like the notion of everyday culinary cannibalism, the notion of the habitual or serial killer chills us, and there is overlap here, as many a serial killer may be driven by their pathology to consume the flesh of their victims. Especially monstrous are those said to have claimed a huge number of victims. One example is Gilles de Rais, whom I spoke about briefly in my episode The Specter of Devil Worship. A war hero and compatriot of Joan of Arc, in the Hundred Years’ War, he was arrested in 1440 and charged with the murder of more than one hundred and forty children, mostly boys. In his trial at the ecclesiastical court of Nantes, the gruesome details of his alleged crimes, including sexual assault, ritual abuse, and necrophilia, truly made of him a human monster. But worse still was Countess Elizabeth Báthory, a Hungarian noblewoman who stood trial for killing hundreds of young women and girls in the late 16th and early 17th centuries. By the highest count, she is said to have claimed as many as 650 victims. It was said that the Countess chose only virgins as her victims and bathed in their blood to ensure her own youth and beauty. In both of these cases, it was not only the aristocratic individual who was tried for the crimes, but also their complicit servants, and also in both cases, there are today doubts about the reality of their crimes. Gilles de Rais had made enemies among the nobility as well as in the church, and questions about exaggerated numbers of victims and dubious witness testimony and perhaps coerced confessions led to some, as far back as Voltaire in the Enlightenment, suggesting that the accusations of devil worship and ritual murder leveled against de Rais may have been a plot against him, much as is suspected of the accusations against the Knights Templar in France 133 years earlier. And in the case of Elizabeth Báthory too, the number of 650 victims is widely thought to be embellishment, and the stories of her bathing in blood are believed to be a later invention. Báthory too is also thought by some researchers to have been the victim of a conspiracy, accused by debtors whose debts would be canceled upon her arrest, and tried by Catholic authorities who sought to seize her wealth and land and to destroy the influence of a Protestant family. Certainly in both cases, there do seem to have been genuine reports of missing children, but how much of these stories are total fiction? It is similar, in some ways, to the demonization of the Mongols. Genghis Khan is sometimes called the world’s most destructive mass murderers, claiming some 40 million victims, such that the resulting reduction in carbon dioxide cooled the planet. And the Mongols, another early candidate for Pliny’s dog-headed monsters, were also rumored to be cannibals. However, this is the portrait of Genghis Khan created by those he invaded. Even the most devoted pacifist can recognize the difference between a serial murderer and a general marshalling troops in warfare, and among his own people, Genghis Khan was a hero, whose empire was ruled by law and encouraged religious and racial tolerance. We find this to be the case again and again, when we look at the claims of human monsters throughout history. Much of what is claimed about them is questionable, if not downright fictional.

In my last episode, I established that in many cases, accusations of conspicuous, habitual cannibalism as a core aspect of cultures considered “savage” was largely, if not entirely, a fiction. However, the same cannot be said of cannibalism generally, as I conceded. When starving, people will break the taboo and resort to eating the remains of other humans, or even killing their fellows in order to eat them. This is not denied. Nor can it be denied that there do exist cannibal murderers, those whose pathology or mental illness compels them to commit acts of anthropophagy during the course of their murders. Many of these have been Americans: Boone Helm, the Kentucky Cannibal, Albert Fish, the Brooklen Vampire; Arthur Shawcross, Henry Lee Lucas, Lester Harrison, Jeffrey Dahmer… the list goes on, and that’s not even considering cannibal killers from other countries. To walk a fine line between respecting the grief and suffering of these murderers’ victims and also recognizing the many contributing factors that may lead some individuals to commit these heinous acts, I do want to recognize that these killers are human beings. However monstrous their acts, they are not “monsters” in the principal sense of the word, that of a nonhuman creature of strange or terrifying shape. Despite what Netflix calls these killers, they are less monsters and more precisely are sociopaths or psychopaths. They are people who suffer from antisocial personality disorder or borderline personality disorder or schizophrenia. Rather than demonize, we must recognize that they are the product of their particular background and environment, their specific genetic predispositions, and their developed pathologies. Some may object that this leaves no room for evil, and very well. If by evil one means demonic possession or some such nonsense, then yes, I am not leaving room for that, and I would suggest that to literally demonize mass murderers in this way is to take away culpability for their crimes. It is something that such criminals may sometimes try to do themselves, claiming they are not responsible because the devil made them do it, which is nothing but a convenient fiction. Many such serial murderers also  demonize themselves by vastly inflating the numbers of their victims, claiming they killed hundreds when there may only be evidence for a handful. The point is that both murderers themselves and the public that struggles to comprehend their crimes and is morbidly fascinated by them both tend to construct false versions of these killers, mythical monsters that we then tell scary stories about. In this way, it is much like the Euhemerist view of mythology, which states that mythological accounts likely originated in actual historical events and people, but were distorted in their retelling through the ages. And if we want to know how people will tell stories about Jeffrey Dahmer and other modern day serial murderers 500 years from now, perhaps the best model would be how we remember legendary murderers who lived half a century ago.

A depiction of Gilles de Rais using his victims’ blood to perform black magic.

The first and most famous of legendary murderers from long ago that I think serves as an apt example of how some potentially true story can be inflated and fictionalized into legend is Sawney Bean of Scotland. According to the legend, Alexander Bean, Sawney for short, the surname spelled sometimes with an e at the end, was born in East Lothian to a family of ditch-diggers and hedge-tenders. He didn’t much care for the life of manual labor he was born into, and his father beat him savagely for his indolence. Eventually, he ran away from home, and during his wanderings, he found a kindred spirit in one Agnes Douglas, called Black Agnes because of her cruelty and because of rumors that she practiced witchcraft. The two were a match made in hell, for they both had no compunctions about robbing people to sustain themselves, murdering them to cover their crimes, and even consuming the flesh of their victims to serve both ends. The two of them took up residence in a cave on the coast, near Bennane Head, a very real cave that can be visited today. There, over decades, Sawney Bean and Black Agnes raised fourteen children, 8 boys and 6 girls. Withdrawn from society entirely, they continued to prey on passing travelers, ambushing them as they traveled at night, dragging their corpses back to the family cave, feasting on their remains and pickling whatever they could not eat to preserve it for later. Searches for these victims would conclude when discarded body parts washed up on beaches nearby, and the deaths were typically blamed on animal predators. Over the decades, the Sawney Bean clan grew, with his children incestuously producing numerous grandchildren, some 32 grandsons and granddaughters. With so many mouths to feed, their depredations increased, to the point that they could no longer be hidden. Local inhabitants came to recognize that there were murderers in the area and began searching for them. Some found the cave but did not believe that any person could live in it. Instead, more than one innocent person was accused of the Sawney Bean clan’s crimes and hanged for them. Eventually, one of their victims escaped. He was a man riding home from a country fair. While his wife was pulled from her horse and killed by the inbred cannibals, the man held them off with his sword and pistol and was eventually saved when a large group of travelers approached, scaring the cannibal clan away. When the news spread, a posse of 400 men was mustered by the king for the purpose of seeking out the clan. Their bloodhounds led them right to the cave, where along with a pile of pilfered valuables they found, to their horror, barrels full of pickled body parts and corpses hanging from the walls like a butcher shop. In the end, according to almost every version of the tale, every last member of the Bean Clan was killed for their horrific crimes. Sawney Bean himself was defiant to the end, it was said. “It isn’t over,” he shouted, according to one telling, “it will never be over!” And indeed, it never would be, for his legend lives on today. Although the Bennane Cave is difficult to reach, visitors still frequent it. One can easily find YouTube videos of people exploring it.  Its interior is covered in graffiti. And beyond local lore, the story survives in the lyrics of various heavy metal songs and in numerous fictionalized retellings, the most prominent of these being Wes Craven’s The Hills Have Eyes, as well as other films centering on inbred cannibals, like Wrong Turn and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. But how much of the original story was itself fiction?

First, it must be acknowledged that the story did not appear until long after the time it is supposed to have happened. So far as anyone can determine, it was first told in British chapbooks, small booklets printed on the cheap and sold cheaply that told lurid stories of criminals. These cheap publications were preceded by the broadside ballads that sold for just half a penny and had previously done so much to popularize stories of cannibalism, and they would be followed by the “penny bloods” or “penny dreadfuls” of later years, so-called because of their gruesome content. The earliest of these to contain the story appeared sometime in the late 1700s, whereas the story itself is said to have happened in the late 1500s or somewhat later. This is a difference of some 200 years. Add to this fact the claim in the story that the Sawney Bean clan murdered more than a thousand people, and we begin to recognize that there must be some fiction here. The murder of thousands would not go unrecorded for two centuries and only first appear in literature known for embellishment. It is especially so if the news had reached the royal court, and a force of men was dispatched upon royal decree to find and bring the cannibals to justice. There would be record of that. Yet there are no reliable historical records of these events previous to the chapbooks. Additionally, in the several chapbooks and many later retellings of the story, there are numerous differences and contradictions. Early ones indicate that it took place during the reign of Queen Elizabeth, while others claim it was King James VI of Scotland, James I of England, who brought the clan to justice. Likewise, the story of the clan’s end was inconsistent. By one account, when they were taken to stand trial, the men of the clan were first forced to watch their women and children burned at the stake before they were themselves drawn and quartered, but in other versions, the women and children were first forced to watch the men be mutilated and bled to death, their hands, feet, and genitals severed. Then in still other versions, they were all executed without process, as the posse that found their cave destroyed it with the clan inside, detonating a charge of gunpowder and collapsing the cave on them. Of course, this version does not work with the identification of Bennane Cave as the Sawney Bean cave, since that cave is not collapsed, but then again, there are further issues there. That cave, for example, is simply not big enough to have housed such a massive clan. With 14 children and 32 grandchildren, we’re talking about a family of nearly fifty people, and beyond the difficulty of even finding a cave big enough to house such a brood, it is simply unlikely that so massive a clan could have gone unnoticed for 25 years, as the story claims, even if they did hide in their apparently huge cave during the day and only came out by night.

Sawney Bean at the entrance of his cave

One further theory is that this story originated as anti-Scottish propaganda, and there are several points to be made in favor of this notion. First, it should be recalled that there was a long history of characterizing the people of the region as savage cannibals. According to the Romans, cannibalism was practiced all over Europe by the primitive peoples there—another example of claims that the Other is inhuman because they do unthinkable things. Julius Caesar claimed the Irish were cannibals. Pliny claimed the Druids of Gaul were cannibals. Likewise, in the Common Era, St. Jerome of Stridon described, in the late 4th century, “the Attacotti, a British tribe,” which he claimed “eat human flesh,” saying that “when they find herds of swine, cattle, and sheep in the woods, they are accustomed to cut off the buttocks of the shepherds, and the paps of the shepherdesses, and to consider them as the only delicacies of food.” These mysterious inhabitants of the British isles were then said to prefer the shepherd to the flock, as it were, and it is telling that this baseless account was long taken to mean that the Scottish were cannibals, when really no one knows if the Attacotti were entirely made up or who they were, if they really existed. Now consider when and where the story of Sawney Bean emerged: specifically in British publications, not Scottish literature, and in the wake of the Jacobite rebellions, when supporters of James II, the exiled Stuart king, made five attempts to restore him to the throne. The movement was strong in Scotland, so fears of Jacobite revolution often centered on fears of Scottish uprising. Therefore, a story about British forces being dispatched to root out the threat of Scottish savages does seem somewhat to have been a thinly veiled propaganda story. Driving home that notion is the fact that, among the British, “Sawney,” the name given to the chief savage in the tale, was actually a racist epithet for Scotsmen. However, there are reasons to doubt this characterization of the story as well. While early versions of it have Queen Elizabeth, the last Tudor monarch, wiping out the Bean clan, many versions of the story have James I crushing the cannibal brood, and this English king was also James VI of Scotland, son of Mary, Queen of Scots, and himself a Stuart monarch. Therefore, the symbolism does not really work. Moreover, the sorts of chapbooks in which the story appeared mostly told the stories of vicious and savage British criminals, so it is difficult to suggest that it was pure propaganda.

Some of the chapbooks of the era did tell the stories of real crimes, and the Sawney Bean story was thereafter immortalized in sensational true crime catalogues like The Newgate Calendar, which was a publication associated with Newgate Prison. It has therefore long been thought that there may have been some truth behind the story, some kernel of history that served as the basis. One of the earliest versions of the Sawney Bean tale that wasn’t anonymous gives the author name “Captain Charles Johnson,” and it has been pointed out that this was a known pseudonym of the pamphleteer and novelist Daniel Defoe, author of the famous castaway novel Robinson Crusoe. Since Defoe was known to have based that story and others on true life sources, it has been suggested that he may have done likewise with the story of Sawney Bean, or may in fact be the inventor of the tale. However, the potential real life basis of the story is hard to find. No contemporaneous sources, such as 16th century pamphlets or private diaries, have ever been found relating a story about someone named Sawney Bean. The closest would be a broadside from 1750 that mentions one “Sandy Bane,” a murderous Scotsman who ate cats. Some have found other potential candidates. In a 1696 popular history, Nathaniel Crouch wrote of a thief who lived with his wife and children “in a den,” who were all burned alive for the crime of killing and eating young people over the course of many years. And then perhaps the most likely candidate is Andrew Christie, called Christie-o-the-Cleek, a butcher who during a 14th century famine lived in the Scottish wilds with a group of scavengers who resorted to cannibalism to survive. Thereafter supposedly developing a taste for it, it was said that Christie led the group in ambushing travelers and eating both them and their horses. He derived his name from the detail that he supposedly hung the corpses on butchers’ hooks called “clekes.” Stories of Christie Cleek predate those of Sawney Bean by a century or more. However, if we were able to identify Christie Cleek as the basis of Sawney Bean, the same problem remains, for we find that Christie Cleek’s story was also embellished in its retellings. The earliest accounts describe only Christie’s resorting to cannibalism during the famine, not to any group of accomplices or their ambushing of travelers. And studies of all such literature indicate that the theme of ambush on the roads was a common trope used again and again in such pamphlets and chapbooks as those in which the stories of Christie Cleek and Sawney Bean appeared. So it seems that the entire story of an inbred cannibal clan that might set upon unwary travelers was simply a horror fiction invented to capitalize on common fears of highway robbery at the time.

Depiction of the capture and execution of legendary German arch-killer, Christman Genipperteinga

Complicating further the entire question is the fact that there are numerous other such strikingly similar stories that appeared in generally the same time period but elsewhere in Europe, specifically in Germany. The most awful of these was one Christman Genipperteinga, also variously called Gniperdoliga. Like Sawney Bean, Christman took up residence in a cave, not on the coast but in the woods near Bernkastel, in the Rhineland. His cavern home was chosen because it offered a nice vantage of the nearby roads and passing travelers. Genipperteinga turned highway robber, murdering travelers and discarding their corpses in the deepest recesses of his cave. According to some tellings of his tale, he kept a journal in which he detailed the wealth he had amassed as well as the number of his victims, which, being supposedly 964, was rivaled only by that of the Bean clan, but Genipperteinga did it all by himself. He did have children, which he fathered by raping a certain woman victim he had kept alive and captive as a slave, but rather than amass a brood of little killers, he was said to have murdered all of his children, hanging them, and then remarking on how they danced as they hanged. Eventually, he allowed the female hostage he kept, the mother of his murdered children, to go into town, and she revealed the killer’s den to authorities. Christman Genipperteinga is said to have been condemned in 1581 and broken on the wheel—a brutal method of torture and execution in which the limbs are snapped and woven within the spokes of a wheel that is then suspended above ground on a pole, allowing gravity to do the rest. Genipperteinga survived 9 days on the wheel, according to the story, but there are no local records that attest to the tale, only a series of pamphlets. Thus much like Sawney Bean, Christman Genipperteinga is considered likely a fictional character. Like Bean, the inflated number of victims strains credulity, for he would have had to murder a traveler something like twice a week to reach such a number. And we see elements of his story in other folklore, as well. The element about the female captive turning him in recalls the Brothers Grimm story The Robber Bridegroom, in which a young woman finds herself the bride of a robber and cannibal. While Genipperteinga was not called a cannibal in the earliest of the pamphlets, in some later ones, this was added to his story. And the detail of Genipperteinga living in a cave also reappears. There is the legend of the Robber Lippold, who supposedly lived in a cave in Lower Saxony and abducted a local mayor’s daughter, and years later, when she was allowed to visit the market if she swore to talk to no one, she turned the robber in. Perhaps this was the inspiration of the Brothers Grimm tale, but since it goes back to the 15th century, or perhaps it was the inspiration of the Genipperteinga story. Then there was Daneil’s Cave, also in Lower Saxony, which was supposedly home to the robber Simon Bingelhelm, who, it was said, killed several infants and even cut unborn fetuses from the bellies of his pregnant victims. The infanticide of this tale certainly corresponds with Genipperteinga’s, and the fact that Bingelhelm was said to make candles with the children’s entrails for black magic purposes may correspond as well, for in some later versions of Genipperteinga’s story, he too was said to be a magician, turning himself invisible.

With the introduction of child murder for the purposes of black magic, we find here undeniable parallels with the story of yet another German serial killer, who coincidentally or not, was put to death in the same year that Genipperteinga was said to have been executed, and in the same way, on the wheel. His name was Peter Niers, and while he too was dramatized and embellished in pamphlet literature, there are also local records to indicate that he was a real person. He did not claim the rather unbelievable total of a thousand victims, but his number of killings is still rather unbelievable, having been convicted of 544 murders, 24 of which were unborn infants cut out of their mothers. Unlike Sawney Bean and Christman Genipperteinga and the Robber Lippold and magician Simon Bingelhelm, it was never claimed that Niers or his band of robbers lived in a cave. Like actual highway robbers of the period, they roamed and hid in different places. But like Sawney Bean, he was accused of cannibalism, and like Simon Bingelhelm, he was said to use the fat and the flesh of the infants he killed to craft magical candles, and as was said of Genipperteinga, he was supposedly able to make himself invisible, specifically through the lighting of those magical candles. It was also said that, through his black magic practices, he could turn himself into an animal to avoid capture. Yet he did not avail himself of these powers when he was captured, first in 1577, and then after escaping, again a few years later, when it was claimed an innkeeper and some suspicious citizens of a town he was visiting opened his bag to find fetal organs. While, as I said, there is much reason to conclude that Peter Niers and his gang were real criminals, the stories of his black magic, invisibility, and transformation into animals should make clear that he was thoroughly mythologized. The fact that confessions of his crimes were extracted under torture makes the stories about him no more reliable, since as we have seen with the Inquisitions and witch hunts that were still going on then in Europe, torture will cause people to say whatever their captors want to hear. And Niers’ torture was horrific. His skin was peeled off in strips, and hot oil was poured into his wounds. His feet were oiled and roasted over coals. And finally, he too was broken on the wheel. When Niers was first captured, in 1577, he confessed under torture to 75 murders, but somehow, by the time of his execution in 1581, it had become 544, which would mean 469 murders in just 4 years. That’s ten murders a month, 2.5 a week. What is more likely, that he was actually able to carry off so many murders or that he simply kept increasing the number of murders he was confessing to in order to get his captors to stop torturing him? 

A depiction of torture and execution by the breaking wheel

Then there is the further fact that Peter Niers was said to have been mentored by another prolific German arch-killer of the 16th century, a robber named Martin Stier who had been executed in Württemberg in 1572. Martin Stier was a shepherd, and he was said to have organized a gang of other shepherds, and while today we may have some idyllic view of shepherds and their pastoral lives, as one of my principal sources, Joy Wiltenburg makes clear in her book Crime and Culture in Early Modern Germany, herdsmen were of a low station at the time, thought to be dishonorable sorts who loitered out in fields plotting their crimes. So already, we have some reason to suspect that Stier and his fellow shepherds may have only been the victims of prejudice against their class. It was claimed that Stier was really the master sorcerer, and that he taught Peter Niers all he knew. It was apparently Stier who showed Niers how to turn invisible, who taught him the power of eating the hearts of unborn fetuses. How do we know this? Because it was claimed by the author of a single anonymous pamphlet, which was actually a ballad or song about Niers, and we might imagine that this connection was only made because it offered a convenient rhyme.   Yet much of what was said of these arch-killers in ballads and pamphlets was taken as truth, and we know this because of the work of Johann Jakob Wick, the compiler of the largest surviving collection of broadsheets and pamphlets on the heinous crimes and supposed miracles of the 16th century, called the Wickiana. Wick was a Protestant clergyman, and he collected these reports in an attempt to compile evidence of Satan’s works and to discern indications that the world was in the End Times. Interestingly, when the pamphlets he collected were actually signed, it was revealed that they were often also written by Protestant clergymen, and thus motivation for their embellishment of the crimes and the dubious claims of sorcery and the supernatural appears clear, as with the claims of cannibalism, which were common of many accusations of devil worship and witchcraft. Therefore, the crime literature of 16th century Germany is revealed to be little more than religious mythmaking, inventing more satanic bogeymen to scare the public into pious devotion, just like the witches and devil worshipers that were claimed to lurk everywhere, and much like those other supposed sorcerous murderers who were accused of being werewolves, like Peter Stumpp, about whom I spoke in detail in my series on the topic. In the end, everything is questionable, from the number of their victims to the savagery of their deeds, and even, in some cases, their actual existence.

The 16th and 17th century accounts compiled by Wick of prolific serial murderers are too many to actually examine in detail. There was also Ulrich Oettinger, who was nicknamed Sew Vile, and Melcher Hedeloff, who was credited with 251 murders, and numerous others. And that is just in the Wickiana, which was specific to Mainland Europe and not considering the many British arch-killers profiled in later English chapbooks, like Sawney Bean. Most were highway robbers, many were the founders and chiefs of gangs, several were said to live in caves, and commonly they were said to practice cannibalism and black magic, especially that which required them to kill pregnant women and remove their unborn children. Some, like Niers, were even said to be possessed by the devil, or on the Devil’s payroll, as in literally, Satan was said to have provided them a monthly salary. Another term for these books that Johann Wick collected were “Devil books” because it was thought they kept readers apprised of the literal works of the devil. In some ways, the legendarium surrounding highway robbers in Early Modern Europe is very similar to the later myth surrounding the Thuggee strangler gangs of colonial India, which I spoke about in great detail in my episode on the topic. Like those highway robbers in India, who may have been prolific murderers but whose crimes were also undoubtedly embellished, European highway robbers became not only killers on the road, but also evil cultists practicing ritualized sacrificial murder, which wasn’t actually the case with the Thuggee at all. Whether tapping into fears of travel in a dangerous world or fears of the end times, these Devil Books, these gruesome pamphlets, were essentially inventing monsters, much as their successors, the penny dreadfuls, would do in the 19th-century. These monsters were upsettingly human, but as we try to track them down, to find the truth of them, we find them to be phantoms, as illusory as any phantasm. So after all, everywhere we look for monsters, whether it be werewolves, vampires, witches, giants, savage cannibals, devil worshippers, or even just extraordinarily wicked murderers, we find a lot of myth and falsehood. True crime aficionados will argue that, certainly, heinous crimes are real, which is true, but they must recognize that most good research on most true crime stories involves debunking the mythology that has developed around each case. And the fact is that, while true crime obsession can lead one to feel that heinous crimes happen everywhere all the time, in reality crime rates are dropping, something also not widely reported on because there is often more interest in crime than in the lack of it. All of this is, I think, rather comforting. Perhaps, much of the time, the only thing to fear in this world is actually the falsehood that is spread to make us fearful, or as FDR said, “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.”

Further Reading

Crone, Rosalind. “From Sawney Beane to Sweeney Todd: Murder Machines in the Mid-Nineteenth Century Metropolis. Cultural and Social History, vol. 7, no. 1, 2010, pp. 59–85. Taylor & Francis Online, doi.org/10.2752/147800410X477340.

Gammon, Julie. “Retelling the Legend of Sawney Bean: Cannibalism in Eighteenth-Century England.” To Feast on Us as Their Prey: Cannibalism and the Early Modern Atlantic, edited by Rachel B. Herrmann, University of Arkansas Press, 2019, pp. 135–52. JSTOR, doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv8jp0cn.12.

Hobbs, Sandy, and David Cornwell. “Sawney Bean, the Scottish Cannibal.” Folklore, vol. 108, 1997, pp. 49–54. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/1260707.  

Wiltenburg, Joy. Crime and Culture in Early Modern Germany. University of Virginia Press, 2012.

Anthropophagi: The Myth of Cannibalism

Every Halloween season, we are inundated with images of monsters and evil beings, the stories about whom we can trace back to history and folklore. In fact, this is something I have endeavored to do during several October episodes of the podcast, such as my series on vampires, a monster that appears to have arisen from the conjunction of sleep paralysis nightmares experienced by mourners and a lack of understanding of the decomposition process by those who dug up corpses, thinking they had been rising from the grave to trouble people at night. I explored the historical basis of folklore surrounding the werewolf as well, which appears to be a monster that took form from language used about violent criminals and accusations of sorcery. Closely connected to the myth of werewolves was the myth of witchcraft, which I explored and demonstrated to be rooted in moral panic and scapegoating, typically caused by a tragic and lethal combination of social, political, and economic factors. And we see a parallel between the phantom threat of witchcraft and the specter of devil worship generally, which throughout history has been a baseless accusation leveled by the religious against those outside their communities, against personal enemies, or against the Other. The concept of the Other is important to understand here in an anthropological sense. In this field, Otherness is defined as the state of being excluded by a dominant group or culture. Othering is the act by a dominant group, of excluding another group and stigmatizing them because of differences, whether real or imagined. Witchcraft and devil worship were common forms of Othering, perpetrated often against outsider women who may not have conformed to local norms, and in the case of the European witch persecutions of the early modern period, specifically the witch trials of the Inquisition, against entire Christian communities whose doctrines were deemed unorthodox. One accusation commonly made against the Other, which sprang entirely from the fevered imaginations of the accusers, was that of cannibalism. The devil worshipper, it was thought, sacrificed and consumed people, the witch was said to eat babies. We see this too claimed as the habit of all the monsters we fear. The werewolves, who were so closely related to witches in their folklore, were said to be man-eaters. And even the legend of vampires or revenants, who in some cases too were thought to have been witches or cursed by witches, depicts an inhuman creature that feasts on the living, drinking their blood and even devouring their flesh. We might conclude that at the heart of all our monster stories is the notion of cannibalism, or anthropophagy. This does not, however, suggest any basis in reality of these legends, for among modern scholars, the idea of cannibalism has come to be viewed more and more as a myth, a baseless imputation, like that of sorcery, frequently leveled against the Other but perhaps reflective more of the fantasies and fears of the accuser.

Claims about monsters being man-eaters did not appear when we started calling people witches, werewolves, and revenants. No, there is a long history in mythology of man-eating monsters. Of course, we might presume that this can be traced back into the distant, benighted past, when humanity struggled for survival against predators that would literally devour them. Indeed, even in medieval and Early Modern Europe, the threat of man-eating wolves was very real and clearly influenced our notions about monsters, like the wolf man. We see this also in folklore about ogres, the man-eating monsters of many a legend that were depicted as hairy beasts, not unlike a werewolf themselves. Ogres were also enormous, which connects them to perhaps the earliest of mythical man-eating beasts, the giants of ancient Greek mythology. In the works of Homer, we see the idea of a man-eating, humanoid monster going far back into antiquity. Aside from the less than human looking sea monsters that might devour sailors, like Scylla, there was the Cyclops who ate men, and the Laestrygonians, a whole tribe of giants that were said to be man-eaters. In a poem attributed to mythological bard Orpheus, he speaks more generally of a time when all men were cannibals, “When men devour’d each other like the beasts, / Gorging on human flesh,” and thus the myth of a primitive human people who customarily dined on the flesh of other human beings seems to have been born. And even before the common era, it was already being used to Other those in distant lands, with Herodotus, The Father of History and perpetuator of myth, speaking of distant and mysterious peoples like the Scythians north and east of Greece, and of the mystery lands beyond, about which he must only have heard rumors and folktales. “Beyond this region the country is desert for a great distance,” he explained confidently, “and beyond the desert the Andropophagi dwell.” The very word means “man-eaters,” just as the more modern version, “anthropophagi” means “human-eaters,” but in case it wasn’t clear, Herodotus clarifies: “The Andropophagi have the most savage customs of all men; they pay no regard to justice, nor make use of any established law. They are nomads, …they speak a peculiar language; and of these nations, are the only people that eat human flesh.” Here we see the cannibalism of a certain foreign tribe connected with their Otherness, the peculiarity of their customs and strangeness of their language, and their supposed savagery. This notion of faraway and savage peoples engaging in cannibalism would develop through the Middle Ages and come of age during the Age of Exploration, when Europeans traveled the world and came into contact with foreign tribes that they assumed practiced cannibalism. The investigations of explorers and conquistadors convinced the world that, indeed, these distant people were savages and did practice cannibalism as a habit of everyday life. Even modern ethnographers and anthropologists, having never questioned it, subscribed to this idea. It was not until the 1970s that a skeptical view of this belief began to gain currency in the field.

A depiction of Odysseus’s ships being attacked by the giant cannibals, the Laestrygonians.

Skepticism of the very existence of customary cannibalism among any group of people simmered for some time in the academic community. It began rather logically. Specifically, as belief in cannibalism had grown through the centuries, many had come to believe in what is called gastronomic cannibalism, that is the eating of human flesh for culinary reasons, as a preferred dish, rather than for any other cultural or religious reason. To go along with this understanding of cannibalism was the notion that, if some people just loved eating other people for the taste of it, then they would not limit themselves to eating the dish only when they managed to vanquish some enemy or encounter some outlander; rather, they would seek their favored meat within their own community, which is called endocannibalism. It made little sense that any people would thus diminish their own numbers by killing those within their own community just to sate some hunger for human flesh, especially when other sources of food existed,. Therefore, gastronomic endocannibalism appeared to be unlikely, except in cases of mortuary cannibalism, or eating of the dead. But this then meant that cannibalism could not have been a customary, everyday practice, as had long been thought, and tales of tribal kitchens being always full of body parts, of their frequent “cannibal feasts,” seemed less and less believable based on the simple fact that, logically, opportunities for cannibalism must have been rare, limited only to sacrificial rituals or warfare. Then in 1979, cultural anthropologist William Arens dropped the bombshell book The Man-Eating Myth: Anthropology and Anthropophagy, which actually examined the evidence for the existence of such practices and found it wanting. Specifically, he demonstrated that in almost every encounter thought to provide proof of cannibal practices, there had been no direct witnessing of cannibalism, there had been language barriers to clear communication, and there had been preconceptions on the part of European colonizers that influenced their reports of cannibalistic practices. Arens blames not just colonialism but also anthropologists for perpetuating the myth, and this, of course, led to backlash, with many a colleague and peer attacking his conclusions, comparing him to a flat-earther because there was simply, in their estimation, too much evidence of cannibalism to deny it. However, Arens’s view of cannibalism as little more than a racist presumption of savagery that has led to centuries of slander and defamation, especially of Pacific Islanders, has only gained credence during the last 50 years. Though there are still academics who treat it as a kind of denialism, they often do so by misrepresenting Arens and those who picked up his torch. For example, those who view cannibalism as a myth perpetuated by European explorers do not claim that the act of cannibalism has never taken place. There is no sense in denying the act of cannibalism among murderers and the mentally ill, for example. Pathological cannibalism, then, is conceded as real. Nor is there any denial of the fact that individuals, or even entire peoples, may resort to cannibalism, despite taboos, when facing starvation. This too is conceded. Even ritual cannibalism is conceded by some of these academics, as human sacrifice is known to have been practiced in some cultures and it is not impossible that some such rituals contained the symbolic consumption of small portions of the sacrificial victim. What is denied, and what Arens and other academics, like Gananath Obeyesekere, a principal source for this episode, have convincingly proven, is that widespread customary cannibalism, as a typical practice among native islanders, was wildly exaggerated and largely inaccurate.

Before the Age of Exploration, which brought with it stories of distant people who had actually been encountered, there were medieval travel narratives and legends of faraway places that fired the imaginations of explorers. Before trans-oceanic contact, tales of exploration focused on the far east, and many were absolute fiction. In the Alexander Romance, a fictional account of Alexander the Great’s exploits, the biblical names Gog and Magog are reinvented as kings of so-called “Unclean Nations” deep within Asia who practice cannibalism—essentially the equivalent of the faraway Andropophagi imagined by Herodotus. Hundreds of years later, the Letter of Prester John appeared, a fictional description of a Christian kingdom in the far-off and fantastical East about which you can hear a great deal more in my episode on the topic. In this letter and its later embellishments, we find mention again of the cannibalistic Gog and Magog nations, as well as strange monstrous people like unto the man-eating myths of preceding mythology, including one-eyed creatures like the cyclops but also beings with big floppy ears, hopalong folk with one giant foot, beings with their faces in their chests and no heads, and dog-headed people—oddities who had centuries before been recorded in Pliny the Elder’s Natural History, but whom, of course, no one had ever actually encountered. Several of these monsters would be further described in other fictions masquerading as genuine travel narratives, such as The Travels of Sir John Mandeville, which described an Englishman encountering them during his journey across India and China, depicting dog-headed men specifically as cannibals. During these years another travel narrative often considered more genuine appeared, that of Marco Polo, which was a clear influence on Mandeville’s Travels, and which omitted any such monstrous creatures but still described cannibalistic customs in India, China, and Japan. Lacking strong evidence for the cannibalism Marco Polo claimed to have observed, and considering other major omissions from his narratives, some have come to suspect that Marco Polo’s entire narrative might be pieced together from hearsay rather than any actual travels he undertook, but that is a topic for another episode. For now, what’s germane is that, by the time of Christopher Columbus’s voyage across the Atlantic, the myths and legends of faraway places being peopled by monsters and cannibals were so ingrained into the European imagination that Columbus and his men fully expected to encounter them.

A depiction of the monstrous races thought to inhabit distant places, from The Voyage and Travels of Sir John Mandeville

Columbus owned a copy of Mandeville’s Travels and seems to have believed he would find such creatures as were described in it when he crossed the Ocean Sea. In his journals, he acknowledges that this was not the case, stating, “I have not found any monstrous men in these islands, as many had thought.” Nevertheless, the people he did find there he tended to view as still being monstrous and savage in their customs. He expected to find dog-headed cannibals, and finding instead people with normal heads, he still did not think that perhaps then they were not eaters of men. Indeed, we owe the English word “cannibal” to Columbus, who popularized it as a synonym for the awkward anthropophagus, or man-eater. The word derived from the name of the native tribe Carib. Columbus encountered first the Arawak people, with whom he attempted to communicate, which meant only miming through gesture. I will speak more on the problem of miscommunication through gesture later. What’s important now is that he returned claiming that to the south of these Arawak there dwelled monstrous people with dog noses and only one eye, called Caribales, who were known to eat human flesh. The simple fact that Arawaks seemed to have confirmed the existence of cyclopean dog-headed monsters reveals that there was obvious miscommunication, that Columbus was trying to ask about the monsters he’d expected to find, and that the Arawak, only vaguely understanding, had indicated that he must mean the Carib, their enemies, whom they viewed as warlike. Since Columbus’s reports resulted in a widespread identification of the Carib people with cannibalism, even skeptics sometimes suggest that the Arawak themselves may have suspected the Carib of man-eating, or that the Carib purposely tried to scare their enemies by encouraging the thought that they might devour them, but the simple fact is that we do not know whether the Arawak held this belief about their enemies prior to European contact, when through crude gestures, white men came around asking where the evil man-eating people might be. According to Columbus, through these uncertain communications they learned not only that the Carib people were one-eyed and dog-faced (which was not true), and not only that they ate the flesh of people, but also that they did so as a matter of course, not in a religious context but simply as regular meal preparation. And where did they get their meat? Supposedly they raised children like livestock, fattening them for the slaughter. Here we see the myth of cannibalism in its final and lasting form—the notion that an uncivilized culture just decided they love eating people and built their whole food cycle on it. It is not clear whether the Arawak were saying the Carib ate their own children or the children of their enemies, and this clarification was unnecessary because the purpose of the story, if indeed it was actually conveyed to the Spanish in the way that they understood it, was likely only to demonize the other tribe. Columbus actually did show some skepticism, acknowledging that the Arawak may have been slandering their enemies or telling the explorers what they wanted to hear, but he nevertheless happily spread the stories in Europe, and when the first accounts of his voyage were published, they were illustrated with pictures of those same old man-eating monsters Pliny had long ago described.

Today, it is recognized that the Carib that Columbus claimed were cannibal monsters. who actually called themselves the Kalinago, never practiced cannibalism in the way described, fattening children for slaughter for their own everyday nutrition. Even so, some historians will still insist that they did practice cannibalism of a ritualistic kind during warfare, a ceremonial consumption of small portions of their enemies. First, it must be recognized that this is far different from the kind of gastronomic cannibalism first attributed to them, and second, this too relies on only secondhand hearsay evidence; no skeletal evidence of cannibalism among the Kalinago has ever been produced. During Columbus’s second voyage, a captain under his command sailed into a certain island harbor, scaring the natives away, and he reported that, inside one of their dwellings, he found “four or five bones of the arms and legs of men.” This was accepted as evidence of cannibalism among the Kalinago for a long time, even though the captain actually didn’t know what tribe’s village he had invaded, saying only, “we suspected that the islands were those of the Caribe, which are inhabited by people who eat human flesh.” In later years, French missionaries would make direct contact with the Kalinago and report that they were not cannibals, and that they kept the bones of their ancestors in their homes in accordance with their beliefs that ancestral spirits acted as guardians. These reports did little to halt the already widespread view of the Carib cannibal. After this initial claim that some among the native peoples of the New World practiced cannibalism, the myth appears to have spread based purely on prejudice, that is, the pre-judgment that cannibals would be found there, and the repetition of claims that had been previously made. For example, during the next century, a popular narrative was published by a soldier who claimed to have lived in native captivity in colonial Brazil, describing the cannibalistic practices of the Tupinamba natives there. Afterward, some French explorers and writers also published works that describe the same tribe’s cannibalism, and these works were drawn on by one of the most influential works on the topic, an essay called “On Cannibalism” by Renaissance philosopher Michel de Montaigne. As scholars since have revealed, however, there is no independent evidence of that soldier’s captivity among the Tupinamba, his narrative appears not to have been written by him, its contents seem to have been plagiarized from preceding accounts of cannibalism elsewhere, and the works of the French explorers who followed appear to have cribbed liberally from his narrative in describing their own encounters with the Tupinamba. The simple fact behind all of this rehashing of claims and narratives is that lurid accounts of cannibalism sold well, so there was always the temptation for travelers to make up such experiences in order to reap financial rewards. Indeed, one of those French writers who has since been shown to be plagiarizing a plagiarism, Jean de Léry, in his 1578  History of a Voyage to the Land of Brazil, Also Called America, acknowledges this tendency to deceive, referring to “the fabulous tales found in the books of certain people who, trusting to hearsay, have written things that are completely false,” and conceding “that since … travelers to distant lands cannot be contradicted, they give themselves license to lie.” Nevertheless, he insists that his narrative is true, though he also is sure to remark that “if there are some who are unwilling to give credence to … this history, let them be advised, whoever they may be, that I have no intention of taking them to see those places.” So what we find, again and again in the stories of cannibalism in the New World published by supposed travelers during the Age of Exploration, is that they borrow liberally from each other, cannibalizing each other’s work, if you will, and without any concrete evidence for their recycled claims, each is essentially just saying, “Trust me, bro.”

A late 16th century depiction of cannibalism in Brazil.

Another major vector for the spread of claims about cannibalism comes from encounters with Pacific Islanders, especially among the sailors of Captain James Cook’s expeditions. As his were scientific expeditions on behalf of the Royal Society, who tasked him with finding the mythical southern continent of Terra Australis, he and his officers documented their journey extensively and conducted what then passed for ethnographic studies when encountering native islanders, such that it would seem their records are reliable and that, when they recorded their encounters with cannibals, their claims were credible. The problem was, these men of science, voyaging almost 300 years after the myth of cannibalism had taken root in Europe and become standard belief, arrived at every island expecting to find cannibals, and this is evidenced in their journals and reports, which describe their efforts to communicate with islanders and, invariably, to determine whether each new group of islanders were cannibals. To be entirely fair to Cook, they may have had some reason for expecting to encounter cannibals, as prior to his return to the area in his second voyage, a French expedition preceded them, also searching for Terra Australis, and also collecting ethnographic information around New Zealand and Tasmania, and its captain, and others sailors, had been massacred by a Maori tribe’s attack on their camp. Months later, after French reprisals on the tribe, a grisly discovery was made at one Maori settlement: bones near a fire and what appeared to be a Frenchman’s cooked head on a spike. Word spread quickly then that the Maori were barbarous cannibals, and the next year, some of Cook’s men seemed to witness such evidence of their cannibalism for themselves when a boat they’d sent out at Grass Cove did not return. On investigating, they found the boat and some articles of clothing, and nearby, they found some baskets with cooked meat, which they took to be human flesh because also nearby, they discovered one of their sailors’ heads and two white hands. What must be emphasized here, however, is that in neither of these incidents was actual cannibalism witnessed. At the very least, we only see evidence for the killing of the sailors—and it must be remembered that many Maori viewed the Europeans as strange alien invaders—and at most, it’s proof of the placing of their corpses into fire, which was often described by the Europeans in culinary terms as “roasting” or “cooking.” But just as valid an explanation can be found in the known regional practices of human sacrifice, typically of enemies slain in battle. Captain Cook, who became somewhat obsessed with being invited to one of these “cannibal feasts” he imagined, would eventually be allowed to witness such a sacrifice in Tahiti, years after the Grass Cove incident, and what he described offers a plausible explanation for both previous massacres. With much ceremonial ritual, they prepared the sacrifice’s body, and the skulls that surrounded the ceremonial site indicated its head would be removed, but Cook saw them bury the body, and the closest to cannibalism they came was when the victim’s eyeball was removed and ceremoniously shown to the tribal chieftain, who merely nodded his approval. Then a dog, which were commonly eaten by Maori, was butchered and cooked on the fire, and it was the dog meat that was consumed in the ritual. Cook imagined that in the distant past they may have consumed the sacrificial victim and that by his time, the dog meat served as a surrogate, but this was speculation. Wartime human sacrifice rituals likely varied across Polynesia, but the fact is that the dismembered heads and hands found after both of the previous massacres very well could have been evidence of a known ritual that did not involve the consumption of human flesh at all, and the baskets of cooked meat at Grass Cove may not have even been human flesh. Indeed, the sailors who reported discovering it even said that they “supos’d it was Dog’s flesh,” and they admitted to skepticism, saying they, “still doubted their being Cannibals.”

While some aboard Cook’s scientific expedition may have been skeptics about native cannibalism, that cannot be said of sailors generally in that era. Cannibalism had essentially become a part of shipboard life for many British sailors. Numerous were the incidents, famous and not, of shipwrecked or starving sailors resorting to cannibalism for survival, such that, when they returned to England, they often stood trial for their actions and were invariably acquitted, to the point that many a sailor came to recognize the practice as acceptable in such circumstances. Indeed, the phenomenon of shipboard cannibalism was so common that sailors returning from long voyages often found themselves put in a position of confirming or denying whether it had occurred. It became a favorite topic of ballads and broadsheets, and it was here, in the context of British shipboard cannibalism, that the myth of human flesh tasting delicious was spread among sailors. Add to this the preoccupation with finding evidence of cannibalism among the more scientifically minded on Cook’s voyage, who at every stop hoped to find bones or skulls that would provide evidence of the Polynesian cannibalism they had heard so much about, and we begin to get a sense of how strange encounters with them must have seemed to Pacific islanders: ragged white men disembarking from their ships, half starved and making signs and gestures about cannibalism, such as biting their own arms and pointing at the natives. On more than one occasion, it appears very clear that this inquiry through gesture was mistaken as the British telling the natives that they themselves desired to eat human flesh. At one point, Captain Cook and his men attempted an experiment with a couple of Maori who had come aboard their ship. Having discovered a decapitated human head, they cooked it themselves and cut off a morsel of its flesh, offering it to the Maori, urging them to eat it through gesture. These Maori obliged, and they made a big show of how delicious it was. This grotesque “experiment,” which he actually conducted twice, seems to have finally convinced Cook that all Maori were indeed cannibals, even though, when we read accounts of the incident, it sounds an awful lot like the Maori visitors, surrounded by strange and formidable men that they believed to be man-eaters who wanted them to be man-eaters as well, simply went along with what they thought was expected of them, pretending to relish the taste just to appease them and so as not to offend them. Indeed, on many occasions, even when the islanders appeared to understand that the British were inquiring about their own native customs, they still understood it as meaning that the British themselves practiced cannibalism. Take the case of Captain Cook’s death, during his third voyage. At Hawaii in 1779, his men watched through a spyglass as he was clubbed and carried away. His men made demands that they he be returned or that they would make war on the native Hawaiians. Two terrified priests then came to Cook’s lieutenant and showed him a piece of cooked meat, indicating that it was all that remained of the captain. Through carefully questioning, the Hawaiian priests confirmed that Cook was indeed dead, that the priests had cut his flesh off, and that they had burned it in a fire. Cook’s lieutenant then asked if they had eaten the flesh, for that was the only purpose he could think of for removing flesh and cooking it, but according to him, “They immediately shewed as much horror at the idea, as any European would have done; and asked, very naturally, if that was the custom among us?” What the priests had actually performed on Cook’s corpse were the funerary rites that their culture typically reserved only for their most respected elders and leaders. While Cook’s men thought they had savagely dined on their captain, they had actually accorded him their highest honors.

A depiction of Captain Cook’s witnessing of a human sacrifice ritual.

These are the kinds of stories we find as we examine the “evidence” of cannibalism more and more closely, as William Arens and Gananath Obeyesekere have done. We find that, among indigenous peoples portrayed as cannibals by colonizers, there was as much of a taboo on eating human flesh as there is in any Western culture—and perhaps even stronger taboos. Take the example of the Aztec people during the Spanish siege of Tenochtitlán. Though they were suspected of being cannibals by the Spaniards, to the point that they became notorious for it and are even remembered as cannibals in 20th century scholarship, when they were starving to death in their besieged city, they never resorted to cannibalism and instead surrendered to the Spanish genocide. Elsewhere in the Americas, more recent discoveries of massive amounts of bones with scrape marks on them have led archaeologists to assert that cannibalism was a regular part of Pueblo Native American culture, but others have cautioned that there may be different explanations, such as ritual “witch curing” practices. Certainly in examining the Polynesian human sacrifice and funerary rituals, which also involved cutting the flesh from bones but as far as we can prove did not involve the consumption of that flesh, we find further alternative explanations that could account for these archaeological findings. And considering all the misunderstandings and false accusations of cannibalism that we know have occurred throughout history, we really must err on the side of caution. Reports from the Roman empire that inhabitants of Ireland and Scotland were savage cannibals persisted through the 19th century and into the 20th, but that doesn’t make them true. And we all recognize that the Blood Libel, claiming Jews were kidnapping and consuming Christian Children, was nothing but baseless conspiracism that fueled moral panic, much like the claims of cultists eating children in the Satanic Panic of the 1980s. Because of this history of getting it wrong, we must require only the most incontrovertible evidence to conclude that any peoples ever engaged in cannibalism. It must be acknowledged, though, that the skeptical view of cannibalism spearheaded by Arens has not yet become the scholarly consensus. Nevertheless, it has led to a reevaluation of the evidence, and to a more nuanced and convincing understanding of the practice as being more rare, mostly small scale, in a ritual or ceremonial context, engaged in largely symbolically when and if it did occur. So despite the objections of anthropologists to the scope of some skeptics’ denial of cannibalism, they have nevertheless mostly relegated the old idea of institutional, commonplace, gastronomic cannibalism among the Other to the realm of mythology, acknowledging that such claims were mostly the propaganda of colonizers who used it to justify their “pacification” (aka conquest) of “savages” (aka the indigenous), as well as the cultural erasure that they termed “civilizing.”

*

Until next time, remember, when you see a cartoon native putting your favorite Looney Tunes character in a cauldron, when you see Cap’n Jack Sparrow tied to a spit over open flames by Caribbean islanders, as you might well suspect, that kind of scenario may be entirely fiction and more than a little racist.

Further Reading

Arens, William. The Man-Eating Myth: Anthropology and Anthropophagy. Oxford University Press, 1979. Internet Archive, archive.org/details/maneatingmythant0000aren/mode/2up.

Fischer, Josh. “Cannibals and Witches Have Scientists Gnashing Their Teeth.” Science, 20 Jan. 1999, www.science.org/content/article/cannibals-and-witches-have-scientists-gnashing-their-teeth.

Mancall, Peter C. “Columbus believed he would find ‘blemmyes’ and ‘sciapods’ – not people – in the New World.” The Conversation, 5 Oct. 2018, theconversation.com/columbus-believed-he-would-find-blemmyes-and-sciapods-not-people-in-the-new-world-104306.

Obeyesekere, Gananath. Cannibal Talk: The Man-Eating Myth and Human Sacrifice in the South Seas. 1st ed., University of California Press, 2005.