Ripper's porn

[Nemo]

Hi All

While there is a current discussion regarding "murder porn" - I thought I would invite comments on a pet theory of mine that the Ripper was a reader, and was privy to some of the "obscene" publications at the time of the murders and in the years immediately preceding.

I think the most significant publication would have been "Psychopathia Sexualis" (1886)

For instance, just one case mentioned in the book relates to a Sergeant Bertrand...

He imagined having sex with women and then killing them. He would then contemplate the corpse and how he had defiled the woman. He then seems to have become obsessed with necrophilia.

For want of human bodies, he obtained those of animals.He would "cut open the abdomen, tear out the entrails and masturbate during the act he decared that in this way he experienced inexpressible pleasure".


Later, he would dig up bodies from graveyards, even when other people were around due, to an irresistible impulse - accompanied by heart palpitations and the like.He stated that much more pleasure could be derived from the corpse than with a living woman.


I could believe this was the Ripper if it did not occur in 1848

I could imagine that the Ripper murders were a culmination of the killer reading and dwelling upon certain case studies such as the above. He may well have wished also to terrorise similar to "Spring heeled Jack". At least I think the Ripper would have been "titillated" or otherwise stimulated by the often gory and sensationalist broadside publications popular in the LVP.

Anyone got any thoughts along these lines?

[Mascara & Paranoia]

I'd say that was in the realms of possibility. I've always wondered if Jack may have looked at pornographic pictures (or even if such a thing existed in those days). If that was the case, I'm not sure if it would've necessarily have been the root of his little problem but it may very well have inspired or even triggered him to turn his fantasies into a reality.

[JSchmidt]

It doesn't need Krafft-Ebbing's book. There were enough cheap and lurid publications around, for example the Penny Dreadfuls or pornographic chapbooks. The truly horrid and/or explicit parts of Psychopathia Sexualis were also in Latin in the early editions so a reader would need to have at least some education to understand them. And then there is the language barrier again: has it been translated to English already in 1888?

[Doug Irvine]

I've been wondering if JtR was influenced by verbal or written accounts of the Zulu war of 1879. The Zulu ritually cleansed the dead after victory in war by disembowelling them. They also castrated their fallen enemies so that they could use the genitalia in purification rituals known as Muti. It might be possible that JtR lost someone close to him, like a father, brother, or uncle in such a manner. Andrei Chikatilo thought that his cannibalism was caused by his mother telling him stories of how his older brother was eaten by cannibals.Chikatilo said even though he was horrified by the stories he still found them titillating. JtR might have shared a similar taste for debauched literature as Ed Gein. Gein was an avid reader of death cult magazines (death cult magazine is how they are described in wkipedia. I don't exactly know what a death cult magazine is, but it doesn't sound good) and adventure stories. Gein's proclivities were greatly influenced by his choice of reading material. The press must have been full of stories of Zulu atrocities after the massacre of the English at Isandlwana and the death of the exiled prince of France Louis Napoleon in a later skirmish. I would consider a JtR, Zulu connection a fait accompli, EXCEPT that the police and press seemed to have totally missed the connection. I must admit to being baffled as to why nine years after dead English soldiers were disembowelled and had their reproductive organs removed that similar deprivations to murdered prostitutes did not arouse some kind of response, at least in the press.

[Malcolm X]

this is quite a good post, the Ripper might also have been influenced by ``Gilles de Rais`` and a touch of ``Vlad the Implaler ``.

he might have had a huge interest in the occult as well, because ripping out a young woman's heart meant something to him, that can be explained by the occult as well.

R D'Onston noticed this too, because these murders do indeed lie exactly on the Vesica Piscis, best explained by Ivor Edwards and it's quite a convincing theory too.... mutilations like the Ripper's are routinely seen over the world in Black Magic Rituals.... but not so much in the U.K

[smezenen]

Hmmmm..... I wonder where Prof. Richard von Krafft-Ebing was during the autumn of 1888? Maybe in London’s east end researching one of his books.

No I don’t believe nor am I suggesting that the good professor was Jack the Ripper, but I also wonder if someone who studies extreme sexual deviance or even reads about it and/or obsesses over it can somehow snap and start killing prostitutes.