Jack the Ripper and Black Magic

Preface Jack the Ripper was a leading and international conspiracy theory of the late Victorian and premodern period. The unsolved case continues to charm, acquiring its own mythology and fancied suspects. Fiction is transmuted into fact and history into firm beliefs. True crime events that produce tangled theories and attract modern forensic interest to a serial killer whose identity is still unknown. Any approach seems to mask rather than resolve the murders that happened in 1888 in Whitechapel, London’s East End, the impoverished heart of Victorian London.

Though the overall case history of the Whitechapel murders has been examined and documented, less attention was brought to vague anomalies noted in official files, Home Office reports and in subsequent police press statements and memoirs. Stories of supernatural events and shady politics born of opaque senior police conclusions has further entrenched the mystery. Without the full details, conspiracies flourish and detract from the truth, however incredible. It is then useful to compare Jack the Ripper legends in their historic context with a fair variety of sources and established investigative reports to discern fact from fiction.

The Victorian era was also an age of the secret societies. A review of these period subcultures is important in considering the Whitechapel murders because of repeated police references. These clubs were political, mystical, economic, esoteric, fraternal, subversive, and friendly. Some were law enforcement agencies. If the Ripper was a local nobody as supposed, and Scotland Yard simply failed to capture the culprit, why make subsequent politicized statements in defense of evolving Victorian police methods? Why record responses to tabloid press theories well into the next century with official phantoms and cautionary highlevel police fictions? Constantly, the known facts are overwhelmed and at odds with fantastic historical surmise.

Jack the Ripper lore has become linked with the study of Queen Victoria’s British Empire. The subject is studied by those who are drawn to the era’s cultural and social elements and hooked by the mystery of the Whitechapel murders. Release of the official police and government files on the case during the late 1970s brought further insights and scholarly attention. “Ripperologists” have made significant contributions to the subject much as amateur astronomers searching for supernovas in an endless sky have contributed to the efforts of NASA. The advent of digital archives and search engines has added vast amounts of raw Victorian data to the mix. With ongoing online release of primary sources, such as the Old Bailey criminal trials and scanned newspaper collections, particularly of obscure American 5