Jack the Ripper and Black Magic

2 Sacred Prostitution The women who are believed to be victims of the Whitechapel murders1 have a legacy of some historical importance. They met death at the hands of Jack the Ripper sooner than they likely would have, given their poor health and the squalid conditions they survived daily in Victorian East End London.

The victims’ lives and deaths reflected the times but were imbued also with the symbols and hopes of Victorian London’s early feminist, socialist, religious and political movements.

Since then the stories of the Ripper’s casualties have served as sources for popular histories, fictional treatments and academic feminist gender studies. Each group has projected its own agenda onto the victims.

Some have opined that the Ripper’s motivating impulse to kill and mutilate numerous prostitutes in the space of a few months in 1888 was sexual. Influential criminal case studies are sources of abstract theories and speculation on the nature and inclinations of sexual serial killers.2 As vendors of sex to any man with a few pence in dark spaces, they were available victims for Jack the Ripper.

Knife murder, shocking mutilations, extraction of internal organs including uteri — all would result in copious amounts of warm blood. It is plausible to theorize that the Whitechapel murderer had a deeply disordered sexuality who devoured the sensations of killing. Yet no evidence of sexual assault was noted in the inquests, autopsies, or police reports. Today the theory is just that. There is simply no hard evidence for that position, except perhaps for the notion that even Jack the Ripper was not devoid of sexuality, frustrated and deviant as it may have been, or that every serial mutilating murder case is sexual in nature. Though senior police openly concluded that Jack the Ripper was a sexual maniac, the internal investigation pursued other motives as credible that cannot be dismissed in considering the Whitechapel murders.

Because sexual serial killers, especially of prostitutes, are known to find pleasure in cruelty, the argument goes that the Whitechapel murderer must also have been of this type because of the victims he chose. It is not a new concept; the first to make the assertion were Scotland Yard police surgeon Dr. Thomas Bond and Melville Leslie Macnaghten. The publicized and idealized portrayal of the sexual killer of fallen women was thus born. The theory, however, was not confirmed by the identification of a suspect or supported by contemporary medical reports.

As the murderer’s count is also a contentious issue with only three victims known for certain,3 the interpretation of the Ripper’s motives becomes even more problematic and less likely to indicate or confirm the identity of the killer. The cautious police conclusions on 27