Concerning my early notions about the idea of human sacrifice as related to the above, I'd have to say that my perspective modified itself radically during the course of the work. This is not to say that I think my earlier notions are wrong, so much as to say that I now feel I have a broader picture. I still believe that, in some instances, the violation of taboo involved in taking a human life might involve such a ritually powerful psychological shock in the mind of the high priest (or serial murderer) that it propels him over the edge into some desired higher or at least altered state. You could support this with the testimonial of Joseph Kellerman, the serial-murdering "Shoemaker" from Flora Rhetta Schreiber's book of the same name. Kellerman's "aura" phase, during which he suffered, from visual and auditory hallucinations, continued right up to and during the actual murders themselves. What's interesting is Kellerman's comment during the book... and I'm paraphrasing from memory now... that while at first he would have hallucinations, feel weird, hear voices, and then go and kill somebody, as his killing career progressed there came a point where he was committing the murders in order to see hallucinations, feel weird, and hear voices. The murders, in other words, became his way of accessing an alien universe -- an altered reality.
Like I say, this was my basic prognosis at the opening of From Hell, and I think it still holds water. What I hadn't considered, however, was the obverse of the coin: what is the victim's relationship to the killing?
Two books led me to what I feel is an improved understanding of this issue. The first was The Random House Dictionary of the English Language... definitely the most powerful Grimoire of magical spells in my extensive collection... which translates the Latin root of the word "sacrifice" as "to make holy." The second book was Patrick Tierney's The Highest Altar (Viking Books, 1989), in which the author recounts his travels and studies in Peru as part of a deeper investigation of the nature and meaning of the phenomenon of human sacrifice.
According to Tierney, the object of human sacrifice, at least in the fairly broad region that he studied, was to translate the supposed "victim" into a god, who would then hopefully intervene on behalf of the mortal tribe in the court of the immortals. The best families would compete for the honour of having their son or daughter be the chosen one, after which one child or youth would be selected. This incipient deity would then spend perhaps a year on a grand tour of the country, born aloft on waves of adulation that would make Elvis and Michael Jackson weep with envy. Every step they took would be on rose petals. At the end of the year, they would be made holy. This was often done by taking the child up to the top of some Andean peak. seating them in a beautifully decorated shrine full of offerings, administering an anaesthetic drug, and then leaving them to die of exposure. This is actually one of the best ways to die, by all accounts, since the body and mind simply sink into a warm, coma-like torpor and sleep from which they never wake up. With this shucking of the gross material body, the essence of the child would be free to make its way into the tribes visionary afterlife landscape and take its place amongst the gods, remembered and petitioned by its people forever.
Now, while it might seem a considerable leap from some mountain-top bower of incense and tropical flowers to what Iain Sinclair referred to as the meat decor of Miller's Court, I think that some intriguing observations are made possible when the Whitechapel murders are considered in this rarefied context. For example, the statements made by Whitechapel women of the period, that I was discussing earlier, to the effect that they wouldn't mind being a victim themselves if it made people say nice things about them. These superficially tragic and desolate sentiments take on a different and more resonant cast if considered in the light of Peruvian families competing for their child to be chosen as the one made holy. It's as if those women had the idea that a lifetime of regret and mean, impoverished living could be wiped clean with one sudden movement of the right knife, in the right hands. Literally at a stroke they would be transformed into a local saint, as Polly Nicholls had been, as Mary Kelly had been.
My own ideas about the nature, of the magical experience revolve around the concept of an "Idea Space", in which some of the more complex of these entities might actually be considered to be "alive" in some special sense. Within this framework, the idea of sacrifice takes on a slightly different colouring. I myself have made sacrifices in a ritual context, but since I'm in the unfortunate position of being a diabolist and vegetarian, I'm afraid living sacrifices were out of the question. My own solution is to consider the mechanics of the act of sacrifice in the following light: if you wish to make a supplication to a supposed entity that is composed entirely of ideas and lives in a realm composed entirely of ideas, then it should be clear that something physical would be of no use whatsoever to such a hypothetical being. Such a being would not traffic in actual things so much as in the ideas of actual things.
Now, let us accept for the moment that any entity or object that we can perceive in the material universe is composed of two basic components. Firstly, there is the reality of its actual physical being: its material presence in space or time. Then, there is the idea of the object or entity, an immaterial presence unbounded by the same considerations of space and time. As a ready example, I could cite the death of a loved one: the physical presence is gone, broken down to its constituent chemicals, its constituent atoms. That person does not exist physically anymore as a discrete physical entity. The Idea-Presence of that person cannot die, however. It hangs around and wakes you up crying at four in the morning. Five years later it taps you on the shoulder while you're doing the washing up and it makes you smile.
In my own ritual sacrifices, I have burned objects of meaning and significance to me, including the original to one of the magical drawings I sent you a while back. The idea is to sacrifice, in the conventional sense of "giving up," something which is of value to me. It is also to remove the physical component of the object, leaving only the memory or Idea Space presence of the object intact. In my terms, this removal of the physical component makes the object "sacred," i.e., existing only on a level above the tangible and material world.
Richard Dawkins, author of the excellent The Blind Watchmaker and a staunch materialist who would have no truck at all with any of my vague metaphysical notions, would maybe describe this "Idea Presence" as the sum of a person's memes, a sort of idea-space equivalent of genes, an ideological genetic code that will endure after the death of the individual and continue to interact with the material world. Dawkins cites the fact that while there are no measurable genetic traces of the philosopher Socrates to be found anywhere in the world, there are memetic traces to be found on every hand: Socrates' ideas are still current and still have their effect upon the world of human thinking. My own ideas are perhaps a tad more mystical than Dawkins', but he provides a useful model.
In terms of the Whitechapel crimes, we cannot establish a real material physical identity for the being we call Jack the Ripper. Not Gull, not Druitt, not Stephen, and certainly not poor old bloody James Maybrick. Jack the Ripper, in a very real sense, never actually had a physical existence. He was a collage-creature, made from crank letters, hoaxes, and sensational headlines. He exists wholly in Idea Space. Looming forward from our books of theory and our fictions, from our slasher films and our contemporary mythology of serial murder, from the pages and appendices of From Hell. He is unencumbered by a physical body or human identity. He has transcended human reality to become, like it or not, one of our immortals.
In a sense, it might also be said that in choosing his victims, he elected them to the same extra-human estate that he himself was destined for. Five anonymous Whitechapel women now live in the realm of legend forever, are translated from weak and ailing flesh into symbols, martyrs, saints of a kind. Look at the grave marker to Marie Jeanette Kelly, "the primadonna of Spitalfields," erected in Leytonstone churchyard by besotted ripperologist John Morrison. If the realm of concept and consciousness is, as I believe it to be, truly the realm of the sacred, then in the crucible of the Whitechapel murders, both killer and victims were in a sense "made holy."
