by Richard Sugg
a love affair that happened without Lawford’s Gate; in which a young damsel having smitten a young fellow, he strongly importuned her with his addresses; but she giving him the deaf ear, he took an opportunity on Sunday last to give her a proof of his passion in the following manner; she having occasion to be blooded for a slight disorder, the operator had no sooner closed her vein but he eagerly seized the dish which held her blood, and drank it off. Tis thought if this young damsel will not take this for sufficient proof of the young man’s integrity, she will never meet with such a humble servant.78
We cannot very definitely interpret either of these striking incidents on the brief accounts given here. But associated data suggests the following. The later case does not obviously imply high status among the two involved (the woman is not ‘a lady’, nor the youth ‘a gentleman’). And, assuming that they were relatively humble, then the educated author’s reading of the event may well be some way off the mark. Rather than being a startling ‘proof’ of his love, the youth’s illicit draught may instead have been an attempt to magically further its mutual success. In magical terms the more common formula is to get the beloved to drink your blood (or sweat, among other things). But magic has all sorts of variations, and quite often defies ordinary logic (and we should also bear in mind that getting the woman to swallow his blood would have required a good deal of planning and perhaps bribery on the youth’s part).
It was probably in popular magic that such potions were used most frequently. In the early twentieth century Gèza Roheim found them amongst gypsies, and noted that in Silesia one could mix sweat or blood or hair into the food or drink of the desired person. At Amboina, meanwhile, lovers did indeed ‘drink each others blood’. At Nagylebgyel in Hungary ‘a man will drop a few drops of blood from his finger into a glass of wine the girl is about to drink’; whilst both German and Serbian women were known to ‘mix their menstrual blood into the coffee or wine’ of husbands or those they sought to win.79 In the late nineteenth century W.J. Hoffman heard of a Pennsylvanian woman who, besotted with a boatman who failed to reciprocate, used the following method ‘to compel him to love her even against his will. With the blade of a penknife she scraped her knee until she had secured a slight quantity of the cuticle, baked it in a specially prepared cake and sent it to him’. Whilst the result, admits Hoffman, remained unknown, the woman herself was ‘said to have had the utmost faith in the charm’.80 More generally, Gillian Bennett reports that those Christians who credited blood libel tales sometimes believed that the stolen blood ‘could be used as a love potion’.81
What of the earlier case in Leadenhall Street? There is no doubt that the couple were privileged. They are explicitly identified as ‘a gentleman and a lady’; they travel in a hackney coach; and they pay a guinea. Accordingly – although we should not rule out magical aims – it seems likely that this mutual blood pact had some degree of proto-Romantic psychology behind it. In order to understand the associated motivations, we can turn to a literary version of their act which was penned just before the close of the eighteenth century.
In 1796 there appeared a work entitled Horrid Mysteries. This itself was an English translation of a lurid Gothic novel, Memoirs of the Marquis of Grosse, by the self- styled German ‘marquis’, Karl Grosse. The book featured an occult and powerful secret society, allegedly modelled on a real organisation of the fifteenth century, the Illuminati, which began as an intended counterweight to political tyranny, but ultimately degenerated into a corrupt and satanic sect.82 The society does indeed undertake the drinking of blood as one of its rituals. By way of initiation, the character called Carlos is stabbed and has his blood drunk by its brethren.83 But our interest lies with a vampiric love pact made between Carlos and his beloved, Rosalia. The two have very recently met and fallen into an extravagance of mutual passion. Remarkably potent for their time, the descriptions of the couple’s ardour must have ranked high among those passages which allegedly ‘tarnished the name’ of Minerva Press, the work’s earliest English publishers:
I felt myself closely encircled … a quivering, balsamic lip burned on my languishing mouth; my breast heaved against a panting bosom; all my senses were entranced; my blood fermented … a virgin fulness enchanted my senses … We roved through the garden arm in arm, melted, as it were, into one being, and frequently dropped half fainting on the swelling grass to exchange our souls in burning kisses.
Just moments later it is Rosalia who pulls out a dagger in order to effect their marriage by blood: ‘she bared my arm, and opened a vein, sucking the blood which flowed from the orifice in large drops; and then wounded her arm in return, bidding me to imbibe the roseate stream, and exclaimed, “thus our souls shall be mixed together!”84
Come 1818, this incident was sufficiently well known for Thomas Love Peacock to parody it – with tellingly coded brevity – in his satirical novel Nightmare Abbey. The chief protagonist, Scythrop, dwells in a gloomy mansion in the wilds of Lincolnshire, and has often been seen as a parodic recreation of Percy Shelley. Scythrop’s passion for his attractive cousin, Marionetta, prompts him to urge: ‘“do as Rosalia does with Carlos, divine Marionetta. Let us each open a vein in the other’s arm, mix our blood in a bowl, and drink it as a sacrament of love. Then we shall see visions of transcendental illumination, and soar on the wings of ideas into the space of pure intelligence”’. Although Peacock’s version of the pact verges on outright slapstick (Marionetta, who ‘had not so strong a stomach as Rosalia’ promptly ‘turned sick at the proposition’ and fled away along the corridors of the house) it is nevertheless a useful comparison in some ways.
When the original Rosalia exclaimed, ‘“thus our souls shall be mixed together!”’ she certainly did not mean what an early modern lover might have done by such a phrase. For one thing, some early modern writers evidently did believe that kisses alone could literally do this. And if they could do so for Rosalia and Carlos, then why bother opening veins? Hence, when Scythrop hopes to ‘soar on the wings of ideas’, he captures at least something of the essentially Romantic psychology of the earlier love pact. The ‘ideas’ that impel such an act are now intellectual and philosophical, rather than narrowly Christian. Here, to drink blood is to drink a new kind of self, rather than an old kind of God.
But Peacock’s rewriting is also useful for its notably tamer phrasing. Even when merely described, rather than actually performed, the blood pact is – as it were – relatively anaemic. In proper English fashion it will be taken from bowls – a sanitised vampirism which only serves to remind us how potently transgressive Rosalia and Carlos were. In a society where sexual activity was fiercely monitored and tabooed, we find a man and a woman sucking fluid directly from one another’s bodies. It is important not to underestimate the genuine sensuous charge this must have had, circa 1796. All the torrid quiverings and fermentings of the encounter may look faintly comic to us. But – as the ‘tarnished’ reputation of Minerva Press alone implies – they had a far great density and power some 200 years ago. They had, indeed, the unsteady force of something newly discovered: an openly sexualised and intimate individuality. Here is a kind of magic for the privileged classes of Europe – a celebration of the transformative powers of sex which aptly marks the shift from general charms to personal charm.
Was there anything of this kind of psychology in the barber-shop incident of 1720? There must, at least, have been a quite powerful atmosphere of sensuality: in that case, after all, the couple literally drank blood, rather than merely writing about it. And it seems likely that, whilst such behaviour was hardly common, this was probably not the only time that it occurred amongst the gentry. Frustratingly uncertain as that early piece of love vampirism may be, we can certainly see a much clearer social shift under way in the bloodlusts of the early nineteenth century. Just a year after Peacock’s novel, Polidori published his sexually charged tale, The Vampyre. From this tellingly Byronic yarn through Carmilla (1871–72) and Dracula (1897) the broad pattern i
s clear. For a society at once obsessed by and profoundly ambivalent about sex, tales of blood-drinking are no longer religious or medical or scientific. Rather, they are a convenient way of experimenting with what is otherwise unspeakable, allowing the terror of supernatural demons to craftily merge with a Victorian terror of the sexual body.
Just four years before Stoker’s novel, for example, the sexologist Richard von Krafft-Ebbing, in his Psychopathia Sexualis of 1893 told of how he had once been visited by a married man with many scars on his arms. Krafft-Ebbing explained that: ‘when he wished to approach his wife, who was young and somewhat “nervous”, he first had to make a cut in his arm. Then she would suck the wound, and during the act became violently excited sexually’.85
By the Edwardian period, even medicinal cannibalism itself has been absorbed within this newly sexualised paradigm of what we might call ‘intimate transgression’. In November 1910, Rupert Brooke penned a poem entitled ‘Mummia’, whose opening verses run thus:
As those of old drank mummia
To fire their limbs of lead,
Making dead kings from Africa
Stand pander to their bed;
Drunk on the dead, and medicined
With spiced imperial dust,
In a short night they reeled to find
Ten centuries of lust.
So I, from paint, stone, tale, and rhyme,
Stuffed love’s infinity,
And sucked all lovers of all time
To rarefy ecstasy.86
That third quatrain, in which the speaker claims to have ‘sucked all lovers of all time’ into some strangely heady distillation, leaves us in little doubt that the associated ‘mummia’ is at once potent and sensual – as indeed does the single night which somehow compacts ‘ten centuries of lust’. But this new form of mummy is not something which early modern patients or physicians would have recognised. Aptly sea- changed by the tides of post-Romantic sexuality, corpse medicine is now transformed into an aphrodisiac. The transformation is the more intriguing given that Brooke might have been expected to know a little more about medicinal mummy than his peers.87 His interest in the substance may have been partly sparked by London or Cambridge Egyptology. (Intriguingly, Brooke admitted to envying his friend Hugh Popham’s post at the British Museum, as he (Brooke) ‘had often dreamed of sneaking into the museum at dead of night to embrace a female mummy’.88) But it was almost certainly derived more directly from his thesis on John Webster, which he was researching in 1911. In The White Devil, the lines on Lodovico explicitly identify mummy as ‘physic’, and in The Duchess of Malfi the association with the ‘salvatory’ gives at least a hint at mummy’s medical nature.89
This kind of telling cultural revision is found in yet more startling forms in later decades. We saw that, in Germany in 1824, one man was prepared to kill in order to make medical use of his victim’s blood. By 1957, the motivation for such a crime was very different. In Vineland New Jersey that summer, a forty-seven-year-old Puerto Rican farm labourer, Juan Rivera Aponte, was charged with the murder of a thirteen- year-old-boy, Roger Carlotto. Aponte’s aim, he told authorities, was to powder the skull (found drying out by his kerosene stove) and then make ‘a love potion to cast spells on women’.90
By this stage, the potion is explicitly identified as ‘black magic’ by Aponte and those reporting the crime. And the case was clearly an exceptional one. For all that, we can see at one level how it relates to older, more benign forms of cannibalistic love magic. And we can also remind ourselves, at another level, that perhaps the most startling case of sexual cannibalism of all time occurred consensually, between two educated Germans, less than ten years ago. In 2001 Armin Meiwes posted an Internet advertisement requesting ‘a well-built 18 to 30-year-old to be slaughtered and then consumed’. He in fact received several responses from people who later backed out of the proposed transaction. Finally, on 9 March, Bernd Jürgen Brandes went to Meiwes’ home, having conscientiously made his will and booked a day off work. Meiwes severed Brandes’ penis, which would have been eaten had it not been badly overcooked (with garlic, pepper, wine and salt) by Meiwes. Later, Meiwes butchered Brandes’ corpse quite systematically and ate parts of it for some time after the killing.
There is no ambiguity about the basic facts of this case: the events are on videotape. Whilst Meiwes and Brandes obviously fall into a very small minority in one sense, it is surely no accident that this event occurred in the early twenty-first century, rather than (say) the early seventeenth. Whatever the exact nature of its psychology, the pact was broadly a product of an era in which sexuality is a very basic form of cultural and personal definition. Perhaps strangest of all is the evidently consensual nature of the killing and cannibalism. Whilst Brandes’ mental state has been queried, the case made legal history just because it was so difficult to accuse Meiwes of straightforward murder, and he was ultimately convicted only of manslaughter, thus being sentenced to just eight years’ imprisonment. The apparent agreement of the two men makes the incident very different from the many cases of cannibalistic sexual murder documented throughout the twentieth century. It is almost as if, so deep inside the post-Romantic era, Meiwes and Brandes took this step in order to enter into new realms of cannibal intimacy, after so many tamer variants of such psychology had been enacted. We must also bear in mind that, even if Meiwes and Brandes themselves were just a minority of two, several people did initially respond to the request.
People who are prepared to kill or die for sex or for love potions clearly have to be taken seriously. At the same time, whilst their startled peers are able to at least partly comprehend their behaviour (in a way that Milton or Marlowe probably could not have done), such people are engaging in actions which are socially meaningful, rather than cosmically meaningful. They are not, like so many patients of the early modern era, using of of human skull or skull-moss in the belief that it contains emanations from the stars, or a distillation of the of of human soul.
It might well seem apt to end a book full of strange and disgusting facts with the strange and disgusting tale of the two German love cannibals. But there remains one late element of the afterlives of medicinal cannibalism which is arguably just as strange, and which now has a topical counterpart that is no less shocking than the pact of 2001.
Social and Medicinal Cannibalism
In our own times there have been a few relatively benign (arguably even commendable) uses of the of of human body which can be broadly linked to the traditions of medicinal cannibalism. For a long while mummy was used in paint. ‘Artists declared’ (notes Cumming) ‘that mummy-powder beaten up with oil, gave richer tones of brown than any other substance’.91 How discerning one has to be to spot such tones in the National Gallery is difficult to say; but in the present day small amounts of this cannibalised pigment do survive: the Brighton artist Stig Evans, for example, still possesses a quantity of it.92
A much more recent development has been the use of human fat as fuel. In 2005 the Australian sportsman Peter Bethune had about 100 millilitres of fat removed from his own body, in order to contribute to the fuel for his boat, Earthrace, when it attempted a round-the-world speed record. As Mr Bethune weighed in at just 70 kilos, surgeon Martin Rees had considerable trouble finding anything at all, and the resulting fuel was sufficient to power the boat for just 2 kilometres. Bethune himself added that recovery was ‘rather like waking up the day after a hard rugby game’.93 There again, Earthrace was no ordinary vehicle. According to Jenna Higgins, of the National Biodiesel Board, a gallon of grease gives a gallon of fuel, with the same mileage obtained from conventional diesel. This potential was recently harvested by a Beverley Hills liposuction surgeon, Craig Allen Bittner, who for some time ran the SUVs of himself and his girlfriend on fat which (he claimed) had been willingly granted by his patients. Despite that, Bittner was in violation of human tissue laws, and in November 2008 he closed his once thriving practice and disappeared to South America.
S
ome environmental campaigners may feel that of of human tissue laws should be amended to exploit the green potential of unwanted of of human fat. Consider, for example, the aims of the Estonian company, Lipotechnica, with its vigorous promotion of ‘of of humanfuel’ as a way to ‘help commercial customers improve their environmental stewardship practice’. Although Lipotechnica’s website (www.lipotechnica.com) is in fact an elaborate spoof, it is a spoof which has a certain resonance and significance in the era of rising fuel costs, melting ice caps, and Bittner’s ‘lipodiesel’. Perhaps one day scientists and green governments will unite to produce SUVs in which the driver can plug themself into a literally ‘auto-motive’ liposuction fuelling system, wolfing hamburgers as they drive, instead of pulling into petrol stations.
As we saw in chapter three, however, this kind of notion would have genuinely dark overtones for those native Bolivians and Peruvians still haunted by the kharisiri and the pishtaco. These strange roaming demons offer us probably the most memorable and potent encapsulation of a surprisingly widespread and enduring fear: powerful and invasive outsiders will quite literally carve up and process your body in the interests of science, industry, or medicine. Although in many cases this kind of attack is not actually cannibalistic, it falls under that label in at least two senses. First: it draws on the feeling that cannibalism is a fundamental form of invasion. Second: it quite overtly matches popular uses of the verb, ‘to cannibalise’, in which this term is taken to imply some degree of illegitimate (rather than just creative) re-use of ‘parts from one unit for incorporation in, and completion of, another’ (OED).
To put it another way: for those political minorities who genuinely believe that the powerful will do this to them, such fears project the taboo of cannibalism into a form of social myth. There is nothing that these powers will not do to us if we let them: they will even cannibalise us. In this area, the line between truth and fantasy can be a peculiarly hard one to draw. And, even when such tales are clearly false, as in the case of the ‘fat for skin-creams’ scandal of November 2009, these stories can have a certain socio-historical logic of their own.