They All Love Jack

by Bruce Robinson

  This narrative has neither the desire nor the intent to push its understanding of Freemasonry beyond the calamity of Jack the Ripper. The Ripper, and not I, is the enemy of Freemasonry. I have no aspiration either to condemn or support Masonry; beyond an understanding of the corruption of its rituals by this most terrible of murderers. I am therefore like a man who has learned of Christianity with Judas Iscariot as his guide. Michael Maybrick hated Freemasonry no less than he hated the women he killed.

  It’s an unhappy reality that this remarkable nineteenth-century American journalist never knew how close he got. Ezekiel and St John are written all over Mary Kelly’s crime scene – if not on the walls, then into her body – no less than hatred was written into Jane Caputi’s disgusting example of misogyny in Vietnam.

  The five books of Moses, the Prophecy of Ezekiel and the Apocalypse of St John are the three Kabbalistic keys of the Biblical edifice … The New Temple, the plan of which is given to exact Kabbalistic measures, is the type of labours of primitive Masonry. St John in his Apocalypse reproduces the same images and the same numbers, and reconstructs the Edenic world ideally in the New Jerusalem.45

  In other words, the Temple of Solomon and the murder place of Hiram Abiff, its great structure predetermined in one of Ezekiel’s visions and written up in Chapter 40 of his raving-mad prophecies.

  In this mid-Victorian representation we see all the usual symbols, including compasses on the square, superimposed on a Bible opened at Ezekiel 40. It is this Old Testament howl that raises the Prophet’s star amongst Freemasons.

  He’s equally forthcoming in another department of more local interest, and that is his prurient fixation with the sexuality of young women, whom he enthusiastically converts into whores. Some of the language is frankly pornographic: ‘23.20: For she doted upon her paramours, whose flesh is as the flesh of asses, and whose issue is like the issue of horses …’

  This is about a young woman making love, and the amount of sperm involved (‘sponk’ to the Ripper). Theologians might argue to the contrary, insisting that these vile outpourings must be read as a metaphor, and in this sense the theologians are right. Ezekiel and St John are virulent with symbol. But that is a facet of enquiry that needn’t trouble us here, because the Ripper took them literally; it was all part of the Funny Little Game. And just in case anyone missed the Masonic message over Eddowes, it was made up for in his mutilations of Kelly, where he compensated for any shortcomings by literally ‘going by the book’, following instructions found in Ezekiel, 22 to 62:

  23.25: And I will set my jealousy against thee, they shall deal furiously with thee: they shall take away thy nose and thine ears. 23.36: The Lord said moreover unto me: son of man, wilt thou judge Aholah and Aholibah? yea, declare unto them their abominations. 23.37: They have committed adultery and blood is in their hands.

  Ezekiel’s hatred of the adulteresses is transformed, by homicidal alchemy, into hatred for the adulteress Florence Maybrick. As a surrogate whore, Kelly must have her breasts cut off – ‘plucked off’, as Ezekiel quaintly puts it. Today this disturbing caveman would almost certainly be sectioned under various provisions of the Mental Health Act.

  Ezekiel wasn’t the only inspiration at Miller’s Court. Further encouragement was supplied by that other sacred text of Freemasonry, St John’s apocalyptic Book of Revelation. According to the nineteenth-century American historian of Freemasonry Albert Pike, the prophecies of Ezekiel and the Apocalypse of St John are beyond the grasp of most: ‘St John did not write to be understood by the multitude.’46 In this he was entirely successful, but I would add a caveat: most of Ezekiel and St John aren’t worth understanding. Moreover, I prefer theological historian Solomon Reinach’s critique of the Apocalypse: ‘Among the absurdities and astrological speculations with which this book is filled, there are certain sublime passages which have become classics in all literature, but as a whole it is a work of hatred and frenzy.’ Like Ezekiel, Revelation is a loony-tune, a howl from the suburbs of hell. Its author conjures a veritable rush-hour of demons and mystic has-beens, babbling of their capacity to do ill. The recurring highlight of this shocking scream is the visitation of punishment upon the WHORE and instructions for the subsequent carve-up.

  It is said that the Book of Revelation was ‘Writ with the Quill of an Angel’s wing, by a Divine Inspiration’,47 its feathers represented in the illustration of the Past Master’s Degree. Others might call this a tall story. Reinach thinks it’s the work of a forger in third-century Cairo, and nothing to do with St John at all.48 Either way, the Apocalypse exists in all its horror. In the head of a psychopath one could barely imagine a more dangerous endorsement. It is axiomatic that when the religious matches come out there are always more witches than wizards, the madmen become prophets, and the women Satan’s Whores.

  Albert Pike conflates Ezekiel and the Book of Revelation, and so did Jack. Theologians have burnt the oil trying to deconstruct these texts, but as far as the Ripper is concerned they needn’t have troubled, because he took both by rote. He wasn’t in the business of interpreting symbols in the entirely legitimate exercise of Masonic ritual; he was in the business of taking the Freemasonic piss. The whore in Revelation is symbolic of Papal Rome; the whore in Jack’s book was Florence Maybrick. These texts are of course anodyne in the rituals of Masonry, but mix this pantomime of misogyny in the furnace of a psychopathic brain, and you don’t get a benevolent assembly of Freemasonic Brethren, you get the Whitechapel Murderer.

  We can look at the photograph below as if it’s a monstrosity from some long-forgotten sideshow, a waxwork or a work of fantasy. But it isn’t, and it’s horrifying. This was a young woman, poor as dirt, but she had a life, it belonged to her, and the infinite sadism of this most horrendous of murderers has left her like this forever.

  And the woman was arrayed, full of abominations and filthiness of her fornication. And upon her was a name written, MYSTERY, THE MOTHER OF HARLOTS AND ABOMINATIONS OF THE EARTH. And the 10 horns which thou sawest upon the Beast, these shall hate the Whore, and shall make her desolate and naked, and shall eat her flesh, and burn her with fire.49

  In this minimally pruned passage from Revelation we get the lot: nakedness, cannibalism, and burning of flesh. But the Beast had barely begun to fulfil his Biblical obligations – detailed instructions to be found at Ezekiel, 23.29:

  And they shall deal with thee hatefully, and shall take away all thy labour, and shall leave thee naked and bare: and the nakedness of thy whoredom shall be discovered, both thy lewdness and thy whoredom.

  Now that the woman is in pieces, her breasts and face cut off, what did this vile augury decree should next be done with her?

  22.20: As they gather silver and brass, and iron, and lead, and tin, into the midst of the furnace to blow the fire upon it, to melt it, so will I gather you in mine anger and my fury, and I will leave you there and melt you.

  All very well, but how is the Beast to do it? He has flesh, but no furnace. He is alone in a filthy hovel in Miller’s Court.

  24: Set on a pot, set it on, and also pour water into it: Gather the pieces thereof into it, even every good piece, the thigh, and the shoulder, fill it with choice bones, and burn also the bones under it, and make it boil well, and let them seethe the bones of it therein … to put whose scum is therein, and whose scum has not gone out of it! Bring it out piece by piece; let no lot fall upon it. For her blood is in the midst of her … I will even make the pile for fire great. Heap on wood, kindle the fire, consume the flesh … and let the bones be burned. Then set it empty upon the coals thereof, that the brass of it may be hot, and may burn, and that the filthiness of it may be molten in it, that the scum of it may be consumed. She hath wearied herself with lies, and her great scum went not forth out of her: her scum shall be in the fire. In thy filthiness is lewdness: because I have purged thee, and thou wast not purged, thou shall not be purged from thy filthiness any more till I have caused my fury to rest upon thee.

  And som
ething to that effect is what I believe Abberline and Dr Phillips found in the grate. Coal and bones and pieces of burnt flesh. I don’t know if Kelly’s kettle was brass or tin, but it’s water that moderates during boiling, and it was the deliberate lack of it that caused the spout to melt. ‘Set it empty upon the coals thereof,’ says the Prophet, ‘that the brass of it may be hot, and may burn, and that the filthiness of it may be molten in it.’ Abberline testified that ‘there had been a large fire, so large as to melt the spout off the kettle’.

  ‘It has been ascertained that a very big fire must have been kept burning all Friday morning in the room in which Kelly was found,’ wrote the Evening Standard on 12 November, ‘as a kettle on the fire was very much burned, the spout having entirely disappeared. The police thought it likely that the murderer had burned something before leaving the room after the crime, and accordingly the ashes and other matter in the grate were carefully preserved. Yesterday afternoon Mr [Bro Bagster] Phillips and the Coroner for the district visited Miller’s Court, and after the refuse had been passed through a sieve, it was subjected to the closest scrutiny by the medical gentlemen. Nothing, however, was found which is likely to afford any clue to the police.’50

  As I understand it, these two photographs are generally interpreted as depicting the crime scene, in other words what the police saw on arrival in Kelly’s room. Palpably they are not. The differing positions of the body make this assumption impossible, proving that one or other of these photographs had to be contrived.

  In the wider picture, Kelly’s bed is pushed up against a wall. Next to her is a bedside table piled with her body parts, and this horror is the focus of the second picture. Common sense demands we immediately notice something iffy. The first and obvious inconsistency registers across Kelly towards the bedside table. The bed is against the wall, making this point of view impossible unless the bed has been moved.

  For simplicity, I will call these two photographs the bed picture and the table picture. Consider the position of Kelly’s arm/hand in the bed picture with the same arm/hand in the table picture. In the latter, the hand is about midway up the side of the table, but in the bed picture it is parallel with its front edge. This means either the table has been moved or the hand has been moved; it was probably both. These photographs do not agree with each other, and for want of a better word, one of them has been ‘posed’. This presumption is important in respect of camouflaging the Ezekiel-motivated Masonic piss-take. Consider the position of Kelly’s left leg in the bed picture, and now compare it with the leg in the table picture. In this, some part of the bone, like an arched knee, is visible, whereas in the bed picture it is not. In comparison with the right leg, this ‘leg’ has an almost ghost-like appearance, nearer to the camera but much less defined. In the (table) picture, the left ‘leg’ is more focused, but in a completely different position.

  When these photographs were returned by their apparently anonymous donor, a part of Dr Bond’s autopsy notes was included. Bond says Kelly was naked. Phillips said she was wearing a chemise. She wasn’t, and as usual Phillips is dissembling.

  Bro Dr Phillips made a significant slip of the tongue over Kelly at the inquest into another of the Ripper’s victims. She was the headless and legless half-body of a woman found at Backchurch Lane (September 1889). Called ‘the Pinchin Street Torso’, it was written off by the police, as was the headless, blood-drained trunk in the cellars of New Scotland Yard, a.k.a. ‘the Whitehall mystery’. The coroner presiding over the Pinchin Street mystery was again Wynne Baxter. During an exchange with Bro Dr Phillips, Bro Baxter blithely put up a question:

  BAXTER: I should like to ask Dr Phillips whether there is any similarity in the cutting off of the legs in this case and the one that was severed from the woman in Dorset Street? [My emphasis. ‘Dorset Street’ refers to Mary Kelly.]

  To which Phillips replied:

  PHILLIPS: I have not noticed any sufficient similarity to convince me it was the same person who committed both mutilations.51

  It’s a revealing response. He doesn’t say, ‘What leg severed from the woman at Dorset Street?’ Implicit in his reply is that one of Kelly’s legs was severed. Does that not explain the spectre-like appearance of the left leg in the wider picture? Bereft of injury, it looks like emulsion painted onto a negative to me; and if I am in error, what then is the footless leg with a viciously slashed thigh on the bedside table? Although the quality of the pictures is poor, Mary Kelly didn’t have three legs. In the wider picture there’s a length of cloth, absent in the table shot, covering her thigh joint and extending under her arm to obscure her shoulder.

  Mr Philip Sugden says, ‘Bond’s statement that Mary’s body was found naked was contradicted by Phillips’s inquest testimony that she was clad in a linen undergarment. Phillips was right,’ he asserts, ‘because in a surviving photograph of the scene a puffed up sleeve of the garment is clearly visible about the top of Mary’s left arm.’52

  Mr Sugden is mistaken. Bond was right, and Bro Phillips wasn’t telling the truth. He had occult reason for the porky: ‘Gather the pieces thereof,’ instructs Ezekiel, ‘the thigh and the shoulder.’ A glaring artifice is evident here.

  I ask the reader to look closely at the photograph, and consider Mr Sugden’s ‘puffed sleeve’. Adjacent to it is Kelly’s chest, her breasts removed, together with all the tissue down to the ribs. And yet this ‘puffed sleeve’ shows no apparent blood soaking. Could anyone imagine that this material was in situ when Jack carved her up? Flesh has been torn away at the inside of the ‘puffed sleeve’, a heart extracted, and a face hacked off.

  In reality it isn’t a ‘puffed sleeve’ at all, and nothing to do with an undergarment. What it is, is part of a carefully positioned cloth, covering her (missing) shoulder and extending down under her arm, where it abruptly detours in a connivance to cover her amputated leg at the thigh. Bro Phillips didn’t care to admit that Kelly was ‘desolate and naked’ and boiled in the grate, because of the Biblical (Masonic) nut that comes to mind.

  The historian Stephen Gouriet Ryan published an incisive essay on the events at Miller’s Court, focusing on the Ripper’s comprehensive ‘desexing’ of the victim: ‘The Kelly mutilations have been seen as so much meaningless hacking and a frenzied wallowing in the entrails, in a paroxysm of sadistic impulses. But there was also a method in his madness, to demonstrate, in the most graphic, barbaric way, his absolute domination over, and rejection of, hated womankind.’53

  Ten out of ten for the American journalist who could have known nothing of what Phillips actually saw. The Ripper hated like Ezekiel hated, and followed his instructions to the letter. ‘On most of the New Testament,’ writes theologian Lowther Clarke, ‘Ezekiel has left little trace’ – except, with dramatic exception, ‘in the Book of Revelation of St John’.54

  A psychopathic disciple, signing himself ‘Revelation’, followed up with a four-page snigger, mailed from ‘America’.

  Purporting to have been posted in ‘Minneapolis Minnesota’, it’s dated 25 December 1888, and has nothing to do with Minneapolis, but is another tease bounced out of New York. We have no envelope, but precedent and the dates tell the story of the letter having undergone a twenty-three-day round trip before it was received by the City Police on 17 January 1889. It’s the usual mocking ramble: ‘I’ll withhold my real name and just put a fictitious one, my name will be Revelation.’ Referring to Revelation three times, he signs off with it – ‘Respectfully Revelation’. Written in the margin, ‘I do not wish my name to be published’, and (with an ‘f’ for ‘s’) ‘A friend of mine Delia Bafs, 2323 Jackson St Minneapolis Minn can receive my.’

  To accomplish his transatlantic trick, the letter’s author would have had to be in Liverpool, where (M)inneapolis (M)innesota, also known as (M)ichael (M)aybrick spent Christmas 1888 as a guest of his brother. He would tell us so himself at the ‘trial’ of his sister-in-law, whose hospitality he was then enjoying. At Miller’s Court he was killing her surr
ogate: the letters ‘FM’ – (F)lorence (M)aybrick – are visible on the wall behind Kelly, probably written in her blood.

  In an interview with an American newspaper, Inspector Henry Moore said the assassin had ‘hung different parts of the body on nails and over the back of chairs’.55 A hundred years later, citing the incomplete report of Dr Bond, wherein such information is not to be found, Ripperology proclaims Moore’s recollections must be ‘treated with caution’.56

  Caution against what? Doing a disservice to this fucking nightmare, or caution against thinking what might have motivated it? With a woman’s leg on a bedside table, to what end might ‘caution’ be urged in respect of flesh over the back of a chair? Such parsimonious inhibition is what exasperates me most about Ripperology. It’s always peering through a microscope, but blind to the bigger picture. Some bad-thinking man had been in this room hacking a woman to the bone, and the question isn’t where he slung the flesh, but why the authorities wanted to cover it up.

  ‘What,’ asks Mr Tom Cullen, ‘were the police trying to hide?’57 The stupefying selfishness of the Victorian Establishment was in large part responsible for the picture above. Any smart copper could have stopped this catastrophe in its tracks.