The belief that eating an enemy or a god would make him ‘part of’ oneself is so old and profound that it suffuses religion to an embarrassing extent. By eating the body of his deity, the savage would assimilate the deity’s power and divinity, sometimes literally. If it was a corn-god (and there were many), then the deity’s earthly body was the corn itself, which of course did give the eater of it some strength. If it was a vine-god, then the juices of the grape were his earthly blood, which afforded the drinker of it extra power. ‘The drinking of wine in the rites of a vine-god like Dionysus is not an act of revelry, it is a solemn sacrament.’5 Similarly, Dionysus was thought sometimes to appear in the shape of a bull, and at Dionysian festivals worshippers would eat the raw flesh of the bull thinking they were taking parts of their god into themselves.
All of which is resonant of the dominant religion now obtaining in the Western world. Christianity in fact inherited this basic tenet of paganism, and when Christ exhorted his followers to eat his flesh and drink his blood he was merely following precedent. Thus has primitive cannibalism passed into the mystic ritual of the communion service in Christian liturgy. When the communicant takes the wafer and the wine, it is not enough that he should believe he is eating the flesh and drinking the blood of Christ. The doctrine of transubstantiation explicitly states that the wafer and the wine are, at the moment of Holy Communion, literally the body of Christ. Thus a true Christian must be a cannibal, or he is nothing – a mere mouthing dissembler or heretic. And the reverence with which the worshipper eats that flesh is an act of love.
Christianity proclaims its pagan origins even in its iconography, with Christ impaled on a cross and saints penetrated by arrows or disembowelled. It is born from primitive urges. Jeffrey Dahmer grew up with these images lauded as icons of the ultimate good, and yet there was a dangerous ambivalence attached to them, for they were overlaid by Lutheran austerity. He would be expected to imbibe the Christian faith and at the same time deny its pagan extravagance, which is to rob it of its glow and history. Most full-blooded Italians and Spaniards have no difficulty with the blatant violence and sex of Christian imagery, for they accept the pagan element in themselves to which their Church gives expression. They are part of Nature, close to the earth and its origins, with strong links to their distant brutal primitive ancestry. They are a continuity and their Church is the celebration of that continuity. Lutherans, on the other hand, people of the cold north, tend not to be so elemental or dramatic, and are offended by the robust paganism of the Catholics, whose Dionysian excesses they condemn. The pagan yearnings of Jeffrey Dahmer were forbidden by his own contradictory two-way-facing religion; he might have to fashion one of his own to accommodate them.
What might happen internally to a man like Dahmer is illustrated by the strange phenomenon of ‘windigo psychosis’ among certain North American Indian tribes, particularly in Canada. Its chief characteristic is a compulsive desire to eat human flesh.
The origin of the psychosis is religious. The Indians believe in a giant ravenous monster with a heart of ice called a windigo. He is fearsome to behold, insatiable, and omnipresent. If an individual becomes possessed by the spirit of the windigo, he will be compelled to kill and eat his fellow men, and since there is a harsh tribal taboo against cannibalism, the possessed man is condemned to be an enemy of his own kind, to be ostracised and despised. There is no greater fear than to be taken over by the windigo spirit. Children of the Ojibwa tribe played a game in which one of them pretended to be the windigo while the others ran screaming for cover; if he caught a child he would pretend to eat him. The analogy with our own ‘bogyman’ games is obvious, as is the legacy from demoniacal possession. A parallel belief in the idea of a ‘spirit helper’ who will protect the individual from the windigo calls to mind the ancient Greek tradition of the ‘daemon’ as guide and interpreter.
The relevance of all this becomes clear when psychology investigates the nature of the tribal society which harbours such a belief. It is a society which places greatest store by the exercise of self-discipline; which forbids outward shows of emotion, not only of anger but of joy also; which values huge restraint and fortitude under adversity; which, in short, demands the repression of self to such an extent that every ordinary feeling is driven underground and acute anxiety is the inevitable result. The social rules of these tribes are a sure recipe for mental breakdown.
The male hunter would spend days alone, a weak and isolated man pitted against all the inimical forces of nature and forbidden by his culture to lament his lot. He would therefore be driven to seek a relationship with someone or something outside himself, and this could only be attained through the intercession of an invisible spirit helper. Thus was each man utterly apart from every other, and stoicism the ultimate virtue. It is no wonder that deep distrust, even to a paranoid schizoid level, was often the outcome of such enforced apartness. Spontaneity was banned, extreme wariness encouraged. The need for affection was entirely stifled, with the result that people became introverted and lifeless. In these circumstances, possession by the windigo is relatively easy – the spirit walks into a vacancy where a vibrant person should have been. Already one may recognise the shadow of Jeffrey Dahmer.
The first symptoms of windigo psychosis are a tendency towards abrupt mood changes (the eruption of moods formerly suppressed) and a deep lethargic depression. Since the advent of the white man, alcohol has been available to release those anxieties and suspicions which had lain dormant, and the depressed individual will, in drinking, bring himself ever closer to explosion. He is progressively shunned, until his isolation is confirmed and he withdraws from society to give himself over to the windigo. He might eventually become a windigo himself, emerging from the forest to kill and cannibalise the tribesmen whose company he craves.
One such case came to light in 1879 in Saskatchewan. A Cree Indian called Swift Runner took the white man’s police to a grave near his camp. Human bones were scattered about the camp, and it transpired that Swift Runner had killed his wife and eaten her, and forced one of his sons to kill a younger brother and dismember him – he, too, had been eaten. He confessed that he had killed his baby son and his mother-in-law and made food from them. All this, apparently, while there was no shortage of conventional food in the camp, so the motive for cannibalism could not be hunger. Swift Runner was tried in Edmonton. He asked why he was there and the judge told him it was because he had eaten his family. ‘You might as well hang me because I’m going to kill lots more,’ he said. He appeared indifferent when sentence of death was passed upon him.
Swift Runner’s confession resembled Dahmer’s, in that it was detailed and co-operative. He had already dissociated himself from the acts he was describing. Attributing his cannibalism to the windigo spirit which possessed him, he was able to hold himself not accountable, in his own mind, for what he had done. He had had no alternative, he was not in control, he had surrendered to the windigo. Those who investigated the case came to the conclusion that ‘the profound impact of belief upon behaviour has all the quality of a determining force’.6
The thread which unites such disparate analogies as the pagan element in Christianity and the windigo curiosity is that of spiritual power, to be spurned at one’s peril, to be courted as best one may. Indian tribes erroneously thought they could keep the windigo at bay by rigorous control of their emotions; Christians have likewise tried to ward off their devil by making themselves invasion-proof, unconquerable, and have achieved the opposite. When it comes to the Christian use of relics to propitiate the deity and gain power from him, we find ourselves moving right into the haunted world of Jeffrey Dahmer.
There are churches in Italy which boast altars or walls festooned with body parts. Model representations of feet, hands, noses and the like are offered by the faithful to their God in the certainty that He will heal them, give them some of His power. The shrine of St Anthony in the Basilica at Padua has pinned to its sides dozens of photographs of people mut
ilated or otherwise damaged in road accidents, in acknowledgement of Anthony’s having saved the victims from something worse. The Virgin Mary is variously credited with having rescued mariners by hauling their ship to safety in her teeth, or stopping the flow of lava from Mount Etna with her foot. Historically, too, sacred relics from the Divine Corpse have had churches built to house them, and when the Bishop of Chalons removed Christ’s navel from his church and threw it on the fire, the whole town rose up in fury against him. There was even a sacred relic of Christ’s foreskin venerated in mediaeval times.
The potency of these superstitions resided in their promise of power, in the belief that the faithful would benefit from them. Did this amount to delusional thinking? A false idea is factually incorrect, a delusional idea incorrectly attributes power. If I were to maintain that a brass kettle is revolving around the moon, it would most probably be a false idea (though I might persist in believing it and could not have my belief dissolved by reason). Should I expect the kettle to determine the winner of a horse-race it would be a demonstrably delusional idea. Jeffrey Dahmer’s shrine was not a false idea. It existed. He had the black table, the griffins to protect it, the skulls to adorn it, two skeletons to flank it. But the power he expected to derive from it was delusional. It was ‘a place for meditation, where I could feel I was drawing power from an outside source . . . I was trying to get in contact with the spirits.’7
He was deliberately vague when asked what was the purpose or direction of that power, even telling one doctor it might assist him in making money in real estate. I suspect this was not a serious remark, but one intended to demonstrate the hopelessness of the question. You do not interrogate the spirits, you do not channel their energy towards the achievement of earthly ambition. You humbly do their bidding. You summon their power and prostrate yourself before its pulsating fire. Obedience, not manipulation, is your function. Dahmer did not say what he would do with the spiritual power bestowed upon him through his shrine, because he did not know. How could he? The whole idea was a delusion, an absurdity, the construction of a diseased mind. But it was his diseased mind, and it was not amenable to literal enquiry. The question was foolish, earth-bound, and the answer, which the doctor assiduously wrote down and reported, was appropriately banal.
On quite another level, the level of pure untouchable madness, Dahmer’s shrine was to be his mansion of ecstasy, where he would ‘go out of’ his quotidian identity and mingle with the spirits who understood him. They might well be the spirits of the people he had killed, people who knew him better than anyone in the world, indeed the only people who knew him as he really was. The fact that he would reach these spirits through the relics of sex and murder indicated the fundamental religiosity of his beliefs, for sex, murder, and solitary meditation are all part of the torrid fabric of religion. The Japanese mystic and novelist Yukio Mishima experienced his first orgasm while looking at a painting of the martyrdom of St Sebastian, his body ecstatically pierced by arrows. Mishima went on to dream of slaughtering young white men on a large marble table (just like Dahmer’s table – an altar of sorts) and eating parts of their bodies. In 1970 he committed hara-kiri, publicly disembowelling himself at an army headquarters in Tokyo. The Japanese dare not call Mishima insane, because he was their greatest novelist as well as their most embarrassing suicide, so they prefer to say nothing about him at all. But his mysticism was clearly born of a disturbed erotic religiosity, immune to mental health classifications; the D.S.M.-III-R cookbook would have been just as inadequate with Mishima as it was in defining Jeffrey Dahmer.
Dahmer’s crimes permitted him to act, for a moment, at a higher level of intensity than is given to ordinary folk with ordinary joys. His ‘windigo’ alienation had forged for him a solitary path isolated from the rest of humankind. He was unreachable. Daily life held no meaning for him. Mundane happiness was denied him. His madness evolved from the need to create a moment of bliss, his moment, unlike anyone else’s. The psychiatrist cannot really enter into such a closed, private world, or if he can, it must be to destroy it. The murderer’s separateness is his only identity, in that he has an experience we do not have. The doctor’s purpose is to cure him, make him like everyone else, deprive him of that one identity which, insanely, makes him feel he exists. The successful psychiatrist is a killer, for he murders ecstasy.
Peter Shaffer’s play Equus tells the story of a young man who has unaccountably blinded half a dozen horses at the stables where he is employed. It is based upon an actual incident, but Shaffer uses it to dramatise the conflict between society’s need for bland conformist sanity, and the individual’s need for transcendence. The boy is examined by a psychiatrist, Dysart, who brutally brings him through the experience by ‘abreacting’, reliving it under hypnosis. He is then horrified at what he has done. ‘He’ll be delivered from madness,’ he says. ‘What then? He’ll feel himself acceptable! What then? Do you think feelings like his can be simply reattached, like plasters? Stuck on to other objects we select? Look at him! My desire might be to make this boy an ardent husband – a caring citizen – a worshipper of abstract and unifying God. My achievement, however, is more likely to make a ghost! Let me tell you exactly what I’m going to do to him! I’ll heal the rash on his body. I’ll erase the welts cut into his mind by flying manes. When that’s done, I’ll set him on a nice mini-scooter and send him puttering off into the Normal world where animals are treated properly . . . With any luck his private parts will come to feel as plastic to him as the products of the factory to which he will almost certainly be sent. Who knows? He may even come to find sex funny. Smirky funny. Bit of grunt funny. Trampled and furtive and entirely in control. Hopefully, he’ll feel nothing at his fork but Approved Flesh. I doubt, however, with much passion. Passion, you see, can be destroyed by a doctor. It cannot be created.’8
Shaffer is not suggesting that the passions of a damaged soul should not be excised, that it would somehow be acceptable for deluded stable-boys to blind horses at will; he says that the doctor has nothing to put in their place once they have been removed. By the same token, nobody would think of proposing Jeffrey Dahmer’s strange passion could be excused, still less allowed. He has quite properly been exiled from society and no more young men will fall victim to his depravity. But the source of his compulsion has not been eradicated; the psychiatrists examined him, attempted to diagnose him, but they did not cure him. Nor did they know him. His very blandness, his lack of colour and contour, testify to the total secrecy of his personality. The only people who really knew him are dead.
Dahmer’s passion was necrophilic, and it was his alone. His shrine would do honour to it, in the inviolable privacy of his mind. Dr Friedman thought that the shrine answered a need to have something artistic, decorative and creative in the house, but he did not spot the significance of this. The aesthetic sense objectifies, after all; it has to. It loves the static, the seeable, the perceivable, the deadness of immutability. The need to create beauty is in a way necrophilous, for it hankers after stillness and permanence and control. The creator of beauty is a controller. There is no reciprocity in art.
Dahmer’s shrine would be his creation, the only one in his entire existence. It would be beautiful, bound by the mystical absolutes of symmetry (as his drawing shows), and it would be his ultimate exercise in control. He knew all about the beauty of things, and nothing whatever of the love which gave them life. Sitting before the table, alone with his relics, he would have control over his life at last, over sex, the world, the past, power through the absolute beauty of death. Those he had killed would be there with him, twelve skulls in front, the skeletons of Lacy and Miller at each side. They were not wasted. He had kept something of them. They were now his companions in the world of the spirit, which that vast uncomprehending and hostile world outside could not touch. He had been chained to that world, an unwilling guest among its horrible disorder. Here before his shrine he would be free at last. Somebody asked, What was it a shrine to? �
��Myself,’ he said. The self which diverted, the aberrant self. Shockingly, it would be the only place on earth where he could feel his own kind of comfort and ease, for nowhere else would he fit. ‘If this had happened six months later, that’s what they would have found.’
In the company of flickering lights, incense, ghosts, and silent comforting eyeless grinning skulls, Jeff Dahmer would finally be in peace. It was ‘a place where I could feel at home’.9
Postscript
THE INSANITY DEFENCE by Kenneth Smail, Ph.D.
The insanity defence in a criminal trial attempts to introduce morality into the legal assessment of blameworthiness. The defence becomes an examination of good and evil, though these are not the qualities directly assessed and debated by the secular participants in an insanity trial. It arises from the moral consciousness of the community, but is managed within the criminal justice system and examined using concepts of the mental health professions. Mental disease, mental defect, mental capabilities and psychiatric diagnoses are the words which come into play.
But mental responsibility is not only an issue of morality; it is also an issue about reason and emotion. Reasoning processes may collide with the emotional response to crime. Victim and community outrage is a natural consequence of the social disorder and chaos created by criminal violence, but expressions of anger have to be postponed until the insanity question has been deliberated. The defendant may be exculpated for an act he in fact committed, because an abnormal mental state is held accountable. Under those circumstances, the insanity defence may invoke anger because justified wrath cannot be heaped so readily upon something one cannot see or touch.
The Shrine of Jeffrey Dahmer Page 30