The Candles Theory

[admin tim]

One of the mainstays of a certain ripper theory involving black magic rituals is that the prostitutes' organs were taken in order to fashion 'magic' candles from them.

I have searched high and low on the www for information about this (as you might ascertain from the number of URL's that have been posted recently) and have come up dry. There are references to candles made from human fat, but it is unclear as to whether or not this involved murder, or if the source of the fat was prostitutes.

And, at any rate, internal organs are not 'fat', and quite a bit of chemistry is involved, as in a rendering plant, in order to turn a muscular organ such as a uterus into something that will readily burn as a candle.

Does anyone have any information on this subject? If so, please share it.

[How Brown]

That "certain theory" is the notion that Stephenson committed the murders and then used the fat from the organs of harlots to make candles.

Impossible.

My doctor,a little Filipino jerk,told me that the organs taken from the women would not make so much as a good skinny birthday candle that you find sticking in a birthday cake.

The goopy looking candles that Cremers mentions may have been fabricated from human fat,but not from the work of Stephenson. A gift ,at best, to the guy.

But that idea will probably still keep floating around that the fat was used to make candles as long as it makes "Goth" teenagers buy books on creepy,scary Satanic stuff.... You know how that works. Good for reading while spinning the old Ouija board and watching "The Ring"...

Boo !:rolleyes:

[John Savage]

Hi Howard,

The chemistry for rendering fat from flesh is really quite simple.

Put it in a pan, put pan in hot oven, and leave it for an hour or two.

I did it yesterday with my Sunday roast.

Rgds
John

[How Brown]

Dear Prof.Savage:

Yes sir...but a roast is,as you know,far from a uterus or kidney...or a heart...or any internal organ.

I have only one question for you and your post....

Why wasn't I invited,sor ? ;)

[Spiro]

Hi Tim,

A really good question and some sage replies to go with it. Firstly, you can’t find anything on the www because it is one of those myths that exist only in the imaginative world of Ripperology. There is simply no evidence for it but plenty of religious and supernatural themes from which it derives.

The idea that candles and death are linked is a very primitive idea and developed into the mention of ‘Jewish corpse candles’ that has a long tradition. As the Jews of East End London were blamed for the Whitechapel murders, traditional and false rumours of the barbarity of the Jews and the suspicion placed upon ritual butchers or shochet ran riot.

These myths merged with press reports such as The Star 9th October 1888 on German ‘thieves candles’ made of uteri but as has been mentioned, its not possible to make candles from internal organs.

But Donston did mention them because the fat of a human is suitable in the manufacture of candles and in use by Satanists. He derived the idea from Eliphias Levi and it made a good story. But it should be remembered that even today, human substances are used in medicine a good example being the use of pituitary glands that led to the ‘mad cow’ disease.

The idea was picked up by Bernard O’Donnell to pad out his manuscript, expanded by Harris to explain the motive for the taking of organs and has since been taken to ridiculous heights by the author of BMR written for ‘goth’ teens.

Will Tom Cruise be coming over for a lamb roast? I hope not because Scientologists are vegetarians at heart.

Hope this has been amusing!

Spiro

[admin tim]

Hello, Spiro:

Very interesting reply, I must say. I had thought there must be at least a kernel of truth in this story, and I have visited some pretty ugly websites dedicated to the occult in an effort to learn the details. There just aren't any insofar as use of prostitutes' body parts are concerned. 'Human fat' is all that is said, and I would have to suspect that this fat must be harvested - or stolen - from corpses; there is not a word about ritual murder being required to obtain it.

One site I found was dedicated to ritual candles, and there were hundreds of them available for various 'magic' purposes. I looked through there for at least an hour and found nothing - not even a mention of human fat being used.

Well, I don't quite know what to think about this. I hadn't thought of the book in question as appealing to 'goth' teenagers, but I had expected to find some external reference to this particular aspect - and none has so far been forthcoming.

Thanks for your reply and info. :clap:

[How Brown]

Tim:

You might find yourself waiting for a while longer,as most of us cannot find a single reference outside the Levi {Rituel et Dogma } reference....or should I say any of us... The candle idea is a another weak link in the chain of evidence against Stephenson. By the way,I was not kidding about asking my doctor ( a jerk because he hassles me about smoking a bit too much when I go to see him..) about the candles.


Spiro...amusing anecdote and yet a sober commentary as well.

If I have any free time on my hands,I will check into how many prostitutes it would take in order to create one Victorian candle worth lighting,using the fat from the heart,kidney,and uterus. Since this necessary act won't get done by the candle ideas current cheerleader, one of us should do it.

[admin tim]

Well, so far as I know, the only organ taken that might have any fat attached was that kidney. The uterus, bladder, and heart would essentially be fat-free. One has only to look at the butcher's to see the fat attached to a beef kidney - and there is none too much of that, even on a kidney from a 1500 lb. animal. Maybe the candles in question were birthday-cake size. Seriously.

I wonder why JTR didn't ever go after the liver in this case then. That is the only internal organ that gets 'fatty', and that from alcoholism, and it would have been much easier to locate and extract. This would have been a perfect fit under the known circumstances, if that was what the organs were needed for. My book on forensic pathology shows a normal liver next to a fatty alcoholic's liver, and the contrast is dramatic.

[How Brown]

Good point about the liver Tim....

If there was any part of the victims bodies which did contain enough fat to make a candle...we won't ever know.

I don't think the Ripper took any body parts that could create candles. And Cremers talks of a candle far larger than a skinny birthday candle.

[Nina Brown]

These were the only references that I could locate that specifically mention the use of a uterus in making candles, or more accurately the contents of a uterus.

The following describes how thieves’ lights were obtained and from whom.
See Article: Thieves’ Lights (Germany, Ernest Moritz Arndt)
http://www.pitt.edu/~dash/hand.html

Sir James George Frazer, The Golden Bough, 1922, p.30-31
Often it is prescribed that the thief’s candle should be made of the finger of a new-born or, still better, unborn child; sometimes it is thought needful that the thief should have one such candle for every person in the house, for if he has one candle too little somebody in the house will wake and catch him. Once these tapers begin to burn, there is nothing but milk that will put them out. In the seventeenth century robbers used to murder pregnant women in order thus to extract candles from their wombs.

Nina :eek:

[Magpie]

I've heard of thieves candles too, sometimes called "hand of doom" or "hand of glory", that were fashioned from the fingers of a hanged man collected from the gallows at midnight.

Check this out:

http://www.pitt.edu/~dash/hand.html#england

[How Brown]

Thanks Magpie and Nina...nice finds:thumbsupbud:

[Chris G.]

Hi Howie

D'Onston himself does mention the "candles made from human fat" in his anonymously written 1 December 1888 article in the Pall Mall Gazette (http://www.casebook.org/press_reports/pall_mall_gazette/18881201.html) (emphasis mine):

"Now, in one of the books by the great modern occultist who wrote under the nom de plume of 'Eliphaz Levy', 'Le Dogme et Rituel de la Haute Magie,' we find the most elaborate directions for working magical spells of all kinds. The second volume has a chapter on Necromancy, or black magic, which the author justly denounces as a profanation. Black magic employs the agencies of evil spirits and demons, instead of the beneficent spirits directed by the adepts of la haute magie. At the same time he gives the clearest and fullest details of the necessary steps for evocation by this means, and it is in the list of substances prescribed as absolutely necessary to success that we find the link which joins modern French necromancy with the quest of the East-end murderer. These substances are in themselves horrible, and difficult to procure. They can only be obtained by means of the most appalling crimes, of which murder and mutilation of the dead are the least heinous. Among them are strips of the skin of a suicide, nails from a murderer's gallows, candles made from human fat, the head of a black cat which has been fed forty days on human flesh, the horns of a goat which has been made the instrument of an infamous capital crime, and a preparation made from a certain portion of the body of a harlot. This last point is insisted upon as essential and it was this extraordinary fact that first drew my attention to the possible connection of the murderer with the black art."

Chris

[How Brown]

Hey C.G. !

Thanks for the mention of the Dec. 1st letter. :thumbsupbud:

You should have seen the look on my doctor ( a real nice Filipino guy,about 4 foot 5 tall...) when I asked him about using fat procured from a uterus,kidney,and heart. I said it in a way as to "scare" him. He was taken aback considerably...;)

He,as Tim Mosley has also mentioned previously,said that the heart would provide some fat....but the uterus and kidney not so much.

In fact after I explained to him what this was in reference to,he said it would have made far more "sense" to simply use the lining of the belly wall or maybe the liver. He had never heard of the history behind the candles.