The Ripper and Thieves’ Candles November 4, 2014
Author: Beach Combing | in : Modern , trackback
The thieves’ candle is a longstanding tradition in Britain, America and, indeed, throughout the western world. Usually the candle was the hand of a dead man with one or more of the fingers made into candles. These candles were supposed to provide safety, invisiblity and be able to cast sleep spells on victims. For example, ‘they entered the house armed with a dead man’s hand with a lighted candle in it, believing that a cande so placed will not be seen by any but those whom is used.’ Those killed violently offered the best hands, including those executed by the state by hanging or other methods. Anything else on the thieves’ candle: drbeachcombing AT yahoo DOT com Now what does this have to do with Jack the Ripper and the Whitechapel Murders? You might well ask. Consider though this report from 1888 that appeared in that London institution the Pall Mall Gazette.
According to Dr Bloch, a Galician member of the Reichsrath, there is no more inveterate superstition among German thieves than to believe that a candle made from the missing portions of the victims in Whitechapel will throw all those upon whom its light falls into the deepest slumber. Such candles are, therefore, invaluable to burglars. In 1810 a man was executed at Mladgeburg, at whose trial it was proved that ‘a regular manufactory ‘had been established by gangs of thieves for the production of such candles.
The ‘hand’ seems in this case to be a candle made of human fat: in this case the fat of murdered victims. It would be interesting to know if the English underground had similar beliefs to their cousins on the continent. On the basis of this report you would expect nineteenth-century murder victims to have bits and perhaps particularly hands chopped off for precisely this reason, if not by the killer then by any criminal brethren who found themselves in the locality before the bobbies arrived. Indeed, several of the mutilation cases connected to the Ripper may easily have originated in this way. For example, the Torso Case (aka The Whitehall Mystery, 1888) where a torso was discovered without legs and head. Jack the Ripper seemed, meanwhile, to specialise in organs, he ‘ripped’ at the abdomonen in all but one case: it is not clear what particular purpose these organs served, though ripperologists have produced theory after theory from an incompetent midwife (!), to interested doctors.
