3
NecroHysteria—A Short History
Describing Egyptian embalming methods in The History, circa 440 BCE, Herodotus writes, ‘The wives of distinguished men, when they die, they do not give for embalmment right away, nor yet women who are especially beautiful and of great account. Only when they have been dead three or four days do they hand them over to the embalmers. This is done to prevent the embalmers from copulating with these women. For they say that one of them was caught copulating with a freshly dead woman and that a fellow workman told on him.’[59] In the 1940s, Ed Gein would wait at least three or four days before disinterring a woman’s corpse (or part of) for whatever sexual purpose he had in mind. 2,500 years before Gein’s crimes were unearthed, Herodotus describes the prevalence of similar taboos of necrophilia in Ancient Egypt.
There are necrophiles who only experience full sexual satisfaction from having sex with a dead body, and there are those that copulate with corpses because of their availability and the unavailability (or impossibility) of having sex with a living person. Is it a freedom of sexual choice or a weakness and failing of the super-ego? From the time of the pre-Socratic philosopher Empedocles (490-430 BCE), who ‘kept a woman alive for thirty days without breath or pulse,’[60] to the library of books on serial killers and sex murderers, writers and historians have been fascinated with necrophiles and necrophilia. ‘Before I began killing boys, and afterward when I couldn’t find one or hadn’t the energy to go looking, there was another thing I would sometimes do. It began as a crude masturbation technique and ended very near mysticism. At the trial they called me necrophiliac without considering the ancient roots of the word, or its profound resonance. I was friend of the dead, lover of the dead. And I was my own first friend and lover.’[61]
If ‘[d]eath is the last great taboo,’ if ‘[w]e cannot look it in the face for fear of seeing the skull beneath the skin,’[62] surely having sex with a dead body, penetrating that skull beneath the deliquescing flesh, is the greater taboo, and the one from which to begin to philosophize about the human condition. Referring back to Herodotus and forward 2,000 years to Montaigne’s moral epigram formulated from his thoughts on Egyptian death rites in which he states he has ‘formed the habit of having death continually present, not merely in my imagination, but in my mouth,’[63] then the occurrence of necrophilia among Egyptian embalmers through to the likes of Ed Gein, Ted Bundy, and Jeffrey Dahmer shows that death and the love of the dead is not merely a myth, not part of our dark imaginings, but part of human culture, continually present, a parallel world in which love turns into pathological obsession and a close proximity to death becomes a perversion. ‘Then he turned to the girl. He took off all her clothes and looked at her, inspecting her body carefully, as if he would see how she were made. He went outside and looked in through the window at her lying naked before the fire. When he came back in he unbuckled his trousers and stepped out of them and laid next to her. He pulled the blanket over them.’[64]
In 1931, Carl von Cosel (Carl Tanzer), a radiologist and amateur inventor in his mid-50s, took an obsessive interest in 22-year-old Maria Elena Milagro de Hoyos, a tuberculosis patient at the sanitarium in which he worked in Key West, Florida. After falling in love with the attractive woman, he bought her jewellery and other gifts, and used his medical knowledge to try to cure her, but Elena succumbed to her illness and died in October of that year. Distraught, von Cosel had a mausoleum constructed in Key West Cemetery in which—with the consent of her family—he preserved her body in formaldehyde. He would visit her and talk to her, installing a telephone so he could speak to her at all times. But even that was not enough—it did not dampen his obsession or his desire. Two years after he first fell in love, he disentombed the embalmed body and took it home on a pushcart. ‘Decay had set in in a most disheartening manner. Only with the greatest care was I able to peel the pieces of textile from the body; this took hours. We then lifted the body out of the coffin and laid it on a table with a clean sheet. Having sprayed the body all over again, I now proceeded to sponge her, face with a specially prepared solution and also her hands and feet. With dismay I discovered that in view of the damage already done much more cleaning was required than could be done in the one night I had the morgue at my disposal.’[65] He rigged her bones with piano wire and coat hangers, inserted glass eyes into the orbital sockets when her real eyes putrefied, smothered her with wax and make-up, replaced some of her rotting skin with silk, had a wig fashioned, eviscerated the body and filled it with rags like a Guy Fawkes dummy, and dressed her (it) as a bride. To enable sexual congress with Elena, he intruded a paper tube into what was once her vagina. ‘Long I lay thus, holding her closely to me, the living and the dead united in love. The sweetness, of this was divine. Never had I dreamt that she had preserved so sweet and intense a love for me after being in the grave so long. Was it possible? I could hardly grasp or believe it, but here was the undeniable evidence. Life and death united together, eye to eye.’[66] As David Foster Wallace has pointed out in Both Flesh And Not, ‘the unpleasant is perfectly OK, just so long as it rivets.’[67] Von Cosel lived with his corpse bride for seven years before Elena’s sister—acting on information—discovered the body in his house and reported him to the police. A local rest home put his lover’s body on public display. Von Cosel underwent psychiatric tests in prison while awaiting trial but the case never made it to court. Authorities reburied the corpse in an unmarked grave. Von Cosel responded by making a life-size doll of Elena, incorporating her death mask, and lived with it until he died in 1952. Von Cosel’s necrophilia attracted attention in the news and the arts, and horror writers used his actions as building blocks for shocking tales of tomb raiding and lust, murder and eroticism, madness and pornography.[68]
Von Cosel’s necrophilia centred on one corpse on/in whom/which he consummated his possessive love regardless of societal norms. He transgressed any repressive balance, any primary principles. ‘I had begun feeding her body orally with nourishing fluids regularly every day.’[69] The object transference of his libido from dying woman to dead body enacts the ‘limitlessness in desire,’[70] where ‘urges of the flesh pass all bounds in the absence of controlling will.’[71] The id (the duality of the libido and the death drive) overwhelms the super-ego. As Freud has it, ‘Each one of us goes a bit too far, either here or there, in transgressing the boundaries that we have drawn up in our sexual lives. The perversions are neither bestialities nor degeneracies in the dramatic sense of that word. They are the development of germs that are all contained within the undifferentiated sexual predisposition of a child, the suppression of which or their application to higher, asexual goals—their sublimation—is destined to supply the forces behind a large number of our cultural achievements. So if someone has become coarse and manifestly perverse, it would be more accurate to say that he has remained so, that he represents a stage of an arrested development.’[72]
65
Karl Tanzler von Cosel, ‘The Secret of Elena’s Tomb,’
68
See Tom Swicegood,
71
George Bataille,