Such practices have long since disappeared, but every so often the taboo of cannibalism surfaces from the underbelly of human depravity. Following a tip-off about some weirdo posting ads on the Internet about wanting to eat men, the police raided the home of forty-two-year-old Armin Meiwes in the small German town of Rotenberg in 2002. What they found was truly grisly. Armin had a freezer containing human body parts and a video recording of the evening he killed and butchered his victim. That was just the beginning. The tale would develop into an even more shocking case of cannibalistic essentialism.17
A year earlier, Armin had advertised on an Internet chat room dedicated to sadomasochistic discussions, looking for a young man to slaughter and eat. Apparently, talking about cannibalistic fantasies is not that uncommon in Germany. Unbelievably, a forty-three-year-old Berlin engineer, Bernd Brandes, replied. In fact, Armin had half a dozen men come and visit him, but only Bernd apparently was willing to see it through to the end. Bernd harboured a real desire to be eaten. Following a brief e-mail exchange, they agreed to meet at Armin’s home.
On the fateful evening of March 9 at Armin’s house, Bernd Brandes swallowed twenty sleeping tablets downed with a half-bottle of schnapps. He then begged Armin to cut off his penis for both of them to eat. He wanted to be eaten alive! After an initial failed attempt with a blunt knife, Armin successfully cut it off. Bernd had difficulty eating his own manhood, as it was too chewy, and so Armin tried frying it with garlic but ended up burning the meal. Bleeding heavily, Bernd decided to take a bath. Meanwhile, Armin went downstairs to read a Star Trek novel. After a few hours, he returned upstairs to finish off Bernd with a kiss before stabbing him in the neck. He then butchered the body, putting the pieces in his freezer cabinet next to the frozen pizza. He buried the head in the garden. The whole incident was recorded on videotape, proving that Bernd Brandes had been not only a willing victim but also an encouraging one. By the time the police arrived in December 2002, Armin had eaten twenty kilograms of Bernd cooked in olive oil and garlic, washed down with South African red wine.
The media frenzy that followed brought up the obvious questions. Why did Armin do it? Armin claimed that from an early age he had wanted to eat another person. More disturbing to contemplate was how anyone could willingly want to be eaten. How could Bernd Brandes want such an horrific death or, for that matter, attempt to eat his own penis?
We can only speculate about Bernd’s motives, and getting answers from Armin is proving to be difficult. I have made several requests to set up a meeting with Armin Meiwes, who is now serving a life sentence in Germany, but so far these requests have been declined. However, the available reports and testimony indicate that both men had a perverse sense of essentialism, vitalism, and holism.
In his e-mail reply to the initial posting, Bernd said that he wanted to exist inside another man’s body. Clearly, he believed in an afterlife inside someone else. He was like the puppet mouse dead inside the alligator that children believed would still have a mental life. Armin held reciprocal supernatural beliefs about his victim. He wanted someone to live on inside him. During police interviews, Armin reported that Bernd tasted similar to pork, but that with every mouthful his memory of Bernd increased. He felt much better and more stable with Bernd inside him. He also reported that his English had improved. Bernd Brandes had spoken fluent English. In the most recent interview in 2007, Armin said that Bernd was still with him.18
CELLULAR MEMORIES
I may never get the opportunity to question Armin Meiwes about his supernatural beliefs, but I have spoken to the much more amiable and approachable Ian Gammons, who lives with his good wife, Lynda, in the small village of Weston in Lincolnshire, England. Lynda and Ian have been married for over thirty years and share an intimacy over and beyond what most couples can ever expect to achieve.19
In 2005 Ian was suffering from kidney failure when it was discovered that Lynda was a match and would make a suitable donor. She didn’t even hesitate, and the life-saving operation was a success. About two months after the operation, Lynda and Ian were out shopping when something peculiar happened. Ian turned to Lynda and said, ‘I am really enjoying this.’
Ian and Lynda have always been very close but very different in their interests. Ian is a typical male who hates shopping, gardening, cooking, and all the pursuits that Lynda loves. The idea of Ian enjoying shopping seemed too strange. Ian began to cook and to enjoy helping out in the garden. Previously, he would have simply heated up a frozen dinner. When Lynda raised the topic of getting a pet dog, Ian agreed despite having been a cat person all his life. And the similarities go beyond hobbies and tastes:
My experiences are still developing. I am becoming more intuitive and I have a greater awareness. In particular, we share many more dreams. Last night Lynda woke up and said that she had a weird dream of a white house in a green field by the sea. I had exactly the same dream. Is it true that our DNA is mixing? Is that how it could possibly happen?
Ian is a soft-spoken man who genuinely wants to know how to explain his experiences. He is not your typical New Age hippie talking about essences, vital life energies, or the connectedness of the cosmos. The only sensible answer, he feels, is that he and Lynda now share a link because part of her is inside him. He has absorbed part of his wife and is turning into her in a small way.
It’s not an uncommon report in transplant patients. Around one in three transplant patients believe that they inherit the psychological properties of the donor.20 The most famous example was Claire Sylvia, who received the heart and lungs of a young man in the 1980s.21Following the operation, she developed a taste for drinking beer and eating chicken nuggets. For a ballerina, this was a strange departure. More bizarrely, she found herself attracted to short blonde women. The deceased’s girlfriend had been short and blond. And, yes, he liked beer and chicken nuggets, which were found in his coat following the motorcycle crash that killed him.
Such reports are claimed to be examples of cellular memories, a supernatural belief that the psychological aspects of an individual are stored in the organ tissue and can be transferred to the host recipient. Some claim that each cell of our body is connected. If the brain creates the mind and brain cells contain the psychological states of memory, then other cells in the body share this information. On the surface, something like Ian’s belief that he had incorporated Lynda’s mental states through her transplanted DNA does seem logical.
At one point, there seemed to be some scientific evidence for such a bizarre notion. James McConnell is a controversial figure in the science community. In the 1950s and 1960s, he was conducting experiments on simple worms to measure how long it took them to learn a maze.22 Having trained a bunch of these flatworms to slither around the maze, he then did something very unusual. He chopped the trained worms up into small pieces and fed them to untrained worms. These cannibal worms now learned to slither around the maze faster compared to other worms that had not been fed the cannibal diet.