In recent years, from time to time, the public has been shocked by reports of acts of cannibalism (cannibalism, anthropophagy). Most often this is criminal cannibalism, that is, associated with the commission of crimes, as a rule, murders, followed by eating parts of the victim's body, drinking his blood, etc.
There is, of course, non-criminal cannibalism, for example, when a leg amputated by a surgeon is eaten. Criminal cannibalism is more often associated with sexual crimes, i.e. committed on sexual grounds and in connection with sexual experiences.
In the modern period, criminal cannibalism first attracted serious attention in connection with the crimes of the notorious Chikatilo, who over 15 years killed 53 people (women, girls and boys) on sexual grounds and was exposed in 1990.
He was a pitiful person, life and sexual failure, passive homosexual and impotent, but he became a formidable and unforgiving killer when he gained power over the victim. He lived in some kind of his own world, in his altered reality, where no one had access and which was divided into ordinary life at home, at work and during those hours when he lured and killed the victim. After killing, he dismembered her, shredded, cut out pieces of the body, as a rule, associated with sex life, and often ate them: in boys, he ate the contents of the scrotum.
You can explain Chikatilo's cannibalism in different ways, but I believe that here you basically need to keep in mind the following: 1) eating the intimate parts of a woman's body at the symbolic level had the meaning of owning her, because in real life he, impotent, could not do this; 2) the eating of the genitals of boys could occur in order to acquire their male sexual power, which he sorely lacked.
I believe that if he could kill a grown man, he would probably do the same. Thus, Chikatilo's cannibalism had a purely sexual meaning and was generated by his pathetic and unsuccessful attempts to acquire a biological male status, to establish himself in inter-sex relations, at least on a psychological level, thereby providing self-intervention.
The latter was extremely important for him, since the constant failures in the sphere of these relations caused him a very painful psychological trauma. In general, he considered himself a failure in life, a man driven by fate. Therefore, in conversations with me, he talked a lot on this topic, listing in detail all the offenses and insults inflicted on him, especially from women and associated with sexual failures.
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I deliberately do not dwell on Chikatilo's crimes in detail, since they were covered in more detail in the press and other media. Here it is necessary to pay attention to the fact that this killer is a sex offender and the acts of cannibalism, as I tried to show, are also committed on a sexual basis. Eating the male genitals, which give sexual power, shows how effective and efficient the archetypal mechanisms and the collective unconscious, discovered by K. G. Jung.
The belief that eating the corresponding parts of a person's body leads to the fact that the cannibal acquires the desired abilities that the victim possessed, has been preserved from the ancient person in the collective unconscious and manifests itself in the actions of modern people. This phenomenon is well known to ethnologists.
Along with Chikatilo, the cannibal killer Dzhumagaliev became world famous, whose actions and personality stand out even against the background of other serial killers-necrophiles. These two monsters are united by the fact that their crimes took place on a sexual basis, were closely associated with sexual experiences generated by the catastrophe in intergender relations.
Dzhumagaliev, 30 years old, in 1979 in Kazakhstan killed seven women. In the first five cases, as a hunter, he waited in ambush at night for his victims and immediately stabbed him, and killed the rest at home. The first victim was A., he dismembered her corpse, took her body parts home and eaten for a month, made dumplings, fried, boiled. A few weeks later he killed K. and drank the blood from the corpse. Soon after, he attacked L. and Ya., But did not drink their blood and did not eat their meat, as he was prevented.
The next victim was V., the killer drank her blood and buried parts of her body in the ground, but he did not eat them, since he had the intention to melt the fat from her body in order to smear it on the grave of his grandfather. Then followed the murder of two more women, their corpses, he dismembered and drank blood, cut off their heads, ate the brain. In one of them, he made a hole in the lower abdomen with a knife and performed sexual intercourse through it.
This is, in short, a list of absolutely monstrous deeds of Dzhumagaliev. Psychiatric examination of this supermonster showed that he had a burdened heredity: his paternal aunt was strange, withdrawn, the older sister had something wrong with the psyche. Grew and developed normally, did not lag behind. Selectively sociable, more reserved; hardworking, loved order and justice, and especially travel and animals.
Early on he began to go hunting with his peers and with his grandfather, whom he greatly respected, then - more often alone. Little by little, love for animals became excessive, overvalued, I thought a lot about their defenselessness and was indignant at the attitude towards them. While hunting, he began to shoot past the game, nursed wounded animals. He believed that animals understand him, and he understands them.
Interest in girls arose at the age of eight, from the age of 16 he periodically met with them, but did not make attempts at sexual intimacy. The stories of animal and human sacrifices made a great impression. In 1970 he graduated from the railway school and worked for some time in his specialty.
While serving in the army, at first everything was fine, then my mood dropped noticeably, I began to drink; after demobilization, he twice tried to go to college, but nothing came of it, which led him to believe that he was a failure. He went to the mountains and lived in caves for a long time. From 1974 to 1977 he traveled around the country and worked in various organizations, then returned to the state farm to his parents.
With women, he was reserved and shy. Since 1975, he began to develop visual representations of various naked parts of the female body and internal organs, while experiencing sexual arousal. Sexual intercourse was mainly with random women, contracted syphilis, then - trichomoniasis. Upon returning to his parents, he began to live permanently with a certain I., however, this cohabitation was more than strange; beat her, at his request, she entered into an intimate relationship with acquaintances, and at the same time he believed that I. was behaving incorrectly and constantly instructed her.
Gradually, he began to turn away from sexual intercourse, did not receive complete satisfaction, but the craving for the female body remained, the influx of "translucent", often severed parts and organs of the female body, as well as the viscera, increased. I discovered the domination of matriarchy and "accurately" assessed its danger, therefore deciding that women should be intimidated (I carefully studied his own handwritten notes, which also contained these thoughts). There was a desire to drink their blood in order to receive the gift of prophecy, and came to the idea that by eating female meat, he would reduce his attraction to them.
After each murder, he noted with satisfaction that debauchery had decreased, women began to respect men more, they had fear. Once, during intercourse with a random woman, he strangled her, punched her in the stomach, pinched her breasts and legs, and declared that she drank his blood. At the same time, he looked pleased, smiled.
He told psychiatrists-experts that he prepared for each murder, for the hunt for women as for a solemn event. He developed an aversion to meat and ordinary sexual intercourse, there was only a passion for a dismembered female body and a desire to have sexual intercourse in a puncture wound on the stomach. The surviving personal records of Dzhumagaliev say that the eaten human meat led to an increase in the "independent train of thought."
He has become an outstanding personality. His contribution will go to the good of society and will be appreciated in the future, and in order to better record this, after all the murders, he should have gone to the mountains and write an instructive scientific work. He is awaiting his execution with interest in order to "catch the impulse of the transition from life to death and understand the meaning of life."
Dzhumagaliyev is diagnosed with schizophrenia. However, this does not exempt us from the need to answer the daunting question: what is the inner, personal meaning of what Dzhumagaliev did, which pushed him to such monstrous acts. Undoubtedly, he was distinguished by cruelty, absolute insensibility to people, necrosadism.
There is also no doubt that this is a deeply alienated person who has almost completely lost touch with the outside world, hating women, who he regards as a source and focus of evil. However, these correct statements, as well as the presence of schizophrenia, do not bring us very close to revealing the reason why he killed women and, most importantly, why he ate the bodies of those killed.
The important fact that Dzhumagaliev killed women, not men or children, requires an explanation. It seems to me that the answer may be as follows: with women, he was restrained and shy, that is, most likely, he feared rebuff from them, and therefore they seemed to him a hostile force: he cohabited only with random, easily accessible women, in other words, the choice of sexual the partner was completely not personified for him, which ultimately is also associated with the fear of being rejected by others; from such connections he contracted dangerous venereal diseases; Dzhumagaliev did not develop proper relations with Ya., with whom he cohabited for more or less a long time.
Pushing her into intimate relations with his acquaintances, he thereby pushed her away from himself and at the same time convinced himself of the danger of women, these malevolent creatures. It is especially significant that this cannibal wanted to have sexual intercourse in the wounds on the stomach and actually did them - this also testifies to the rejection of the woman, concentrated in this case on the genitals, he does not seem to notice it, does not want to have anything to do with it.
Dzhumagaliev's hostile attitude towards women is a particular manifestation of his absolute maladjustment to the modern world. With good reason he can be called a "primitive" man. Thus, hatred of a woman and, above all, the action of the collective unconscious in the form of a return of cannibalism, powerfully stimulated the unprecedented actions of this man.
Dzhumagaliev, as insane, was sent for treatment to a psychiatric hospital in Kazakhstan, where he spent over 10 years and then was discharged from it. After that, reportedly disappeared. I do not know how effective the treatment of the cannibal was, but it is not certain that he is no longer dangerous.
According to his psychological characteristics, Dzhumagaliyev is not much different from other criminals similar to him. Like them, this is a necrophilic, extremely aggressive personality, withdrawn, autistic, maladjusted. He constantly lives in another world, not only psychologically, but also physically, and the latter is due to reasons of a psychological order. So, he left the alien world of people in the mountains and lived in a cave for a long time, felt a special closeness to animals and believed that he understood them. His maladjustment is also manifested in extreme hatred of women, due to his sexual failures and withdrawal, as well as the fact that he was sick with syphilis.
It is very important that Dzhumagaliyev is interested in the moment of his own execution in order to "catch the impulse of the transition from life to death." As a person belonging to different worlds, he quite naturally pays special attention to the line that separates life from death, and thinks that this would help him understand the meaning of life, which, in general, is not without reason.
Regarding Dzhumagaliev's special closeness to animals, I consider it necessary to cite interesting considerations of M. Eliade: “… The acquisition of friendship and, at the same time, power over animals within the framework of archaic thought (Dzhumagaliev's behavior should be explained primarily from archetypal positions, as discussed below) does not mean any regression to a lower biological level. Since, on the one hand, animals are endowed with symbolism and mythology, which are of great importance in religious life, then communicating with animals, speaking their language and becoming their friend and master means gaining a spiritual life that is much richer than the life of a mere mortal. And on the other hand, the prestige of animals in the eyes of “primitive” man is very great: they know the secrets of life and nature, they even know the secrets of longevity and immortality”*.
It is not out of place to note that the first sign of the restoration of paradise life is the establishment of dominion over the animals and it was not by chance that the order was ordered to give the animals names, and this was equivalent to the ability to command them. In mystical legends, animals sometimes obeyed the saints, who fed them as if they were domesticated. Friendship with wild animals, their voluntary acceptance of human domination have long been considered clear signs of the return of a paradise state and even paradise times. It is possible that in this primitive man - Dzhumagaliyev - a desire to return to the original time was manifested.
Numerous crimes of the Novokuznetsk sexual killer and cannibal Spesivtsev were for some reason little known. Meanwhile, this is undoubtedly one of the most bloodthirsty killers of our time. Probably, the media paid little attention to him, usually very eager for such cases. I will cite data about him in print, but, unfortunately, they suffer from significant incompleteness.
In the summer of 1996, pieces of children's bodies and a skull were found in the Lbe River in Novokuznetsk. It has been firmly established that they were dismembered at home. At the same time, children, usually from disadvantaged families, began to disappear in the city.
The search was carried out on a large scale, during which they drew attention to the Spesivtsev family, which had long been known to the police. It consisted by that time of three people: mother Lyudmila, daughter Nadezhda and son Alexander (then he was 22 years old); father, allegedly an alcoholic, was kicked out of the house, and he lived separately.
It was a family alienated from others, but very close-knit, and the solidarity especially manifested itself at an antisocial level, that is, any offense of a family member was immediately taken under her protection, and the guilty person was justified in front of others by any means - the family acted as a united front.
So, all three could spit in one gulp at a person they did not like and call him obscene words, but it is no less important to emphasize that the mother resolutely defended her son in everything even more than her daughter, and her daughter always stood up for her brother. The mother stole, on trifles and often, the son constantly stole and committed many small hooligan acts. However, they somehow got away with it, I think, to a large extent thanks to the cohesion of the family, the resourcefulness of each of them and deceit, the ability to stand up for themselves separately and together.
In 1991, Alexander, distinguished by his frail physique and isolation, met a certain Zhenya, and many believed that things were going to the wedding. But when Zhenya decided to break up with him, he locked her in the apartment, tortured and beat her for almost a month. When the police finally arrived, they saw a dead girl, who was lying curled up on the sofa, as if trying to keep warm. She was wearing only a dressing gown, put on a naked body, she was completely dry, she looked like a twelve-year-old child, there were many sores on her body. The scalp was removed from her, but her head was neatly tied with a kerchief.
Spesivtsev was able to avoid criminal liability, since he was declared insane and sent for compulsory treatment to the Oryol psychiatric hospital. However, three years later, they decided that he had recovered, and the offender returned home.
As the newspapers reported after his arrest, he began to take revenge on everyone, both for the "psychiatric hospital" and for all insults; neighbors allegedly heard terrible screams from his apartment: they were chopping something, the only strange thing is that the proper measures were not taken.
Spesivtsev was exposed, as it often happens with us, by accident. Plumbers carried out heating maintenance. Spesivtsev did not open it, he said that he was being kept locked up as a mental patient. When they broke down the door together with the district inspector, a heavy cadaveric smell hit from the apartment. In the bath lay the body - a stump, in a huge saucepan - the remains of the body, the head. In one of the rooms they found a girl wounded in the stomach, with a broken arm, completely naked; she died in hospital a few days later.
During the preliminary investigation, it was established that Spesivtsev had killed 19 people, including boys, but 82 sets of clothes with traces of blood were found in his house, it was not possible to establish their owners, as far as one can judge, which suggests that no one was killed 19 people, and much more. Spesivtsev himself killed, often mocking the victim beforehand, sometimes using the Polaroid to photograph his victims in the nude. He butchered and dismembered corpses together with his mother, she also cooked pieces of the body, he ate it and forced those victims who were still alive to eat.
A dog, a diver, has long eaten only human flesh. Sometimes Spesivtsev, without leaving the apartment, spent three or four days with the dead (sometimes 3-4 people at once). Then the mother came, they butchered the corpses, and she always carried them away. All this went on for a long time: he killed, dismembered human bodies, sometimes ate pieces of bodies, fed the dog with them, mocked the victims, prolonging their torment, and constantly inhaled the corpse odor.
He had been engaged to death for a long time, ever since the days when he gradually, day after day, killed unfortunate Zhenya; he lived next to death, not at all embarrassed by its neighborhood, since it was close, understandable, and therefore, for many days, without leaving the house, he was in a vile, dense corpse vapor, probably lived by this vapor. And death also made it possible to take revenge on the hated world, which is why she, death, was so necessary. He, like many necrophilic murderers, because of this killed easily, without regret, never repented, on the contrary, he received great satisfaction from the fact that he deprived others of life.
The general motivation for Spesivtsev's crimes is clear - he took revenge on all mankind, killed, realizing his enormous brutal potential. There are many insignificant, skinny, sickly people in the world, but only a tiny fraction of them will dare to raise another hand. It was the high aggressiveness, which at first found its expression in violence against neighbors and other loved ones, that gave him the opportunity to commit the first murder - Zhenya, and then kill more and more, without hesitation and without fear of anyone or anything. I believe that death itself added considerable strength to him, which existed here, nearby, helping him, but also demanding new sacrifices. He brought them, in the impotent hope of finding satisfaction for the hatred that burned him. Why was Spesivtsev still engaged in cannibalism?
I think that the motives of cannibalism here are similar to those that pushed Chikatilo to similar actions - Spesivtsev ate pieces of a woman's body and thereby avenged his sexual failures and, in particular, for the fact that Zhenya pushed him away. Apparently, the eloquent fact that the killer's dog ate human flesh also needs explanation.
We can assume here cannibalism "by someone else's hands", or psychological cannibalism: the dog acted as a psychological continuation of the Novokuznetsk monster, and the fact that it ate human flesh also gave a sweet sensation of revenge to people.
Spesivtseva's mother Lyudmila deserves special analysis. First of all, she is an accomplice in murder and cannibalism, while I want to emphasize that complicity is not only a criminal law, but also a moral category. She is an accomplice in the criminal legal sense because she lured victims into the house to be killed by her son, he always hoped for her help, namely, that she would take away the corpses and hide the traces of the crime. She is an accomplice in cannibalism, since she dismembered the bodies of those killed, boiled them, gave the dog to eat, and her son ate too - this is morally.
In general, Lyudmila Spesivtseva is a typical necrophilic person, a person of death, since she actively contributed to the murders committed by her son, she felt the death of many people from his hand as the only way out of the life situation in which Alexander found himself, many murders were committed in her presence, she dismembered corpses and cooked pieces of human meat, fed them to the dog.
However, her criminal help to her son was not just maternal support - in this way she atoned for a deeply disturbing sense of guilt: this frail, frail, pitiful, weak, eternally ill man came out of her womb, who did not enjoy any success with women and had no friends. Nobody needed him at all. Except her.
It is among the serial killers, and according to my information, mainly among them cannibals are now found in our country, in this regard, Dzhumagaliev is especially characteristic, and to a lesser extent Chikatilo. One might think that, in some context, drinking the victim's blood is also cannibalism.
Yu. Zh. Antonyan from the book "The History of Cannibalism and Human Sacrifice"
The second part is here