The Little Death: Living and Loving as a Necrophiliac | VICE | United Kingdom
The Little Death: Living and Loving as a Necrophiliac
October 27, 2015
by Daniel Oberhaus
All photos courtesy of Jörg Buttgereit/Nekromantik
This article originally appeared on VICE US
Hayden (not his real name, for reasons that will become obvious) is 18 years old and he will never forget the moment when he first realized he was a necrophile. He was 14 years old at the funeral of a girl who had been a close friend—it was the first time he had come in contact with a corpse.
"I could feel the chill of her skin on my hand for hours [after] and I thought about what it would be like to hold onto her forever. She was so cold, and her eyes were so open and blank and lifeless," Hayden told me, recalling the experience.
"I remember the way the light glinted off her face and made her look like she was asleep, but her eyes were so wide and so dead," he continued. "I thought I could drown in them. I wanted to brush my hand through her hair and curl my fingers around hers and just let my skin linger and mold to hers so I could feel her forever. It felt like it was over too soon."
When he would recall the experience, Hayden said, it was often accompanied with intense feelings of anger and guilt. And when he tried to tell others about what he had felt, he added, they were far from accepting.
For as long as humans have attempted to codify appropriate social behavior there have been either explicit prohibitions against necrophilia, or at the very least strong taboos against the practice. Yet despite the taboo, necrophilia also played a very important role in the imaginations of these same societies. Take, for instance, the case of Achilles, who allegedly engaged in necrophilic acts with the Amazonian Queen Penthesilea after killing her. Or Herod the Great, who allegedly preserved the second of his ten wives in honey and proceeded to have intercourse with her for seven years after her death.Some scholars believe Charlemagne frequently committed acts of necrophilia. And if you want to get slightly more modern, Sleeping Beauty has some pretty heavy necrophilic overtones.
It may have been the very prevalence of these necrophilic tendencies—whether fantasized or realized—that justified codifying explicit laws against necrophilia in the first place. Perhaps necrophilia is more common than we are comfortable acknowledging. After all, sex and death have always been connected, even in language (in French, la petite mort, or "the little death," has become synonymous with sexual orgasm).
The first use of "necrophilia" in its modern sense can be traced to the Belgian psychologist Joseph Guislain, who coined the term in a lecture in 1850. He used it in reference to the French necrophile François Bertrand, who had recently been convicted of exhuming and mutilating corpses in Parisian graveyards. But it wasn't until the term became canonized in Richard von Krafft-Ebing's groundbreaking psychiatric workPsychopathia Sexualis that it really gained widespread usage.
Still, in the psychiatric community, necrophilia has remained a fringe area of study, in part because it's too rare and taboo to research in any rigorous sense. Even theDiagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, the authoritative text for psychiatric diagnosis, didn't have its own listing for necrophilia until the fifth and most recent edition came out in 2013. (In previous editions, necrophilia was listed under "Paraphilia Not Otherwise Specified").
In 2009, Anil Aggrawal, a professor of forensic medicine at the Maulana Azad Medical College in New Delhi, proposed a new system of classification for necrophilia, which he described as "one of the most weird, bizarre, and revolting practices of abnormal and perverse sensuality." His ten-tier system is far and away the most nuanced approach to necrophilia to date and is extensively outlined in his book Necrophilia: Forensic and Medico-legal Aspects, the most in-depth study on the subject ever published.
"The primary difficulty [in studying necrophilia] is lack of literature and lack of sufficient number of cases," Aggrawal told me. "I cannot say I could completely overcome these difficulties, although I tried to."
Unlike previous attempts at classifying necrophilia, such as the 1989 study by Jonathan Rosman and Phillip Resnick, which classified necrophilia into two groups—"genuine necrophilia" and "pseudonecrophilia"—Aggrawal found that there was in fact a wide spectrum of necrophiliac tendencies. Drawing from dozens of case studies from around the world, Aggrawal's tiered system ranged from tame sexual fantasies to the extreme acts of necrosadism.
At the tame end of the spectrum is Class I, which includes role players, "romantic necrophiles," and necrophilic fantasizers whose sexual deviance usually doesn't involve any of the legal infractions we generally associate with necrophilia. These people are sexually aroused by a living partner pretending to be dead or engaging in sexual role plays involving anything from resurrecting a partner through sex to pretending to be a vampire. Class II includes romantic necrophiles who are unable to accept the fact that they have lost a loved one, such as the widow who was recently found to be sleeping next to her decomposing husband for a year after he had died.
Moving across the spectrum, necrophilic fantasizers, or Class III, get off by actually fantasizing about the dead, which may involve anything from visiting funerals or cemeteries to having sex in the presence of a coffin, or getting erotic sensations after seeing images of dead bodies.
Beyond this is the realm of necrophilia in its classic sense, involving people who actually engage in sex acts with the dead. As Aggrawal's classification scheme makes clear, there are a staggering variety of ways to accomplish this, ranging from those who achieve sexual stimulation from simply touching a dead body (Class IV), to those whomutilate dead bodies while masturbating (Class VI), to homicidal necrophiles (Class IX), who are so desperate to have sex with a body that they will kill the living to achieve this.
"Chat about a violent murder at the dinner table and people join the conversation; mention necrophilia and the whole table goes silent." —Carla Valentine
According to Aggrawal's writings on the subject, it is not only possible, but relatively common for necrophiles to advance along this spectrum over time. In his book, he cites numerous case studies of those who previously experienced necrophilic fantasies taking up jobs that would regularly put them in contact with corpses in order to bring those fantasies to life.
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