Entry #5: Jeffrey Dahmer's Power Totem

The mythological griffin embodies two sides of Dahmer's devolved nature--the alley cat and the harpy.

AT THE TIME OF HIS ARREST, when asked if he’d had any portents about being apprehended by the police, Dahmer explained that, yes, he did.

In February of 1991, five months before his arrest, the body of one of his drugged victims had slid free from Dahmer’s bed and collided with a table that displayed two griffin figurines. The griffins fell onto the floor.

He explained the foreshadowing event—and the griffin figurines—like this, as noted in the arresting officer’s police report:

Dahmer stated that these [griffins were] of the occult, and symbolized personal power and made it that he did not have to answer to anyone. Dahmer stated that there were words written on each griffin, one had leon and the other had apal¹. Dahmer again stated that these symbolized personal power and he felt that [their fall from the table] was a sign to show that he was losing control.

A fixation on private omens and apotropaic warnings from the environment can be a form of magical thinking that borderline personality types are prone to. And if I had to designate one particular mode of mental dysfunction from the DSM (Diagnostic Manual Of Mental Disorders), I’d place Dahmer squarely under that rubric.

But mental illness aside, there’s something eerily fitting about Dahmer’s attraction to the symbol of the griffin. Something synchronistic.

I doubt that Dahmer consciously understood the resonance of the symbol—an emblem of royalty (and the protector of treasures). He seemed to associate the griffin with spookiness. A vestige from his 1970s high school forays into seances. And later, while living with his grandmother, his cursory exploration of satanism.

But none of this was unusual for the mid-70s, when the fallout from the counter-culture movement, with its inherent paganism, was still off-gassing. I remember reading and playing around with Anton LaVey’s Satanic Bible in high school. The book had a subversive, gothic-cool vibe about it. A year later I lost the book at the beach.

But within the realm of fantasy and dream—the two worlds Dahmer moved through more readily than mundane reality—the griffin is a revealing totem for the serial killer. The fabled creature merges the chthonic world of the Dionysian with the crystal-sharp rationalism of the Apollonian.

In his book, The Shrine of Jeffrey Dahmer, biographer, Brian Masters talks about Dahmer’s alignment with the Dionysian. Masters describes it like this:

“Every human being has dark, shameful, nasty impulses—the combined inheritance of the species. They spring from Dionysian urges of drama, destruction and anarchy, and they have to be kept in check by the structures of civilisation, including religion and morality. That these savage irrational urges are ever-present is undeniable; so, too, is it obvious that they are mercifully constrained by self-regulation. In Dahmer’s case, the constraints failed, the inhibitions collapsed, and Dionysus broke loose.”

But so too, with Dahmer, did the Apollonian—break loose.

Dahmer was a hybrid. His cold-blooded disconnect from the realm of human empathy and compassion was shot through with his often-mentioned ‘compulsion.’ A fierce drive that was the equivalent of a scientist’s passion for penetrating nature’s mysteries.

It would help to define the two principles, the Dionysian and Apollonian, in more detail.

The Dyonsian represents nature’s hidden secrets. The incessant toggling between creation and destruction is the essence of the Dionysian. The god Dionysus was associated with all things fluid—tears, blood, sap, wine, honey, and semen. The Dionysian is constant liquidity, which obliterates the identity of objects.

Conversely, the Apollonian relates to mankind’s efforts to create sharp distinctions and definitions. The naming of things. To freeze time—to make the mobile into objects. Motionless things that one can apprehend—safely distanced from the metamorphosing activity of nature.

In essence, it is the Apollonian drive within Western culture that created art and science. After chaos (Dionysus) came order (Apollo).

Dahmer’s childhood explorations into taxidermy were a euphemism for his primary passion, which was to understand the anatomy of the unseeable, what was beneath the skin—the viscera and bones that comprise any lifeform’s inner structure. This, of course, requires stasis-making, a killing of the living, to reveal its secrets.

Dahmer explained that he killed because he didn’t want the people he’d ‘acquired’ to abandon him. I interpret this another way. I believe he attempted to fashion something more primitive (Dionysian) but scientific (Apollonian).

Dahmer wanted what was formerly mobile to remain forever motionless. This would allow him to forge, via sex—the primal nexus-maker—a relationship where Dahmer remained king. A connoisseur (Apollo) as a vivisector (Dionysus) sent forth from the hell realm.

Dahmer’s Uranus in Leo (the exempt self as liberator) was in a tight square to his Venus in Taurus, a natal position associated with the love of physical beauty and sensuality. Read conventionally, this aspect makes for individuals drawn to taboo—kinky—forms of affection.

Viewed from the world of literature, Dahmer is a character plucked from one of Marquis DeSade’s novels where Dionysian sparagmos (the rending, mangling, and tearing of the flesh of animals or humans) is the rule of disorder.

There are no emotional needs to attend to with a corpse. One has a rapt audience of ‘one’ to dominate, control, and dispose of when a new audience member is required.

Vernell Bass, Dahmer’s neighbor, wrote in his book, Across the Hall, that he’d often hear Dahmer in the evening having conversations with—or sometimes yelling at—a supposed guest in Dahmer’s living room. Later he discovered that Dahmer was expressing himself to a severed head.

Sex was always part of the kill/merge and then dissect/study cycle for Dahmer. It is through a sexual union that people experience the deepest bonds. A connection the closeted Dahmer craved deeply. But sex requires submitting. Merging. And Dahmer badly wanted one half of the experience, but not the other.

This mirrors the conjunction between the Moon and Mars in Aries in Dahmer’s natal horoscope. The unfettered expression (Mars) of the self (Aries) and its needs (Moon) is the central will to power in one’s emotional life. Better to maintain one’s sovereignty than lose it in the blur of sex, where the self is momentarily lost in passion.

Mars in Aries is the most phallic, warrior-like Mars in the Zodiac. Its motto: Complete capture and rule—is the rule.

But placed as the Martian-lunar conjunction is—in Dahmer’s 7th house of ‘other,’—he projected his emotional drive into the environment, into the world of relationships. This made him both fearful and suspicious of others’ potential for violence. But also compulsively drawn to reclaiming the power he’d disassociated from himself.

The problem with projected aggression is that when one is untethered from the civilizing power of their super-ego, violent emotions are prone to explode uncontrollably toward others.

And Dahmer, almost always inebriated, fell prey to eruptions often. His first murder was committed in a kind of possessed state where out of nowhere, he smashed his first victim, Steven Hicks, in the head with a barbell. What prompted the attack? Hicks had simply announced that it was time for him to leave—to make it to a concert on time.

And then again, nine years later, in a hotel room, amidst an alcohol-induced blackout, he murdered his second victim. To his dying day, Dahmer claimed no memory of committing the murder of Steven Tuomi. He simply woke up on the hotel bed—lying atop a corpse. Tuomi’s chest had been caved in by repeated pummeling.

The griffin, if stripped of its royal connotations, and made more pedestrian, is a fitting symbol for Dahmer’s hybrid of the Dionysian and Apollonian.

Considered this way, the regal lion becomes an ordinary alley cat. And Dahmer personified many of the qualities associated with cats. He was a prowler—a creature of the night.

Vernal Bass mentioned several times coming upon Dahmer, smoking outside in the back of their apartment, surrounded by scores of cats milling at Dahmer’s feet.

Cats are eye-intense, making them perfect symbols of the Apollonian realm. Dahmer was a voyeur deluxe—constantly watching and appraising beauty—and then hunting.

Felines appear calm and controlled but can irrationally flip into fearful ‘scaredy cats.’ Upon his capture, while pinned to the floor by two arresting officers, Dahmer wailed like a feral animal—a howl that made its way to the street outside his apartment. But then moments later he broke into whining and whimpering, murmurings that resembled a baby.

Cats are solitary, autocratic, and vain. Dahmer was all of that.

It’s interesting to watch videos of Dahmer appearing in the courtroom during his trials. His tall, ramrod body strides into the room as if working a fashion model’s catwalk. He’s often seen fussing with his hair, patting it into place should it be unkempt. Cats primp continually, spending hours resetting every hair in place.

The eagle, the talon-bearing portion of the griffin, I associate with the Greek harpies. And the Dionysian world.

Camille Paglia writes of harpies:

“They are ‘the Snatchers’ (from harpazo, ‘snatch’), airborne pirates, befouling men with their droppings…They are smoky intruders from the underworld….Greek art and literature never did crystallize a shape and story for them, so they remain vague.”

Sounds similar to pirate-like Dahmer, who still, today, remains the most enigmatic murderer in the history of crime. Doubly so if you view the two televised interviews he made from prison. His clear thinking, straightforward articulation, and placid mid-western demeanor still draw disbelief from those observing him. “Huh?” you say to yourself, “That guy, did that?”

Dahmer’s ostensibly docile, agreeable manners are, I claim, the most pronounced markers of his exceptional form of madness. And make him preternaturally unique within the pantheon of serial killers.

His expressionless expression is derived from Hades, where the god of that world, donning his magical helmet, walked invisibly among mortals. And Dahmer did the same as he slinked and stalked cat-like through the bars and malls of Milwaukee.

Until next time!

Opening image: Griffin, published in 1660 in Amsterdam in the first Dutch encyclopedia of animals. Picture by the engraver Matthias Merian. Public domain.

1. “Leon” is the Spanish word for lion and the lion represents the type of power that attracted Dahmer. “Apal” is more problematic. It could simply be from Hebrew, and means, “darkness” and “gloom.” Vague, but also fitting.