Mummies, Cannibals and Vampires

by Richard Sugg

  Less monumental in size, but colossal in their evocation of time (and far more portable), were the curiously immaculate bodies of the Egyptians themselves. No other culture had achieved anything like this. At this point most Europeans had little or no knowledge of bog mummies (and would not have guessed their true age even if they had.12) Occasionally in Europe bodies would fail to decompose: thus one had saintly mummies in Italy, and demonic ones in the territory of the vampire.13 In London, after the Great Fire of 1666 destroyed much of St Paul’s Cathedral, Samuel Pepys and others saw the exposed remains of Robert Braybrooke, Bishop of London (d.1404), being ‘his skeleton with the flesh on; but all tough and dry like a spongy dry leather’. Many, Pepys added, were ‘flocking to see it’.14 In 1701 a man’s body was found trapped in a Piccadilly chimney, its flesh wasted away, and skin ‘extreme hard and dry as shoe leather’; and in 1774 a mummified husband and wife appeared in a vault in St Martin’s-in-the-Fields, their coffins having evidently mouldered away.15 In Protestant England such oddities seem, however, to have been more a source of curiosity than of either wonder or terror. And they were, of course, seen to be the work of chance rather than of art.16

  Time and again, by contrast, seventeenth-century commentators marvelled at the vanished art of Egyptian embalmers. Around 1672, down in the darkness of an Egyptian burial cavern, one European traveller gazed in wonder at ‘that balm which is now quite lost’. It was, he noted, looking into the broken mummy which he and his assistants had just violated, ‘black, hard, and shines like pitch, having much such a smell, but more pleasant’.17 There was certainly pressure to imitate the art of the ancient Egyptians. But, as Pierre Pomet ruefully confessed in 1694, all the best and most costly efforts on the bodies of the honoured dead had never staved off decay for longer than a mere two or three centuries – a bare fraction of the 4,000 years which some Egyptian mummies were thought to have endured.18 Even the legendary conqueror Alexander the Great, embalmed after his early death in the summer of 323 BC, began to weather badly after 300 or so years. By the time that the Roman Emperor Augustus came to view Alexander’s body – a few years before the birth of Christ – it was (remarks Francis Bacon) ‘so tender, as Caesar touching but the nose of it, defaced it’.19 The difference between modern and ancient embalmers could not be explained simply by the proverbially arid climate of North Africa. Here were real human beings whose flesh, transmuted into a hard shining brown or black, ‘like stone pitch’, and having ‘a good smell’, offered an extraordinary suspended fragment of remotest antiquity.

  Such uncannily preserved relics invested the Egypt of the sixteenth century with a semi-mythic status in the minds of many Europeans.20 Those who could afford to make such a journey might well have heeded the commonplace advice that travel per se was dangerous and foolhardy – a notion underlying (and amply proved by) Thomas Nashe’s The Unfortunate Traveller of 1594. Others, who just barely knew the region as part of Old Testament history and could never have funded even a quarter of the voyage, may have found it effectively as distant as the moon.

  This situation must have changed as explorers and academics became increasingly interested in the area, and returned home with both reports and relics. A memorable example is that of the German Jesuit, Father Johann Michael Vansleb. At a casual glance Vansleb looks like a kind of seventeenth-century Indiana Jones. Some time between 1672 and 1676, Vansleb could be found dauntlessly probing the darkest and most morbid caverns of the Egyptian desert.21 He tells of French explorers scaling the great Sphinx with rope ladders, and finding its head to be hollow (though predictably filled up with sand); and of the stark plains of death spread out across the desert:

  think upon a boundless champagne, even and covered over with sand, where neither trees, nor grass, nor houses, nor any such thing is to be seen … [and] full of dry bones of arms, legs, feet, and heads … of scattered pieces of wood of coffins, [and] of little idols … marked before and behind with hieroglyphic letters.

  Even the intrepid Jesuit admits that these ‘mournful signs of man’s mortality’ are, on first sight, ‘able to dash a person newly arrived out of countenance, and to affright him’.22

  Despite this, and despite suffering intermittently from a quite severe fever, Vansleb more than once has himself lowered down on a rope into the mummy pits or ‘wells’ of Saccara (now usually Saqqara), the great necropolis located north-west of Memphis, and some twelve miles from modern Cairo. Sometimes wriggling on his belly along a tunnel half buried in sand, he peers by the wavering light of candles and matches at sarcophagi of sycamore wood or stone; breaks open coffins; unwraps bodies. Mummies themselves are rifled in search of the funerary idols sometimes lodged within their eviscerated trunks. Vansleb and his comrades are undeterred by either the shadows of death, the occasional foetid air which snuffs their candles, or even the ugly bats – ‘exceeding a foot in length’ – which we met earlier.23 He is rewarded not only by his detailed observations, but by assorted pieces of plunder, including one stone coffin of about 800 weight, and another ‘made of above forty cloths glued or pasted together in thickness, which are not in the least rotten’. In a neat emblem of the relations between Time and Vanity, a mummy’s head bandage ‘on which the countenance of that person was represented in gold’ is removed to reveal ‘nothing of the face remaining, which is commonly reduced to ashes’.24

  Clearly European reverence for Egypt could have ironic consequences. It did not guard these relics against vandalism or theft. At the same time, it was significant that they were thought worth stealing. Similarly, for some it was only this ‘true mummy’ of the pharaohs which was worth eating. Vansleb himself was of this opinion, and others, including Samuel Purchas, the compiler of Renaissance travel narratives, agreed with him.

  This ‘true mummy’ was not only a costly and effective medical agent. In certain literary passages of the seventeenth century it indeed assumes that general aura of the sacred (or magical) more usually reserved for the saintly relics of Catholicism. Shakespeare’s Othello, for example, seems to suffer from epilepsy, falling into a fit in act four, scene one, at the peak of his jealous rage. It may be for this reason that he so highly values the handkerchief mislaid by the luckless Desdemona. This, he tells her, had been given to his grandmother by an Egyptian sorceress. Although its exact date of origin is not specified, we know that ‘the worms were hallowed that did breed the silk’, and that it had been ‘dyed in mummy, which the skilful/Conserved of maidens’ hearts’. Medical use of the heart was rare, though not unknown.25 It seems to have been more definitely agreed that mummy made from the bodies of virgins, or maidens, was indeed specially potent, and commanded an unusually high price for that reason.26 The possible association with epilepsy may here be purely accidental. What is interesting is the way that Egypt is drawn in as a loose but (we may assume) swiftly recognisable source of magical power. The aim of the passage is to steep the handkerchief in the most mystical and revered atmosphere, and in this sense Egypt is a shrewd choice.

  For many Renaissance Christians the great hypnotising expanses of time, lying like deserts of vast eternity between themselves and the pharaohs, considerably mitigated the potential taboos of Egyptian corpse medicine. Perhaps equally important was the fact that these ancient bodies had nothing like the smell or texture of ordinary dead flesh. Even their stylised shapes and decorations served to abstract them from those ordinary human beings strolling down Bucklersbury at the time of Shakespeare or Marvell. If mummy had, in an unadmitted psychological sense, always to come from somewhere else, and from someone else, then this was a highly suitable choice. Is it, then, a mere oddity of phrasing when the Italian anatomist and advocate of corpse medicine, Berengario da Carpi, says of his medicinal plaster that ‘a notable part of human, or rather mummy substance enters into its composition’?27

  As Philip Schwyzer has pointed out, supply from Egypt probably became increasingly difficult as the seventeenth century wore on.28 Come 1652 Alexander Ross was already high
ly sceptical about the availability of ‘true’, Egyptian mummy, and by 1691 Dumont was able to report from Saccara that ‘the curiosity of the Franks has at last exhausted’ the ancient mummies of this site.29 Although there were allegedly some coffins ‘that were never opened’, the Moors ‘who only know where they are … keep the price of such rarities very high’. Managing (perhaps by bribery) to be let down into these burial pits, Dumont saw ‘some pieces of mummy, but so spoiled, that ‘twas impossible to preserve any of ’em’.30 One further indication of the difficulty of obtaining Egyptian mummies is offered by W.R. Dawson, who points out that ‘Guanche mummies from the Canary Islands were also exported to Europe for the apothecaries’.31

  Arabian Mummy

  In 1609 the traveller Robert Cottington explained how intrepid Arabian merchants could tramp for up to two months ‘thorough the sandy deserts, where no people dwell, neither any road way’, directed only by observing ‘the courses of sun, moon, and stars, for fear of missing their way’. So perilous were these regions that travellers, ‘not meeting with water in twelve or fifteen days’ space’ would sometimes ‘to save their own lives … kill their camels, and drink the blood’. When this did not avail, Cottington adds, their ‘dead carcasses consume not, but maketh munna’, or mummy, ‘every way as physical or medicinable, as that which cometh from Alexandria’.32 Not everyone agreed on the virtue of this distinct, Arabian mummy. But the source itself seems clear. On occasion, even those with adequate water supplies might simply be overwhelmed by ‘hurricanes of sand … driven with the wind’, which – as Samuel Wesley reports in 1693 – could sometimes ‘make mummy of whole armies’.33 Vansleb, similarly, told of how, in the Arabian deserts, ‘the dead bodies of men and dogs are found entire, who falling asleep, and staying behind the caravans, are covered over with an ocean of sand driven by the high winds’.34

  Vansleb himself did not believe that these sand corpses could be ‘termed true mummy’, and over in England in mid-century, the reactionary thinker Alexander Ross was in agreement.35 The mummy from ‘the tombs of the Egyptian kings’ had been, he believed, ‘spent long ago’, and that from the desert sandstorms had ‘no more virtue to staunch blood’ than did ‘a stick’.36 Others were uncertain not just about the power of this alternative source, but as to the basic claim of preservation itself. In 1565 John Hall was open-minded but cautiously undecided, able only to note that ‘baked or dried sand, hath been proved to preserve fruits longtime unputrefied’, and to hope that someone else would presently offer a more conclusive view.37 Some time before 1594, the Dutch cartographer Petrus Plancius was more emphatic, deriding those ‘great palpable lies, whereby fools are persuaded, that the mummy proceedeth of those bodies which do perish in the sands that be in the deserts of Arabia, as though it were possible that those bodies could be preserved in those sands without stench or putrefaction’.38 The Frenchman Vincent Leblanc claimed to have set out on some remarkably lengthy journeys through the east in 1567, when he was about thirteen or fourteen, and in the English translation of these traveller’s tales we hear of how, from ‘the sands of Egypt … the greatest part of mummy or flesh buried and roasted in the sand is gotten, which the wind uncovering, the next passenger brings to town for trade, it being very medicinable’. Either Leblanc had a sharp change of heart, or his work was edited at some point, for on the same page we are told that this sand mummy is indeed ‘a mere fable, since there is nothing but bones to be found there, the rest being eaten by the worms’.39 Toward the close of the seventeenth century, an anonymous author seemed no more certain than Hall, including among ‘imperfect relations of many things’ the question ‘whether mummies be found in the sands of Arabia, that are the dried flesh of men, buried in those sandy deserts in travelling; and how they differ in their virtue from the embalmed ones’.40

  Some may have connected the natural sand mummies of the deserts with those of Peru (or even Poland).41 In the former case, Garcilaso de la Vega, a sometime inhabitant of Peru, told of how ‘the air of Cozco being rather cold and dry, than hot and moist, is not subject to corruption; so that flesh being hanged up in a room where the windows are open on all sides, will keep eight, or fifteen, or thirty, nay to a hundred days without being mortified, until it is become dried like mummy’. He had, he added, not only seen this himself, but also ‘tried and experimented’ such natural mummification ‘with the flesh of cattle of that country’.42

  For others, it may not have been only the powers of climate which were involved. Whilst Ross had no time for the alleged medicinal qualities of such corpses, he did take seriously the idea that ‘diet … is a great help to further or retard putrefaction; for they that feed plentifully on flesh, fish, or other humid meats, which breed much blood and humours, are apter to putrify than those who feed sparingly on hard and dry meats’. Hence, ‘in the siege of Amida, by Sapor the Persian king, this difference was found; for the European bodies, who lay four days unburied, did in that time so putrefy, that they could scarce be known: but the Persian bodies were grown hard and dry, because of their hard and dry food’.43 Those who did believe in the ‘sand mummies’ of Arabia might have felt this to be useful evidence, given the broadly eastern character of the merchants crossing these desert wastes.

  For those who did credit it, this type of mummy seems to have been softened and made acceptable not by time, but by the strange alchemy of the climate. At least potentially, European travellers in the region might have recognised that the merchant they saw in a bazaar one day could be the curative which they or their peers swallowed down just a few months later. For all this, Cottington’s ‘munna’ was occasionally used as a (perhaps archaic) form of ‘manna’. In that case, then, mummy is not only accepted, but associated with the heavenly food which God sent to the Israelites during their wanderings through the desert.44

  For those who flatly refused to believe in the sandstorms themselves, there was also yet one more variant of the sand mummy. In 1694 Pomet wrote of those bodies ‘which are called white mummies, and are nothing else but the bodies of those that are drowned in the sea, which being cast upon the African coast, are buried and dried in the sands, which are very hot’. These corpses, ‘though they have been lusty men in their lives, after they have lain some time there, they weigh not above thirty pounds, and are then in a condition of keeping forever’. Pomet goes on to put the existence of this type of mummy beyond doubt when he adds that, ‘there is one in Paris, in the cabinet of Mr Boudet, nephew to Mr Boudet, the king’s physician’. Although Pomet himself asserts that these bodies ‘have little or no virtue in them’, he tells us several things here. One: the Egyptian sands were thought so potent in their preservative qualities that they could mummify not only those overwhelmed in sand mountains, but those who had been well-sodden by drowning. Two: having cast a quasi-scientific eye over one specimen (perhaps in Boudet’s cabinet) Pomet had been struck by the lightness and dryness of the body. And three: for all his disdain of this variety, Pomet further admits that such bodies are in fact ‘dear’ to buyers.45 They too, it would seem, were in demand.

  One last point on the commercial value of human bodies is especially intriguing. For Pomet also stated that ‘the same druggists [of London] send to foreign countries, especially Germany, these skulls covered with moss, to put into the composition of the sympathetic ointment, which Crollius describes in his Royal Chemist’, and which Pomet himself felt to be very effective in the cure of the falling sickness.46 There is no ambiguity here. Pomet makes it quite clear that Britain was actively exporting human skulls to the continent – in particular, to Germany. As strong supporters of Paracelsianism, German practitioners were themselves likely importers. But why was Britain in particular such an active exporter of these moss-clad skulls? The answer to this has been hinted at by Francis Bacon, and will be discussed below, in the context of European warfare.

  Trade

  In 1565 one Johann Helffrich of Leipzig was searching fruitlessly for Egyptian mummies in the sands outs
ide Cairo. ‘The natives, he wrote, “seek these with all energy, for they sell them to the merchants of Cairo by whom they are further sold. Some of the Arabs eat them out of curiosity”’.47 As well as implying that mummy was not a routine medical agent for the Arabs at this point, Hellfrich clearly shows us that it was being vigorously plundered and exported to Europe. We have seen that the surgeon John Hall was able to prescribe it in this same year, and some time before 1582 one intrepid traveller witnessed the determined grave-robbing activities which secured supplies for European apothecaries and their customers. An anonymous Elizabethan tells of seeing ‘the bodies of ancient men, not rotten but all whole’, being daily unearthed from a Cairo pyramid. This kind of trade was still flourishing in 1586, when a British merchant apprentice, John Sanderson, illicitly obtained a mummy shipment of over 600 pounds in weight.48 In France, some time in or before 1584, the influential Huguenot poet Guillaume du Bartas wrote a stanza on global trade:

  So come our sugars from Canary isles:

  From Candy, currans, muscadels, and oils:

  From the Moluques, spices: balsamum

  From Egypt: odours from Arabia come:

  From India, drugs, rich gems, and ivory:

  From Syria, mummy: black-red ebony,

  From burning Chus: from Peru, pearl and gold.

  Interestingly, this seems to refer to both Egyptian and sand mummies (the former being ‘balsamum’ and the latter that from Syria).49 If so, then it would appear that by the 1580s both these substances were well-known items of trade in France, and were more or less as synonymous with Egypt and Syria as sugar was with the Canaries.