Mummies, Cannibals and Vampires

by Richard Sugg

  In his 1601 satire Poetaster, Jonson had the merchant Albius assert his commercial creed with the words: ‘He that respects to get, must relish all commodities alike; and admit no difference betwixt oade, and frankincense; or the most precious balsamum, and a tar-barrel’. A few lines on, Albius’ endearments to his wife Chloe include ‘my dear mummia, my balsamum’, thus confirming that his ‘precious balsamum’ is indeed mummy.50 Again, mummy seems here to be synonymous with trade, and to require no gloss. But there is some possibility that Jonson (like Shakespeare and Donne in the 1590s) was being a little modish. Come 1605, the sometime archbishop of Canterbury George Abbot could write in his Brief Description of the Whole World of those mummies known ‘plentifully at this day, by the whole bodies, hands, or other parts, which by merchants are now brought from thence, and doth make the mummia which the apothecaries use’.51 Notably, Abbot had not included any reference to mummy (or mummies) in the section on ‘Afric and Egypt’ in the book’s first edition of 1599. Given that he was (as Kenneth Fincham points out) a man of ‘broad intellectual tastes’ with a fondness for expanding his work, it seems that he had become aware of this new commodity only some time after 1599 (rather than merely being too slapdash to mention it in his first edition). By contrast, mummy appears to have been both more common and more conspicuous by the time Abbot did come to discuss it. For when he refers to ‘the colour being very black, and the flesh clung unto the bones’ he seems to be describing something which he himself has seen.52

  By the time of Cromwell, in 1650, mummy was still a sufficiently popular commodity to be included in a list of items subject to import duty, attracting a tax of one shilling per pound.53 The association between mummy and trade seems only to have grown stronger after the Restoration: when Samuel Pepys saw a mummy it was not in a collector’s cabinet, but in a merchant’s warehouse.54 Much later, in 1793, a government select committee discussed a proposal to trade with Japan. This would involve a ship of 800 tons, carrying £7,000 worth of merchandise from Europe. Mummy features here in a prospective list of only eight commodities.55 Whilst it is just possible that the ‘mumia’ of this document refers to mineral pitch, we would be wrong to assume that human mummy was itself not a significant commodity at the close of the eighteenth century. In 1799 Philipp Andreas Nemnich’s trade dictionary cites words for ‘mumia’ in German, Dutch, Danish, Swedish, French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Russian, and Polish. Tellingly, the Spanish and Portuguese term, ‘carnemomia’, is conspicuously fleshly.56

  A further indication of the trade value of mummy comes from the alleged manufacture offraudulent substitutes. In 1564 the French royal physician, Guy de la Fontaine, visited Alexandria. Fontaine claimed that he there met a Jew who traded in mummies. After much persuasion, Fontaine succeeded in being shown the merchant’s storehouse. Here he saw ‘several bodies piled one upon another’. He then asked the merchant ‘what sort of drugs he made use of? and what sort of bodies were fit for his service? The Jew answered him, that as to the dead, he took such bodies as he could get, whether they died of a common disease, or of some contagion; and as to the drugs, that they were nothing but a heap of several old drugs mixed together’. He then dried the bodies in an oven and exported them to Europe. He himself, he added, ‘was amazed to see that the Christians were lovers of such filthiness’.57

  We will find what looks like a peculiarly warped version of this story resurfacing in the eighteenth century. Even in the form given here, the tale must prompt some suspicion. Why would a Jewish merchant endanger his allegedly thriving trade by so candidly laughing in the face of one of France’s most influential customers? Yet, whilst we must be cautious as to just who was producing such counterfeits, these do indeed seem to have existed. And, if they really did exist in the year of Shakespeare’s birth, then we can infer that demand was already strong from certain quarters at this point. For fraud made more sense once the supply of Egyptian mummies was becoming genuinely scarcer or more difficult to plunder. Yet in the 1580s Britain had received a shipment of 800 pounds’ weight of mummy, and this itself was evidently genuine, given the busy excavations which Hakluyt’s voyager saw around 1582. From a very early stage, then, European demand for mummy seems to have been great enough to prompt commercial opportunism – a habit which might stand as an ironic precedent for the adulteration of leisure drugs such as cocaine and heroine in the twentieth century.

  Some time before 1626, the play The Fair Maid of the Inn could use the insult ‘Out thou concealment of tallow, and counterfeit mummy’ without further gloss.58 In his geographical work of 1635, John Swan was aware of a variant of Fontaine’s story (which had itself been emphatically repeated by Ambroise paré in 1582). Whilst he disbelieved such tales (‘most ridiculously (in my opinion) do they err who say it is made of man’s flesh boiled in pitch’) Swan did suspect a form of ‘counterfeit mummy’ to be on the market. For Swan, this was ‘a corrupted humour taken out of old tombs, which there droppeth from embalmed bodies’ – the problem being that these bodies were not the most noble and costly mummies of the region, but instead those of ‘poor men … merely dressed and stuffed up with bitumen’.59

  Karen Gordon-Grube has argued that ‘the abuses of mummy dealers in selling inferior wares’ were especially widespread and notorious by the end of the seventeenth century, and in 1694 this problem was forcefully lamented by Pomet.60 As well as repeating the story of Fontaine and the Jewish merchant, Pomet goes to some trouble to emphasise the painstaking nature of the best Egyptian embalming. He seems to do this just because it is difficult to persuade many agents or customers that they are being defrauded; for he then goes on to stress that a people who took such trouble would not easily allow these bodies to be plundered for export. Echoing the tale of 1564, he proceeds to assert that ‘we may daily see the Jews carrying on their rogueries, as to these mummies, and after them the Christians’. For ‘the mummies that are brought from Alexandria, Egypt, Venice and Lyons, are nothing else but the bodies of people that die several ways, whether buried or unburied’. Well over a century after Fontaine’s visit, these are still being disembowelled, filled with ‘myrrh, aloes, bitumen, pitch and other gums’, baked in an oven, wrapped in cerecloth, and dried, to be ‘sold here for true Egyptian mummies to those who know no better’. Underscoring the futility of trying to halt this practice, Pomet adds, ‘as I am not able to stop the abuses committed by those who sell this commodity, I shall only advise such as buy’ to choose carefully, before going on to describe in detail just what authentic mummy should look, feel and smell like.61

  It seems clear that, for at least 130 odd years, the web of the corpse trade threw its strands out not just to the deserts of Cairo and Syria, but to obscure backstreet dealers in North Africa. Dead bodies were actively scavenged. For all we know, they may have been actively produced, just as they would be for anatomy teaching, in Edinburgh several decades later, or in Colombia in 1992.62 Amidst the heat and flies of Alexandria, now forgotten men kept company with heaps of anonymous dead, busily seeking to roast and process them before they putrefied. We have seen that Francis I was a specially avid user of mummy in the earlier sixteenth century. Such a client was probably better able than most to fill his purse with the true mummy of the noble burial chambers of Cairo (and, dying in 1547, Francis may also have met his end before fraud became more widespread). There again, we have also seen that the patients of Theodore Turquet de Mayerne included Henri IV, Charles I, and Charles II, figures who lived during the peaks of the counterfeit trade. It is just possible, then, that when Hamlet explained how ‘a king might go a progress through the guts of a beggar’ he had in fact got this sobering journey the wrong way round.

  Europe

  If the dry sunlight and dry bodies of modern Arabia and of ancient Egypt might somehow cleanse corpse medicine of its more abhorrent connotations, the same can hardly be said for that which was harvested from the bloody and brutal killing sites of Britain and the neighbouring continent. Europe had four
chief sources of direct supply for human body parts. These were the gallows; the anatomists; the grave; and the battlefield.

  The Executioner

  Germanic and Scandinavian Countries

  In the winter of 1668–69 the English traveller Edward Browne was touring Vienna. Although it was a particularly hard winter – with even the majestic Danube now as frozen as the Thames would be in 1684 – Browne took himself around the sights energetically, admiring the Prater gardens, the menagerie with its lions and tigers, and the usual curiosities and churches. He also had the good fortune to be present at more than one execution:

  in treason and high crimes they cut off the right hand of the malefactor, and his head immediately after. I saw a woman beheaded sitting in a chair, the executioner striking off her head with a foreblow; she behaved her self well, and was accompanied unto the market place by the Confraternity of the Dead, who have a charitable care of such persons, and are not of any religious order, but lay-men.

  On what seems to be the same occasion, Browne saw a man ‘executed after the same manner’. ‘As soon as his head fell to the ground, while the body was in the chair’, and even as the corpse was shooting jets of blood and steam into the frosty Viennese air, Browne saw ‘a man run speedily with a pot in his hand, and filling it with the blood, yet spouting out of his neck, he presently drank it off, and ran away’. It seems that Brown did not have to have this action explained to him: ‘this he did as a remedy against the falling-sickness. I have read of some who have approved the same medicine; and heard of others who have done the like in Germany’. He admits that he did not ‘stay afterwards so long as to know the effect thereof, as to the intended cure’, adding, ‘but most men looked upon it as of great uncertainty’.63

  These few lines tell us a good deal about the popular treatment of epilepsy in Germanic countries of the early modern era. First: it seems that a woman’s blood was not considered suitable medicine by the patient in question. Second: the man drank the blood and then ran. This could at first look like the action of someone afraid of capture, ashamed of his behaviour, or both. It could also imply that he was seeking to escape the executioner, who might well have expected payment for the blood. As for the payment, it is likely that this had been arranged beforehand. And, in running away after he had gulped down the hot blood, the patient was almost certainly following a standard medical prescription.64

  On 6 June 1755 in Dresden a man named Johann Geord Wiedemann took the blood cure and then ‘“ran away”’.65 In 1812 in Hanover, one Louis Stromeyer (aged eight, we might note) ‘was taken by the family servant to see a beheading, and observed how women dipped handkerchiefs in the decapitated malefactor’s blood to use as a cure for epilepsy. The epileptics then ran off through the crowd, accompanied by those administering the cure, and were supposed to keep running until they dropped’. Meanwhile, ‘after a beheading in Stralsund in 1814’ one witness wrote of ‘“a remarkable phenomenon”’: ‘“two riders … led a poor sick man, probably an epileptic, and filled a moderately large jug to the brim with the executed person’s blood. After the invalid had drained the ghastly contents right to the bottom, he was bound fast between the horses with strong reins and pulled away at a breakneck gallop”’.66

  Comparing these two accounts, we can see that the perhaps initially ambiguous phrasing of the second means just what is clearly stated in the first. After drinking the blood, the patient must be made physically exhausted, and as quickly as possible. Hence, in 1814, the sick man indeed seems to have been forced to gallop with the horses until he, too, ‘dropped’ from fatigue. There may well have been various reasons for this custom. One has already been hinted to us by the German chemist Johann Schroeder: ‘the drinking of the blood requires great caution, because it … brings a truculency’ upon those who imbibe it. Schroeder too advised that those epileptics taking the blood cure should afterwards vigorously exercise until ‘there is a free perspiration’, and this warning was still being given by an Irish author in the eighteenth century.67 It is clear, then, that the effects of blood-drinking were sufficiently well-known for onlookers to realise that patients (and perhaps especially men) could become extremely aggressive after swallowing such a concentrated shot of human energy.68 In some, this ‘truculency’ might only have registered as intense physical agitation. But in either case the remedy was the same: burn off some energy quickly, before the blood dose takes effect.

  Yet this was probably not the only (or even chief) reason behind the sudden breakneck dash of the epileptic vampire. Richard J. Evans, the scholar who has given us those valuable accounts from Germany, also shrewdly notes that, for many people from the Middle Ages on, epilepsy was at least partly attributed to the malfunction or temporary absence of the human soul. As the soul at this time was the core of vitality and energy (as well as a spiritual idea), epileptics sought to consume the vitality of executed criminals by drinking the blood in which the soul (at least partly) resided. While we will have much more to say about this reasoning in chapter six, we can here emphasise one interesting point. In forcing this sudden hectic sprint of the blood-gorged epileptic, medical advisers were not just hoping to burn away unwanted aggression, and were certainly not merely following a traditional habit for custom’s sake. Their motivation was not vague and magical, but precise and medical. The life force that had just been imbibed needed to be circulated around the body as briskly and thoroughly as possible. Hence a state of maximum physiological agitation was required, in order to fully absorb the vital powers of the criminal.

  Linking the eyewitness of 1814 back to Browne, we can elaborate two further points from the English traveller’s report. Browne was himself a physician (as was his father, the celebrated writer Sir Thomas Browne).69 Stating that ‘many physicians have, in all times, abominated’ such medicine, he both distances himself from it, and implies that it was unfamiliar in England. Browne also seems to have questioned onlookers in the execution crowd about the therapy: ‘most men looked upon it as of great uncertainty’. He would almost certainly have inquired of gentlemen, not commoners. What we seem to find, then, is that many of the educated Viennese viewed the practice with scepticism or bemusement: hence the 1814 reference to ‘a most remarkable phenomenon’. But that latter phrase (along with the revulsion at ‘the ghastly contents’ of the jug) may in part be the product not just of educated society, but of the post-Enlightenment world per se. We know that a number of highly learned men (including Robert Boyle, c.1685) took blood therapies seriously.

  Nor is this the only important point we should make about the (perceived) division between literate and popular culture. Perched far above such habits, in the safe and sanitised twenty-first century, we are in danger of forgetting something quite basic. Even if blood-drinking had been merely the preserve of the illiterate, this would not permit us to automatically sweep it away, with a dismissive gesture, into the shadowy netherlands of popular magic and superstition. To put the point one way: most people were illiterate and uneducated, and this was the way in which most people saw the world. To put it another way: most of our ancestors were illiterate, and believed these kinds of things. If we were transported back there, we would believe them, and we would be likely to try and drink human blood if we suffered from the then frightening and highly tabooed condition known as the falling-sickness or ‘sacred disease’.70

  And – whatever the observer of 1814 may have felt – we would have been attempting it until quite late on in the nineteenth century. The practice certainly went back some way. Kathy Stuart details a scene from ‘an early sixteenth-century execution in Swabia’, where ‘a vagrant grabbed the beheaded body “before it had fallen, and drank the blood from him, and they say he was cured of the falling sickness from it”’. (This account, incidentally, shows no obvious sign of revulsion, and derives from an aristocratic family chronicle.)71 Evans, meanwhile, cites just a few of the ‘numerous reports of this practice’, starting with Nuremberg in 1674, where ‘the blood of executed
criminals was caught in a cup as it spurted from the severed neck’, and which fluid was indeed reported (by an obviously literate observer) to have made various epileptics ‘“healthy and healed”’. There, as in Dresden in 1731 and 1755, Evans rightly infers that the blood was sold by the executioner, confirming this when he finds that, in Mainz in 1802, eyewitnesses saw ‘the executioner’s servants’ catching ‘the blood in a beaker’ before ‘some of the onlookers drank it as a cure for epilepsy’.72

  Whilst the custom was still common throughout the 1820s in Germany, an interesting variation appears during a Stockhausen execution of 1843. ‘Six epileptics, equipped with drinking-mugs, had gathered round the scaffold, but the officials refused them access to the blood on the advice of a medical specialist, who told them it had no effect on the disease’. But a court official, by contrast, ‘took pity on them and secured a certification from two professors at the nearby University of Gottingen that drinking the blood could have a beneficial psychological effect’. This incident is interesting because it suggests that – whether due to suggestion or otherwise – epileptics were sometimes cured by drinking blood. It also shows that, around mid-century, there was by no means a general revulsion at such habits on the part of educated and powerful authorities – something confirmed by trouble-free instances in Franconia in 1854, and Göttingen in 1858. In the latter case, epileptics stood close by the scaffold, having ‘“handed the [executioner’s] assistants glass vessels in which the assistants caught the blood as it bubbled over”’ before giving it to the patients, ‘“who drank it immediately”’. The educated or powerful were still co-operating with the practice come 1861, when workhouse governors in Hanau ‘gave an epileptic inmate permission to attend a nearby execution’, actively ‘advising her to drink three mouthfuls of warm blood from the dead malefactor’s corpse’. In Berlin in 1864 the executioner’s assistants were allegedly selling blood-soaked handkerchiefs, whilst actual drinking was recorded at a Marburg execution of 1865.73