Mummies, Cannibals and Vampires

by Richard Sugg

  The Restoration

  Open Hostility

  We can assume that, by the time he wrote of his experiences in Vienna, Thomas Browne’s son, Edward, had read Hydriotaphia. For all that, even when confronted with the startling spectacle of a man gulping blood from a body in the throes of death, Browne the younger does not directly attack this therapy. Rather, having noted how, ‘I have read of some who have approved the same medicine; and heard of others who have done the like in Germany’, he then adds, ‘but many physicians have, in all times, abominated that medicine’. Perhaps so: but what does Browne himself think? We are not told. The hint may be subtle, but it is consistent with what had gone before in attitudes to corpse medicine. Implicitly, Browne seems to defer to medical authority, even when seeking condemnation; it is what physicians think about this that matters most. Edward himself was to become a fully fledged physician; we can only assume that, in his youth, he imagines himself to lack sufficient experience or training to make his own clear judgement.

  If Edward Browne is at once uneasy and yet equivocal, he is nevertheless about as openly hostile as any British author between 1660 and 1700. Boyle, in his 1683 Memoires for the Natural History of Human Blood, admits that ‘many have a strong aversion, and some an insuperable, though groundless abhorrency, from medicines made of man’s blood’. Groundless though this may be, it is sufficiently potent and widespread to prompt Boyle to experiment with deer’s blood as a possible alternative.48 Without letting us know who these patients might be, Boyle confirms the persistent gap between practitioners and certain of their clients, underlining the divide quite nicely via his own airy dismissal of such qualms (‘groundless abhorrency’). As we saw in chapter two, the woman who had seemed to respond so well to blood therapy had had this remedy given her under a false name.49 Given the apparently spectacular results in that case, we can well imagine that Boyle could easily square the duplicity with his conscience.

  Similarly, the Lichfield physician Sir John Floyer has no ethical qualms himself about ‘mummy, or other putrid parts of animals’ (such as skulls), being merely concerned, at a technical level, to warn readers that ‘all putrid things are very unwholesome in our diet’. At another level, he recognises the opinion of Theophrastus, that ‘the foetor gives us an aversion’ to such treatments; hence, one ‘should always avoid giving mummy, or other putrid parts of animals … to those who have a violent aversion, especially if we smell their putrid … odour’.50 Besides having some concern about the material effects of mummy, Floyer here is notably just humouring the delicacy of certain patients in a similar way to Boyle. There is no outright objection to medicinal cannibalism as a phenomenon.51

  Ambivalence

  Trade makes all things common … 52

  If we compare this neat little aphorism from Du Bartas with Thomas Browne’s pithy summation (‘mummy is become merchandise’) we have a very useful key with which to approach the coded but consistent literary references to mummy found after 1660. In a sense, one of the most interesting things about Browne’s phrase is this: it was only in 1658 that a writer could so plainly say something which had arguably been very obvious for at least several decades. In the ambivalent literary references before the Restoration, one recurrent factor was an implied gap between the attitudes of physicians, and those of patients or other members of the public. At times this gap is a matter of discomfort for non-medical personnel; at others it more basically involves the sense that mummy is arcane or unfamiliar for some members of the public. As the Restoration period progresses, mummy increasingly becomes markedly over-familiar (especially to ardent playgoers). And in most literary usages, this is a familiarity which is marked by varying degrees of contempt.

  There must be a number of reasons for this new status. First, we should not underestimate the general demystifying effects of the English Revolution and the regicide – events which radically subverted the old aura around monarchy, for example, and the power of religion to hold back the advances of nascent science. Secondly, mummy was necessarily bound to become at least slightly more familiar over time, however it was treated by those involved in its use. But the fact remains that one of the chief ways in which mummy was familiarised was through its status as a valuable commodity. When du Bartas remarks that ‘trade makes all things common’ he implies two possible effects on a substance such as mummy. On one hand, the normalising, levelling powers of the mercantile world could initially work to defuse the charge of strangeness or taboo which hovered about corpse medicine. At one level mummy was just another commodity, no more offensive than molasses or myrrh. But in the longer term, as mummy was levelled down to the point of degradation, we reach the stage where more coded jibes about profit and commerce (‘sell us for mummy’ and so forth) crystallise into Browne’s unequivocal four words. And it perhaps is not going too far to hear a subtle emphasis on the word ‘become’. It is not just that mummy has ‘become merchandise’ since the trade became especially viable in the sixteenth century. Rather, in a more oblique but real sense, the several decades of this commerce mean that mummy has become merchandise in a quite special way by 1658. It has been turned into merchandise, by this stage, in a way that it was not in (say) 1590. For some decades it was both a commodity and a partly separate entity, an object of wonder and admiration. But when Browne writes Hydriotaphia, mummy has become, for some observers, nothing but merchandise. Where once the long alchemy of time had elevated human flesh into something faintly numinous, the corrosive acids of trade have now reversed the process.

  Jonson had captured the early stages of that process particularly well back in Poetaster in 1601. In chapter three we heard the merchant Albius criticised by his wife Chloe for a narrow focus on trade. Albius responds: ‘upbraid me not with that: “Gain savours sweetly from any thing; 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”’. By ‘balsamum’ Albius almost certainly means mummy; and in juxtaposing this with the lowly ‘tar-barrel’ he is not merely offering a general contrast, but very probably inviting the reader to suspect of him readily making or dealing in counterfeit mummy, prepared with ordinary pitch. Whilst in du Bartas’ phrase, ‘common’ perhaps carries a relatively neutral tone (as in ‘shared’ or ‘general’), we can well imagine that Jonson, like Chloe, had a certain disdain for ‘common little men’ such as Albius.

  Albius’s real-life counterparts do indeed seem to have made mummy quite negatively common by the time of Charles II. Occasionally, we hear of an intact mummy, a wondrous artefact with some status as an individual. The king himself had ‘an entire Egyptian mummy with all the hieroglyphics and scutcheons upon it’ presented to him on Friday 20 December 1661 ‘at Whitehall by Captain Hurst, who lately brought it into England from the Libyan sands’. And this artefact, supposedly ‘the body of a princely young Lady’ preserved at least 2,500 years, could also be seen ‘by any person of quality, who is delighted in such curiosities, at the sign of the Hand and Comb near Essex house in the Strand’.53 But, if you were a playwright or a playgoer, your attitude was likely to be far less reverent or wondering than this advertisement might imply. Even without recalling that Pepys saw his first mummy in a warehouse, we can infer from dramatic references that mummies now were, almost overwhelmingly, the stuff of derisive wit and low comedy.

  Mummy in Restoration Literature and Drama

  We have seen that pre-Restoration literature could show considerable ambivalence towards corpse medicine. But from 1660, references in non-medical texts display a particularly clear shift of attitude. All the uses of mummy which we encounter in plays, poems, and fictional prose are negative ones. It is probably also significant that most are comic.54 Instances generally fall into one of two groups. First: while dramatic characters had previously imagined themselves or their victims being made into mummy or sold for it, it seems to be only from the start of the Restoration that people risk being ‘beaten i
nto mummy’. The phrase presently grows so common as to be more or less proverbial, and seems to have been a good deal more popular than the now familiar ‘beat to a jelly’. It probably implies a victim beaten to the colour of mummy; possibly also the texture too – and evidently with a more general sense of human flesh in its most radically altered form.55

  Why else was this particular threat so popular in this period? Firstly, we find that four instances of beating or threatened beating explicitly involve master–servant relations, with a fifth concerning a threat from a ‘gentleman’ to a ‘foolish citizen’, and a sixth involving the poor in general. The implicit sense of ownership and commodification thus conferred on mummy is especially clear when a character in John Dryden’s 1668 play Sir Martin Mar-All remarks of his servant, ‘An’ I had a mind to beat him to mummy, he’s my own, I hope’.56 In a different but related way, it would have been taken for granted by many readers or viewers that this was a spontaneous, dishonourable form of violence, at the furthest remove from the ritualised, honourable combat of duelling. In Mary Pix’s 1697 comedy, The Innocent Mistress, an irate master underlines this point, proposing to his servant to ‘kick thee into mummy, for though my sword’s drawn, I scorn to hurt thee that way’.57 Despite this ostensible condescension, the trend ultimately indicates a need to reassert status boundaries which had been fatally damaged by the revolution.

  Popular as such threats are in Restoration plays, they often vary so little as to provide scant clue as to other possible implications of this new expression. It must be significant in some way that particular living people (other than criminals) are now so frequently imagined as potential material for medicine. This shift may in part reflect the spread of Paracelsian mummy recipes from the forties onwards, given that in those cases the unwilling donors were indeed the recently dead. But most basic of all to this new rhetoric is one particular trait. To beat somebody into mummy is, in effect, to get much closer to them than one would by merely threatening to sell them. It is here especially that we see the indirect effects of that ‘trade’ which ‘makes all things common’. People in general now feel much closer to mummy than did those who, like Greaves, wondered reverently at the culture of the ancient Egyptians. The actors of the Restoration stage are very far from being stunned into a reverent dream of times past, or time suspended. Another way of saying this is to see that, after 1660, anyone can make mummy; just kick your servant or your enemy hard enough, and you have in a few moments what once alchemised itself across centuries into a drily statuesque artefact.

  One further way of glossing all the mummy beatings of the era is to imagine that – not unlike Fuller – such authors have jumped the fence of authority behind which corpse physicians had previously sheltered. In this latter case, it is not so much that they rip up the veil of mystification, as that (like good Restoration virtuosi) they break into the laboratory and begin pounding up Egyptian imports in the mortar themselves. Even Egyptian mummy, after all, had to be beaten or at least crumbled if it was to be spread on plasters or swallowed in liquids. Occasionally an author comes unintentionally close to the precise mechanics of processing, as when Sir Peregrine Bubble (‘credulous fond cuckold’ and eponymous spouse of Thomas D’Urfey’s The Fond Husband) ironically swears: ‘My bed! my bed is my castle; and, by the Lord Harry, he that violates it but with a look, my fist shall crush him into mummy’.58 Here the verb more realistically offers us, not a mere bruising, but something much nearer the behaviour of mummy when powdered or crumbled into the constituent atoms which allow it to be mixed and drunk.

  The second popular usage compares the old or prematurely aged with ‘mummy’ or ‘a mummy’.59 We have seen that the dryness of mummy had been proverbial for some time. Yet interestingly, in past decades it did not often prompt this kind of rhetorical twist. As I have argued, it may indeed have helped to distance mummified bodies from the repellently viscous corruption of ordinary decaying corpses. What we seem to find with this new category is that it implicitly degrades both the person abused, and the mummified body itself. In this way, it contrasts sharply with that Paracelsian thought which in fact elevated the medical potency of any corpse into something semi-divine. (Indeed, just thirty odd years since, George Wither had managed, without the influence of Paracelsianism, to equate self-mummification with the most potent spiritual ephiphanies.) To put it another way: in popular theatre mummies are now negatively, rather than positively ancient.60

  Restoration comedy being what it is, such rhetoric lends itself especially well to the horror of young women faced with ancient suitors. In The Loving Enemies in 1680, the young Lucinda rebels against the prospect of a husband no more than ‘an history incarnate, true annals writ upon a skeleton’, demanding of her father, ‘and what then, go to bed with this rotten chronicle? no he shall lie covered with cobwebs first. I don’t intend to embalm matrimonial mummy, to spoil the apothecary’s trade, and fill my closet with gally-pots’.61 In 1696 even a lowly serving girl, Ansilva, recoils at Gerardo, ‘a lover of threescore’ who will come to her arms ‘all wrapt up in sear-cloth like a mummy – my imagination sickens at it … ’.62 In Elkanah Settle’s opera The World in the Moon Jacintha tells the aged alderman Sir Dottrel Fondlove in no uncertain terms that he is ‘a scarecrow to flesh and blood; an antidote to love’, one who ‘hast been dead to womankind these fifty years’ and ‘buried in searcloth and flannel threescore’, before demanding:

  Does thy cozening lawyer want a memento mori?

  The scrivener dried parchment for thy mortgages?

  Thy surgeon want a skeleton? thy ’pothecary a mummy?

  And thy brother Belzebub a broker’s shop?

  Thy lumber-house of antiquity would furnish ’em all.63

  But this extra charge of (intra-generational) antipathy is by no means de rigeur for such abuse. In 1674 a servant, Sanco-Panco, is derided as ‘some Egyptian mummy preserv’d/By a petrifying vapour’ – one who moves ‘as if he/Had no soul’; while Sanco-Panco’s aged and deformed mistress, Strega, is described as ‘Arabian mummy’.64 By the later seventeenth century we can hear in a private letter of how, ‘on Tuesday last, that walking piece of English mummy, that Sybil incarnate, I mean my Lady Courtall, who has not had one tooth in her head, since King Charles’s Restoration, and looks old enough to pass for Venerable Bede’s grandmother, was married – could you believe it? – to young Lisanio … ‘.65 As well as redressing the gender balance a little as regards such marriages, these lines suggest that this rhetoric began to pass from stage wit into more or less common speech as the century neared its end.

  Not only that, but the joke had become so oft repeated as to be itself a venerable piece of antiquity. Whilst that letter writer effectively signals this in his briskness of phrasing, by 1689 Thomas Shadwell had already flung a jibe at the stale habits of weak playwrights, having the aptly named Oldwit rail at his wife and daughter for ‘out-painting all the Christian Jezebels in England’. ‘Pox on’t’, he adds specifically to his wife, ‘you would by art appear a beauty, and are by nature a mere mummy. There’s wit for you again. Gad, I’ll pepper you with wit’.66 In those last two sentences we can clearly perceive Shadwell establishing an ironic distance between himself and the tired quips of certain peers. We might add that, for all his lack of wit, Oldwit here points up a certain truth of his day. When he says, ‘you would by art appear a beauty, and are by nature a mere mummy’ he oddly reverses the way in which the ‘art’ of Egyptian embalmers had been so often perceived to miraculously defy ‘nature’. Yet this seeming oddity is apt – at least as regards the degraded stage mummies of the Restoration. Implicitly, these hybrid entities (part living Europeans, part ancient Egyptians) are now merely the result of natural ageing and decay. In the age of over-familiarised wonders, they are increasingly ordinary.

  A variant on that ironic inversion is found in 1677 in Wycherley’s The Plain Dealer, where a widow tells Major Oldfox, ‘you Major, my walking hospital of an ancient foundation, thou bag of mumm
y … wouldst fall asunder, if ‘twere not for thy sear-cloths’.67 Here we meet an almost complete inversion of the perennial endurance and firmness of mummy (recall Howell: ‘More firm than that hot Lybia’s sands do cake’68). This may be just an accidental result of the great popularity of such jibes. Yet it is also hard not to feel that it again says something about the growing lack of reverence for mummy, or mummies. At least in the English imagination, these durable artefacts are somehow becoming less substantial, even putrefying, some 2,000 years after their deaths. This imaginative decay could not be achieved by just one physical act of violation, or even several. But almost 20 years after Browne, it has begun to occur as a result of an accumulated irreverence. What time could not do, avarice has.69

  We can put this another way if we view such rhetoric in terms not just of its irreverence for long-dead Egyptians, but for those Europeans loosely imagined as dried and ancient mummies whilst still alive. Are such quips, finally, rather more than just a modish (and presently hackneyed) way of sniping at the aged? It is certainly no accident that several of these jibes are aimed at those who (effectively) refuse to lie down and die in the winter of their years. Aspiring to youthful brides or lovers, they acquire just the faintest edge of those uncanny qualities which accrued around the mummy more fully in later eras, doggedly haunting a world which they should really have left long ago. But if we turn back to the medical side of mummy, we also find another coded message bound up in the ravelled sear-cloths and gums of these ancient reprobates. At a quite basic level, this rhetoric identifies living Europeans and dead mummies. Arguably, it does so in a way that was very rarely seen in the earlier decades of a thriving mummy trade. Throughout that period, patients were, in the simplest physiological sense, literally, chemically identified with the mummy which they swallowed, and which became, at least temporarily, part of them. Yet almost no one (including the most vocal critics) overtly stated this. Come the Restoration, that identity is figuratively asserted, time and again, in well-worn jokes about the elderly.