Mummies, Cannibals and Vampires

by Richard Sugg

  As with that slow process of trade and familiarity which, in Browne’s words, caused mummy to become merchandise, the identity of patient and drug comes about only after an unusually long period of digestion and assimilation. Even then the merging of the two is portrayed obliquely, with criticism or blame being shifted onto those who are either fading to the edge of society through sheer physical age, or who fail to quite follow tacit laws about just how the elderly should behave. Yet the identity is now there, in a way that it rarely was before. The long habit of swallowing human flesh has finally produced a definite physiological effect – as if the patient and the source material have begun to blur or fuse together. Mummy has, in more senses than one, finally come of age.

  In the cases of both beating and age, mummy rhetoric must have been finely balanced between cause and effect. That is: mummy was now sufficiently familiar, sufficiently demystified, to lend itself to the first wave of these quips, from the late 1660s and onwards. As time went on, such rhetoric – not only read, but heard upon the stage – must necessarily have conditioned attitudes to mummy, and probably to corpse medicine more generally, thus cementing the irreverence which had given rise to the earliest of these jokes from the likes of Duffett and Dryden.

  In saying this, however, one has to discriminate to some extent between mummy and mummies. If mummy itself, as relatively anonymous material used for hard-headed practical ends, now grew more degraded in literary and dramatic uses, mummies were perhaps slowly beginning to enjoy rather more dignity than in previous decades. (Even in quips about aged ‘human mummies’, the mummy does at least occasionally cease to be a mere collective noun, moving some way from commodity to artefact, or even person.) They were, as suggested above, starting to shift from typically being something to someone. And the novelty of this new status could be quite precisely registered. In Duffett’s 1678 comedy Psyche Debauched, for example, a character vaunting whoredom over matrimony vows, ‘I will revive the Sect of Adamites, renew the Family of Love, and make the slavery of marriage so out of fashion, that a man and wife shall be showed about, and wondered at as much as an hermaphrodite, an entire Egyptian mummy, or a cat with two tails’.70 Here the cause of wonder is not mummy, but ‘an entire Egyptian mummy’ – something still sufficiently unusual, at this point, to be worth gaping at.

  Come the mid-1680s, the dilettante playwright Sir Francis Fane also thought that this was the case. In 1686 Fane published a tragedy called The Sacrifice. This play, set in China, features not only a decidedly lame incarnation of Tamburlaine, but a whole chamber full of mummies. Plotting to murder Tamburlaine, a character called Ragalzan seeks the aid of ‘a mummy-priest’ – an eastern religious official whom Ragalzan himself derides as an essentially fraudulent guardian of mysteries. The would-be assassin is disguised as a mummy, and then hides in ‘an amphitheatre of crowned mummies’. This itself is part of a temple, and is disclosed only some way into the scene, presumably with an attempt at dramatic effect. With the audience aware that Ragalzan is lurking there disguised, Tamburlaine, his daughter Irene, and his general Axalla stand alone viewing these wonders. Irene, seemingly as well travelled as her restless father, remarks that ‘These mummies are more curious and magnificent/Than those we saw at Cairo’, to which Axalla:

  And much more numerous:

  Which answers not amiss, to the prodigious space

  Of time, supposed by their chronology.

  There follow some tedious speeches on fame, glory, and mortality, after which, ‘Enter mummy priest, habited like a conjurer’. Elaborating on the ‘prodigious … chronology’, this worthy begs:

  Greatest of emperors, draw near, and see

  The richest wardrobe of mortality

  The world affords: Here stand time-daring mummies

  Of China monarchs for ten thousand years.

  Although less than reverent of these artefacts and their alleged age, Tamburlaine and Axalla sound rather more like doubtful Western Christians than the impatient men of action invented by Marlowe:

  Tam.

  What a canting tone,

  And what a monstrous tale!

  Ax.

  They’ve long traditions;

  And lie by old records as well as hear-says.

  Tam.

  No, no. Printing has been here in use some thousand

  of years, no wonder they have so many lies.

  For pious Christians, ‘ten thousand years’ had to be a lie. Some years after Ussher’s calculation of the age of the world and the date of Creation, Fane very probably knew that, whether Chinese or Egyptian, mummies were simply not allowed to be more than 6,000 years old. The priest goes on to describe these various princely mummies: one built a university, one invented printing, another gunpowder, and so on. When Tamburlaine asks, ‘Are all your princes then philosophers?’, the priest responds:

  No. But whosoever finds an admirable art,

  Is straight made governor of some wealthy province,

  And his invention is ascribed unto

  The king, whose reign he lived in.

  This tour and associated explanations are prolonged for some time – presumably so as to build up suspense, as the audience is at once expecting one of the mummies to pounce on Tamburlaine, yet also evidently unsure which of them is actually the disguised assassin, Ragalzan.

  Finally, with the priest pointing out ‘the great Tzionzon, builder of the Wall’, Irene remarks, ‘He stares, and turns about his head. Oh horrid!’. ‘Tis strange!’ agrees Tamburlaine (perhaps rather mildly, in the circumstances). With no less improbability the mummy priest responds

  Marvel not, sir; ’tis usual with him:

  He seems offended at your conquests here

  after which, ‘Ragalzan leaps down, stabs at Tamerlane: Irene interposes. He and the priest leap down the trap-door’ (Stage Direction).71

  At one level, it is surely no small irony that, after having been so rudely plundered in order to treat wounds all those decades, the mummy should now take his revenge by seeking to inflict one. In this case treatment is not required, however, as by remarkable luck the blow has merely struck Irene’s bracelet, thus averting injury to either father or daughter. At another level, we can add that we here encounter perhaps the first English dramatisation of the uncanny qualities of the mummy – ones which were to be exploited vigorously in later epochs, and which even now arguably take second place only to the vampire. True, the key mummy here is a human impostor. But in Fane’s imagination this quality must have been offset by the audience’s uncertainty as to just who or what was going to suddenly jolt out of the frozen shadows of Time to strike the blow. In this sense, then, the play effectively foreshadows the uncanny shiver generated by those later fantasy mummies, who somehow cheated not only decay but death itself, rising when it suited them to avenge their violated tombs.

  At this point, the present author must reveal his own dramatic sleight of hand. Whilst I have deliberately invited the reader to imagine the staging of Fane’s play, it was in fact never acted. This may indeed have been just because the presentation of this formidable chamber of mummies was considered prohibitively troublesome or expensive. There again, it may have just been due to Fane’s ‘“having long since devoted himself to a country life, and wanting patience to attend the leisure of the stage”’.72 But there seems to be no doubt that Fane had at some point intended the play to be acted (as his comedy, Love in the Dark, had been in 1675). When writing, he took the unusual step of placing a mummy (whether mentioned or seen) in a tragedy rather than a comedy, thus clearly assuming that the sight of a mummy could generate awe and terror, even if the reference to some mummy was now typically the stuff of abusive low comedy.

  Three quite distinctive references to corpse medicine take us up to the eighteenth century. First, we have a long poem by the Royalist clergyman Robert Dixon. In Dixon’s Canidia, or, The Witches, the eponymous women of darkness boast of how

  In laboratories’ zealous fire,

 
The chymists’ limbics we inspire,

  To firk up salts, fixed or volatil,

  Spirits of silver, gold and steel,

  Sulphur and mercury dance in a wheel;

  Egyptian mummies, and the moss

  Of dead-men’s skulls purged from dross;

  Elixirs, quintessential draughts,

  Raising sallets, and such like crafts.73

  Taken alone, these lines look like a sharply critical inversion of those Paracelsian chemists who in fact usually prided themselves on their piety, and for whom chemistry and alchemy were tightly bound up with the numinous essences that God had locked up within ordinary earthly matter. The tone is at one level satirical, whilst at another it is the witches (and thus also the Devil) who are responsible for any successes which these chemists have.74 That impression seems to be reinforced when Dixon elsewhere cites the old rumour that syphilis had been caused by cannibalism:

  Is the pox an American disease,

  Or came it rather from the Genovese?

  Who barrelled up Venetian mummy

  And sold it to them again for tunny?

  And so they got both pox and money.75

  Overall, the poem’s several references to mummy are more negative than positive (as when one group of witches has ‘lank breasts, lean arms, with wrizzled flanks,/And mummy hips, and shrunk up shanks’).76 But when the speaker asks the witches to explain various perennial mysteries, such as ‘Why carcasses buried in the sand,/Never corrupt in mummy land’, when ‘whole caravans’ stuff, flesh and bone/Of man and beast’, are ‘turned into stone’ he is more or less neutral, and nowhere in the poem is there an overt attack on corpse medicine, or any closer association with cannibalism than that seen above.

  This association is made unusually plain by Robert Boyle. In 1665 Boyle published a set of philosophical dialogues between two characters, named Eugenius and Lindamor. Partially dramatised in the manner of Plato, these featured a conversation sparked when the two sat amongst a group eating oysters. Wondering why Lindamor alone is not partaking of these, Eugenius is told: ‘whilst I saw such persons so gustfully swallow these extolled fishes, the sight lead me to take more notice than perhaps you have done of the strange power of education and custom’. Lindamor has been prompted, he further explains, to consider ‘how forward we are to think other nations absurd or barbarous for such practices, that either the same, or little better, may be found unscrupled at among our selves’. Because of his travels, he adds, ‘I am not forward to deride … the practice of any people for being new, and am not apt to think, their customs must be therefore worse than ours, because they widely differ from them’. He then turns to the notoriously raw behaviour of American tribes such as the Ouetecas: ‘we impute it for a barbarous custom to many nations of the Indians, that like beasts they eat raw flesh. And pray, how much is that worse than our eating raw fish, as we do in eating these oysters?’ Nor, he emphasises, ‘is this a practice of the rude vulgar only, but of the politest and nicest persons among us, such as physicians, divines, and even ladies. And our way of eating seems much more barbarous than theirs, since they are wont to kill before they eat, but we scruple not to devour oysters alive’.

  Presently this essay in cultural relativism reaches that most glaring blindspot of early modern Christendom: ‘among the savagest barbarians’, notes Lindamor, ‘we count the cannibals’. Admitting that, ‘as for those among them that kill men to eat them, their inhumane cruelty cannot be too much detested’, he adds, ‘but to count them so barbarous merely upon the score of feeding on man’s flesh and blood, is to forget that woman’s milk, by which alone we feed our sucking children, is, according to the received opinion, but blanched blood; and that mummy is one of the usual medicines commended and given by our physicians for falls and bruises, and in other cases too’. Moreover, ‘if we plead that we use not mummy for food, but physic, the Indians may easily answer, that by our way of using man’s flesh, we do oftentimes but protract sickness and pain, whereas they by theirs maintain their health and vigour’.

  Just what are we to make of this rare moment of European candour? Although a very few critics had, before this, explicitly described corpse medicines as cannibalistic, the closest precise parallel with Boyle’s reflections seems to be Montaigne – a forerunner who is indeed a very good match for the enlightened relativism of the dialogue as a whole. At the time Boyle writes, he and Montaigne seem to be alone in having overtly attacked European hypocrisy on the issue of cannibalism.77 Although we could split the details of this criticism in various ways, I will here divide it into the categories of blood and flesh.

  In the first case, we find Boyle ingeniously raising the question of ‘blood-cannibalism’ long before routine blood transfusions had made the subject a matter of occasional debate.78 As noted in chapter one, the charge regarding milk made more sense in a medical world where all bodily fluids were finally variants of blood. If it may seem whimsical for all that, we should recall, too, the outrage prompted by Alfred Gell in Papua New Guinea, when the Umeda saw him unthinkingly thrust his cut finger into his mouth. For a people who would never dream of even chewing their own nails, this was a significant act of auto-cannibalism.79

  Within the context of corpse medicine, however, Boyle’s remarks on blood and milk are not merely avant-garde, but oddly puzzling. He himself, after all, was frequently using blood for experiments of various kinds. Given the broad reflectiveness of the oyster dialogue, these trials alone could well have fallen under Lindamor’s critical eye. But clearly more pertinent still were those preparations of blood used for medicine – something which, as Boyle himself confessed, bred ‘insuperable aversion’ in certain clients. Why then pick on milk, rather than blood medicines? The two are remarkably similar, even down to the fact that both are essentially processed forms of blood: the one altered by nature, the other by the chemist’s art. Hence, having questioned the drinking of human milk, Boyle could not very easily defend blood medicine by claiming that it was cooked, as opposed to raw, cannibalism. In this light, we might begin to wonder if his defence of the ‘barbarous Indian custom’ of eating ‘raw flesh’ is an unconscious form of apology for a European hypocrisy which is not merely general, but very closely associated with himself in particular. This might explain why he once again turns back to raw feeding after discussion of mummy, noting that ‘as the highest degree of brutishness, our travellers mention the practice of the Soldanians at the Cape of Good Hope, who not only eat raw meat, but, if they be hungry, eat the guts and all of their cattle, with the dung in them’. To this Lindamor answers (among other things) that ‘I know several among us, (and perhaps some fair Ladies too) that to prevent the scurvy and the gout, drink their own or boy’s urine’, whilst peacocks’ and dogs’ dung are ‘commonly given to patients of all sorts and qualities against sore throats’.

  Boyle’s handling of mummy seems more straightforward. It reinforces our impression that the distinction between physic and food was an important one, and that (Fuller notwithstanding) it remained a viable one in the 1660s. For Boyle does not – like Fuller – question that distinction itself. Rather, he tries to argue that physic is no better than food, and perhaps worse (‘by our way of using man’s flesh, we do oftentimes but protract sickness and pain, whereas they by theirs maintain their health and vigour’). It is probably significant that Boyle makes these impressively shrewd and enlightened remarks in a work which is generically distinct from his medical or chemical writings. Such a criticism notably arises in a book specially devoted to probing what is not normally discussed by educated Christians. It does not naturally, automatically arise when Boyle is talking about medicinal cannibalism in scientific contexts. It also seems important that the tone of the Occasional Reflections is largely just that – reflective, and gently provocative, rather than violently indignant or in any way prescriptive. It seems on the whole designed to make a few people think differently, not to make everyone act differently. For all that, we cannot help but be impressed
by a mode of thought so like that of a late twentieth-century anthropologist; one which freely admits that ‘most nations in styling one another’s manners extravagant and absurd, are guided more by education and partiality than reason’, and that ‘we laugh at many customs of strangers only because we never were bred to them, and prize many of our own only because we never considered them’.80 Here, at last, was an early modern author who could nod with genuine understanding if the Wari’ had replied to him, ‘thus was our custom’.

  Our third case takes us close to the end of the seventeenth century. Around its midst, we found the ambivalent Thomas Fuller ready to fill in some of the typically blank space which lay between the plunderings of Cairo and the wounded or bruised bodies of European mummy patients. He imagined various fragments of the mummy ransacked from the quiet tomb, and presently ‘tumbled and tossed’ upon the waves before being ‘buried in the bellies of other men’. Around 1693, the baronet Sir Samuel Morland probed that space in yet more obsessive and lurid detail. Morland deliberately chose three cases of complex bodily dispersal, so as to insist that no such problems could finally obstruct the omnipotence of God in the process of Resurrection. He talked of a man eaten by fishes, and another devoured in a forest by animals, in both cases mingling these initial acts of consumption with further levels of the food chain. Thirdly, he asked his readers to

  suppose a man-child born into the world, and (as ’tis believed) the flesh of that infant, in a few years, to be evaporated, and new flesh grown up in the room of the other; and let us suppose this body to live and change for the space of threescore or fourscore years, and then be buried in the sands, (as is practised in some very hot countries) and there remain a thousand or fifteen hundred years, till such time, as it is grown perfectly dry, and fit to be made use of for mummy; and this mummy to be distributed into the hands of several hundreds of apothecaries, and each of these apothecaries to make use of it in their physical doses, potions, or otherwise, and to administer it to as many hundreds of their patients, and each of those patients to void the same, or any part of it, by stool and those stools to be carried away by the scavengers, into some common place, and there mingled with the ordures of ten thousand other persons, and from that place taken up by the salt-petre men and converted into gun-powder, and that powder shot away into the air.81