Mummy

For seventy days the body lay in the dry heat of the embalmers’ workshop, packed to the shoulders in natron salt, giving up its water the slow way fruit does. The men who worked over it moved without hurry, their hands sharp with the smell of myrrh and cedar resin, and one of them wore the black jackal mask of Anubis so that the god of the dead might be said to stand at the table himself. What they were making was not a corpse. It was a house.

A person, in Egyptian understanding, was more than one thing. There was the ka, the vital double that survived death and needed feeding; there was the ba, the personality, winged and free to travel; and both had to come home each night to something they recognised. If the flesh rotted away, the soul would find no place to land, and the promised eternity would collapse into a second and final death. Preservation, then, was not vanity or squeamishness about decay. It was salvation, purchased in salt and linen.

The work was exact and unlovely. Herodotus, who watched Egyptian embalmers ply their trade in the fifth century BCE, described how the best of them drew the brain out through the nostrils with a hooked piece of iron, opened the left flank with a blade of sharp Ethiopian stone, and lifted out the organs to be dried and sealed in canopic jars, each jar stoppered with the head of one of the four sons of Horus. The emptied cavity was rinsed with palm wine, packed with bruised myrrh and cassia, and sewn shut. Then came the natron, and the long wait, and at the end of it the wrapping: bandage over bandage of fine linen, smeared with gum, until the shape of the person was lost inside a smooth pale cocoon.

One ritual remained, and it is the one that matters most here. Before the sealed coffin went into the ground, priests performed the Opening of the Mouth, touching the face of the mummy with an adze and a fishtail blade called the pesesh-kef, restoring by magic the senses the body had lost. Now it could see, breathe, speak, and eat in the world to come. The mummy was meant to live again. Not to shuffle and strangle, but to wake as a blessed thing in the image of Osiris, whole and justified before the gods.

A real mummy is a quiet object. The skin goes the colour of old leather and shrinks against the skull until the teeth show; the wrappings darken to amber where the resin soaked through; the whole thing weighs almost nothing, so that a grown man can be lifted like a bundle of reeds. There is nothing in it that wants to rise. And yet this silent, weightless husk became one of the most reliable monsters the West ever built, and it happened late, and it happened mostly in England.

The turn began with wonder rather than fear. The Egyptian Hall opened on Piccadilly in 1821, and through the 1830s fashionable Londoners paid to watch real mummies unwrapped on stage, the bandages coming away by lamplight while a lecturer narrated. Crowds pressed into the British Museum to see the dead of a vanished empire laid out in glass. The cultural historian Roger Luckhurst traced the whole idea of the mummy’s curse to this period and this place, not to any papyrus from the Nile. The curse is a Victorian invention wearing an ancient costume.

Fiction supplied the shape. Jane C. Loudon’s novel The Mummy!, published in 1827, put a reanimated pharaoh into a far-future England, brought back by something like electricity rather than any spell. Louisa May Alcott wrote of a cursed mummy seed. Then Arthur Conan Doyle, in Lot No. 249 from 1892, gave the genre its lasting engine: a scholar who revives a mummy and looses it, lumbering and murderous, on his enemies in the dark of an Oxford college. Bram Stoker followed with The Jewel of Seven Stars in 1903. Piece by piece the writers assembled a creature the embalmers would not have recognised.

Reality then handed the legend its greatest gift. In 1922 Howard Carter opened the almost untouched tomb of Tutankhamun; the following spring his patron, Lord Carnarvon, died in Cairo of blood poisoning after an infected mosquito bite, and the newspapers, hungry and delighted, declared the pharaoh had reached out of the grave to take him. The story ran and ran. There was no curse carved anywhere in the tomb. Of the twenty-six people present at the opening, only six died within the decade, and Carter, who had done the actual disturbing and was surely the curse’s obvious target, lived on until 1939.

None of this slowed the myth, because in 1932 Universal fixed it in the eye forever. Karl Freund’s film The Mummy, from a script by John Balderston, gave the world Imhotep, a priest mummified alive and woken by the reading of a sacred scroll, walking the modern world to reclaim a woman he had loved three thousand years before. Where the studio had adapted Dracula and Frankenstein from books, here it more or less invented its own mythology, the dead who walk, and the bandaged silhouette dragging one leg has never left the screen since.

The mummy’s power, in the form the world remembers, is patience. It does not need to run. The curse reaches across centuries to find the man who forced the seal, and the revenant that carries it cannot be bargained with, frightened off, or permanently outrun; it simply keeps coming, and in many tales it answers only to the scroll that raised it. Its weaknesses are the mirror of that strength. It is slow, stiff, and easily burned, tethered to its tomb and its purpose, undone in film after film by fire or by the destruction of the spell that animates it. And the curse itself dissolves the moment anyone counts the bodies. The one real hazard a sealed tomb holds is smaller and stranger than vengeance: the mould and bacteria that can wait, alive, in a shut chamber for a very long time.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is a mummy?

A mummy is a dead body deliberately preserved against decay, most famously by the embalmers of ancient Egypt. In Egyptian belief the preserved body served as the eternal home of the person’s soul, which needed an intact form to return to in the afterlife. In modern Western folklore and horror, the mummy is instead an undead monster that rises from its tomb to punish those who disturb it.

Why did the ancient Egyptians mummify their dead?

The ancient Egyptians mummified their dead so the soul would have a recognisable body to inhabit forever. They believed a person was made of several parts, including the ka (life force) and the ba (personality), which had to reunite with the preserved corpse to survive death. If the body rotted, the soul was thought to face a second and permanent death.

How were mummies made?

Egyptian embalmers removed the internal organs, storing them in canopic jars, and drew the brain out through the nose, as the Greek historian Herodotus described. The body was then dried for around seventy days in natron salt, packed with myrrh and other spices, and wrapped in many layers of resin-soaked linen. A final ritual called the Opening of the Mouth was performed to restore the dead person’s senses for the afterlife.

Is the mummy’s curse real?

No ancient Egyptian curse has been found that supports the popular legend. The idea took shape in nineteenth-century England, driven by public mummy unwrappings and horror fiction, and exploded after Lord Carnarvon died in 1923 following the opening of Tutankhamun’s tomb. Only six of the twenty-six people present at the opening died within ten years, and Howard Carter, who led the excavation, lived until 1939.

Where does the walking, reanimated mummy come from?

The reanimated mummy of horror is a modern invention rather than an ancient myth. Writers such as Jane C. Loudon, Arthur Conan Doyle, and Bram Stoker developed the idea across the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and Universal’s 1932 film The Mummy fixed the image of the bandaged undead who walks to reclaim a lost love. Genuine Egyptian belief expected the mummy to be reborn as a blessed soul, not to shamble after the living.

Related Entries

Anubis, Osiris, Isis, Ra, Set, Sekhmet, Imhotep, Sphinx, Scarab, Ba, Zombie, Draugr, Revenant, Ghoul, Jiangshi, Lich, Bast (Bastet)