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| People used to eat mummies. |
A while back I discovered that people with lots of money and imagination were eating preserved human bodies to get high, about 200 years ago.
I thank Annick Le Guérer for this tidbit, she wrote about
it in her book Scent, the Mysterious and Essential Powers of Smell, written in
1988, and translated from French in 1994.
There was a time, we must remember, when mummies were a
new thing, never before imagined by the Westerners excavating these
immortalized bodies. It's hard to conjure the pretense of shock at something
that has been around since long before you were born.
For a moment if you will, try to imagine what it would
have been like to learn that deep within the awe-striking pyramidal limestone
masses were 3,000-year old physically intact human bodies. This at a time
before we had refrigerators!
We couldn't even keep a bowl of potato salad from going bad in a couple days,
and here's an entire human body with its skin still intact, and older than the
entire city in which you live.*
That's magic to a person of the 19th century. Today, our tupperware will probably
last longer than our species itself, nevermind the bodies we leave behind. We
have plastic flowers for goodness sake. But if you can transport yourself back
to a time where everything was ephemeral, you can begin to understand the
fascination.
And the exoticism. The preserving substances used on
mummies were much less known to Europeans hundreds of years ago. Today we can
fly from London to Cairo in four hours. Then, it could have taken up to a
month. Today we can have in our pantry any spice produced in any place in the
world, within a few days. Things were different then. Egypt in itself was
pretty exotic, and mummies, forgetaboutit.
So if you can now picture yourself at an all-nighter in a
regal estate, well after midnight, deep into the spirits, when your host spreads
on the table these tiny morsels of dry-aged royalty from another era, and who
might as well be from another planet, and tells you to dig in – you will be
intoxicated. The meat doesn’t make you intoxicated, of course; the idea is
enough to placebo the heck out of your dopamine receptors.
I get into the details of how smells are so good at
tricking us in this
older post. But if you're interested in throwing your own mummy-party,
these folks from the University of York have decoded the
ancient recipe:
Mummy
-a plant oil – possibly
sesame oil;
-a "balsam-type" plant or root extract that may
have come from bullrushes;
-a plant-based gum - a natural sugar that may have been
extracted from acacia;
-crucially, a conifer tree resin, which was probably pine
resin
*Note that this isn't entirely true, for we have known
for a long time about preserving things. Many of the same substances used to
preserve mummies also preserve our food. Also note, however, that roughly
speaking the practice of using spices to preserve food decreases as you move
from the equator, with those places tending to use fermentation as a means of
preservation instead, which is the opposite of using spices – one keeps
microbial activity at bay, and the other uses it on purpose to regulate the
rate of decay. Fermenting mummies would not have worked as well. But that’s
pretty tangential, and a transparent excuse to say fermented mummies.
** Know that
Europeans are not entirely unfamiliar with mummies; they’re called relics,
and they’re not nearly as old.
***Finally, preserving the
dead is not the most uncommon thing ever; Japan has a long history of it.
Post Script:
Embalming was just
one aspect of preservation. Other steps included:
-Removal of the brain - possibly using a
"whisking" process to cause the brain to liquefy
-Removal of the internal organs
-Putting the body into a natural salt to dry it out
-Coating the body in the embalming recipe , to kill
bacteria and to seal it
-Wrapping the body in linen
Notes:
Aug 2018, BBC
Nov 2016, Limbic
Signal
Feb 2016, Network
Address
Apr 2017, Network
Address
Japanese Mummies
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