Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and the Curse of Tutankhamen

Lord Carnarvon is dead. The end came at 2 o’clock in the morning of April 5th, 1923. His wife, Lady Carnarvon, who had made a hurried trip to Cairo from London by air and by sea, and two of his children was present at the bedside in his room at Continental Savoy Hotel in Cairo. Not two months earlier George Herbert, the Fifth Earl of Carnarvon, had been standing next to archaeologist Howard Carter. In front of them was the discovery of the century, the tomb of Pharaoh Tutankhamen.

The discoverer of Pharaoh Tutankhamen's tomb! The newspapers hailed Lord Carnarvon but in actuality he was the moneybag. The earl was an extremely wealthy man and since the turn of the century he had put a lot of money into archaeologist Howard Carter’s excavations in Egypt. So when an unknown tomb was discovered at the end of last year, a tomb they soon found out belonged to Pharaoh Tutankhamen, he would of course at least be present when it was opened.

It was February 17th when the hired Egyptian crew finally had removed all the rubble and was able to open the burial chamber. It truly was the discovery of the century. The treasures! Even though it became clear that robbers already had been there, hundreds, maybe thousands of years ago, there was still so much left for the British in the tomb of King Tut, as the pharaoh quickly became nicknamed in the popular press.

The news spread via telegraph to all corners of the globe. The press devoted much space to the contributions to the world’s art and history which the British explorers had uncovered. Days later, however, some more dire news were telegraphed from Cairo. Lord Carnarvon was ill.

Resting in Aswan after the opening of the burial chamber, he had been bitten on the cheek by a mosquito which had caused an infection. He suffered a fever for a few days, rallied to health, but then collapsed again. Lady Evelyn Herbert had her father moved to the Continental Savoy Hotel in Cairo but blood poisoning had by then been complicated by a bout of pneumonia. The specialist who had been sent from London arrived too late, only hours after it was all over.

Even weeks before Lord Carnarvon finally succumbed to the illness the tabloids had started circulating rumours. Maybe it wasn’t an insect that was the culprit. Maybe the earl had touched some poisoned object in the tomb itself, set thirty centuries ago to revenge the dead king on any who might disturb his rest. There had been talk of curses laid by the ancient Egyptians, with mystic incantations, on any who dared disturb the sleep of a Pharaoh.

Superstitious rumours of possessed Egyptian mummies and cursed tombs were nothing new. Not that new at least. Tales of curses had been doing the rounds of gentlemen’s clubs like the Reform Club and Savile Club for years between the likes of Rudyard Kipling and H. Rider Haggard. It wasn’t until a bright young journalist decided to write a story of one of them that it all changed.

The Priestess of Amen-Ra

A cursed Egyptian coffin? The story Bertram Fletcher Robinson had heard at the soirée at Lady Sykes, from the mouth of an employee at the British Museum nonetheless, was too interesting to ignore. Fletcher was only thirty-four but was already a well-known and highly regarded journalist in London. It’s 1904 and he’s working as an editor for the Daily Express, a tabloid founded only four years earlier. And true to the Express’ gossip columns, Fletcher starts writing a story based more on hearsay than actual facts, but does it with his usual neutral flair.

In early summer of 1904 the readers of Daily Express find their interest getting caught by a titillating headline on the front page: “Priestess of Death. Weird Story of an Egyptian Coffin. Mummy’s Romance”.

In a corner of the First Egyptian Room at the British Museum, behind the crouching body of the prehistoric chief who lived before there were Pharaohs in Egypt or pyramids on the Nile, stands a woman moulded from some ancient form of cardboard. She is merely a shell, the cover of a mummy case. Her hands are crossed upon her breast, and her dark eyes stare forward into vacancy. According to the catalogue, she is №22,542, a problematical royal personage and a priestess of the College of Amen Ra. She lived in the mighty city of Thebes some 1,600 years before Christ.

The first paragraphs are factual enough, then Fletcher drops the bomb: there hangs a terrible story about this coffin cover.

Facts I will presently relate are true, though whether they be a coincidence or a manifestation of supernatural power, who can say? For three months I have been gathering the tangled threads of evidence. I have now in my possession proofs of the identity of all those who suffered from the anger of the priestess of Amen Ra. But for the sake of friends and relatives I have been requested to suppress the names.

The rest of the story is an account of all the misfortunes and “accidents” that happened in the coffin’s trail, beginning with it being purchased in Egypt in the 1860's by a British traveller only referred to by Fletcher as Mr. D., up until the cover came into the possession of the British Museum in 1889. Fortunes that have been lost. Arms amputated. One accident and death after another. Since the arrival to the British Museum though, the priestess of Amen Ra had not troubled anyone with her supposed curse.

What is the explanation? There is none that may be offered. As the great Egyptologists will tell you, it is certain that the Egyptians had powers which we in the twentieth century may laugh at, yet can never understand. You may accept it or not, according to your religion and beliefs.

It didn’t matter if the reader accepted the strange mummy story with its chain of disaster or not. It was out and in print. Ready to be used as a source, ready to be retold and reprinted as soon as anything unexplained or unfortunate happened in any connection with the excavations in Egypt. But Fletcher could never have imagined that he one day himself would be part of the legend. And a day not far off at all.

In the morning of January 21st, 1907, a cable goes out to the London newspapers. Mr. Bertram Fletcher Robinson has died from typhoid fever. He was only 36 years old. His colleagues mourn the premature close to a career that was full of such promise and achievement. In the tabloids on the other hand questions start to get raised. It’s only less than three years since his story of priestess of Amen-Ra. Wasn’t it strange that Mr. Robinson had died at such a young age and not long after he had written about that unlucky mummy?

It was still though just rumours in the tabloids, not even front page news anymore. At least it wasn’t front page material until a friend of Fletcher’s stepped of a steamer in New York sixteen years later: Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of Sherlock Holmes, and he’s on a mission.

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

Death once haunted Arthur. Now it gives him peace. And purpose. It’s April 4th 1923 and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle is disembarking the S.S. Olympic with his family in the New York harbour. He’s back to the United States less than a year since his last visit. He’s back with the same mission as last time, to promote spiritualism.

The author behind Sherlock Holmes, the literary consulting detective that had become so world famous that for many he was more alive than most real people, had as many in the British bourgeois dabbled in spiritualism. When it became popular in the late 1800's it filled a newly created void. After the industrial revolution had skyrocketed and brought science to the forefront, the old religions began to lose their stronghold. There were new questions to be asked. Other worlds to be discovered.

Séances, spirits, ectoplasm. Arthur hadn’t been as much a sceptic as he had been an agnostic. But then something happened. Over and over again. Death. So much death. The Great War had barely started in the late summer of 1914 before his wife’s brother Malcolm died in battle. The next year it was his niece Oscar. When his son Kingsley almost dies in the battle of Somme, Arthur isn’t an agnostic anymore. He is a believer. In November of 1916 Arthur publishes a full page press release in the newspapers. “Conan Doyle Thinks We Can Talk with the Dead” the headline proclaimed in The New York Times.

So many have already died during The Great War, which never seems to end. It doesn’t make any sense. Not as a Christian. Arthur isn’t alone in feeling hopeless, and faithless, in view of all the horrors of a world in war. Christianity is antiquated and doesn’t answer all the questions anymore. The spiritual movement does, Arthur felt. It provides us with proof of life after death. Spirits exist, and we can come in contact with the dead. This is the next step in faith, he writes:

In recent years there has come to us from divine sources a new revelation which constitutes by far the greatest religious event since the death of Christ, a revelation which alters the whole aspect of death and the fate of man.

When both Arthur’s son Kingsley and brother Innes dies of the Spanish flu right after the war finally ends in 1918, he grieves, but finds peace in that they are not completely lost. Their spirits are still there, and may be able to communicate with through a medium. And so Arthur finds a new mission in life. He visits dozens, no, hundreds of mediums all over the world, and soon finds himself an authority on the subject. Which is why the newspapers of course want his expert opinion when Howard Carter and Lord Carnarvon, on February 17th, 1923, open the tomb of Pharaoh Tutankhamen. Will the spirit of King Tut be displeased?

Arthur is sitting before an open fire in his study in his Buckingham mansion when the reporter suggests the possibility of maybe interviewing Tutankhamen's spirit. Get the pharaoh’s own opinion about what’s happening with his long dead body. Arthur jumps to his feet in protest. Of course not! You just can’t interview the spirit of Tutankhamen! Arthur’s amazed by how ignorant the public in general is in the subject. He sits down again.

Tut-Ankh-Amen’s spirit left his body so many years ago that I expect he has forgotten he ever had such a thing as a body. Or at all events the spirit departed so long ago he has ceased to worry about the body. People have asked me if I or my mediumistic friends have had communication with the spirit of Tutankhamen. They must either be mad or think me mad. Tut-Ankh-Amen’s spirit is probably far away on some other planet or perhaps on this one. The remains which they ghoulishly dug up at Luxor are no more to him than a discarded overcoat.

The reporter tries again. Maybe the unseen spirit of the ancient Pharaoh is responsible for the indignation among certain groups of scientists over the disturbance of the tomb? Rubbish! Arthur exclaims.

All rubbish so far as Tutankhamen’s spirit is concerned. It is more likely a spirit of ordinary common decency that prompts protests against the rifling of the sacred grave. I have never heard of any communication with Tutankhamen’s spirit and am not likely to. So far as the old king’s body is concerned it ought to be reinterred. Let grave robbing foreigners continue their investigation toward more useful ends.

During all of March the newspapers in the United States anticipate the arrival of the creator of Sherlock Holmes who promises to prove the existence of ectoplasm during his six months’ lecture tour on spiritualism, starting at Carnegie Hall in New York. Together with his family he sets sail on March 20 from Southampton. The voyage takes eight days. Meanwhile, back in Egypt, Lord Carnarvon is fighting for his life and the rumours of a curse get louder each day.

The Gramophone

Arthur has settled in with his family at Biltmore Hotel, New York. In two days he will resume preaching his “gospel of psychic phenomena”, as the newspapers called it. Tremendous strides have been made in psychic research since his last visit to America last spring. This time he shall reveal some amazing new discoveries for the first time and has taking with him a number of photographs which should make the hardest sceptic think.

He has already had the opportunity to speak to the press shortly after his arrival. And that was his role. That was his mission. Arthur is the first to admit that he personally has no connection to the spirit world. All that he can is to be a gramophone. To go about, to meet people face to face. To make them understand that spiritualism isn’t a hoax, but a great philosophy.

I see more and more that this question of psychic investigation, of the future life, is the most important thing in the world. It is more important than international politics, than the Ruhr, than Bolshevism. Doubt as to the future underlies all the social unrest of the world. Men’s faith was shaken by the war. There will never be anything right in this world until we get religion right, for religion is the basis for all else. So I seek proof, and with proof I would link faith, and by the joining of these two religions will be made secure and placed on a scientific basis.

Arthur knows he’s right. He could fill a room in his house with letters from people that are telling him of the consolation that he has given to them through his lectures and writings. How they have, once more, heard the sound of a vanished voice, felt the touch of a vanished hand. As he told a reporter from the New York Times earlier that day:

I will pick up my work here where I left off. This is all I live for now; all my thoughts turn in the same direction.

And in that direction, a curse laid ahead.

The Ghosts Did It!

Lord Carnarvon is dead. It’s the morning of April 5th, and Arthur, like the rest of the world, has woken up to the news of the earl’s death. But unlike everywhere else, the reporters in New York have at their disposal the world’s most famous proponent of spiritualism. What does the creator of Sherlock Holmes, the deducing and logical detective, has to say about Lord Carnarvon’s death and the rumours surrounding it? And Arthur knows this. So when he peels off to his daily rounds of interviews he is ready with an answer.

With his usual blend of sincerity and showmanship he concocts his own theory of what happened to Lord Carnarvon. According to Arthur, the earl’s death is a result of occult influences because of his intrusion into the tomb of King Tutankhamen.

It is neither decent nor safe to take from their resting places the bodies of old kings. The Egyptians knew much more about the occult than we do today. This must have been a peculiar element of an Egyptian curse.

The ancient Egyptians were very anxious to guard the tombs of their Kings, there is reason to believe that they placed elementals on guard, and such may have caused Lord Carnarvon’s death.

An evil elemental may have caused Lord Carnarvon’s fatal illness. One does not know what elementals existed in those days, nor what the form might be.

These elementals are not spirits in the ordinary sense, in that they have no souls.

An elemental is a built-up, artificial thing, an imbued force which may be brought into being by spirit means or by nature.

The headlines are loving Arthur:

“Doyle Blames Spirits for Carnarvon Death”
“Conan Doyle Tells of an Evil Elemental”
”Conan-Doyle Says Spirits Killed Lord”
“Says Ghosts Did It”

And for every reporter who approaches Arthur, his theory of the elementals only grows bigger. It’s as he’s writing one of his old ghost stories. It’s also then that Arthur comes to think of his old departed friend Bertram Fletcher Robinson.

Fletcher’s death had shaken Arthur. They had been more than casual acquaintances. Arthur had met Fletcher in South Africa in 1900 during the Boer War. Fletcher reported for the Daily Express and Arthur had volunteered as a medic. They returned to England on the same boat, where the two swapped writing plans and story outlines. A year after they got back home Fletcher invited Arthur to Devonshire. And there, on the haunting moors, they came up with would become The Hounds of Baskervilles. One of the most famous of Sherlock Holmes’ cases. Arthur took the name from Fletcher’s driver during the visit, Harry Baskerville.

Arthur remembers the story Fletcher once wrote. About that “unlucky mummy” at the British Museum. So when the next reporter interviews him, Arthur makes Fletcher part of his own story. As the tabloid had done over ten years ago. He turns Fletcher to another victim of “the curse”. When the reporters keep on coming, Arthur starts to add to his stories.

There was once a mummy in the British Museum which it was believed was guarded by one of those elementals, for everyone who came in contact with it came to grief. This was the mummy of a queen, and even one of my dear friends, a journalist who investigated the misfortunes that befell those who handled the mummy.

“It is impossible of course to say with absolute certainty if this is true”, Arthur explains. And true it was not one bit. For one thing, there wasn’t a mummy, only the wooden case of a coffin. And the case hadn’t belonged to a queen either. But facts weren’t something that bothered Arthur. Unaware of, or maybe he just didn’t care about, the factual “details”, he continues his story. He had warned Fletcher, Arthur says:

I told him he was tempting fate by pursuing inquiries, but he was fascinated and would not desist. Then he was overtaken by illness. The immediate cause of death was typhoid fever, but that is the way in which the “elementals” guarding the mummy might act. They could have guided Mr. Robinson into a series of such circumstances as would lead him to contract the disease, and thus cause his death, but, as in Lord Carnarvon’s case, human illness was the primary cause of death, and the ‘elementals’ might have brought about the conditions causing illness.

Arthur’s theory of the powerful spirits he calls “elementals” receives wide attention in the American newspapers. Often he is mentioned as the world’s most noted exponent of spiritualism. And for Arthur this is just part of his mission, playing his role as a gramophone. But as he does it, he is lending credence to the myth of the “curse of Tutankhamen”. A myth that now has a world-renowned expert as a supporter. But some are not having it. The backlash begins.

Fake news

It is nonsense to say that because the ‘elementals’ do not harm everybody therefore they do not exist — one might as well say that because bulldogs do not bite everybody therefore bulldogs do not exist.

Arthur is finding himself having to answer for his wild comments. The more notable press isn’t having it. Especially when he starts to explain how his wife, who is a medium, often gets advice from an ancient Eastern spirit, who lived 3,000 or 4,000 years ago in Arabia. Even before his first lecture, the New York Times takes exception to his irrational speculations about a curse and run an editorial about Arthur with the headline “He’s Beginning to Strain Our Patience”.

Egyptologist’s not only discredit the idea of any supernatural factor in Lord Carnarvon’s death, but regard the suggestion with impatience. “The curse theory of the death of the Earl of Carnarvon, discoverer of King Tutankhamen’s tomb, is pure bosh,” declares Professor D. D. Luckendill, expert in Egyptology at the University of Chicago and the assistant of Professor James Henry Breasted, who accompanied the Carnarvon expedition. “I don’t know of any Egyptologist’s who believe in these superstitions or that they have any powers of vengeance, as some people seem to think they have. Anyone who does believe in them is not a scientific Egyptologist.”

Arthur’s theories aren’t even supported by fellow spiritualists. G.E. Wright, Secretary of the London Spiritualist Alliance, declares in a surprising statement that Lord Carnarvon himself was a spiritualist:

I say quite definitely that there can be no possible connection between Lord Carnarvon’s death and occult influences. Carnarvon was a member of this alliance for several years, and I am sure his death was due to natural causes. We regard as silly the ideas that are going about as one of those old wives’ fables. Occult influences do not persist in one place for 3,000 years.

In The Morning Post an editorial is published condemning the spreading of false and misleading information:

Free education does not make mankind any less credulous. Democracies are just as subject to hallucinations and imaginings as in the days when astrologers flourished and witches suffered. Many ancient tombs have been discovered and we may take it that in the vast majority of cases the successful explorers died peaceably in their own beds years after the secrets of the grave had been revealed and classified. But in the case of the tomb of Tutankhamen the interest of the whole universe was aroused. The world, fired by the activities of an energetic Press, insisted on drama and surprise.

It is Friday April 6th, two nights after his arrival, and Arthur is ready for his first major rally at Carnegie Hall. The curse of Tutankhamen is already behind him. This, this is why he’s here. This is what he lives for now. Spreading the word of spiritualism which promises an answer for the atrocities of the Great War. He hopes to get more of the Americans on board. Which is why he tonight has tailored his message cleverly to his audience.

Arthur tells the crowd that the new world spiritualist church will be called the Church of America because this was where it had started. He then places his hand to his head and closes his eyes for dramatic effect. He claims he has a vision and can see “a great church forming which will take in all sects from the Roman Catholic to the Salvation Army…. We will offer them an aid to their religion, which will bring religion and science together, which will …. Place them on a sound foundation. This puts a real vitality into religion. It is not new, for it harks back to the early Christians who, I believe, were all spiritualists. We are trying to get something practical because the old Christianity is dead — dead. How else could ten million young men have marched out to slaughter? Did any moral force stop that war? No, Christianity is dead.”

Arthur may have left the curse behind him as quickly as it had appeared. But the collision between superstitious gossip and a gramophone in the shape of the world famous author of Sherlock Holmes forever left its mark. In its wake, people became enthralled in a seamlessly endless fight against disinformation and constant debunking. People like Ernest.

The Egyptologist Sir Ernest A. Wallis Budge

I do not recall any public alarm about the curse of the Pharaohs before. I think the interest this case has aroused is due to a sort of hyper-sensitive feeling among people nowadays. They go in much more for these spiritist things than they did in the old days. I really do not know any reason why people should be frightened about it, unless they are superstitious.

Sir Ernest A. Wallis Budge smiles gently through his golden spectacles. In his dimly-lighted study near the British Museum, where the centuries old mummies lie sleeping, Ernest, the famous Egyptologist, and the Keeper of Egyptian and Assyrian Antiquities at the British Museum, is talking to yet another representative from the Press about the curse of the Pharaohs. He’s starting to lose track of how many times he’s rejected the theory as bunkum and nonsense.

If there had been such a curse and it could have been effective, there would not be any archeologists left today. The American, Professor Reisner, has explored thousands and thousands of tombs in Egypt. Then there is Professor Petrie; also Professor Elliot Smith, who does nothing but examine mummies. Nothing has happened to any of them. They must be very lucky people! Lord Carnarvon, has only dug out one person.

He himself has conducted excavations at Aswan, in Egypt; at Gebel Barkal, on the Island of Meroe; at Semna and other sites in the Sudan; and at Nineveh and Der, in Mesopotamia.

I have dug up mummies in many lands, and yet no curse has descended on me. Don’t you thinking that those people who have been said to have perished under the curse would have died anyhow? You might as well say that the million people who go to the British Museum every year and see the mummies are in danger of falling under the spell.

It doesn’t matter. People believe what they want to believe and the tabloids go along with all the foolishness. Ernest shakes his snow-white head. It’s no wonder that he prefers the companion of Mike. Mike is one of Ernest’s best friends. Mike is a cat. A fine old tabby Tom cat who lives in the little lodge at the gates of British Museum. His temper is legendarily bad, except to Ernest. The two meet every day and Ernest finds Mike’s companionship a great deal more sensible and soothing than that of most human beings. Which says a lot as Ernest frequently is a guest of the King and Queen.

When the reporter asks if there’s any truth to the connection between the mummy case at the British Museum, the one that Fletcher Robinson wrote about those years ago, and the Titanic disaster, Ernest isn’t smiling anymore.

Afterlife

In a time in history when large parts of the world laid in ruin, when millions of young women and men had died, people searched for answers. Disillusioned they turned to rumours, superstition, conspiracy theories. Arthur found his answers in spiritualism. For him the movement filled that void. It gave him comfort. A comfort he wanted to spread to others. At one of his lectures during that tour in 1923, in the United States, he explains to his audience what the afterlife was like:

At the instant of death, the aesthetic body, a sort of envelope duplicate of the real body, floats off. There is a period of rest and sleep, varying from a few hours to several months, depending upon the spirituality of the person. In extreme cases there is the Heavenly waiting room. Some spend centuries there, but they all finally get called. The Heaven into which the dead man goes is a regular world, on a higher plane. The colors are brighter, the sounds sweeter, the people nicer. Each man acquires his normal strength, about the age of 30; each woman receives again the beauty of 25. There are many circles or groups of persons liking the same thing. The keynote of each community is sympathy.

Arthur dies in 1930, still acting as the gramophone, still on his mission. Four years later Ernest dies in a London nursing home, aged 77. To his last day, still having to fight the curse of Tutankhamen. To no avail. The curse of the mummies lived on.

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