Why We Fear Mummies… And Should We?
Mummies have been around for a long, long time. Only in relatively recent history, though, have they been something to fear.
And of course, I use the term “fear” extremely lightly. I’d wager that far less than zombies or kraken or any other mythical monstrosity, the Mummy isn’t something many kids have nightmares about. It took a fairly drastic rebooting of the mythos in 1999 to give the story any real sense of dread; and at that point, the creature was simply upgraded to a “vengeful god” with very little remaining from the original source material.
But what actually is the source material? Where did the Mummy myth come from? And more importantly — as this blog tends to pursue — is there any deep dark corner of real-life science that lends some truth the to the fantasy?
And believe it or not, that answer is a bit complicated.
Let’s start at the beginning, which actually for mummies (lowercase) gets a bit too prehistoric to really track down. Mummification happens —technically speaking—when any dead body is desiccated and preserved, either intentionally or otherwise. Spontaneous mummification is a naturally occurring process, and discoveries found in bogs or blocks of ice all around the globe can date back over millennia. It’s actually thought that this natural phenomenon is what inspired ancient civilizations like Egypt to recreate the process artificially. In different shapes and forms, anthropomorphic mummification was adopted in dozens of cultures from Egyptians to Incas, Denmark to China. It became a downright fad.
And sure enough, back in the Middle Ages, this type of desiccated body was a well-known natural resource — something that came from the ground just like oils or clay. But before around the 16th century, these bodies weren’t used to study history… and actually the truth is kind of amazing: mummies were ground up and ingested as medicine. Mmm.
This is actually when the term “Mummy” got adapted. Starting in the early 1400s the word was taken from the Arabic term mumiyah, today referencing a variety of asphalt (aka bitumen) that was thought to have healing properties. Mummified corpses were ground up and distributed as a cure-all powder.
Literally gross, but who am I to judge.
The history is important though, trust me. The mummy industry was remarkably successful — records show that Egyptians starting producing “fake” mummies from recently deceased bodies to keep up with high demand in Europe. It wasn’t until the late 16th Century that a French doctor started wondering whether rubbing ourselves in dead-body-dust might actually cause disease, rather than cure it. This newfound understanding of pathogens, coupled with two of Europe’s largest plague outbreaks in 1665 and 1720, resulted in a slow evaporation of the Mummydust™ craze. Still, and for ever after, the term mummy was used to universally describe a dead, desiccated body, regardless of whence it came.
Now things start to get real crazy. For some insight on how the meaning of the Mummy continued to evolve, let’s look to the coolest internet tool around: Google’s Ngram.
Prior to about 1750, “Mummy” (capitalized) was associated primarily with the medicinal powder, but after the treatment became debunked, the hundred-or-so years between about 1800 and 1900 were a stable environment for the mummy (lowercase)—at least culturally. It was an era when, after the term was solidified in Western language, the corpses were perceived as rare archeological resources to be displayed alongside other natural oddities, or quite frequently a centerpiece to be unraveled at parties. So, you know, everyday mummy stuff.
And during this time, the mythos of the Mummy simmered quietly in the background. Just a few years after the publication of Frankenstein in 1818, the mummy followed suit in 1827 in the aptly titled The Mummy!: A Tale of the Twenty-second Century. This was the first hint of the “modern” and horrific version of the monster we would come to accept as the norm for most of the 20th Century.
“The dried distorted features of the Mummy looked yet more hideous than before, when animated by human passions, and his deep hollow voice, speaking a language he did not understand, fell heavily upon his ear, like the groans of fiends.” — Jane Webb’s The Mummy!
The groundwork was there, but it wasn’t until the rise of Egyptology in the late 19th Century that the Mummy mythology took on its most defining characteristic: curses.
Curses on ancient burial grounds were hardly a new phenomenon, but it wasn’t until Egyptologists began raiding tombs and sending word of translated curses back to Europe that popular culture got intrigued. In 1922, the opening of Tutankhamun’s tomb and the subsequent death of George Edward Stanhope Molyneux Herbert, the fifth Earl of Carnarvon, made international news. The ultimate piece of Mummy fiction was released on film in 1932, and forever after, mummies became associated with curses and unstoppable vengeance against those who disturb their slumber.
So let’s look again at the Ngram timeline (now expanded) and see how the rise of the Mummy, capitalized, skyrocketed once this archeological story finally found its hook.
The reason we fear mummies is more a story of vengeance than of terror. Especially compared to other undead monsters like zombies or skeletons, the Mummy doesn’t attack en masse — it’s a deliberate, directed story of revenge. Honestly, prior to this June’s upcoming release, the most recent high-profile story that falls into this camp may be the 2014 sleeper hit It Follows.
But the big question still remains: is there any hint in science or biology that parallels the mummy mythos?
No.
Well, sort of.
In plenty of cases, animals that are thought to be dead have been known to miraculously spring back to life—a great example being types of frogs that are able to recover from having their bodies frozen solid in ice. It’s also suspected that certain diseases that cause death-like paralysis in humans were the origins for vampire mythology as well.
But in these species, we’re defining “death” extremely loosely. Bodily functions may resemble death, but not in a true sense. While there’s an illusion of resurrection or reanimation, it’s nothing close to our Mummy mythology. On top of that, these stories don’t really capture the vengeance that characterizes the modern Mummy, but there’s a better biological allegory: disease.
Especially with plagues or contagions, much more so than reanimated frogs, there is a sense of being hunted or pursued by “death” — not the literal undead, but by the lingering influence of those that are no longer alive. In this sense, corpses are truly able to wreak havoc on the living, and this isn’t just true for humans.
Not just for ants, but many other types of insects can be infected by deadly parasitic spores just like these. These infected corpses must be disposed of carefully, otherwise risking the pathogen returning back to the colony and wiping out a dozen more individuals. Luckily humans don’t have a similar concern, but it wasn’t that long ago that combating the plague required similar measures.
I find it amazing that the most accurate natural corollary for the Mummy myth — a disease — was the exact antithesis of what mummies were originally perceived as — a cure.
Even if the science behind the curative properties of Mummydust™ was bogus, the history still remains. It wasn’t until biologists were able to better understand and track disease that our perception of mummies flipped, not just into disease-carriers, but to a fictitious, exaggerated metaphor for disease itself. Was there a paranoia and revulsion of mummies that lingered long after the 1700’s that lead us to create such a specific (almost ironic) mythology today?
Maybe not intentionally, but it’s hard to say for certain.
I’m excited to see how the mythos will continue to evolve, today and into the future. Let Universal take the reins for the next few decades and see what comes to pass. Hopefully for us moviegoers, they’ll find a way to make the mummy truly terrifying.
Or, if not that, at least something we all can enjoy.
