Mummification Fascination
Reflections on mummies in pop culture.
Mummies. They’re everywhere. They’re in museums, movies, legends, and history. They’re a pop culture phenomenon, and have been for years. But they’re also, y’know, human remains. So why this cultural fascination with them?
First, the problem of mummies in museums. Most big history museums have an Egyptian section, filled with mummies, sarcophagai, and organ jars. Tourists come in to take pictures if it’s allowed, and to marvel at these ancient artifacts. I think that a lot of times, people going to see mummies in museums forget that they’re human remains. They think of them just as a pile of bandages in a beautiful sarcophagus. And don’t get me wrong, sarcophagai are works of art. But so coffins, and we don’t just put those in museums with the people still in them. Ostensibly, the placement of mummies in museums is to showcase the marvel that is the process of mummification, how extraordinary it is that these bodies can be thousands of years old still be able to be put in museums. The organ jars on display is, I think, supposed to convey the same message, as well as a little bit of macabre fascination. A thing for tourists to point at and go ‘Isn’t it so creepy that they did that?’. Under the facade of awe, the fact that mummies are in museums at all is disrespectful, and also pretty racist. No matter how well preserved George Washington’s remains were, we’d let him rest, not dig him up and put him and his coffin on display. So why can’t the same respect be shown to ancient Egyptian royalty?
Like in museums, movie mummies are meant to be creepy. They’re old, dead, and “exotic” (also pretty racist). They’re royalty from far-off lands that were disturbed by people who thought they needed to be in a museum and are now going to kill those people. They’re basically zombies, but slightly prettier. This phenomenon has some of the same problems as mummies being in museums, namely, making mummies something evil and dangerous. Most mummy movies acknowledge that mummies are royalty, but only in a very old and outdated sense. These movies pull from urban legends and myths about mummies, and make them bigger, and more scary.
The best known mummy legend is that of King Tut. I have some thoughts and feelings about this. The legend is that there was a curse placed on his tomb, so that whoever opened it would die. Some archaeologists opened it anyway, took him and his belongings out, and got sick and died soon after. There was probably a lot of toxic mold in there. People remember King Tut for his curse, and his youth. He was only eighteen when he died, and became Pharoah because his father died. He is known to have liked ducks, and had several inherited medical problems that led to his early death and probably meant he was in pain most of the time. The legend of King Tut is the basis for most movie mummies, similar to how Dracula is the basis for almost all vampires. Unlike Dracula, however King Tut was a real person who was actually mummified when he died. He is not fictional, and neither are the other Pharoahs who find themselves portrayed inaccurately in pop culture. Most “curses” on pyramids, which are tombs, were just recorded as a way to keep the dead undisturbed. And yet.
The Mummy is interesting specifically as a Universal Monster, because it is one of the only ones that had a decided-upon look before the movie. Dracula looked like that because of Bela Lugosi and the studio, same for Frankenstein. The Mummy looked like that because that’s how real mummies look. Vampires probably aren’t really real, and there hasn’t yet been somebody who tried to create a whole human out of stitched-together dead human parts. But there are mummies, and they were real royalty. Now, can they come alive through some ancient curse? Probably not. Most illnesses suffered by archaeologists after investigating pyramids were likely brought on by mold and bacteria in there that was as ancient as the mummies.
The Mummy as a cultural phenomenon is fascinating, but also disrespectful in many ways. Mummies are human remains, which means that they used to be living people. Cultural fears of them come not from political upheaval and instability like with zombies, but from warnings they put on their graves to keep people who would desecrate them away, and the completely natural consequences those people faced when they did it anyway. Mummies were never meant to be monsters. They were meant to be royalty, left in peace for eternity. And I think it would do us all well to remember that.