Eating the Dead: A Guided Tour

1

Before we begin, we watch a short video.

“Please, do not take pictures of the bodies,” it asks us, “and, please, be respectful of the dead.” We pass through the doors of the exhibit and are reminded again that “these were once real people, with real lives.”

“That’s nice,” I think. “Classy.” And then a curtain is pulled aside and we are ushered to a maze-like room with dark lighting and eerie, haunted-house music. The dead are lined up in glowing glass coffins throughout the room.

2

The first body I come to is tiny, a little mummified boy not quite three years old. His skin is stretched and brown, strangely smoked looking, but his toenails are familiar. They are trimmed neatly, which makes me think of a mother holding his feet. The nails are paper-thin, like any kid’s toenails at the pool or the park, except that one of his toes has broken off and crumbled away from his foot. I bend down to see better; it looks like his insides are made of tightly rolled paper.

3

My daughter sits on the floor of the exhibit. She has on a scarf and a beret and has tossed her coat on the ground like it’s her own damn studio. She is ten. Today she woke up and decided that she is an artist, so she is sketching in her notebook on the museum floor.

“Pick up your coat,” I say. And when she has, I point to her drawing. “What’s that?”

“A canopic jar. It used to have intestines in it.”

“Nice,” I say.

She’s pretty good, but I’m her mom so I probably can’t be trusted.

She gets up and moves to the mummy of the little boy with the crumbled toe. I cringe and watch her from the corner of my eye, wanting to know how she will handle all this death, the bodies, the inevitability of everything. But I might be projecting. She’s fine. She’s not scared by any of this.

“I’m going to go wander,” I say to her. “Don’t go home with anyone else, yeah?”

“Yeah, yeah,” she says back, already lost in her attempts to get the dead boy’s hollowed face just right.

4

During the Renaissance, apothecaries took the feet or hands or heads or any other body parts of available mummies and ground them up into dust. They named the dust mumia powder and sold it as a medical ingredient. No one even tried to hide what it was made of, since what it was made of was the point of the medicine: people ate it to live longer, believing that it would preserve them the way mummies were preserved.

King Charles II presumably had access to as much mumia powder as he wanted, but he didn’t eat it. He rubbed it over his entire body. He believed the powder wouldn’t just hold off the aging process but that it had the power to transform him into an immortal, into a pharaoh who would not die but only pass from one realm to the next.

Because the number of mummies was limited and the desire to not die was not limited, apothecaries began to run out of the genuine thing, so they took the bodies of the recently dead and ground them up, too. This was called mumia falsa and could be bought at a bargain. People ate those powdered bodies too, though now one wonders why, seeing as how they had died and stayed dead the natural way.

I’ve seen a picture from the flush days of the mummy trade of 1875, of men sitting in the markets with their goods propped up on display. One of the mummies is unwrapped to show off the wares, others piled on the ground like firewood.

People bought and ate the dead right up until 1908, a time when they could have also bought instant coffee, vacuum cleaners, washing machines, neon lamps.

5

My morning run takes me through...