Why Did Seventeenth-Century Europeans Eat Mummies?

Brazilian BBQ from Theodor de Bry, America Tertiae Pars (1592).

In a previous post, I touched on the phenomenon of "cannibal medicine" in early modern Europe. It turns out that it was surprisingly common for medical patients in the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to be prescribed drugs that contained human remains. These included everything from powdered human skull to more byzantine preparations like Oswald Croll's infamous 1608 remedy which invites the reader to "take the fresh corpse of a redhaired, uninjured, unblemished man," and "leave it one day and one night in the light of the sun and the moon, then cut into strips."

Although historians like Richard Sugg have already written perceptively about medical cannibalism, the special role played by mummies in this story has always seemed intriguing and rather under explored to me. I spoke a bit about this at Yale's History of Medicine colloquium last month, and thought I'd adapt some of my thoughts into a post.

First off, it's worth stressing that, historically speaking, there is nothing particularly bizarre about eating people. Perusing one of my favorite early modern drug manuals, John Jacob Berlu's The Treasury of Drugs Unlock'd (London, 1690) makes it plain that a certain form of cannibalism was widely tolerated in Europe. Berlu's guide to drugs is not at all exotic or show off-y - on the contrary, it's a practical handbook aimed at working drugs merchants who needed to know basic facts about the wares they sold. Most of its entries involve relatively prosaic substances like tamarind, sassafras, cinnamon and elk antlers. But there are a few entries, like the one for "Cranium Humanum" shown below, which stand out to a modern eye:

Remember, this is a practical guide to consumable drugs. There's no trace of Swiftian satire or exoticizing hyperbole here. Berlu really does appear to be recommending, in a matter-of-fact way, that drug merchants should rove Ireland looking for moss-covered criminal's skulls, then sell them to apothecaries so they can be ground into powder and drunk by sick English people. 

Thus it shouldn't necessarily surprise us to find Egyptian mummies also appearing in lists of popular drugs and medical guides in the seventeenth century. As I mentioned in a previous post, Pierre Pomet, the apothecary of King Louis XIV, wrote extensively about the medical virtues of la mumie, even commissioning a detailed and not exactly accurate engraving of how he imagined mummies were prepared for burial:

Engraving of mummies from the English translation of Pomet's drug manual (Pierre Pomet, A Compleat History of Druggs published in London, 1712). 

Pomet, like Berlu, seems completely at home with the idea of eating mummy, and his main advice to the reader involves tips on how to avoid getting cheated by unscrupulous mummy merchants:

As I am not able to stop the Abuses committed by those who sell this Commodity, I shall only advise such as buy, to chuse what is of a fine shining Black, not full of Bones or Dirt, of a good Smell... This is reckoned proper for Contusions and to hinder Blood from coagulating in the Body; it is also given in Epilepsies, Vertigoes, and Palsies. The Dose is two Drams in Powder.

Pomet's discussion of eating mummy leads into a larger digression on various other forms of medical cannibalism such as "human Fat or Grease, which is brought us from several Parts, but, as every Body knows in Paris, the public Executioner sells it to those that want it." He even takes a moment to allude to the same moss-covered Irish skulls that Berlu had mentioned: 

The English druggists, especially those of London, sell the heads or skulls of the dead... The English Druggists generally bring these Heads from Ireland, where they frequently let the Bodies of Criminals hang n the Gibbets til they fall to Pieces. You may see in the Druggists Shops of London, some of these Heads entirely covere'd with Moss.

On the other hand, it's hard not to think that there'd be something distinctive about eating an Egyptian mummy rather than just some anonymous unburied criminal's skull (which, given the enormous amount of violence in the seventeenth century, would've been pretty easy to find). After all, we're talking about consuming human remains which are thousands of years old. It's not as if seventeenth century Europeans weren't aware of the rarity and age of what they were dealing with - on the contrary, many of them thought that these remains were far older. Herodotus, the ur-authority on Egyptian history for most Renaissance scholars, had claimed that the Egyptian priests possessed documents demonstrating an unbroken line of kingship stretching back 11,340 years.

In other words, from the perspective of a seventeenth-century European, the Egyptian mummies being sold by apothecaries could conceivably have been thirteen thousand years old.

I think it's reasonable, then, to conjecture that the early modern people who prescribed and consumed mummies valued them partially because of their reputed origins in a distant, Biblical antiquity. And, connected to this, their association with a great and mysterious civilization, a non-Christian society that rivaled any European empire.

Diagram of an Ancient Egyptian labyrinth imagined by the Jesuit polymath Athanasius Kircher in his Oedipus Aegyptiacus [Egyptian Oedipus] (Rome, 1653).

Talking to the Peruvianist Christopher Heaney about this sort of thing led us to wonder whether any early modern doctors believed that Andean Inca mummies shared the same medical virtues as Egyptian ones. It's still an open question, this being a fairly new line of research. But it does seem that at least some physicians and apothecaries did believe that Inca mummies were medically powerful in the same manner. In 1720, for instance, Johann Crüger’s De Mundi Creatione alluded to the drug "mumia" as having a potential origin in Peru. Crüger’s Latin text is intentionally obscure (since he was basically an alchemist)  but nonetheless makes the identification plain: “Wine,” he writes, “has the form of a vitriolic sulphur, not being a type of immature balsam of the Moon; and from thence [it can be found] in the fragrant white balsams of the liquid resins of Egyptian, Peruvian, or Copaici [?] mummies, whether an immature balsam, or a specific oil of the Moon.”

While researching this topic, I stumbled across a wonderfully strange piece of writing by the seventeenth-century physician Thomas Browne: his "Fragment on Mummies." I think Virginia Woolf was spot on when she compared reading Browne to wandering through a cabinet of curiosities - his style is baroque, intricate and mysterious in a way that I find fascinating. It would seem that Browne was opposed to the fashion for such "cannibal mixtures," but he couldn't deny its fascination:

That mummy is medicinal, the Arabian Doctor Haly delivereth and divers confirm; but of the particular uses thereof, there is much discrepancy of opinion. While Hofmannus prescribes the same to epileptics, Johan de Muralto commends the use thereof to gouty persons; Bacon likewise extols it as a stiptic: and Junkenius considers it of efficacy to resolve coagulated blood. Meanwhile, we hardly applaud Francis the First, of France, who always carried Mummia with him as a panacea against all disorders; and were the efficacy thereof more clearly made out, scarce conceive the use thereof allowable in physic, exceeding the barbarities of Cambyses, and turning old heroes unto unworthy potions.

Shall Egypt lend out her ancients unto chirurgeons and apothecaries, and Cheops and Psammiticus be weighed unto us for drugs? Shall we eat of Chamnes and Amosis in electuaries and pills, and be cured by cannibal mixtures? Surely such diet is dismal vampirism; and exceeds in horror the black banquet of Domitian, not to be paralleled except in those Arabian feasts, wherein Ghoules feed horribly.

The Baroque Monsters of Father Schott

In Portuguese, barroco means "imperfect pearl": a fitting name for the Baroque era, a period that combined ornate beauty with a distinct taste for the odd, macabre and irregular. This interplay between the beautiful and the monstrous -- and its connections to the rise of the "New Science" in the second half of the seventeenth century -- is vividly exemplified by the Jesuit Father Gaspar Schott's Physica Curiosa (1662), a compendium of abnormal births, strange animals and fabulous humanoid creatures thought to inhabit the far reaches of the world.

Frontispiece of Physica Curiosa. Source: University of Iowa Digital Library, John Martin Rare Books Room.

The work's Latin title page.

The German-born Schott (1608-1666) was a Jesuit with a keen interest in a number of disciplines, from hydraulic mechanics to medicine and optics. One can surmise that Schott acquired his wide-ranging interests from his mentor, the celebrated Jesuit genius Anathasius Kircher (a polymathic marvel, Kirchner was a founder of Egyptology, used an early microscope to study microbes, lowered himself into an active volcano to learn about the earth's crust, constructed automatons, invented a magnetic clock and authored an immense encyclopedia on China). Below are a selection of images from Schott's Physica Curiosa, all of which I selected from the digital collections of the John Martin Rare Books Room at the University of Iowa. I've cropped some of the engraved plates to show interesting details and added my attempt at translations of the Latin captions and occasional explanatory notes. As the work's extended title dryly notes, Schott seeks to document "Angels, Demons, Men, Spirits, the Devil-Possessed, Monsters, Portents, Animals, Meteors, and other rare, arcane and curious things... and to illustrate them by many examples."

Schott, 579. "Seven-headed monster."

Schott, 393. "Shaggy man who walks with hands on the ground."

Schott, 393. "Woman of the woods in Java." This creature was probably based on the reports of seventeenth century Dutch mariners in Indonesia, who, in turn, may have been drawing upon indigenous knowledge of the orangutan -- "Man of the Forest" in the Malay language.

Schott, 395. "Hair-covered girl of eight years." Clearly a girl born with hypertrichosis.

"Boy with the head of an elephant." His companion is "a horned infant with spread eyes." I have no idea what to make of this one.

The images in this section of the work appear to be a strange combination of depictions of actual birth defects or hereditary abnormalities and pictures of mythical man-beasts that were said by medieval travelers to inhabit the Antipodes. In a later section, the book turns to the interesting and fantastical creatures that were being 'discovered' by European overseas voyages at the time. Many of these illustrations were evidently drawn from a book I wrote about in my post on Edward Topsell's Historie of Foure-Footed Beasts -- others were more fantastical:

Schott, 616. Here we find a "winged bird-centaur with the head of a human" and "a three-headed monster with the heads of a fox, a dragon and an eagle."

And here are the more familiar raccoon and river otter. Note, however, that the raccoon (here identified by its Spanish name, "mapache,") is from the New World and thus would have been as unfamiliar to European audiences of the time as many fantastical beasts.

Cat piano from Schott's Magia Naturalis (Natural Magic).

Finally, an interesting aside: Schott was also the first to describe what may well be the most bizarre musical instrument in history. This was the so-called the Katzenklavier or 'cat piano.' See this blog post on the subject to learn more about this strange creation, apparently real, which was said by Kircher to have been invented to relieve the melancholy of an Italian prince. PETA would have been appalled. For those interested in learning more, I haven't been able to find much written on Schott. However, his teacher Athanasius Kircher has generated a large body of fascinating scholarship -- see Paula Findlen's edited volume Athanasius Kircher: the Last Man Who Knew Everything (2004) for a good introduction.