There were, however, some high quality “artificial mummies” to be had (or at least a recipe for their production), as anthropologist Karen Gordon-Grube uncovered in the official London Pharmacopoeias of the 17th century:
[The Paracelist Oswald] Croll recommended that mummy be made of the cadaver of a redheaded man, age 24, who had been hanged. The corpse was to lie in cold water in the air for 24 hours, after which the flesh was cut in pieces and sprinkled with a powder of myrrh and aloes. This was soaked in spirit of wine and turpentine for 24 hours, hung up for 12 hours, again soaked in the spirit mixture for 24 hours, and finally hung up to dry.
In an interesting turn of fate, the popularity of grinding up mummies for medicinal purposes may have started because of a mistranslation. Apparently Arabs often used the petroleum-based substance we call tar or bitumen as an adhesive and to staunch wounds. Their word for this material was mumia but it also became their word for the mummified human remains they discovered after taking over Egypt in the 6th century CE. The Arabs mistakenly believed the mummies to have been prepared with bitumen during the preservation process. Centuries later, Europeans heard about the medical benefits of mumia. Unfortunately, they wound up hoarding mumia—the dried-up dead guys, rather than mumia—the tarry stuff. Either the locals never figured out the screw-up (which seems highly unlikely) or they simply never bothered to tell the Europeans about it. As a consequence, mummy powder was available at the Merck Pharmacy in Darmstadt, Germany, until 1908. Listed as mumia vera aegyptica, it sold for 17.50 marks/kg.
Essentially, then, as European adventurers, missionaries, and colonists were condemning the indigenous people they encountered for practicing cannibalism, their own rulers and countrymen in Europe were consuming human body parts to a degree and at a rate that would have made Hannibal Lecter proud. Until, that is, they stopped.
Richard Sugg, the foremost expert on the topic, believes that the practice of medicinal cannibalism was abandoned because of “the rise of Enlightenment attitudes to science, superstition, and the general backwardness of the past; a desire to create a newly respectable medical profession; a changing attitude towards hygiene, the body and disgust; and the radically changed nature of the human body itself.” The latter development Sugg described as “a more mechanized model of the human body: an entity now drained (at least for the educated) of its animistic, essentially cosmic vitality.” In short, its spirit and soul were gone. Although not in every case.
In 2002, stories began circulating that Keith Richards had mixed his dad’s ashes with some cocaine and snorted them shortly after Bert Richards’s death that year. Not so, replied “Keef,” “after having Dad’s ashes in a black box for six years, because I really couldn’t bring myself to scatter him to the winds, I finally planted a sturdy English oak to spread him around. And as I took the lid off the box, a fine spray of his ashes blew out onto the table. I couldn’t just brush him off, so I wiped my finger over it and snorted the residue. Ashes to ashes, father to son.”
In a more widespread, though no less personal example, another form of medicinal cannibalism was experiencing an American revival in the 21st century.
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35 Lichens are the results of a symbiotic relationship between a fungus and either an algae or a cyanobacterium. The fungi reap the energy benefits of photosynthesis while providing protection to the photosynthetic algae or bacterium.
16: Placenta Helper
It gave me the wildest rush.
—“The Placenta Cookbook,” New York magazine, 2011
Thumbing through an issue of New York magazine several years ago, I stopped at what appeared to be a recipe-related article by the alliteratively named Atossa Araxia Abrahamian. Across a two-page spread was a photo of what looked to be an über-veiny roast beef, bobbing in a black enameled stew pot. Floating alongside the softball-sized blob of meat was a sliced jalape?o, a walnut-sized chunk of ginger, and a halved lemon. I read the title of the article, “The Placenta Cookbook,” realizing that the main ingredient in this particular dish wasn’t beef at all.