Picture this: a fashionable London drawing room, circa 1850. Guests sip champagne while servants wheel in the evening's entertainment—a 3,000-year-old Egyptian priest, still wrapped in linen, about to be publicly undressed for laughs. The host charges admission. Someone faints dramatically. Everyone has a marvelous time.

But the Victorians weren't even the strangest chapter in mummy history. For centuries before those unwrapping parties, Europeans had been eating mummies as medicine, grinding ancient Egyptians into powder and swallowing them to cure everything from headaches to broken bones. The journey of mummies from sacred vessels of eternal life to party entertainment and miracle drugs tells us something uncomfortable about how powerful cultures consume the sacred objects of others—sometimes quite literally.

From the 12th century onward, European apothecaries stocked a curious product: mumia, ground mummy sold as medicine. Physicians prescribed it for ailments ranging from paralysis to poisoning to simple bruising. King Francis I of France reportedly carried a pouch of powdered mummy mixed with rhubarb, just in case. The demand was so high that when genuine Egyptian mummies ran short, suppliers began mummifying fresh corpses—or simply drying out executed criminals and selling them as ancient artifacts.

How did this happen? The confusion began with a translation error. Medieval Arab physicians praised mumiya—a natural bitumen with supposed healing properties. European translators assumed this referred to the black, resinous coating on Egyptian mummies. By the 16th century, the logic had evolved further: if the coating was medicinal, surely the preserved flesh itself must contain even more potent healing magic. People weren't just consuming ancient bodies; they were consuming their own misunderstanding.

The practice reveals something profound about how cultures assign value to foreign objects. Europeans weren't interested in who these mummies had been—their lives, beliefs, or the sacred rituals that prepared them for eternity. The mummies became raw material, their cultural meaning stripped away and replaced with whatever Europeans wanted them to be. A priest who spent decades serving Egyptian gods became breakfast for a German merchant's upset stomach.

Takeaway

When we strip foreign cultural objects of their original meaning and assign our own, we're not engaging with another culture—we're using its artifacts as mirrors reflecting only ourselves.

By the 19th century, mummy consumption had shifted from medicinal to theatrical. Egyptian antiquities flooded into Europe following Napoleon's 1798 expedition, and mummies became the hottest collectible among the wealthy. But simply owning a mummy wasn't enough—the real social currency came from unwrapping one before an audience. These events combined scientific curiosity with macabre entertainment, drawing crowds that ranged from serious scholars to society gossips seeking thrills.

The surgeon Thomas Pettigrew became England's most famous mummy unwrapper, performing public unveilings that sold out London's lecture halls. Attendees dressed formally and competed for the best seats. Pettigrew approached his work with theatrical flair, narrating each layer of linen removal while audiences gasped at preserved organs and jewelry. One 1834 unwrapping drew such crowds that the Archbishop of Canterbury was turned away at the door—no room left, even for clergy.

These spectacles transformed sacred death rituals into Victorian parlor games. The Egyptians had wrapped their dead with prayers, amulets, and specific spiritual intentions—each layer of linen placed with ritual care to protect the soul's journey to the afterlife. The unwrapping parties reversed this process for applause, turning millennia of sacred preparation into an evening's entertainment. The mummies, who had been prepared to rest eternally, found their eternal rest scheduled between tea service and card games.

Takeaway

Entertainment that requires destroying something sacred for spectacle says more about the audience's need for novelty than about the object being consumed.

Here's the uncomfortable truth: Europeans couldn't have eaten Egyptian mummies or unwrapped them at parties if Egypt had possessed equal political power. The transformation of sacred bodies into commodities tracked precisely with colonial expansion. When Britain effectively controlled Egypt after 1882, mummy exports accelerated. Customs officials looked the other way. Museums competed for the best specimens. The dead had no political advocates.

This pattern—powerful cultures consuming the sacred objects of less powerful ones—didn't end with mummies. Victorian collectors plundered burial sites across Africa, Asia, and the Americas, filling museums with objects that still spark repatriation debates today. The logic remained consistent: our curiosity matters more than their beliefs. Our science outweighs their sanctity. The ability to define what counts as "valuable" versus "superstition" has always belonged to whoever holds more power.

Modern archaeology has largely abandoned these practices, but the underlying dynamic persists in subtler forms. We still consume other cultures' sacred practices—yoga stripped of Hindu spirituality, indigenous ceremonies reimagined as wellness retreats, traditional medicines patented by pharmaceutical companies. The appetite for the exotic, divorced from its original meaning and repackaged for consumption, connects today's cultural marketplace directly back to those Victorian drawing rooms.

Takeaway

Ask yourself: when engaging with another culture's traditions, are you learning what it meant to them, or simply extracting what's useful to you?

The mummy's journey from tomb to medicine cabinet to party entertainment traces a path that remains surprisingly relevant. Each transformation stripped away original meaning and replaced it with the consumer's desires—healing, entertainment, social status—never once considering what the mummies themselves represented.

Understanding this history doesn't require guilt, but it does invite reflection. The next time you encounter another culture's sacred objects or practices, consider: are you engaging with what it meant to them, or just consuming another form of mumia?