"Of Cannibals"

Michel de Montaigne once wrote an essay with that title. I am merely borrowing it and make no claims to brilliance.

It's strange -- is it not? -- to think of all the double standards that we have. Or at least, some of the ones we used to have. For instance, most of us would say we are opposed to cannibalism and have always been...but did you know that there was once a fad of cannibalism that streaked through Europe and all the way across the pond to America under the guise of medicine?

Yes, indeed. Let me explain. In my class entitled English Literature II, we were reading Aphra Behn's Oroonoko; or, the Royal Slave. Our professor, Dr Van de Brakk, supplemented our reading with a few passages from Montaigne's Of Cannibals.

This, for me, brought back memories of just about every book I'd ever read on ancient Egypt and mummies and archaeology. We living humans have not, until recently, treated mummies very well at all.

Mark Twain once wrote that he saw Egyptians use mummies for train fuel (though given his penchant for tale-telling, who knows if this was true or not).

Ground-up mummies were made into paint or tint for artists; though they reported that it went on wonderfully smooth and had a rich colour, it soon cracked.

And the worst, of course, is the cannibalism I mentioned earlier. Mummies were ground up finely and mixed into a "medicinal" powder, to be taken internally.

This began, I think, sometime around medieval times and lasted for quite a while. It was supposed to be a cure-all, a wonder drug. Hah! Cannibalism is cannibalism, my friends, no matter how long someone has been dead. And we condemn the Donners? *eye roll*

It is but justice that when some people crawled into the long tunnels leading to the tombs where many mummies were buried together that their own torches caused the resin-soaked mummies to ignite and, consequently, burn the living invaders to death in the process.

I shall say no more on the subject except to apologise that this blog was not more cheery.