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The Mummy's Curse: the True History of a Dark Fantasy
In the winter of 1922-23 archaeologist Howard Carter and his wealthy patron George Herbert, the Fifth Earl of Carnarvon, sensationally opened the tomb of Tutenkhamen. Six weeks later Herbert, the sponsor of the expedition, died in Egypt. The popular press went wild with rumours of a curse on those who disturbed the Pharaoh's rest and for years followed every twist and turn of the fate of the men who had been involved in the historic discovery. Long dismissed by Egyptologists, the mummy's curse remains a part of popular supernatural belief. Roger Luckhurst explores why the myth has captured the British imagination across the centuries, and how it has impacted on popular culture.
Tutankhamen was not the first curse story to emerge in British popular culture. This book uncovers the 'true' stories of two extraordinary Victorian gentlemen widely believed at the time to have been cursed by the artefacts they brought home from Egypt in the nineteenth century. These are weird and wonderful stories that weave together a cast of famous writers, painters, feted soldiers, lowly smugglers, respected men of science, disreputable society dames, and spooky spiritualists. Focusing on tales of the curse myth, Roger Luckhurst leads us through Victorian museums, international exhibitions, private collections, the battlefields of Egypt and Sudan, and the writings of figures like Arthur Conan Doyle, Rider Haggard and Algernon Blackwood. Written in an open and accessible style, this volume is the product of over ten years research in London's most curious archives. It explores how we became fascinated with Egypt and how this fascination was fuelled by myth, mystery, and rumour. Moreover, it provides a new and startling path through the cultural history of Victorian England and its colonial possessions.
Tutankhamen was not the first curse story to emerge in British popular culture. This book uncovers the 'true' stories of two extraordinary Victorian gentlemen widely believed at the time to have been cursed by the artefacts they brought home from Egypt in the nineteenth century. These are weird and wonderful stories that weave together a cast of famous writers, painters, feted soldiers, lowly smugglers, respected men of science, disreputable society dames, and spooky spiritualists. Focusing on tales of the curse myth, Roger Luckhurst leads us through Victorian museums, international exhibitions, private collections, the battlefields of Egypt and Sudan, and the writings of figures like Arthur Conan Doyle, Rider Haggard and Algernon Blackwood. Written in an open and accessible style, this volume is the product of over ten years research in London's most curious archives. It explores how we became fascinated with Egypt and how this fascination was fuelled by myth, mystery, and rumour. Moreover, it provides a new and startling path through the cultural history of Victorian England and its colonial possessions.
321 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 2012
11 people are currently reading
155 people want to read
About the author
Roger Luckhurst
62 books44 followersRoger Luckhurst is a British writer and academic. He is Professor in Modern and Contemporary Literature in the Department of English and Humanities at Birkbeck, University of London and was Distinguished Visiting Professor at Columbia University in 2016. He works on Victorian literature, contemporary literature, Gothic and weird fiction, trauma studies, and speculative/science fiction.
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Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews
October 21, 2019
A fairly academic overview of how the British viewed Egypt over the years, how the curse stories were connected to museums, private collections and changing political situations, and what authors drew from all this. Very light on the latter content with story synopses filling the space. I would have also appreciated a more tighter focus, especially in the chapter about magic and occult that was essentially just a short history of occult societies and magical thinking. Although Luckhurst goes on too many tangents, overall the ideas and arguments are solid and worth the read, and a good base for the collection I'm going to be reading next.
February 1, 2025
The Mummy’s Curse: The True History of a Dark Fantasy (2012) by Roger Luckhurst
Luckhurst's non-fiction is always well researched and well written. The Mummy's Curse is no exception. Chapters 4 and 5 explore the impact of Egyptian antiquities on scholarly and consumer culture in London. Anyone who has read Robert Louis Stevenson, Arthur Machen, or R. Austin Freeman will appreciate Luckhurst's survey of the period 1800-1900.
A few excerpts:
page: 130
The Oriental Rooms of Le Bon Marché had a major impact on the way that the department store was introduced to London in the 1870s.
page: 155
Victorian creation of the national collection or universal survey museum as an instrumental pedagogical device. The museum is a modern technology because it converts the private, aristocratic ‘cabinet of curiosities’, designed on secret harmonies, into public democratic institutions ordered on transparent taxonomies and aesthetic or scientific sequencing. The national collection confirms the privileged place of the European democratic state in the development of civilizations, nations and empires. The museum disciplines unruly mobs into educated citizens (although in 1780 and again in 1848 troops were stationed in the British Museum grounds to hold off rioters and revolutionaries). Built in the heart of the major European capitals, national collections became, according Barbara Black, a ‘monitored and controlled’ model of the city, an idealized version of what lay beyond the gates.83 Enlightenment reigned in these rooms, producing a regulated order: ‘We learn to read and see alike in the museum, which, as a setter of standards, heralds the advent of a standardised existence.’84
page: 155
But the Museum was never quite experienced like this. The collection was always expanding faster than its underpaid keepers or cramped rooms could manage. Things were stuffed in storage, unregarded, uncatalogued, lost, sometimes left to rot. For all the accumulation, the developmental logic was frustrated by gaps in the archive and the limits of display space. Government Select Committee investigations into the state of the National Repository tell a story of almost permanent crisis. Important gifts were refused due to lack of space.85 The Principal Librarian informed the Select Committee that ‘visitors are bewildered and confused by the extent and variety of the collections’ and that ‘objects are too crowded together, and they are very often mixed in a manner that they ought not to be’ , with many important items barely visible in crepuscular basements.86 Keepers often fought bitterly against extending opening to the wider public. For decades, entry to the Museum was made by personal application for restricted numbers of tickets to particular collections. ‘ As an educational museum,’ Pitt-Rivers thundered in 1891, ‘it is simply bewildering. ’87 Thirty years later, from a very different, Modernist perspective, Paul Valéry regarded the universal survey museum as ‘a domain of incoherence. This juxtaposition of dead visions has something insane about it, with each thing jealously competing for the glance that will give it life. ’88
page: 156
his animistic idea that the accumulation of dead things in the museum might yet contain a secret life deserves some reflection. For Victorian ethnographers and anthropologists, animism was a symptom of the ‘lower psychology’ of savages. The most primitive form of religious belief was that souls might remain after death by moving into inanimate objects.89 Developmental theories of evolution suggested such beliefs were always superseded by a more sophisticated theology, and, later, by a scientific understanding of causation. Yet, as Edward Tylor observed in his conclusion to Primitive Culture , ‘there seems no human thought so primitive as to have lost its bearing on our own thought, nor so ancient as to have broken its connection with our own life. ’90 Modern, Victorian rationality could always be undercut by what Tylor called ‘survivals’ from lower stages of thought. That the British Museum became the location for cultural fantasies about reanimation implies that its enlightened, educative role was often subverted by these ‘survivals’ of magical thinking. Rumours about cursed objects might exasperate curators, but they are evidence that the disciplinary role of the Museum never functioned perfectly or at all uniformly. Indeed, this is closer to what the Postmodern anthropologist James Clifford suggests, that we need to recall artefacts’ ‘lost status as fetishes’: ‘This tactic . . . would accord to things in collections the power to fixate, rather than simply the capacity to edify or inform. ’91 And mummies became sites for these fixations because they were survivals in the modern Museum of older ‘magical’ forms of collecting associated with cabinets of curiosities.
page: 156
Before the arrival of the public museum in the eighteenth century, the aristocratic cabinet brought together wonders, objects of extreme rarity and value that were ‘marked at the outermost limits of the natural’ , ranging through jewels and precious metals to sacred relics, exotic amulets and evidence of chimeras that only existed otherwise in myth or rumour: griffin claws and unicorn horns.92 The cabinet was a secret concentration of princely power, a hoard of wealth but also of occult forces, an apparatus for the exercise of sympathetic magic. The objects in a cabinet were condensations that became intermediaries to invisible worlds, whether of distant exotic lands or realms beyond the ken of ordinary folk.93 Any decent cabinet of medieval or Renaissance curiosities required either a mummy or a sample of mumia , the powdered essence of mummy that was held to have powerful curative effects on wounds. Aristocrats often carried it in pouches for easy access. ‘True Mummie is taken from the monuments and stony chambers of the anciently dead in Egypt,’ the surgeon Ambrose Parey wrote in 1634, though already warning about the industry of fake manufacture of mumia for gullible Christians from ‘the mangled and putride particles of the carcases of the basest people of Egypt. ’94 In the early seventeenth century, Walter Cope took the unusual step of displaying his cabinet of exotic curiosities in London, which included Virginian fireflies, Chinese porcelain, African amulets and an Egyptian mummy.95 Robert Hubert of London collected a mummy that he recorded in his Catalogue of Many Natural Rarities in 1665. And in 1681, the Royal Society cabinet was disparagingly referred to as ‘a ware-house of Aegyptian Mummies, Old Musty Skeletons, and other Antiquated Trumpery. ’96
page: 158
[….] scientific displays of the British Museum were competing with all the sensational exotic entertainments of the imperial metropolis, but also because the city was still riddled with small, private collections of Egyptian artefacts, continuations of the tradition of cabinets of curiosities accrued as symbols of private wealth and power. Nearby, the Soane Museum hosted evening candlelit soirées around Seti’s alabaster tomb in what Soane called his ‘Egyptian Crypt’ .106 For Soane, a Mason, these occasions might well have had occult designs, being recreations of Eleusinian mysteries. Across Lincoln’s Inn, the small collection of the Royal College of Surgeons, formed from the private collection of John Hunter, contained several mummies, displayed along with other medical monstrosities. In 1886, Lord Brassey purchased the ornate Indian room that had been built for the Colonial and Indian Exhibition of 1886 and had it reconstructed as his smoking room in his mansion at 24 Park Lane. The room was opened, by appointment, as a museum of exotic Eastern artefacts, between 1889 and 1918. Henry Wellcome amassed a vast collection of medical material, including Egyptian papyri and funerary artefacts that were publicly displayed in his museum that opened on the Euston Road from 1932. To the north-west of London, Lady Meux’s private collection of Egyptian antiquities at Theobalds Park had a cursed mummy and intimate links to Wallis Budge at the British Museum. John Lee’s private collection of Egyptian antiquities had been catalogued in the 1850s at Hartwell House (complete with Egyptianate follies in the grounds) to the west of London. In Southwark, the Cuming family collected a hundred thousand objects, including hundreds of objects from Egypt, which were displayed in their home, later the Cuming Museum, known as the ‘British Museum in Miniature’ . To the south, Frederick Horniman, from the Indian tea merchant family, built up an enormous private collection of exotic materials from his travels. Near to the Crystal Palace at Sydenham, the Horniman Museum was opened to the public in 1890. He added to his Eastern collections after two journeys in 1894 and 1896, the latter including a fortnight in Egypt. After these journeys, Horniman opened his New Oriental Saloon, which contained a display of five mummies. Emphasizing the old-fashioned nature of this collection, Horniman was even involved with a public mummy unwrapping at the Dulwich Scientific and Literary Association in February 1897. To add to the frisson, this was another priestess of Amen-Ra, a mummy named Peta- Amen-Neb-Nest-Tain. At the end of the demonstration, visitors were each given a small square of the mummy cloth. When the Horniman collection was presented to the people of London on Frederick Horniman’s death in 1901, one of the first professional fieldwork anthropologists, A. C. Haddon, was called in toassess Horniman’s collection. ‘The day has passed when we can consider a collection of “curios” as a museum’ , Haddon reported acidly. 107Perhaps Haddon knew that one of the former curators at the Horniman was Samuel Mathers, a man steeped in occult lore and a self-proclaimed magician who co-founded the HermeticOrder of the Golden Dawn (a man we will return to in chapter 8 ). Later,just before World War II, another small private collection of some two thousand antiquities went into exile in London with its Jewish owner. Sigmund Freudhad been an obsessive visitor to Viennese dealers in antiquities who openly sold unprovenanced objects; his collection now forms part of the Freud Museum.108This is merely a partial list of London ‘cabinets’: it is self-evident that the model of the enlightened British Museum hardly superseded the existence of cabinets and their exotic wonders. The Museum was surrounded by renewed versions of it.
page: 159
Indeed, this logic of the uncanny doubling of the Museum was played out very precisely in London topography. The more the authority of the British Museum grew, the more institutions of marginal knowledge clustered around the edges of the Museum site in Bloomsbury. The Spiritual Institute, founded by James Burns in 1863, was located just round the corner from the Museum in Southampton Row, and became one of the major centres for spiritualist séances and publications in London. The Swedenborg Society (followers of the Swedish mystic Emanuel Swedenborg) took rooms in Bloomsbury Street in 1870, before moving to a large hall in Bloomsbury Square in 1925. In his townhouse in Russell Square, within a stone’s throw of the back entrance to the Museum, Edward Cox undertook research into séances in the 1870s and claimed to prove empirically the existence of ‘psychic force’ . The British National Association of Spiritualists took offices in Great Russell Street, opposite the Museum, in 1878. It was in these rooms that the Society for Psychical Research was founded in 1882. This shadowing effect seemed to demonstrate that the Museum’s mission to bring scientific enlightenment was also always supplemented by an odd reserve of supernaturalism, seeking legitimacy by proximity to the new scientific authority.109
page: 160
and it is also perhaps obvious why the mummy becomes a focus for this supplemental logic within the walls of the British Museum. Mummies are human remains not inert objects. They are liminal, suspended between stages of existence. As Wallis Budge reminded his readers, ‘Believers in Osiris never regarded mummies as wholly dead objects. ’110 The mummy is the quintessential uncanny object that prompts magical thinking about dead things that might come back to life. Mary Bouquet and Nuno Porto have argued that if museum displays of mummies frame sacred rituals as anthropological belief systems, neutralizing ancient awe and dread, it may be that scientific explanations only produce their own form of ‘curatorial magic’ which works by conjuring secular wonder to ‘re-enchant the resulting materials’ .111 Perhaps, though, the history of Egyptian displays in cabinets and museums more compellingly suggests that this uneasy liminality is due to a more fundamental factor: that the mummy never quite successfully reached the status of a museum artefact.
page: 243
It is hard to grasp Crowley’s place in the Edwardian imagination. He was a comical and eccentric figure, working hard on his invisibility spells in the Café Royal, staging his mad ‘Rites of Eleusis’ in a public hall in 1910, and appearing in scandalous gossip over unpaid bills and debased mistresses. Equinox caught him up in a preposterous court action over the ownership of secrets that the judge ultimately deemed worthless. Arnold Bennett called him the Mahatma in Paris Nights , a man ‘wearing a heavily jewelled waistcoat and the largest ring I ever saw on a human hand . . . Without any preface he began to talk supernaturally. ’90 He appears in many memoirs of the time and his exploits amongst London Decadent and Modernist circles could fill many pages, a mythology that has been further encouraged since the 1960s counter-cultural revival of interest in Crowley.91 He drifts through Anthony Powell’s autobiographical novel sequence of London life, A Dance to the Music of Time , as Doctor Trelawney. In The Kindly Ones , Trelawney booms out magical epigrams (‘The Essence of the Will is the Godhead of the True’), but is also cherished as a genuine English eccentric: ‘What will happen to people like him as the world plods on to standardisation?’ someone mournfully asks.92 Powell’s deep conservatism embraced Crowley’s resistance to modern democracy in a novel sequence held together by the idea of occulted patterns of meaning and ‘secret harmonies’ .
page 233
Magical thinking was once meant to be located in the mind of savages only, and then as a developmental phase of cognition in children. More recent psychological research has acknowledged that magical thinking, that ‘general set of invisible, insensible forces that can cause illness, death, disaster and social effects might constitute a cognitive domain with its own relevant set of rules and principles’. This is a framework that has ‘stubbornly resisted the aggressive expansion of modern science’ because it provides some useful, adaptive functions, particularly as a means of dealing with loss, grief and death.
* * *
Luckhurst's non-fiction is always well researched and well written. The Mummy's Curse is no exception. Chapters 4 and 5 explore the impact of Egyptian antiquities on scholarly and consumer culture in London. Anyone who has read Robert Louis Stevenson, Arthur Machen, or R. Austin Freeman will appreciate Luckhurst's survey of the period 1800-1900.
A few excerpts:
page: 130
The Oriental Rooms of Le Bon Marché had a major impact on the way that the department store was introduced to London in the 1870s.
page: 155
Victorian creation of the national collection or universal survey museum as an instrumental pedagogical device. The museum is a modern technology because it converts the private, aristocratic ‘cabinet of curiosities’, designed on secret harmonies, into public democratic institutions ordered on transparent taxonomies and aesthetic or scientific sequencing. The national collection confirms the privileged place of the European democratic state in the development of civilizations, nations and empires. The museum disciplines unruly mobs into educated citizens (although in 1780 and again in 1848 troops were stationed in the British Museum grounds to hold off rioters and revolutionaries). Built in the heart of the major European capitals, national collections became, according Barbara Black, a ‘monitored and controlled’ model of the city, an idealized version of what lay beyond the gates.83 Enlightenment reigned in these rooms, producing a regulated order: ‘We learn to read and see alike in the museum, which, as a setter of standards, heralds the advent of a standardised existence.’84
page: 155
But the Museum was never quite experienced like this. The collection was always expanding faster than its underpaid keepers or cramped rooms could manage. Things were stuffed in storage, unregarded, uncatalogued, lost, sometimes left to rot. For all the accumulation, the developmental logic was frustrated by gaps in the archive and the limits of display space. Government Select Committee investigations into the state of the National Repository tell a story of almost permanent crisis. Important gifts were refused due to lack of space.85 The Principal Librarian informed the Select Committee that ‘visitors are bewildered and confused by the extent and variety of the collections’ and that ‘objects are too crowded together, and they are very often mixed in a manner that they ought not to be’ , with many important items barely visible in crepuscular basements.86 Keepers often fought bitterly against extending opening to the wider public. For decades, entry to the Museum was made by personal application for restricted numbers of tickets to particular collections. ‘ As an educational museum,’ Pitt-Rivers thundered in 1891, ‘it is simply bewildering. ’87 Thirty years later, from a very different, Modernist perspective, Paul Valéry regarded the universal survey museum as ‘a domain of incoherence. This juxtaposition of dead visions has something insane about it, with each thing jealously competing for the glance that will give it life. ’88
page: 156
his animistic idea that the accumulation of dead things in the museum might yet contain a secret life deserves some reflection. For Victorian ethnographers and anthropologists, animism was a symptom of the ‘lower psychology’ of savages. The most primitive form of religious belief was that souls might remain after death by moving into inanimate objects.89 Developmental theories of evolution suggested such beliefs were always superseded by a more sophisticated theology, and, later, by a scientific understanding of causation. Yet, as Edward Tylor observed in his conclusion to Primitive Culture , ‘there seems no human thought so primitive as to have lost its bearing on our own thought, nor so ancient as to have broken its connection with our own life. ’90 Modern, Victorian rationality could always be undercut by what Tylor called ‘survivals’ from lower stages of thought. That the British Museum became the location for cultural fantasies about reanimation implies that its enlightened, educative role was often subverted by these ‘survivals’ of magical thinking. Rumours about cursed objects might exasperate curators, but they are evidence that the disciplinary role of the Museum never functioned perfectly or at all uniformly. Indeed, this is closer to what the Postmodern anthropologist James Clifford suggests, that we need to recall artefacts’ ‘lost status as fetishes’: ‘This tactic . . . would accord to things in collections the power to fixate, rather than simply the capacity to edify or inform. ’91 And mummies became sites for these fixations because they were survivals in the modern Museum of older ‘magical’ forms of collecting associated with cabinets of curiosities.
page: 156
Before the arrival of the public museum in the eighteenth century, the aristocratic cabinet brought together wonders, objects of extreme rarity and value that were ‘marked at the outermost limits of the natural’ , ranging through jewels and precious metals to sacred relics, exotic amulets and evidence of chimeras that only existed otherwise in myth or rumour: griffin claws and unicorn horns.92 The cabinet was a secret concentration of princely power, a hoard of wealth but also of occult forces, an apparatus for the exercise of sympathetic magic. The objects in a cabinet were condensations that became intermediaries to invisible worlds, whether of distant exotic lands or realms beyond the ken of ordinary folk.93 Any decent cabinet of medieval or Renaissance curiosities required either a mummy or a sample of mumia , the powdered essence of mummy that was held to have powerful curative effects on wounds. Aristocrats often carried it in pouches for easy access. ‘True Mummie is taken from the monuments and stony chambers of the anciently dead in Egypt,’ the surgeon Ambrose Parey wrote in 1634, though already warning about the industry of fake manufacture of mumia for gullible Christians from ‘the mangled and putride particles of the carcases of the basest people of Egypt. ’94 In the early seventeenth century, Walter Cope took the unusual step of displaying his cabinet of exotic curiosities in London, which included Virginian fireflies, Chinese porcelain, African amulets and an Egyptian mummy.95 Robert Hubert of London collected a mummy that he recorded in his Catalogue of Many Natural Rarities in 1665. And in 1681, the Royal Society cabinet was disparagingly referred to as ‘a ware-house of Aegyptian Mummies, Old Musty Skeletons, and other Antiquated Trumpery. ’96
page: 158
[….] scientific displays of the British Museum were competing with all the sensational exotic entertainments of the imperial metropolis, but also because the city was still riddled with small, private collections of Egyptian artefacts, continuations of the tradition of cabinets of curiosities accrued as symbols of private wealth and power. Nearby, the Soane Museum hosted evening candlelit soirées around Seti’s alabaster tomb in what Soane called his ‘Egyptian Crypt’ .106 For Soane, a Mason, these occasions might well have had occult designs, being recreations of Eleusinian mysteries. Across Lincoln’s Inn, the small collection of the Royal College of Surgeons, formed from the private collection of John Hunter, contained several mummies, displayed along with other medical monstrosities. In 1886, Lord Brassey purchased the ornate Indian room that had been built for the Colonial and Indian Exhibition of 1886 and had it reconstructed as his smoking room in his mansion at 24 Park Lane. The room was opened, by appointment, as a museum of exotic Eastern artefacts, between 1889 and 1918. Henry Wellcome amassed a vast collection of medical material, including Egyptian papyri and funerary artefacts that were publicly displayed in his museum that opened on the Euston Road from 1932. To the north-west of London, Lady Meux’s private collection of Egyptian antiquities at Theobalds Park had a cursed mummy and intimate links to Wallis Budge at the British Museum. John Lee’s private collection of Egyptian antiquities had been catalogued in the 1850s at Hartwell House (complete with Egyptianate follies in the grounds) to the west of London. In Southwark, the Cuming family collected a hundred thousand objects, including hundreds of objects from Egypt, which were displayed in their home, later the Cuming Museum, known as the ‘British Museum in Miniature’ . To the south, Frederick Horniman, from the Indian tea merchant family, built up an enormous private collection of exotic materials from his travels. Near to the Crystal Palace at Sydenham, the Horniman Museum was opened to the public in 1890. He added to his Eastern collections after two journeys in 1894 and 1896, the latter including a fortnight in Egypt. After these journeys, Horniman opened his New Oriental Saloon, which contained a display of five mummies. Emphasizing the old-fashioned nature of this collection, Horniman was even involved with a public mummy unwrapping at the Dulwich Scientific and Literary Association in February 1897. To add to the frisson, this was another priestess of Amen-Ra, a mummy named Peta- Amen-Neb-Nest-Tain. At the end of the demonstration, visitors were each given a small square of the mummy cloth. When the Horniman collection was presented to the people of London on Frederick Horniman’s death in 1901, one of the first professional fieldwork anthropologists, A. C. Haddon, was called in toassess Horniman’s collection. ‘The day has passed when we can consider a collection of “curios” as a museum’ , Haddon reported acidly. 107Perhaps Haddon knew that one of the former curators at the Horniman was Samuel Mathers, a man steeped in occult lore and a self-proclaimed magician who co-founded the HermeticOrder of the Golden Dawn (a man we will return to in chapter 8 ). Later,just before World War II, another small private collection of some two thousand antiquities went into exile in London with its Jewish owner. Sigmund Freudhad been an obsessive visitor to Viennese dealers in antiquities who openly sold unprovenanced objects; his collection now forms part of the Freud Museum.108This is merely a partial list of London ‘cabinets’: it is self-evident that the model of the enlightened British Museum hardly superseded the existence of cabinets and their exotic wonders. The Museum was surrounded by renewed versions of it.
page: 159
Indeed, this logic of the uncanny doubling of the Museum was played out very precisely in London topography. The more the authority of the British Museum grew, the more institutions of marginal knowledge clustered around the edges of the Museum site in Bloomsbury. The Spiritual Institute, founded by James Burns in 1863, was located just round the corner from the Museum in Southampton Row, and became one of the major centres for spiritualist séances and publications in London. The Swedenborg Society (followers of the Swedish mystic Emanuel Swedenborg) took rooms in Bloomsbury Street in 1870, before moving to a large hall in Bloomsbury Square in 1925. In his townhouse in Russell Square, within a stone’s throw of the back entrance to the Museum, Edward Cox undertook research into séances in the 1870s and claimed to prove empirically the existence of ‘psychic force’ . The British National Association of Spiritualists took offices in Great Russell Street, opposite the Museum, in 1878. It was in these rooms that the Society for Psychical Research was founded in 1882. This shadowing effect seemed to demonstrate that the Museum’s mission to bring scientific enlightenment was also always supplemented by an odd reserve of supernaturalism, seeking legitimacy by proximity to the new scientific authority.109
page: 160
and it is also perhaps obvious why the mummy becomes a focus for this supplemental logic within the walls of the British Museum. Mummies are human remains not inert objects. They are liminal, suspended between stages of existence. As Wallis Budge reminded his readers, ‘Believers in Osiris never regarded mummies as wholly dead objects. ’110 The mummy is the quintessential uncanny object that prompts magical thinking about dead things that might come back to life. Mary Bouquet and Nuno Porto have argued that if museum displays of mummies frame sacred rituals as anthropological belief systems, neutralizing ancient awe and dread, it may be that scientific explanations only produce their own form of ‘curatorial magic’ which works by conjuring secular wonder to ‘re-enchant the resulting materials’ .111 Perhaps, though, the history of Egyptian displays in cabinets and museums more compellingly suggests that this uneasy liminality is due to a more fundamental factor: that the mummy never quite successfully reached the status of a museum artefact.
page: 243
It is hard to grasp Crowley’s place in the Edwardian imagination. He was a comical and eccentric figure, working hard on his invisibility spells in the Café Royal, staging his mad ‘Rites of Eleusis’ in a public hall in 1910, and appearing in scandalous gossip over unpaid bills and debased mistresses. Equinox caught him up in a preposterous court action over the ownership of secrets that the judge ultimately deemed worthless. Arnold Bennett called him the Mahatma in Paris Nights , a man ‘wearing a heavily jewelled waistcoat and the largest ring I ever saw on a human hand . . . Without any preface he began to talk supernaturally. ’90 He appears in many memoirs of the time and his exploits amongst London Decadent and Modernist circles could fill many pages, a mythology that has been further encouraged since the 1960s counter-cultural revival of interest in Crowley.91 He drifts through Anthony Powell’s autobiographical novel sequence of London life, A Dance to the Music of Time , as Doctor Trelawney. In The Kindly Ones , Trelawney booms out magical epigrams (‘The Essence of the Will is the Godhead of the True’), but is also cherished as a genuine English eccentric: ‘What will happen to people like him as the world plods on to standardisation?’ someone mournfully asks.92 Powell’s deep conservatism embraced Crowley’s resistance to modern democracy in a novel sequence held together by the idea of occulted patterns of meaning and ‘secret harmonies’ .
page 233
Magical thinking was once meant to be located in the mind of savages only, and then as a developmental phase of cognition in children. More recent psychological research has acknowledged that magical thinking, that ‘general set of invisible, insensible forces that can cause illness, death, disaster and social effects might constitute a cognitive domain with its own relevant set of rules and principles’. This is a framework that has ‘stubbornly resisted the aggressive expansion of modern science’ because it provides some useful, adaptive functions, particularly as a means of dealing with loss, grief and death.
* * *
August 22, 2017
I have always loved anything to do with mummies and curses and was so excited about this book!
This was not quite what I expected. I think the blurb makes it feel like it would be focused on the story and tales, but it’s definitely more of a reference book. Despite it wasn’t exactly what I hoped and was a bit dull in places, it also had its moments that you couldn’t help but find interesting (especially for me- the behind the scenes of the social and cultural affluence's involved with the digs and museums).
Unfortunately this is one of those that probably deserves more stars than I am giving because it's losing them on the grounds of not quite being what I thought. Otherwise it seems to be well-researched and set-up well for studying. About half of this is references (otherwise this no-doubt, really would have taken me 'til next March to finish)and they are noted throughout the book and linked to their appropriate place in the back. I imagine this would be very handy if you are doing research.
This was not quite what I expected. I think the blurb makes it feel like it would be focused on the story and tales, but it’s definitely more of a reference book. Despite it wasn’t exactly what I hoped and was a bit dull in places, it also had its moments that you couldn’t help but find interesting (especially for me- the behind the scenes of the social and cultural affluence's involved with the digs and museums).
Unfortunately this is one of those that probably deserves more stars than I am giving because it's losing them on the grounds of not quite being what I thought. Otherwise it seems to be well-researched and set-up well for studying. About half of this is references (otherwise this no-doubt, really would have taken me 'til next March to finish)and they are noted throughout the book and linked to their appropriate place in the back. I imagine this would be very handy if you are doing research.
October 7, 2013
This very readable and immensely detailed academic book constructs a history for an idea that I didn't even realize I took for granted: the notion that Egyptian mummies were frightening, Gothic figures who brought terrible curses on those who unearthed or unwrapped them. Luckhurst opens the book by telling the story of Howard Carter and George Herbert's discovery of pharaoh Tutankhamun's tomb in 1922-23. After Herbert dies, curse stories circulate, and Luckhurst begins to question where this idea--that Egyptian tombs brought about the doom of their discoverers--began.
Luckhurst follows the opening chapter with an exploration of the literary, architectural, and cultural place of mummies in the long nineteenth century. He clearly demonstrates that mummies were initially not discussed as cursed objects or even particularly frightening ones (people unwrapped them in public at rather spectacular events in the first half of the nineteenth century!!), but that developments in British imperial history, in class consciousness, and in different forms of communication brought about the idea of the mummy's curse.
This book touches on many interesting areas of Victorian studies, including material culture, supernatural fiction, and late Victorian occult movements. The reader is spirited from a discussion of early-Victorian Egyptian panoramas to the lurid interactions of W.B. Yeats, Florence Farr, and Aleister Crowley as part of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. This is in many ways a book that I wished I had written, but also something that will prove very valuable for future research. I strongly recommend it, and I think it would be of interest to academics and non-academics alike!
Luckhurst follows the opening chapter with an exploration of the literary, architectural, and cultural place of mummies in the long nineteenth century. He clearly demonstrates that mummies were initially not discussed as cursed objects or even particularly frightening ones (people unwrapped them in public at rather spectacular events in the first half of the nineteenth century!!), but that developments in British imperial history, in class consciousness, and in different forms of communication brought about the idea of the mummy's curse.
This book touches on many interesting areas of Victorian studies, including material culture, supernatural fiction, and late Victorian occult movements. The reader is spirited from a discussion of early-Victorian Egyptian panoramas to the lurid interactions of W.B. Yeats, Florence Farr, and Aleister Crowley as part of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. This is in many ways a book that I wished I had written, but also something that will prove very valuable for future research. I strongly recommend it, and I think it would be of interest to academics and non-academics alike!
June 16, 2013
I saw Roger Luckhurst speak on the topics of this book a couple times and found him really interesting and I learned a lot. This book took the substances of those lectures and developed them further. This book covered a whole range of things I'm interested in Victorian and Edwardian history, gothic literature, the occult, colonialism and Egyptology, museum studies and showed how they were all inter-related.
For me the first part of the book where the actual curses were discussed were the least interesting as these were things I'd heard before. For me the most interesting part was the second half where Luckhurst discussed his arguments about the changing nature of how Egypt was viewed from the 19th to the 20th century. He looked at the influence of Egypt on architecture, how Egyptian items were displayed in museums, the changing face of Egyptology in museums, how Egyptian artefacts were described in stories and how curse stories started to circulate. It was also interesting to see the rise in magical thinking. How this went from being something that was supposedly part of "inferior" "primitive" civilisations but was actually on the rise in Britain.
For me the first part of the book where the actual curses were discussed were the least interesting as these were things I'd heard before. For me the most interesting part was the second half where Luckhurst discussed his arguments about the changing nature of how Egypt was viewed from the 19th to the 20th century. He looked at the influence of Egypt on architecture, how Egyptian items were displayed in museums, the changing face of Egyptology in museums, how Egyptian artefacts were described in stories and how curse stories started to circulate. It was also interesting to see the rise in magical thinking. How this went from being something that was supposedly part of "inferior" "primitive" civilisations but was actually on the rise in Britain.
June 30, 2014
In truth, I found this more dull than not, limited in scope and certainly not what I thought I was getting. Going from the title and the blurb, I had thought I would be looking at various representations of "the mummy" or Ancient Egyptian curse stories from its beginnings to the common era. Roger Luckhurst instead present an intense view of the societal attitudes from which the "curse stories" sprung to the climax with Tutankhamun's infamous curse. Rather than spanning "centuries", Luckhurst's main focus is from the late 1800s to about 1930.
Parts of The Mummy's Curse are interesting and, indeed, insightful – particularly Luckhurst's conclusion and insight on the evil eye. But more often than not, I found the text a slog and found myself struggling to keep going. If the focus had not only been on the broader history of the mummy figure and not just the facets of British colonialism that spurred the advent of these curse stories, I would have found this far more interesting and relevant to me.
Parts of The Mummy's Curse are interesting and, indeed, insightful – particularly Luckhurst's conclusion and insight on the evil eye. But more often than not, I found the text a slog and found myself struggling to keep going. If the focus had not only been on the broader history of the mummy figure and not just the facets of British colonialism that spurred the advent of these curse stories, I would have found this far more interesting and relevant to me.
May 15, 2015
I read this book to research a story I'm writing about an Egyptian curse.
For my purposes, the book seemed to ramble into too many areas not specifically related to curses (such as an unusually long diversion on the subject of Pekingese dogs). This apparent lack of focus made me put it down near the halfway point about two months ago, and haven't picked it up since.
That said, I highly recommend this book for anyone researching their own Egyptian curse story. It's not a "read it cover to cover" kind of book, but it is a great resource full of inspirational material for someone devising a mummy's curse of their own.
For my purposes, the book seemed to ramble into too many areas not specifically related to curses (such as an unusually long diversion on the subject of Pekingese dogs). This apparent lack of focus made me put it down near the halfway point about two months ago, and haven't picked it up since.
That said, I highly recommend this book for anyone researching their own Egyptian curse story. It's not a "read it cover to cover" kind of book, but it is a great resource full of inspirational material for someone devising a mummy's curse of their own.
December 30, 2014
Netter Überblick über die Ursprünge des Mumienfluchs in der Literatur mit einer Aufzählung der üblichen Verdächtigen. Nichts wirklich Neues. Ich habe es auch nur quergelesen, weil ich es für eine Hausarbeit brauchte und habe mich daher auf die Teile konzentriert, die für mich wichtig waren.
Ich sehe Loudens THE MUMMY komplett anders als der Autor, aber jeder ist frei, seine eigeen Meinung zu haben. Ich werde seine Meinung zumindest zitieren.
Ich sehe Loudens THE MUMMY komplett anders als der Autor, aber jeder ist frei, seine eigeen Meinung zu haben. Ich werde seine Meinung zumindest zitieren.
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