November 4
The Curse of the (Real Life) Mummy
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On November 4, 1922, in the Valley of
the Kings, a boy who carried water for Howard Carter’s expedition uncovered the
edge of a stone step. Carter had been told by his patron, Lord Carnarvon, that
this would be his last season, and he had very little left to lose. What lay at
the bottom of those steps became the most famous archaeological discovery in
history. Within five months the patron was dead, and within days of that,
newspapers around the world were explaining why.
The explanation they offered was a
curse. It had almost nothing to do with ancient Egypt, and quite a lot to do
with a newspaper contract…
On November 26, Carter made a small opening in a sealed doorway and held a candle to it, and when Carnarvon asked whether he could see anything, he gave the answer that became famous: wonderful things. The burial chamber was opened in February 1923. Carnarvon, who had spent years and a fortune financing the search, died in Cairo on April 5, 1923, after an infected mosquito bite on his cheek led to blood poisoning.
It was a sad, ordinary end for a man
in poor health, and it arrived at the worst possible moment for the story.
Consider the press that was
waiting for it. To recover some of what he had spent, Carnarvon had sold
exclusive coverage of the discovery to The Times of London, reportedly
for £5,000 plus 75 percent of the profits from sales of its articles elsewhere.
Rival papers were left to cover the biggest story in the world from outside the
tomb. The epidemiologist Mark Nelson, who later studied the legend, thinks
competing newspapers probably started the rumor of a curse, and the shut-out
rivals had every incentive to look for another angle once Carnarvon fell
gravely ill. They did not need to look far for help. The novelist Marie
Corelli, whose popular fiction leaned heavily on the occult, warned in New
York World that the most dire punishment follows any rash intruder into a
sealed tomb, citing a rare book in her possession. After Carnarvon died, Arthur
Conan Doyle, the creator of Sherlock Holmes and a committed Spiritualist, told
the American press that an evil elemental, a spirit created by Egyptian priests
to guard the mummy, might be responsible. (This is the same Doyle who fell out with Houdini over the medium Margery, as our October 24th post described, and
who had already written mummy horror of his own…)
Nelson traces the mummy's curse to
fiction, noting that Louisa May Alcott published a short story called “Lost in
a Pyramid; or, The Mummy's Curse” in 1869, more than half a century before
Tutankhamun’s tomb was opened. The famous inscription, supposedly carved over
the entrance or elsewhere in the tomb and promising that death comes on wings
to anyone who enters, has never been found. The investigation put it bluntly:
there is no record of any written curse in Carter's documents or in any modern
collection associated with this tomb. Other Egyptian tombs do carry threats
against violators; this one, however, does not.
In 2002, the British Medical Journal published Nelson’s study of the 44 Westerners Carter recorded as present in Egypt during the excavation, 25 of whom had potentially been exposed to the curse by being present when sealed areas were entered. Those 25 died at an average age of 70, against 75 for the unexposed group, and survived an average of 20.8 years after exposure against 28.9. Neither difference was statistically significant, and Nelson concluded there was no evidence of a curse. He was candid about the limits: the groups were small, and exposed people were more likely to be recorded at all. Carter himself, the likeliest target of any curse, survived until 1939. The Egyptologist Bob Brier, asked about the study at the time, said that thirty years of working with mummies had never produced anything weird.
The legend also kept itself alive
through simple bookkeeping. As the years passed, unrelated deaths of people
vaguely connected to the dig were added to the list of victims, while the many
people who lived long, ordinary lives after entering the tomb went uncounted.
It is the same mechanism that kept the Malachy list alive, which this column
looked at yesterday: remember the hits, forget the misses, and let a vague
enough rule absorb everything. Nelson’s study mattered precisely because it did
the arithmetic that the newspapers never did, counting everyone who might have
been exposed instead of only the names that fit the story.
The legend has proved adaptable,
which is the real lesson here. Each generation found an explanation suited to
its own anxieties for an effect that the records do not show. What Carter’s
team found in the tomb was something quite different from a trap: amulets and
spells placed to protect a boy king on his journey into the afterlife. The
curse was the other thing that came out of that tomb, a story manufactured by a
news cycle, polished by novelists, and kept alive by habit. Carter’s wonderful
things were real … the curse was invented on a deadline.
By
Eleanor L. Harris | Weiser Books
Eleanor L. Harris’s Ancient Egyptian
Magic, published by Weiser Books (and first issued in 1998 as Ancient
Egyptian Divination and Magic) walks readers through the philosophy and
practice of heka, the Egyptian word for “magical power.” Its chapters
cover ritual tools and garments, amulets, magical writing, divination and
trance work, and words of power, drawing on spells translated from the Leyden
Papyrus, the Book of the Dead, the Coffin Texts, and the Pyramid Texts. Harris
is a long-time practitioner who has worked within a contemporary Egyptian “House
of Life,” and her book includes defensive magic and protective workings
alongside divination and rites for the dead.
The curse of Tutankhamun imagines
Egyptian magic as a vengeful hex waiting in the dark; importantly, the material
Harris presents is overwhelmingly about protection, healing, and safe passage,
which is much closer to what was actually placed in the king's tomb. Readers
who finish this post curious about the real tradition behind the invented one
will find a clear, respectful, step-by-step introduction here.
Harris’s work is truly about
practicing the magic, not about Tutankhamun or the curse; readers wanting the
archaeology of the discovery itself should also seek out a scholarly source
such as Bob Brier’s Tutankhamun and the Tomb That Changed the World from
Oxford University Press. But as a practical, accessible entry into the real
magic of ancient Egypt, Harris’s book is mystical masterpiece.
(Every day, Modern Occultist News will present "This Day in Occult History" and your "Daily Occult Review" and will dive into the birthdays, rituals, breakthroughs, and crucial moments that shaped today’s many esoteric traditions. From the Hermetic revival to Witchcraft, from Crowley to cyberspace, we’ll bring the best stories and latest trends to today’s own modern occultists everywhere.)
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