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Friday, Nov 27, 2009
Not that Brier believes any of this. For all the energy he devotes to ancient Egypt's ideas on death, his are simple: There will be no resurrection.
"People worry about sacrilege," he says, referring to his tampering with the dead. "But I think it's just the end."
Not one to linger in metaphysics, Brier prefers direct research. There's a little Martha Stewart in his meticulous fascination with technique. "It was now time for the final wrapping, and our big surprise," he enthuses in his Archaeology article. Like Stewart, his lack of self-consciousness is slightly charming, mainly amazing. This is a dead man, withered and blackened, and Brier doesn't really seem to notice.
"It becomes objectified," Brier says. "You forget you're working with a person."
Indeed, he's too focused on details to dwell on the big picture. The surprise in the procedure was that a dehydrated body doesn't make for flexible limbs. Without a little fluid in the joints, the body's arms will snap if bent over the chest. It was his most important finding, Brier says, and his team was forced to flout tradition and leave the arms by the sides of the body.
Brier wrapped the last finger in 1994, so why an article in Archaeology years later? After half a decade at room temperature, the mummy is finally old enough to evaluate. And according to Brier, it was a success.
"It was better than we could have hoped for," he says. "There was no bacteria attacking it."
This means Brier's mummy could help researchers understand why it's been so hard to replicate lengthy DNA sequences found in ancient mummies.
"DNA studies in mummies may also hold the answers to many Egyptological questions," he says. "We may be able to establish the origins of the Egyptians, and we may also be able to identify unknown royal mummies."
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For all the fuss about Brier, his isn't the only mummy game in town. Far from the university, way beyond Egyptology's purview, a Salt Lake City man who owns his own miniature pyramid has 1,300 bodies waiting to become mummies. The paperwork's done -- the bodies just have to become dead.
For a price, Summum Ra, aka Amen Ra, aka Claude Nowell, president of an organization called Summum, will preserve your corpse exactly as it is. For a smaller price, he'll preserve your pet's. Ra holds the patent on this type of mummification -- it uses a generous portion of Fiberglas to keep the skin from withering --- and as he tells it, it's a better wrap than Brier's.
"[Brier uses] dehydration, like beef jerky," Nowell says with just a little disdain. "Our process uses modern chemicals."
If Ra sounds like a salesman, it's because he is. In addition to being the country's only legal commercial mummy maker, he's a genuine religious leader. The Summum organization may make mummies, but first and foremost it's an official religion.
"Through the reincarnation of an incarnate Master, the flame of Summum burns on," the literature says. "Although Summum has not always been 'registered' with governments and nations, it has always existed."
As with any decent religion, the perks will cost you. Ideally, Summum would offer mummification free of charge, its Web site says. Things aren't ideal, apparently -- the company charges a total of $71,000 and up, depending on the mausoleum arrangement you reach with your cemetery, and the price of transporting your body to Salt Lake City. Since Summum is nonprofit, this is a suggested donation.
But the mummification racket does more than finance the spirituality -- it enables it. Preserving the human vessel, it turns out, is crucial to the Summum faith, which holds that a kind of cloning will occur after death. Unlike the Egyptians, it's reincarnation, not resurrection, they're waiting for.
"With mummification you're remembered," Ra writes, describing the extent to which his process preserves the body. "Your mummiform is a reminder of what your life was about."
It's enough for Mohamed al-Fayed, father of the late Dodi Fayed, lover of Princess Diana. According to Ra, the Harrods owner has signed on to become a mummy, when the time is right. Another customer-in-waiting, Sue Menu, made the decision long ago.
"It just felt like it was what I wanted to have done," Menu told ABC News last year. "To be honest, I hadn't really thought much about it because I was fairly young and I hadn't really even thought about death."
Ra's got a good angle, pitching mummification as an alternative to the increasingly unpopular funeral industry. He makes a good case against traditional funeral homes, which have often been accused of exaggerating the effectiveness of embalming.
"Until the late '70s or '80s, the funeral industry allowed people to believe their bodies would stay looking like new once they were embalmed," Ra says. "But that's not what happened. People paid all this money for a rotten pile of mush."
(The Federal Trade Commission has ruled that funeral directors must divulge, at some point in their talk to customers, that the body will decompose.)
Ra picked up his distaste for the funeral industry in the '70s, when he had friends there. A little research, a patent and 30 mummifications later -- the bodies had been "intransigents," acquired by a medical school -- Ra almost quit his day job.
"I started out making wine," he says. "Still do."
Ra isn't afraid to go after your business. He's quick to remind you of his patent, and he might even throw in a diss to Brier's brand of mummification.
"John Chew said it decomposed," Ra casually mentions of Brier's mummy. John Chew is Ra's former partner, and former professor of mortuary science at Lynn University in Florida. Indeed, Ra claims that his friend somehow saw Brier's project and it had failed.
Brier denies this.
"There are absolutely no signs of decay in our mummy," he contends. "The folks in Utah don't do mummification the Egyptian way, so I don't have much to say."
Like all great brain removers, Ra and Brier see their differences more clearly than their similarities. The two share not only a passion for mummification, but a seriousness about it, too. Each is matter-of-fact about his line of work. Both eschew the opportunity to comment on popular culture's bizarrely enduring interest in the various curses of the mummy. Likewise, neither is particularly inclined to repeat the mummy jokes they hear all the time. They rarely shroud themselves in toilet paper on Halloween, or laugh at "unravel" puns, and they certainly don't end their conversations by saying, "That's a wrap."
While Ra continues to sell the faith-based variety, Brier has since moved on to natural mummies. He's in and out of the Argentinian Andes these days, studying the perfectly mummified corpses of three Incan children. Frozen in snow for hundreds of years, the bodies "look like they're sleeping." And maybe this touches what we like about mummies -- they're dead, but not overwhelmingly so.
