Mummies, Cannibals and Vampires by Richard Sugg

Author:Richard Sugg
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781136577369
Publisher: Routledge

Again the victim (who is ‘of the best complexion’) dies a violent death, presumably while still young and healthy. But what is most striking is that – partly by using the natural power of the sun as a version of the heat employed by chemists – this formula has essentially alchemised the purest gold from the human organism, in the form of a balm whose delightful perfume echoes that ‘odour of sanctity’ associated with both living and dead Catholic saints. By contrast, the Paracelsian curing process, merely neutralising the flesh into something ‘without stink’, looks decidedly inferior.

It is possible that this account is one version of what would now be called an urban legend. For Robert Fludd claimed to have heard of a very similar incident, recounted to him by a sailor just returned from Barbary: ‘a certain Jew after he had beheld an English mariner in the ship, who had a red head, and feigning himself to be much taken with the love of him, wrought so with him, that for three hundred pound’ the sailor agreed ‘to sell himself unto him for his slave, thinking in time to come to give his Jewish master the slip, and run away’. Presently, ‘the ship being ready to return, and the mariners going to take their leave of their captive fellow, they resorted unto the Jew’s house, who after they had demanded for their fellow, led them into a back court, where they found the red-headed captive, his back being broke, and a gag in his mouth and chops and throat swollen’. This – the Jew was supposed to have confessed, with surprising candour – had been ‘caused by the stinging of vipers, which were forced into his mouth’. From this victim, ‘hung up and exposed unto the hot sun, with a silver basin under his mouth, to receive that which dropped from’ it, the Jew allegedly ‘made a kind of poison so deadly, that it did surely kill where it touched’.103

Here, as in the case of the Jewish mummy dealer, the supposed culprit is remarkably unguarded about his darkest secrets (‘your red-headed friend? of course! he’s being tortured as we speak … ‘). A lamentable abundance of fantastic tales about Jewish poisoners, and about murders committed by Jews upon Christians, leaves us in no doubt that this report is yet one more anti-Semitic myth (although we can be equally confident that Fludd and others quite genuinely believed it).104 Yet as fantasies go, it is remarkably exact. Once more the body becomes a kind of alchemical still – in this case, more horrifyingly, while it is still alive. As with standard Paracelsian recipes, the subject is not only young and healthy, but red-headed (hence the distinctive quality and value of his blood).

We can be rather less certain that the Ethiopian recipe was purely fictitious – it was, after all, no more strange than certain Paracelsian formulae, such as John French’s mashing of the human organism into pate. But ultimately, what matters

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