312 History of Monsters

years later, after everything had been ravaged by war and the tombs completely overturned, they found a liquid in some of them as thick as honey and highly fragrant. Egyptian physicians, believing this liquid possessed extraordinary virtues, used it for many ailments and confirmed its miraculous effects. This made them bolder, and they sought this embalming fluid in the tombs of other nobles; once those were exhausted, they eventually turned to the graves of the common people, where the liquid found was of much lower quality. Nevertheless, they called this substance "mummy" and used it for various diseases. From this, we must conclude that the true and legitimate Egyptian mummy is not the dried flesh of those corpses found in the Arabian sands and shipped to various regions as medicine. Therefore, based on what has been said, we can attest that true mummy is rarely kept in our pharmacies. Although some today compose a balsam to preserve human corpses from corruption, this balsam differs greatly from the embalming methods of the ancients.

Today, according to the mind of Porta, a corpse is eviscerated through an opened side, the skull is cut, and the brain is removed; the eyes, spinal cord, and testicles are also discarded. For four hours, it is suspended by the feet, then washed with distilled vinegar and spirits. Afterward, it is dried and sprinkled with quicklime, alum, and salt, and kept hanging for two days over the smoke of myrrh, laurel, rosemary, and cypress. Finally, a seasoning is prepared from quicklime, burnt alum, salt, aloe, myrrh, agarwood, nard oil, and the ashes of green rosemary, burnt brass, cypress, and tartar, as well as saffron, colocynth seeds, antimony powder, musk, and amber. The body is rubbed with this preparation for three days in an open area. This should suffice regarding modern embalming.

If we wish to understand the liquid used by the ancients for embalming corpses, we must turn to Herodotus and Diodorus Siculus, who wrote on this subject. According to them, three men performed this task. The first would mark the place for the incision around the flank of the body laid on the ground. Then came the one who, opening the spot with an Ethiopian stone, would immediately flee for fear of the bystanders, who were sometimes known to chase such a worker with stones. Third, the embalmers, having removed the intestines through the opening—except for the heart and kidneys—would wash the corpse with fragrant wine. Once washed, they anointed it with cedar ointments and other precious simples for thirty days. Next, they sprinkled it with myrrh and cinnamon to make it fragrant; then the corpse, thus prepared and preserved, was handed over to the relatives, with the hair of the eyebrows and eyelids so arranged that it looked like a sleeping man. This is the first method used by antiquity for embalming corpses, according to Herodotus.

The second method involved no dissection; instead, they removed the intestines by means of a clyster prepared from cedar oil injected into the belly, and then salted the body for seventy days. The third method was used for the poor: they cleansed the belly with washes and then stored the body, dried by salt, for seventy days. The Jews, according to Strabo, used asphalt or bitumen in embalming corpses, but the best method was that of the Egyptians, which we discussed just before. Today, however, they use a powder called "myrrh-powder" for seasoning a corpse, which in some way seems to emulate the power of Egyptian embalming. One finds multiple descriptions of this powder among authors, so I will add one here. They take a large amount of salt, alum melted with myrrh and aloe, wormwood, cinnamon, cloves, pepper, cumin, and mountain siler, and grind it all into a coarse powder. With a sprinkle of a little vinegar, they fill the belly of the corpse with this powder, and having coated it with wax, they enclose it in a lead coffin.

Since, as stated, the true mummy of the ancients or the Egyptian embalming cannot be obtained, Crollius prepares a "tincture of mummy" in this way: he takes the corpse of a red-haired man, twenty-four years of age, who has been hanged, sprinkles it with myrrh and aloe powder, marinates it for several days in spirits of wine, and dries the pieces suspended in the air. Finally, he extracts a deep red tincture with spirits of wine, which he extols wonderfully for eradicating the plague and overcoming poisons.

It remains for us to examine the virtues of human excrements; but since ex-