Opening ten days before All Saints’ Day and All Souls’ Day, the Toulouse Museum’s exhibition devoted to mummies is not just a collection of bodies preserved beyond death, whether they come from Egypt or Chilean Atacama Desert. It is above all an opportunity for visitors, whoever they are, to question their personal relationship to death and its most immediate manifestation, the corpse.
In most human societies, the remains are hidden, even concealed, as if struck by a taboo. parodying The Tartuffe of Molière, we play “Cover this body that I cannot see, by such objects souls are wounded. » And, in fact, whether it ends up in ashes in an urn or whether it is dismembered and left as food for scavengers, or even eaten by the relatives of the deceased during a ceremony of ritual cannibalism, the fleshy body ends up the most often by disappearing to, at best, become a skeleton.
However, among the 100 billion or so humans who have preceded us, some have kept, in their posthumous existence – if we can afford the oxymoron – the appearances and finery of the living that they were. The flesh and the skin on the bones with them resisted the death squads, those insects and bacteria that cause the unbearable decay and putrefaction.
Assure the deceased eternal life
The Toulouse exhibition therefore narrates this novel of the mummy, starting of course with artificial mummies, those that humans have created thanks to an adequate treatment of corpses, as was the case in particular in ancient Egypt to ensure a eternal life to the deceased – provided that his moral behavior allows it. An important part is also given to mummies from the Andes, the region where the first techniques for preserving bodies were invented.
However, there are other categories of mummy. We thus have natural ones, when the environment presents particular physico-chemical conditions – drought or extreme cold, peat bogs… There are also scientific ones, and one thinks in particular of the mummified flayed animals of the French anatomist Honoré Fragonard (1732-1799) or the skilfully embalmed bodies of Lenin and Mao Zedong.
To mount this exhibition of a somewhat special kind, the Toulouse Museum had to answer a sensitive question: what to do not to offend the public, even if they know what to expect? Because the face-to-face with a real corpse has no common measure with the viewing of a fictional film, however morbid and bloody it may be. The decision was therefore taken to display the human remains behind one-way glass accompanied by a specific pictogram. It is only by a voluntary act, by pressing a switch illuminating the mummy, that the visitor confronts it. We can therefore choose to escape death, at least for this time.
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