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Mumya
My grandmother (and many of her contemporaries) used ‘mumya,’
“to cure various illnesses.” Not only was this closer than “in the not too
distant past,” but there is apparently still an
illicit trade in mumya in middle eastern countries. When my mother-in-law
traveled to
As youngsters, we (my cousins and I) learned that mumya could cure physical ailments that had chills as their symptoms, and we recall Grandma commenting on the people she had cured, such as my uncle Jack. But even more interesting were the fears and paranoia and phobias she said it would cure. (The connection between the chills and shivering of fear, and the chills of an illness seemed perfectly reasonable to us). When my cousin Steve was afraid as a youngster, Grandma cured him; When as a youngster, my Aunt Molly fell off a horse, giving her mumya was a preventive measure to assure that she would not be afraid to get back on a horse. As we grew older, we might have thought that this worked merely as a placebo, but the use of mumya was filled with its own rules that prevented that. It would not work if the patient knew that he or she was taking it – quite the reverse of a placebo effect. It also could not be used with garlic; the patient had to be prevented from having any food with garlic for the day. I still cannot fathom the connection, but those were the rules.
As to what mumya actually was, that was a mystery that simply
could not be revealed to us. We only began to guess at its origin by our mid 20s
when we realized that it could only be obtained in the
Then I came across a reference in Me'am Loez, The Torah Anthology (Volume 11, Leviticus, page 150) on the prohibitions in dealing in non-kosher food. “Rabbi Yehudah Rosanes, of blessed memory, was asked if it is permissible to deal in mummies (mumya, in Ladino), since human flesh is forbidden as a food. He replied that it is permissible. Since the flesh is completely dry and cannot be eaten, it is not forbidden…” Of course, if the translator had known more about ‘mumya,’ he would have retained that word and explained it in a note. So there we had our first verification of where mumya came from; our hunches were right. When I saw the Discovery channel feature in 1997 on the drugs found in mummies, it seemed like perfectly reasonable hypothesis to me that this palliative power of mumya was derived from this strange combination of nicotine, cocaine and hashish that were in the mummies.
Then more recently, my wife, Marcia, found a book in her elementary school’s library about Egyptian Mummies, published by Harcourt, Inc. It referenced ‘mummiya’ as the Arabic word for the bitumen used in mummification. And then, with an internet search on “mummy and nicotine,” to track down some articles on the subject of that Discovery channel show (8 years ago), we found , it is described as the ground up bitumen tar from mummies, a bit more like what I remember seeing, and that the word’s origin is Persian.
Our childhood mystery is gone, but I would still love to know if this ‘old wives remedy’ has any basis. I have been amazed over the years at how many such traditional remedies have some basis once they have been researched. By the way, it is actually a powdery substance. My memory is that it was black in color, but it was too long ago, and I was too young then to be thinking of careful observation.
For anyone that wants to read the article on drugs found in Egyptian mummies, the URL is:
http://www.colostate.edu/Depts/Entomology/courses/en570/papers_2000/wells.html . A little ways down in the article, you’ll see this paragraph with some comments on ‘mummia,’ which I know is much more in the very recent past than the author seems to realize.
© 2003 R. Altabet
