At the Museum of Toulouse, science writes the novel The Mummy

Opened ten days before Halloween and All Souls’ Day, the Toulouse Museum exhibit is dedicated to mummies not just a group of bodies preserved after death, whether they come from Egypt or the Chilean Atacama Desert. It is above all an opportunity for visitors, whoever they may be, to question their personal relationship to death and its closest immediate manifestation, the corpse.

In most human societies, the remains are hidden, even hidden, as if they were taboo. Parody Tartouf Moliere, we’re playing “Cover this body, which I cannot see, with these things wound souls.” Indeed, whether it ends up as ashes in an urn or is chopped up and left as rubbish food, or even eaten by relatives of the deceased during cannibal rituals, the fleshy body most often ends up disappearing, becoming a skeleton at best.

Yet of the 100 billion or so human beings who preceded us, some retain, in their posthumous existence – if we can bear the paradoxical appearance – of the semblance of life they were. The flesh and skin on the bones have resisted the death squads, those insects and bacteria that cause putrefaction and putrefaction intolerable.

Reassure the dead eternal life

So the Toulouse fair tells this mummy narrative, starting with artificial mummies, those made by humans thanks to the proper treatment of corpses, as was the case in particular in ancient Egypt to ensure eternal life for 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 corpses were invented.

However, there are other categories of mummy. Thus, we have natural conditions, when the environment is special physicochemical – drought or extreme cold, peat bogs … There are also scientific reasons, and one thinks in particular about the mummified slaughtered animals of the French anatomist Honoré Fragonard (1732 -1799) or the corpses of Lenin And Mao Zedong skillfully mummified.

To hold this exhibition of a rather special kind, the Toulouse Museum had to answer a sensitive question: what should not offend the public, even if they knew what to expect? Because face to face with a real corpse has no common measure with watching a feature film, no matter how disturbing and bloody it may be. So the decision was made to display the human remains behind one-way glass, accompanied by a specific infographic. The visitor encounters it only by a voluntary act, by pressing the mummy’s illumination switch. So we can choose to escape death, at least at this time.

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