Yes. They Ate Mummies.
Corpse Medicine, Mummy Juice, and the Modern Market for Human Flesh
In my interview with Danny Jones, while we were discussing the early days of archaeology, I mentioned almost in passing that Europeans spent centuries eating mummies. I did not mean to glide over it as though everyone already knew that was true. It is one of those facts I know so well I tend to say it fast, and Danny knew it too, so we kept moving. Call it the “Mummy’s Curse of Knowledge.”
Since the interview aired, the mummies are the thing people keep asking me about, so here is the full account.
Warning: This article discusses human remains, corpse medicine, and cannibalism.
Yes, Mumia.
“Mummy” reaches us from the Persian mūm, meaning wax, by way of the Arabic mūmiyā. Originally it had nothing to do with a preserved body. It named bitumen: natural mineral pitch, the black tarry asphalt that seeps out of certain mountains in Persia and pools in the ground. That substance had a long medical pedigree. Dioscorides and Pliny both treated bitumen and its cousin pissasphalt as serious drugs in the first century, and the great physicians of the Islamic world, Ibn Sina among them, catalogued mumia as a genuine pharmaceutical for wounds, fractures, internal bleeding, and poison. For a very long time, when a physician reached for mumia, he was reaching for a rock.
The trouble began when the prized black mineral met the Egyptian dead. Embalmed bodies came out of their wrappings dark, hard, and resinous, and later embalming practices did use bitumen-like materials, so observers made a reasonable and catastrophic inference. They assumed the blackened flesh was saturated with the same mumia that came out of the Persian mountains, or had somehow become it. The name of the mineral slid onto the corpse, and then onto the drug ground from the corpse. It was a category error with a body count. By the time anyone noticed, Europe was no longer importing a mineral. It was importing people.
The knowledge arrived through the usual channel: the twelfth-century translation movement, Gerard of Cremona and his colleagues carrying Arabic pharmacology into Latin. By the later Middle Ages, mumia was a standard apothecary item, ground to a fine powder and taken in wine or worked into a paste. It was prescribed as very nearly a cure-all. It stopped bleeding and treated bruises and contusions, which is why battlefield surgeons wanted it. It was given for internal hemorrhage, epilepsy, ulcers, poisoning, and the vague wasting conditions the period lumped together as consumption. If you could name an ailment, someone had prescribed dead flesh for it.
Now, the question is why. Why on earth would anyone want to ingest this?
One influential current in early modern medicine understood the body as animated by vital spirits, a living force distributed through its tissues. A body that died slowly of old age had spent that force down to nothing. A body that died suddenly and violently, before its allotted span, had not. Its vitality was trapped in the flesh, unspent and concentrated. To consume such a body was to take that unused life into your own.
If violent, premature death produced the most potent remedy, then the best mummy did not come from the peaceful ancient Egyptian dead at all. It came from young men who had died by force, and recently. It came from the executed. Therefore, if a body that died before its time held vitality it had not spent, then to eat it was to inherit what it had not lived.
Supply & Demand
Demand ran well ahead of supply. Genuine ancient mummies were finite, and the finite always becomes expensive. So a counterfeit industry grew up around the ports, Alexandria and Cairo in particular. Local merchants took fresh corpses, the executed, the enslaved, the plague dead, the anonymous poor, dried them out, stuffed and coated them with pitch and resin, baked them in ovens or left them in the sun, and sold them to European buyers as ancient mummy pulled from the tombs.
We know this in vivid detail because of one appalled Frenchman. Around 1564, a physician from Navarre named Guy de la Fontaine went looking for the source of the drug in Alexandria and talked his way into a dealer’s stock. The merchant showed him bodies he had assembled himself from whatever corpses had come to hand, and, according to the account, could not fathom why Europeans were so eager to eat this. The story survives because Ambroise Paré, one of the most important surgeons of the sixteenth century and a hard skeptic on this subject, put it into his own treatise against mummy. Paré thought the drug worthless and revolting. He noted that it made patients vomit, fouled their breath, and turned their stomachs, and he used de la Fontaine’s warehouse of forgeries as proof of the whole rotten business.
The trade was a chain. At the bottom, tomb robbers and corpse suppliers, the people who handled the raw material. In the middle, the port merchants, the brokers who dried and dressed the bodies and set the price. Above them, European importers, then apothecaries, then licensed physicians, and finally the paying customer at the top. Every rung took its margin. The body of a hanged man or a dead slave went in as raw material at the bottom and came out the other end as a luxury medicine dispensed by a credentialed professional.
The Cannibal Kings
This was not folk quackery practiced at the margins. It was elite medicine. It was royal medicine, and the phrase is not a flourish. The most powerful men in Europe were eating the powerless dead on the best professional advice available to them.
Francis I of France reportedly carried a small packet of mummy mixed with powdered rhubarb on his person at all times, the sixteenth-century equivalent of keeping aspirin in your coat, and dosed himself with it for whatever ailed him. In England the appetite reached the throne in an even more telling form. Charles II was a serious enthusiast of chemistry, with a laboratory of his own, and he paid a small fortune to the physician Jonathan Goddard for the recipe to a tincture that became known as the King’s Drops. Strip off the courtly name and the active ingredient was powdered human skull, steeped and distilled in spirits of wine. The king took it as a general restorative, and he was still being dosed with it on his deathbed while his physicians tried everything else in the cabinet.
The skull mattered as much as the method. The most potent skull, the physicians held, came from a man who had died by violence and had never been buried, because his vital spirits were still locked in the bone rather than dispersed into the grave. That requirement created its own quiet supply problem, and the supply, predictably, was found among the conquered. English apothecaries reportedly drew on skulls exported from Ireland, where war and famine had left the unburied dead in quantity. The skulls of the colonized Irish dead, shipped across the sea, ground to powder, and swallowed by the colonizer as medicine. The body of the powerless becomes the pharmacy of the powerful.
None of this was fringe. Francis Bacon noted mummy’s power to staunch blood. Robert Boyle, one of the founders of modern chemistry, listed it among his remedies. The institutions that credentialed physicians and printed the official pharmacopoeias put human flesh on the shelf and stamped it with their authority. This was the establishment medicine of its age, prescribed by the licensed to the wealthy, and genuine mummy was still turning up for sale in at least one European pharmaceutical catalogue into the early twentieth century. The practice was not hidden in shame. It was normalized, priced, and printed in the reference books.
Side Dishes
The mummy in the apothecary jar was the imported, upscale end of a much larger domestic system that scholars now call corpse medicine.
The skull of a man who died violently was ground and taken for epilepsy and headache. Usnea, the greenish lichen that grew on the skulls of hanged men left unburied on the gibbet, was scraped off and prized precisely because of where it grew. Human fat, rendered from executed criminals, was sold by executioners under the frank commercial name of poor sinner’s fat and rubbed on aching joints. And there was blood. In parts of Germany, people with epilepsy gathered at the scaffold to drink the warm blood of the freshly executed, a practice documented well into the nineteenth century, which is to say long after the Enlightenment had supposedly closed the file on that kind of thing.
So the mummy was not an exotic outlier smuggled in from a foreign culture. It was the expensive imported flavor of a system that ran, at home, on the bodies of the condemned and the poor.
Eat the Rich? Think Again.
Much of my work examines what I call the broker class: the institutions, merchants, experts, so-called elites, and intermediaries who extract value from the vulnerable, convert it into a respectable commodity, and move it upward toward those with money and power. The mummy trade offers an unusually literal example.
The bodies that fed the machine were executed criminals, enslaved people, the plague dead, the unclaimed poor, and the plundered ancestors of a foreign civilization, dug out of their tombs by the literal ton. The people who consumed the product were kings, aristocrats, and anyone wealthy enough to afford a licensed physician’s prescription. Value was extracted from the bodies of the powerless, passed up through a chain of brokers, laundered into legitimacy by the medical institutions of the day, and finally swallowed by the powerful. The broker class does not only move grain and silver and debt. When the market allows, it will move you.
The irony is the moral center of all this. Europe was doing all of this during the very decades when its powers were justifying conquest in the Americas partly on the horror of cannibalism, describing the peoples of the New World as savages who ate human flesh and were therefore outside civilization and available for subjugation. Montaigne saw straight through it in 1580. In his essay “Of Cannibals,” he pointed out that his own countrymen did far worse things to the living than the peoples of Brazil did to the dead. The label did real political work. It sorted humanity into the civilized and the savage and marked one group as fair game. Meanwhile the civilized gentleman took his neighbor, dried and powdered, with a glass of wine, on doctor’s orders, and did not think of himself as a cannibal for a moment. The institution decided which eating of human beings counted as medicine and which counted as savagery. As institutions tend to do, it exempted itself.
The truth is that Indigenous peoples in many parts of the world have practiced cannibalism, and so have societies that called themselves civilized. This is not a pathology confined to one culture, one continent, or one stage of social development. It is a recurring possibility within human behavior itself, shaped by circumstances as different as warfare, ritual, famine, medicine, punishment, and belief. The indictment is not of one people, but of the human species. People in the past ate people, and people still eat people today.
When the eating finally slowed, the grinding did not stop. It simply changed departments.
Ground mummy became an artist’s pigment, a rich, transparent brown sold under the honest label of Mummy Brown and used by European painters from the seventeenth century into the twentieth. Human remains, worked into the varnish of respectable art and hung in respectable homes. When the Pre-Raphaelite painter Edward Burne-Jones learned what was actually in his tube of the stuff, he carried the paint out into his garden and buried it, giving it the funeral its source had been denied. The London colourmen Roberson kept producing the pigment into the 1960s and stopped, by one account, only because they had finally run out of mummies. A manager reportedly said they might still have an odd limb lying about, but not enough to grind another batch. In Roberson’s case, at least, the paint ran out before the conscience did.
People Still Want “The Juice”
The underlying impulse did not die quietly with the last tube of Mummy Brown.
In 2018, archaeologists in Alexandria excavated a two-thousand-year-old black granite sarcophagus at the construction site of an apartment complex. The tomb weighed around thirty tons and sat roughly five meters below the surface, next to an alabaster head that likely depicted the owner. The find made news everywhere. People were genuinely excited to learn who or what was inside the mysterious black box, and more than a few worried aloud that opening it might unleash a curse.
The moment of truth was a letdown. When the archaeologists lifted the lid, the smell alone made them ill. Inside were three skeletons sloshing in a stew of reddish-brown sewage water. The modern mind, though, has not traveled nearly as far from the sixteenth century as it likes to imagine. In the spirit of the Tide Pod Challenge, people online began demanding to drink the red liquid from the cursed dark sarcophagus.
A Change.org petition called on Egyptian authorities to let the public drink the “mummy juice,” and it sailed past its goal of twenty-five thousand signatures. It is still being signed today, its count past thirty-six thousand, almost eight years after the box was opened. One signer wrote, “This is the true next stage in the evolution of mankind, the world governments dare think they can take this nectar of life for themselves, Give. Us. The. Juice.” Another wrote, “Let us drink from the cursed waters of Set.”
Young Blood
Leave the sewage aside, because the same conviction is running right now with a valuation attached, and the people acting on it are the ones who own things. In 2023 the tech founder Bryan Johnson, who sold his payments company to PayPal for eight hundred million dollars, staged what he called the world’s first multigenerational plasma exchange.
A liter of his teenage son’s plasma went into his own veins, and his own went into his seventy-year-old father’s. The idea came from parabiosis studies in which the blood of young mice appears to rejuvenate old ones, which is to say the modern version arrives, as the sixteenth-century version did, dressed in the scientific language of its day. Johnson ran six exchanges, measured himself relentlessly, found no benefit, and stopped.
The belief did not stop with him. A California company called Ambrosia had been selling transfusions of young-donor plasma at eight thousand dollars a liter since 2017, until the FDA warned in 2019 that there was no proven benefit and real risk, and it closed. The customers were aging, wealthy, and hopeful that youth could be bought by the liter.
That is the belief. The structure sits one layer down, and here the resemblance is narrower, so it is worth being exact. Therapeutic plasma is real medicine. The immunoglobulins and clotting factors it becomes keep people alive, which mummy never did, and a paid donor is not a plundered corpse. What carries over from the mummy trade is not the quackery and not the grave-robbing. It is the direction of the flow. The United States pays for plasma in a way almost no other country allows, and it supplies roughly seventy percent of the world’s plasma. The collection centers cluster, disproportionately, in low-income neighborhoods, where people may sell their plasma as often as twice a week for a payment loaded onto a prepaid card. That material is fractionated and sold upward into a market worth billions. The people who supply the raw substance are the ones who need the small payment, and its value is captured a long way up the chain from the arm it came out of.
The petition and the young-blood market reproduce, between them, the two beliefs that powered four hundred years of corpse medicine. First, that some bodies carry a concentrated vital essence, a nectar of life, that another body can take into itself by consuming it, whether the source is an ancient corpse or a teenager’s vein. Second, easy to miss while everyone is busy laughing at the sewage, that a powerful establishment is already hoarding it. “The world governments dare think they can take this nectar of life for themselves.” That is not really a joke about brown water. That is the old logic of extracted vitality, wearing a meme, arriving complete with the suspicion that the broker class has cornered the supply before the rest of us got a turn. The plasma economy preserves something of that flow, with the magic removed and a license attached.
The Sacred Hunger
In the photograph above, Lady Gaga bends over a cake shaped like a naked human body at a dinner hosted by Marina Abramović. The image touches something much older than simple artistic expression or celebrity provocation: the recurring human idea that power, holiness, vitality, identity, or communion can be acquired through the consumption of flesh.
Eating mummies is only one expression of that idea. Human beings have consumed bodies in warfare, famine, funerary rites, medicine, punishment, religious sacrifice, and acts of incorporation meant to absorb the qualities of the dead. Christianity placed the command to eat the body and drink the blood of God at the center of its most sacred rite. Modern culture reproduces the image in art, horror, fashion, performance, conspiracy, and commerce, even when the flesh itself has been replaced by cake, bread, wine, metaphor, or laboratory tissue.
This is the beginning of a larger paid series on the sacred act of eating flesh. I will be examining communion and ritual consumption, the long history of cannibalism, the difference between survival cannibalism and ceremonial practice, the modern markets that place a price on human blood and tissue, and the diseases that can pass between human beings when the body of one becomes food for another. The deeper question running through all of it is not simply why people eat other people. It is why human beings repeatedly imagine consumption as a way of possessing life, power, holiness, memory, or the soul itself.
That question also connects directly to my earlier essay, Ba’al, Blood, and Bread: The Oldest Pattern in Religion, where I traced the sacrificial meal from the blood of bulls and lambs to the Christian body of God transformed into bread and wine. Sacrifice was never only about killing. It was about division, distribution, and eating: who receives the blood, who receives the flesh, and what kind of bond is created when gods and human beings share the same meal.
For paid subscribers, I am taking that argument further. We are going from the altar to the banquet table, from communion to cannibalism, and from sacred flesh to the modern human body market. Bring an appetite for the argument, if not for the subject.
See you Saturday!
Dr. Heather Lynn is a historian tracing the occult architecture beneath modern power. She is the creator and host of The H Files podcast and the author of five books, including Baphomet Revealed and Evil Archaeology. Her forthcoming book is Codex Machina: How AI Is Decoding Ancient Civilizations, Technologies, and Lost Languages in Our Search for Meaning. Find her at thehfiles.com.
Subscribe on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@DrHeatherLynn
Bibliography and Suggested Reading
Bacon, Francis. Sylva Sylvarum: or, A Natural History in Ten Centuries. London, 1627.
“Blood Work: Why the U.S. Pays for Plasma.” Public Health Watch, 2026.
“Bryan Johnson Admits He Saw No Benefits After Injecting His Son’s Plasma.” Fortune, July 8, 2023.
Dannenfeldt, Karl H. “Egyptian Mumia: The Sixth Century Experience and Beyond.” Sixteenth Century Journal 16, no. 2 (1985).
Dawson, Warren R. “Mummy as a Drug.” Proceedings of the Royal Society of Medicine 21 (1927).
El-Aref, Nevine. “Initial Analysis Shows Skeletons from Huge Egyptian Sarcophagus Are Two Men, One Woman.” Ahram Online, August 19, 2018.
Jarus, Owen. “That Massive Black Sarcophagus Was Opened. Here’s What’s Inside.” Live Science, July 19, 2018.
McCouat, Philip. “The Life and Death of Mummy Brown.” Journal of Art in Society. artinsociety.com.
McKendrick, Innes. “Let People Drink the Red Liquid from the Dark Sarcophagus.” Change.org petition, created July 19, 2018. https://www.change.org/p/let-people-drink-the-red-liquid-from-the-dark-sarcophagus (36,921 signatures as of July 14, 2026).
“Middle-Class Americans Are Selling Plasma to Keep Up with Rising Costs.” NBC News, February 12, 2026.
Miller, Sara G. “Don’t Drink the Mummy Juice.” Live Science, July 20, 2018.
Montaigne, Michel de. “Of Cannibals.” In Essais. 1580.
Noble, Louise. Medicinal Cannibalism in Early Modern English Literature and Culture. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011.
Paré, Ambroise. The Workes of that Famous Chirurgion Ambrose Parey. Translated by Thomas Johnson. London, 1634.
Sugg, Richard. Mummies, Cannibals and Vampires: The History of Corpse Medicine from the Renaissance to the Victorians. London: Routledge, 2011.
U.S. Food and Drug Administration. Statement cautioning consumers against young-donor plasma infusions promoted as unproven treatment. February 19, 2019.
I’m sorry but I’m just stuck on the word “pissasphalt” and giggling
What's really crazy is that Sriracha hadn't even been invented, yet.