HYPERPYRUS Archive - Mummymania

Noreen Doyle

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HYPERPYRUS
THE HYPERPYRUS ARCHIVE: Mummymania

9 August 2007
Thursday
Mummy Masquerades
Subject: Mummymania

This past winter, French forensic scientist Philippe Charlier took a close look at the purported remains of Joan of Arc, displayed in a museum in Chinon, France since the 1930s. What Charlier found was anything but relics of France's favorite saint. The fragments, which included a human vertebra and a piece of rib, were alleged to have been gathered from Joan's funeral pyre. In 1869, these turned up in the attic of a building that had once been a drug store in Paris. But, as Charlier discovered and as was widely reported in the news this past February, the remains were those of an Egyptian mummy, with some (ancient) animal additions. Mummy once being a standard medicinal ingredient--more about the misuses of mummies another time--it was readily on hand to concoct a fake relic.

Fakery can run the other way, too. Sometime before 1945, George Fabyan, who owned a curiosity museum in Illinois, committed an act that is today all but unthinkable, not to mention illegal: he purchased the mummified corpse of a "Native American." Unlike Joan's pitiful remains, this was a well-articulated body, with flesh, face, teeth, and a protruding leg bone. Except that the leg bone isn't human. It's dog. (Joan's "corpse" was long known to contain cat remains; people supposed that a bystander had pitched some unfortunate feline into her pyre.) In 1982, X-rays determined that that dog bone was the only bone in the entire Fabyan "mummy." The whole thing was--and is--a clever fake made of straw, wood, and cloth. Shades of Ray Bradbury's "Colonel Stonesteel's Genuine Home-made Truly Egyptian Mummy"!

It--Fabyan's fake mummy, I mean--is still on display in the Fabyan Villa Museum in Geneva, Illinois.

For more about the faked mummy:
Kane County Chronicle
Remodeling Online

For more about the faked saint:
The Telegraph
(I've written about Joan's remains for Calliope, the history magazine for kids. The article will appear in the April 2008 issue.)