In his lectures on Aesthetics Hegel famously states that Ancient «Egypt is the land of the symbol.» In our age, the land of the symbol has been reduced to a repository of signs, of empty signifiers like the Mummy that must serve as some sort of simulated past that guarantees us that we indeed have history, serve as an anchor for some sort of imagined mythic origin and past. Hence the mummy, a sacred anchor between this world and the afterlife, intricately interwoven into the fabric of cosmic meaning, of Ma’at, can also be reduced to a pop-cultural signifier in horror movies, entirely bereft of its sacred symbolic significance. In his seminal work Simulacra & Simulation Jean Baudrillard sees in the rotting mummy of Ramses II several layers of hyperreality at work. Before I address these, let me mention for context that in 1975 French researchers at the Egyptian Museum in Cairo noticed that the mummy had begun to decay from making it available to the public in a museum. Hence in September 1976 the mummy was flown to Paris to save it from parasitic fungal infection. Only by advanced technology, beginning with the aeroplane, continuing with specific simulations, could the mummy be saved. In fact, because of its delicate condition the French scientists could not not risk experimenting on the Ramses’ actual body. To ensure the treatment would be safe, they used material simulations, microbiological models, and diagnostic mock-ups. To save the «real» king, to save the object, science had to create clones, mock-ups, and statistical models of Ramses’ skin, hair and pathogens making entirely transparent the condition of the mummy as a mere specimen. But this removes the mummy, the actual mummification of the body of the Pharaoh. «In order for ethnology to live, its object must die», Baudrillard writes. The publicly displayed mummy now is prey to worms and science alike. To stress this again as Baudrillard does, the mummy of Ramses II started decaying because it was presented in a museum. Hence, what we can witness here is something peculiar about our age: We are stockpiling the past and history because we sense that both truth and the past are disappearing for us. In our relentless effort to make accessible all past events, through science and its various methods, to make visible and transparent, hence to enwrap in our order of the sign, that which is hidden, enigmatic and mysterious, reserved only for a few mortals and for the gods, a desertification of the truth of the symbolic order sets in. «The West is seized with panic,» writes Baudrillard, and it is significant that the West seems more concerned with this than the Egyptians at the time, «at the thought of not being able to save what the symbolic order had been able to conserve for forty centuries, but out of sight and far from the light of day.» The irony is that the mummy of Ramses II begins to rot precisely only when it is torn from its secretive hidden order, an order that we cannot grasp with our scientific methods, the mummy which should not rot at all, because our way of preserving is a different kind of preserving, a clinical preserving for the sake of maintaining not the mystery of the cosmos, but our order of empty signifiers. What we see in the museum, even though the ‘real’ mummy of Ramses II, is in fact a simulation of history. By frantically trying to make visible the invisible, our age tries to hide the fact that we have lost any genuine relationship with the past. We go to the museum to reassure us that we have a past. But the mummy removed from its symbolic order loses its essence, it loses its sacredness and is transmuted into a mere biological specimen, to be preserved as such, hence transmuted into a signifier for a past that never was but that is purely an imaginary anchor for us. «When the real is no longer what it was, nostalgia assumes its full meaning», and so does a sort of longing for authenticity, as Baudrillard says. A nostalgia for an origin that never was. But in our crazed not mummification of the past, but its musealisation, we kill the very objects we want to preserve by preserving them. We are like Orpheus forever killing what we long for the most. Ramses II means nothing for us, he cannot mean anything for us, because his world is not our world. «Only the mummy is of an inestimable worth because it is what guarantees that accumulation has meaning», Baudrillard continues. The mummy must be preserved not as a sacred vessel binding together different spheres of the cosmos, but to guarantee continued access to the past as a sort of warehouse that soothes our anxiety over our lost access to history. Making available the mummy for the general public and for science secures its decay. It decays even without the scientific definition thereof. Its public display is its decay. «Only absolute secrecy assured [the mummy] this millennial power», as Baudrillard sees with incredible clarity. He continues to point out that the Egyptian had «mastery over putrefaction that signified the mastery of the complete cycle of exchanges with death», which is to say, the Ancient Egyptians upheld a symbolic order in which the intense negativity of death was pulled into being completely, mastered to such a degree that the Egyptians could maintain sacred permanence for millennia, upholding in this way the cosmos. We today however, to quote Baudrillard, «only know how to place our science in service of repairing the mummy, that is to say restoring a visible order, whereas embalming was a mythical effort that strove to immortalise a hidden dimension.» This hidden dimension remains hidden and must remain so. It is its hiddenness. It may very well be that the mummy has for us deteriorated into an object of horror because there still lingers about it that sacred forever hidden dimension that entirely withdraws from any access or availability and it is that very hiddenness of which the mummy is testimony that scares us so fundamentally because all we know is «a visible continuum». And even though all we seem to able to do is pull into visibility the result is a sort of simulated visibility. The truly hidden cannot become visible. Hence science makes visible what is not the mummy: measurements about its state, its composition, its precise age, etc. We desire this faux visibility not for the sake of the mummy, the object has already been killed; but for our own sake, to imagine an origin that never was. We dream, says Baudrillard, of an order that is not ours and of which we cannot make sense. By exhuming the symbolic order of Egypt, by trying to make it accessible to us but on our terms and as our own past we deny this symbolic order its rightful place. Museumification ensure extermination. «Because mummies don’t die from worms: they die,» writes Baudrillard, «from being transplanted from a slow order of the symbolic, master over putrefaction and death, to an order of history, science, and museums, our oder which no longer masters anything, which only knows how to condemn what preceded it to decay and death and subsequently to try to revive it with science.» Ancient Egypt was the land of the symbol, of a symbolic order that incorporated death to such a degree that this most terrifying immediate negativity became its core so that a sacred permanence could uphold itself. Our order, an order of disarray, searches for a kind of permanence, but as it does not master death, our order brings with it decay and death. By placing death at the core, the Egyptians mastered death and produced stability. Ours, as we deny death and the hidden as that which cannot be made available and transparent, bring forth decay and corruption, without sacredness. «Irreparable violence toward all secrets, the violence of a civilisation without secrets, hatred of a whole civilisation for its own foundation,» as Baudrillard concludes his musings about the mummy of Ramses II. Our hatred for mystery, for that which cannot be explained and made available and controllable, hence our fascination with Egypt is based on a thinly veiled hatred for it, for its true dimension, that dimension of the hidden, of the secret. The mummy of Ramses II, even though historically determined to be his, measured, evaluated, and accounted for, with all the apparent precision our machines grant secured by the most advanced means of technological preservation against decay, a decay which only set in because it was removed from its sacred symbolic hidden order, which, as anyone who can read will appreciate Baudrillard implies was real, or even is real, and is real as long as it is left to its own devices and outside our hyperreal operations, this very mummy even though verifiably of Ramses II has itself become a mere simulacrum, a copy without original because it has been torn from its interrelatedness with the symbolic order of which it is. It’s been torn from its relationality and so it no longer is what it has always been. Hence the mummy has lost its ontological status, its being, and has been transmuted, mutilated, into a copy of and for the scientific models that attack it and are pulled over it, a copy without however an original as the original disappeared the minute the mummy was torn from its symbolic order and the hidden dimension. What remains is a simulacrum of it which we perceive through our hyperreality, made up of scientific models, simulations, evaluations, measurements, media stories, and never shall we see the mummy for what it was, because that very dimension of hiddenness, of the truly sacred, is hidden from us and our only way to see, which is not a seeing at all, but a constant measuring and estimating. If you’re interested in Egyptian thinking and ways of being, take a look at Carla Berenice’s course The Egyptian Mind. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, v
