The rumor that returns every few years
Some hoaxes have a curiously long life. One of them maintains that for centuries, people consumed mummies for psychoactive purposes: that a Renaissance European could walk up to their apothecary and ask for “a bit of mummy” to experience visionary states. This claim circulates through psychoactive culture forums, is replicated on mystery websites, and, through sheer repetition, ends up acquiring a patina of historical fact.
It is worth debunking this calmly, as it combines two ingredients that make it catchy: a real fact—mummies were indeed part of the European apothecary’s arsenal—and a false conclusion—that this use was recreational or entheogenic. The distance between the two is precisely what is lost when a source is read “at a glance.”
What the 1927 article actually says
The source almost everyone cites, usually second or third-hand, is a text by Egyptologist Warren R. Dawson titled “Mummy as a drug,” published in 1927 in the Proceedings of the Royal Society of Medicine. Far from documenting psychoactive consumption, the article does the opposite: it explains why the supposed virtues of mummies were a mirage built upon a confusion of words. The sequence, in summary, is this:
- Bitumen as a remedy. In antiquity, natural bitumen from the Dead Sea and regions like Babylon was used as a remedy for multiple ailments. Its medicinal prestige reached Europe through Greeks, Romans, and Eastern cultures.
- The journey of a word. The term “mummy” comes from the Persian mumiya, which originally designated wax and, by extension, bitumen. The Arabs adopted the word mummia for bitumen.
- The confusion of bodies. After the conquest of Egypt, the Arabs also applied mummia to embalmed bodies, assuming—due to their blackish, shiny appearance—that they had been treated with bitumen. Thus, the word came to name both the substance and the corpses themselves.
- Inherited properties. By inheriting the name, mummies also inherited the fame of bitumen: if they were “made” of it, they were attributed the same virtues.
- Commerce. From the 12th century on, merchants in Alexandria exported ground mummies as just another variety of bitumen. Later, the idea spread that the remedy was only effective if it came from a human body, which sent demand skyrocketing.
- The macabre market. When Egyptian authorities banned the trafficking of corpses, suppliers turned to other bodies: burials in Libya, Guanche mummies from the Canary Islands, and, eventually, the remains of dried slaves or executed criminals. “Mummia” ended up being almost any treated flesh.
- The final paradox. The ancient Egyptians did not embalm with bitumen, but with very different resins. So, the properties of mummies were, in reality, those of bitumen… which they didn’t even contain.
Dawson himself concludes, in essence, that these virtues were merely the fruit of credulity accumulated over centuries.
A catalog of medical (and magical) uses, never recreational
What is striking is the commercial longevity of the product: as late as 1908, the pharmaceutical company E. Merck offered “authentic Egyptian mummy” in its catalog at 17 marks per kilo “while supplies lasted.” But if one reviews the uses attributed to it, they all point in the same direction: epilepsy, abscesses, fractures, paralysis, migraines, coughs, palpitations, stomach discomfort, ulcers, hemorrhages, liver problems, burns, poisoning… medical remedies, in short. To these were added magical uses—ointments to “reconcile” couples and the like—typical of the popular thought of the time.
At no point in this tradition do psychoactive properties appear. And that is the key to the misunderstanding: when English texts speak of the use of mummies as a drug, they use drug in the sense of medicine, not recreational drug. English uses the same word for both; Spanish does not.
From a false friend to an imaginary pharmacology
The hoax is, therefore, built upon a linguistic “false friend.” Some Spanish-speaking reader mentally translated drug as “droga” (narcotic), deduced that consuming embalmed bodies produced psychoactive effects, and from there, others began adding a pseudo-pharmacological explanation: talk of endogenous brain DMT, the Egyptian lotus… Each link sounds plausible in isolation, but none holds up when checking the original source.
It is a recognizable pattern: a striking claim, a prestigious source cited without being read, and a chain of replicas that replaces verification with enthusiasm. In the very forums where the rumor was born, the most honest comment admitted to not having read the entire article, “just skimming it.” That phrase summarizes the mechanism well.
Critical reading
This case is a good reminder of information hygiene for anyone interested in psychoactive culture:
- Go to the primary source. Before accepting a historical fact, it is advisable to read the cited text, not its third-hand summary. Here, Dawson’s article says exactly the opposite of what is attributed to it.
- Be wary of false friends. Drug, intoxication, narcotic, or poison do not mean in ancient texts what they seem to mean today. Translation matters.
- Distinguish medical use from entheogenic use. Just because a substance appeared in an apothecary does not imply it had effects on consciousness. The history of pharmacy is full of inert or simply mistaken remedies.
- Suspect improvised pharmacological explanations. Appealing to endogenous DMT or other mechanisms to “justify” an effect that was never documented is putting the cart before the horse.
A genuine interest in altered states of consciousness is not built by accumulating spectacular anecdotes, but by verifying them. The “psychoactive mummies” story belongs in the same drawer as so many other psychonautic myths: it was born from a misreading and survives because it is too good not to repeat.
