Brian J. Showers.com - Through Dublin, Dessicated and Preserved

THROUGH DUBLIN, DESICCATED AND PRESERVED
© Brian J. Showers 2008

EGYPT CERTAINLY, with its Valley of the Kings and impossible funerary monuments, but no, not Dublin! The old ossuary building in Guanajuato, Mexico is the next in line, perhaps even the controlled atmospheres of the British Museum. The more fanciful might even claim that one is more likely to unearth a truly, genuine specimen in some old farmer’s field in Green Town, Upper Illinois. But you and I know that Dublin has its own impressive population of the desiccated and preserved. Mummies, my friend, and they have been waiting for hundreds, sometimes thousands of years for us to visit them.

We start our day north of the river at solitary St. Michan’s. The invitation boasts: “Historic Old Vaults in which Bodies may be seen in a wonderful state of preservation, though not embalmed.” We pass through iron doors into the methane-rich limestone vaults below, its walls clinging with wispy cobwebs. Real, not cinematic. At the far end of the passage a patient quartet awaits our formal introduction. With the archness of an earth-encrusted gravedigger, our guide surmises their identities. Dainty fingers, perfect nails. “Possibly a nun?” Another with its hand lopped off at the wrist. “Maybe a thief?” His crimes now long since forgotten. At the rear of the crypt lies a giant of a man at least 650 years in the grave. Inexplicably, “The Crusader.” Nearly two metres tall, legs sawed off at the knees and tucked beneath the body, thighs crossed invoking the crucifix. As with chimney sweeps, it is good luck to shake hands with the Crusader, or rather lightly touch his brittle middle finger. Take a moment to peer into the hollows where eyes once might have peered back at you.

We will never be sure if young Bram Stoker visited St. Michan’s, but that revered ghost story scribe M.R. James immortalised his visit in “Lost Hearts”: “A figure inexpressibly thin and pathetic, of a dusty leaden colour, enveloped in a shroud-like garment, the thin lips crooked into a faint and dreadful smile, the hands pressed tightly over the region of the heart.” This is what James saw and what we can still see. Everything else is guesswork. Perhaps it is not even who they are that matters, but rather “Here they are!”

We cross the Liffey now for Christ Church where we find a singular duo interred alongside holy and prominent men. On a dusty ledge near the south transept rests a glass-fronted box containing a starving cat made thinner by its forevermore-shrivelled condition. Claws outstretched, legs poised to spring; before him is his muse, a mouse, the one that got away. Sort of. Predator and prey perished together, lodged inside an organ pipe in the 1860s, re-discovered during a subsequent and long-overdue cleaning. How long before these mismatched companions developed a sense of humour about their predicament? There is enough quirk of fate here to justify breaking the solemn cathedral silence with a chuckle. Go on, join them in a laugh.

Continue on to Merrion Street where stands the city’s most eclectic mausoleum. A grand exhibition of morphological variety; from boneless lurkers of the deep to beasts of the savannahs to the denizens of the uppermost branches of the emergent layer. Welcome to the Natural History Museum, a purpose-built dead zoo founded during the reign of H.M. Victoria Regina in the wake of the industrial revolution. Though perhaps not true mummies, did the Egyptians not also ply their trade on crocodiles, monkeys, aves and their beloved felines? Had they the know-how, would they have preserved the lustrous fur of the African wildcat or the white linen and black kohl plumage of the Sacred Ibis? There is a need to preserve in this place. A “mummy complex” (with apologies to André Bazin). Tell me, have you ever seen a live thylacine or dodo? Neither has anyone else presently alive. Consider their flurries of movement before mounted paralysis. Their squawks, snorts, roars, and whistles. What would the noise of their living sound like if all were unexpectedly granted a second chance?

“Is that really skin?” my vibrant companion asked at a hushed whisper. “It can’t be.” It is. We traced the very same follicles, whorls, and creases on our own hands and wrists. We are in the National Museum of Archaeology and History. This is Kingship & Sacrifice tucked away on the ground floor near the café. Bog bodies. A superficial if somehow unfair appellation. Perhaps a nominal sovereign, perhaps an offering to the inscrutable divine. Definitely murder. Mutilated and put into the ground along tribal boundaries by Iron Age hands, dredged up in this age by machines—in some old farmer’s field, no doubt. We give the bodies names like Oldcroghan and Clonycavan; place names, not people names. If we are to believe James Frazer’s The Golden Bough these deaths are homeopathically transmuted into prosperity: to ease the passing of a bad harvest or a king whose power has diminished. My only question is this: Did it work? The tone here is solemn, there is a reverence surrounding these mummies who did not ask to be born.

Mummies without true names or precise memories. And yet visited by multitudes of the curious each year. Who among us will still receive visitors 1,000 years from today or even fifty? Will you be remembered at all?

Remember, these mummies are your friends. They enjoy receiving visitors. Speak with them. They have travelled long to be here with us. Look into their wizened faces and ask them questions. If you hold your breath and listen they might even exhale the dust of centuries as they whisper a secret. It is a rare gift to mingle with the future.