THE MAUSOLEUMISTS HAD GLADLY SATISFIED their curiosity, peeking into a rarefied world of privilege denied to most, but they had never lost sight of who they were and what they were doing. They had as fine a sense of social distinctions as any equerry at Buckingham Palace or any chargé d’affaires at the White House, something I had discovered quite by chance one afternoon at 2 Krasin Street. I had been chatting with one of the oldest Mausoleumists, seventy-nine-year-old Yuri Romakov, and I had asked him whether he himself would like one day to be preserved with all the skill his colleagues could muster. Romakov stared at me through rheumy eyes and tried stifling his disbelief, but he was clearly shocked. Such mummification, he informed me coldly, was only suitable for truly exceptional people. Ordinary folk, he implied, were scarcely worthy of such attention. Indeed, they should be content with whatever nature chose to unleash upon them—fungus, mold, rot, maggots, and beetles.
Romakov, good Communist as he once was, saw little irony in this. Nor was he alone in such sentiments. For hundreds of years in Europe and Asia, morticians skilled in the science of mummification had gone about their work selectively, reserving physical immortality for a privileged few—the rich, the powerful, the holy, the high, and the mighty. Through their adroitness, the celebrated had managed to escape the worst excesses of death, remaining whole, intact, and still eminently presentable to adoring crowds. As a result mummification had become a sort of status symbol in some circles—a visible sign that someone had not only arrived but left in considerable style, and that in between he had been widely loved, revered, worshipped, and blindly followed.
When the famous Italian opera star Enrico Caruso died in Naples in the summer of 1921, for example, his fans were beside themselves with grief. Caruso, they believed, was the greatest tenor who had ever lived, a man whose voice possessed such supple warmth and richness that they could scarcely imagine setting foot again in an opera hall without him. Caruso had understood his fans’ ardor. As souvenirs, he left them more than 240 recordings of his favorite arias and popular songs, but even these were not enough to satisfy his many admirers. They wanted to gaze again on his sturdy, good-natured face, with its deep cleft chin, and his thatch of dark curls. Taking pity on their grief, Caruso’s widow permitted the morticians of Naples, who were renowned for their skills as mummifiers, to preserve her husband and lay him out in state at the Hotel Vesuvio in Naples.
On the day of the funeral, a crowd of 100,000 admirers jammed the streets of Naples to watch Caruso pass by in a wreath-adorned hearse. But this did not put an end to public mourning for the man with the haunting tessitura. Fans continued to clamor to pay their respects, so the Caruso family arranged to display his mummified body in a glass casket in a cemetery above Naples. For seven or eight years, opera lovers made their pilgrimages to the tomb, weeping at the sight of Caruso and leaving bouquets of flowers as tokens of their love; Caruso’s friends regularly gave him fresh changes of clothes. But the tenor’s widow hated the public spectacle her husband had become. It seemed to her an indecency. At last she convinced Italian authorities to help her remove his cadaver to a marble sarcophagus in a private mausoleum.
Caruso’s fans had been loath to part with the great tenor: he had seemed more like a god on the stage than any mere mortal and they had expected him to live forever. Now that he was dead, they craved a glimpse of his face to remind themselves of the joy he had once brought them. Italy’s superb morticians had kindly granted them this wish.
I confess that I like to imagine Caruso surrounded even in death by friends and admirers. A man of enormous physical vitality, the great tenor had once taken immense delight in sketching sly caricatures of his associates. I suspect he would not like to be alone in death. The story of his preservation gave me pause for thought about the original human impulse that lay behind mummification. I wondered if human societies had always been so attached to the great among them, and whether this reverence for remarkable people had given rise to the idea of mummification. Had the first morticians gone to work on someone as rare and extraordinary as Caruso? Or had they devised this form of immortality for another, less transparent purpose, one now forgotten by the living?
EARLY MUMMY EXPERTS were supremely confident that they knew where the mysterious and rather arcane art of preserving the dead began: the answer seemed obvious to all. Egypt was the land of the mummies, the place where desert sands rippled with tattered strips of yellowed linen and bits of withered flesh. Classical writers left little doubt that it had long been so. Even before Alexander the Great had led his armies from his home in Macedonia and Julius Caesar had staggered into the arms of his betrayers on the Ides of March, travelers had penned descriptions of the curious trade of the embalmers along the Nile. Impressed by such lines of evidence, nineteenth-century mummy experts saw little need to look any further for clues: no other early civilization in the ancient world, it seemed, was so brilliant, so mystical, and so apt to have discovered the intricate secrets of preserving the dead.
This blind faith colored much later scientific thinking and led inevitably to some rather grand theories. In the years leading up to the First World War, for example, a prominent Australian anatomist, Grafton Elliott Smith, set aside his autopsies of Egyptian mummies and began scrutinizing mummification methods around the world. He plowed through obscure anthropological texts on the embalming practices of Madagascar tribes and peered at photos of child mummies unearthed in the American Southwest. He combed histories of the Spanish conquest and examined the peculiar pattern of incisions on mummies from the Torres Strait. When he was done, he arrived at what might be called a grand unified theory of mummification, which he published in a book entitled The Migrations of Early Culture. In it, Smith, the man who had amassed the collection of mummified penises that so disturbed his family, concluded that the ancient Egyptians were much more than the inventors of the art of embalming. They were also its chief evangelists, carrying their distinctive culture and the secrets of Egyptian mummification around the ancient world, even to the far shores of South America.
Many of Smith’s colleagues shook their heads at this theory, with its quirky assumptions and sweeping generalizations, but some did not. Novelist H. G. Wells was sufficiently intrigued to popularize it in his own book, The Outline of History, and at University College London, archaeologists began busily exploring the idea of an ancient Egyptian diaspora. But as fascinated as some British intellectuals were by Smith and his splendid ideas, the Australian mummy expert proved no visionary. His grand unified theory was little more than a house of cards. No evidence ever surfaced of ancient Egyptian morticians in such faraway places as Indonesia and Mexico, as Smith had suggested. And in the 1980s, a series of stunning archaeological discoveries in Chile revealed that another society had stumbled upon the secrets of mummification long before the Egyptians. More than two and a half millennia before morticians along the Nile began waving flies away from cadavers, coastal dwellers in Chile had begun skillfully preserving their dead along the parched edges of the Atacama Desert, fabricating mummies of such singular beauty that they continue to haunt South Americans today.
The Chinchorro mummies, as they are now known, are the world’s oldest mummies. Concealed within iridescent black and red masks and bodysuits, they personify, quite literally, the human desire to transcend the frailties of the body and the distintegration of self. Elevating death into something reassuringly, hauntingly beautiful, they are among the most complex mummies ever made in the ancient world. “I’m still mesmerized by the care the Chinchorro put into reconstructing these bodies,” said anthropologist Bernardo Arriaza, “because very often we tend to be shocked by the dead. We don’t want to be around them. But it’s hard to distance yourself from these mummies. They are not just archaeological artifacts, they’re human beings who were trying to be preserved.”
Arriaza is a leading authority on the Chinchorro mummies and his devotion to these ancient bodies is legendary. I first met him at the Mummy Congress, after he had given a paper on his latest research, and I was immediately struck by the fervor in his voice whenever the talk turned to the Chinchorro. A Chilean from the vineyard country south of Santiago, Arriaza teaches physical anthropology at the University of Nevada in Las Vegas, a strange place for a man of his interests to end up. But Arriaza, as it turned out, has never given up Chile. He dreams of returning, taking his American wife and young American son with him. But until then, he remains staunchly Chilean at heart. A Chilean flag drapes one of the walls of his office in Las Vegas and on the monitor of his computer flashes his own personal screensaver: a superb photo of one of the Chinchorro mummies.
As a kind of restorative, Arriaza returns each summer to Chile, working long hours on the collection of ancient bodies at the University of Tarapacá. In between these journeys, he analyzes, lectures, and dreams about Chinchorro mummies. At any one time, he had half a dozen different schemes on the go to help preserve and protect them. He is working with local artists to create a portfolio of painted portraits of the Chinchorro mummies. He is writing popular articles and directing amateur videos. He is even mulling over a plan for mummy performance art at the Burning Man Festival held each year in Nevada—anything to get these ancient mummies better known.
In short, Arriaza is something of a dreamer when it comes to the Chinchorro. But to look at him, there is little hint of a man whose waking thoughts constantly circle around something so old and so cold in the ground. In his early forties, Arriaza is olive-skinned and disconcertingly handsome, with hazel-green eyes, angular chin, chiseled features, and a heavy five-o’clock shadow. He wears a goatee, smiles infrequently, and dresses for comfort, not style, in rumpled polo shirts and khaki pants. He looks more like an artist than a scientist—a painter, perhaps—and this and his air of careless self-absorption seem to have a magnetic effect on many women, even those who have never laid eyes on him. On one occasion, after I had finished writing a magazine article about his work, a young fact-checker called breathlessly out of the blue from New York with a pressing question. “Is he really as good-looking as he is in his photos?” she asked, sighing audibly.
I am never entirely certain whether Arriaza realizes the effect he has on women. But there is a legendary quality to it. His wife, Vicki Cassman, told me that she had gotten to know him while he was conducting autopsies on mummies at the museum at the University of Tarapacá, an atmosphere about as seductive as a funeral parlor. To make matters worse, Cassman was a young conservator at the time. She was ethically, morally, and emotionally opposed to anyone destroying fragile mummies and hated the thought of someone cutting into their brittle flesh. Logic suggested that she should have detested Arriaza. But after just a few days of watching the young anthropologist, she fell head over heels in love.
Arriaza had begun working on mummies in Arica by a lucky chance. His father was a former miner and had relatives in Arica, so Arriaza had enrolled at university there. When he graduated, he’d gotten a job at the local museum. In his second year, the museum had received a call from someone at the local water company. A crew had been out bulldozing a channel for a new waterline along the sandy lower slopes of a local promontory, El Morro. The bulldozer blade had suddenly bitten into some sort of cemetery, but not anything recent. The ground was littered with a handful of strange-looking bodies. Arriaza and some of his colleagues hustled out to take a look. By the time they arrived, a big crowd had begun to gather. The officials from the water company were trying to keep them back. In the sand were pieces of five masked mummies.
Arriaza and his colleagues knew at once what they were. In 1917, the famous German archaeologist Max Uhle had accidentally exhumed a few similar mummies while digging in Arica. After that, researchers had turned up the odd masked mummy here and there along the north coast of Chile. They were exceedingly rare, but everyone agreed that they belonged to an early Andean people whom Chilean archaeologists had dubbed the Chinchorro, after a beach where one of their villages first came to light. The Chinchorro had lived and died by the whims of the sea. They had fished with intricate knotted nets, harpooned sea lions, consumed hallucinogenic plants from the Amazon, adorned themselves with necklaces of lapis lazuli and exotic bird feathers, wrapped cotton turbans around their heads, and lived in villages of reed or skin-covered huts whose floors were plastered with clay and seaweed.
But no one knew very much about their mummies, for there had never been a discovery to match the one at El Morro. Over the next few months, Arriaza’s colleagues recovered ninety-six Chinchorro bodies scattered helter-skelter over seventy-five square feet of sand. Many were artificially mummified and of these each had a molded paste mask bearing a slightly different expression. It almost seemed as if the Chinchorro morticians had tried to capture an abstract likeness of the person within. A few of the mummies were clumped together—a woman with pendulous paste breasts, a man with a paste penis, and several children—as if they had belonged together as a family. But other than that and the fact that most faced out to sea, there were no orderly graves and very few grave goods. It almost looked as if the mummies had never really been intentionally buried at all.
This seemed odd to Arriaza, but he didn’t have much time to mull over its meaning. He had begun working for Marvin Allison, a well-known mummy expert and pathologist from the University of Virginia who had taken on the analysis of the mummies. Allison wanted to age and sex each of the Chinchorro bodies and look for signs of disease. An autocratic, difficult man, he was a great believer in autopsy, but between the newfound Chinchorro mummies and the natural mummies he was already studying, there were simply too many bodies and too little time for thorough analysis. He needed an assistant, someone he could train to gather the necessary data and perform mummy autopsies. So he chose Arriaza, giving the young Chilean an intensive crash course in pathology and anatomy.
Arriaza was in awe of Allison and his immense knowledge of anatomy, anthropology, pathology, and South American prehistory. He was also fascinated by the thought of working on the rare mummies that Uhle had first described sixty-four years earlier. So he began soaking up all the lessons that Allison generously imparted. But as he began dissecting a few of the most fragmented Chinchorro mummies himself, Arriaza felt a deep, unexpected sorrow. He hated adding to the indignities these bodies had already suffered. Moreover, he found it almost impossible to ignore their humanity and artistry. With the help of colleague Vivien Standen, he began recording every step he took and every layer he cut through, hoping to reconstruct on paper exactly how each mummy had been made.
Soon, however, even these elaborate efforts seemed woefully inadequate. After thinking things over, he informed Allison that he wouldn’t be doing any more mummy autopsies. The pathologist was infuriated about having to take over the remaining dissections. By this point, however, Arriaza couldn’t bear to see any more destruction. He began a kind of covert operation, hiding away mummies to keep them from Allison’s hands.
THE CHINCHORRO BODIES that Arriaza had managed to save are housed at the University of Tarapacá in Arica, just down the street from the fabled Restaurant of the Dead. I badly wanted to see them. I suspected that no photos could ever do them justice, and I wanted to learn, if I could, what had prompted the Chinchorro to begin making such elaborate mummies so very long ago. Arriaza seemed pleased to arrange a visit. So, on a Friday afternoon in May, I scrambled out of a cab to meet him on the dusty University of Tarapacá campus. A short walk brought us to a small garagelike building set in a field of olive trees. A faded sign on the door read LABORATORIO ARQUEOLOGIA TIERRAS ALTAS, a legacy I guessed from some previous occupant.
Inside, Arriaza brushed absently past a broad sunlit counter where someone had laid out dozens of old human bones in neat rows. Scattered between were patches of crinkled tinfoil, each cradling a blackened mummified human foot or a hand. A strong mucilaginous smell wafted up from the table: it was the scent of ancient human bone warmed by sunlight. Arriaza, however, took no notice. Trading a joke with Vivien Standen, he reached for a set of keys and unlocked the door to the back room. Flicking on the light, he stepped to one side. Along the far wall were rows of shelving units that stood almost to the ceiling. Each was lined with heavy gray boxes. It was a good deal less than state-of-the-art storage for such important mummies, but it was all that the university could afford.
Arriaza walked over to one of the shelves. With immense care, he eased off the lid from one of the boxes, revealing a tiny outstretched body on a bed of sand. In the soft light, I bent over to take a closer look. It was a child, no more than a toddler, covered in a crumbling, flaking layer of blue-black clay. The tiny eyes of its mask were closed and its mouth drawn shut as if sleeping, like some primitive African idol or a modern Henry Moore sculpture. The effect was very beautiful. But its small body was slowly falling to pieces. A network of deep cracks and fissures zigzagged like ugly open wounds across the paste upon its torso. Sticks and human bones poked out from a sleeve of human skin, where the protective clay had dissipated into powdery dust. It looked as if one more shaking, perhaps even one more nudge, would be the end of the child: the body had the sad look of a badly used doll or a battered child. I wanted very much to protect it.
Arriaza slipped the lid back on gently. Then he showed me another Chinchorro mummy, and another, until at last we had looked at seven or eight. Almost all were children. As I straightened and looked around at all the small boxes, I realized that I was standing in a morgue of the very young. That they had died thousands of years ago took away none of the chill of that silent place and its boxes. Some of the children had been only old enough to take their first swaggering baby steps; others had been unable even to crawl. And a few, the most touching of all, had perished in their mothers’ wombs. But each child, no matter how small or how young, had been exquisitely prepared for eternity with tiny paste masks and bodysuits. “It’s the emotion of love that’s represented here,” said Arriaza gently, “taking all that care to mummify a little fetus. That is very, very touching.”
Such tender concern is a rarity in human societies, explained Arriaza. Among most modern societies, stillborn babies and young infants seldom receive much in the way of funerals or send-offs, for they have yet to become full members of society. “In some parts of the world, if you are not baptized, you are not even considered to be a person,” Arriaza noted. But the ancient Chinchorro had clearly seen things in a different light. They had known and understood—as grief counselors do today—that the pain parents feel after the death of a child is not commensurate with age: the loss of a day-old infant can be just as devastating as that of a two-year-old. “The Chinchorro seemed to honor all human beings whether they contributed to society or not,” observed Arriaza in one recent paper, “paying particular attention to those who never reached their potential.”
That the Chinchorro should have understood the psychology of grief so well is understandable: they had a good deal of experience with it. In an age before modern medicine, Chinchorro infants had regularly fallen victim to a host of bacterial, parasitic, and viral infections. Indeed, one in every four Chinchorro children perished before reaching the age of one. This meant that nearly every Chinchorro mother had suffered the agonizing loss of at least one of her children: undoubtedly, some mourned many more. Arriaza, good scientist that he is, could not say for certain what effect this had had on them, but he believes that it was considerable. Indeed, he suspects that such grief had driven Chinchorro parents to invent mummification in the first place, for only children were intentionally and elaborately preserved in the earliest Chinchorro cemeteries.
This made a touching kind of sense, since modern psychiatric studies have revealed just how traumatizing the death of a child is for most parents. Never expecting that their child—the object of their deepest affections—would die before them, grief-stricken mothers often enter into an altered state of consciousness that they describe as somewhere between life and death. In such a state of mind, wrote Finnish therapist Leena Väisänen, they frequently experience eerie dreams and abnormal psychic and physical phenomena. They long for the babies they have lost and feel an unbearable sense of emptiness and yearning that resembles physical pain. Indeed, most of these women are unable to stop acting as mothers, even though their children are gone. Biologically and hormonally driven to keep their infants alive, they yearn to continue caring for them. In these circumstances, wrote Väisänen, a mother “is constantly preoccupied with the baby, the grave, and death.” They want to stay as close as possible to their infants. Often this need is so overpowering that they create phantom babies in their minds to replace the children who were lost.
Under the sway of such grief, a Chinchorro mother could easily have conceived of the idea of preserving and beautifying the body of her infant. Such a notion may well have become the heart of a soothing ritual handed down for generations among the Chinchorro. Similar ceremonies, after all, are held in other cultures. In Japan, for example, grieving parents take part in a ceremony to call upon a Buddhist god known as Jizo, the custodian of crossroads, to guide the soul of their stillborn children to safety. In honor of this event, they buy or make babylike statues, dress them in baby clothing, then place them along country roads or in the halls of temples. Chinchorro parents may have done something similar, with a mummified child as the focus instead of a mere statue.
Certainly some of the elaborate ministrations involved in making a mummy would have filled the need of mourning mothers to continue caring and tending for their lost children. The earliest mummies, noted Arriaza, had taken weeks of finicky work. The Chinchorro had delicately removed the child’s skin, rolling it off delicately like pantyhose, then stripped the body to bare bone. After reinforcing the skeleton with sticks, they tied the skeleton back together again, plumping it out with bunches of reeds. Then came the artistry. Daubing on a thick ashy paste that dried like clay, they molded facial features and bodily contours, then slipped the skin back over the body and crowned the head with a wig. This left only a final coat of shimmering blue-black paint. This they made from tiny particles of manganese that peppered the sand of a local Arica beach. To obtain enough of this metal pigment to paint a child, someone had to sift through handfuls of sand for many hours—busywork that might have appealed to a heartbroken mother. Then they had to mix the manganese with water and apply it to the mummy with a fine grass brush, polishing it to a smooth iridescent gleam.
Seeing a lost child reborn as a beautiful new being may have eased the heavy hearts of mourners, noted Arriaza. “When a person dies, he gets separated from society and that’s going to be a shock for the living. The dead person is in a kind of limbo. But when the Chinchorro had finished preparing the body, the person could be brought back into society again and this would have been a celebration of the dead.” With their children restored to the world of the living, Chinchorro parents wanted to keep them close. Rather than burying the gleaming bodies deep in the ground, they seem to have lain them gently, like living people, on the sand. For years afterward, families tended them faithfully, gently painting and repainting all their tiny nicks and dents.
Such a ritual must have helped ease the sorrow of loss, for Chinchorro families continued to perform it for more than three thousand years. But as the centuries passed, the ceremony evolved and changed. Instead of reserving mummification only for the very young, families preserved all their kith and kin tenderly. Everyone was treated the same. “Whereas the Egyptians considered only kings and other exalted citizens worthy of mummification,” noted Arriaza, “the Chinchorro accorded everyone in the community, regardless of age and status, this sacred rite.” The Chinchorro also began to envision the dead in a subtly different way, creating mummy masks to reflect this. Instead of scratching two lines for eyes and another for a closed mouth, they punched two tiny holes for eyes and drilled another, larger one for a mouth. By these simple acts, the Chinchorro mummies suddenly gazed out intently at the world, awake, alert, ready to listen to the living. “The Chinchorro did not separate death from life,” said Arriaza. “The eyes of the mummies were open, their mouths were open. So for the Chinchorro, the dead were not dead. They had just gone through a change of state.”
Capable of communicating through the voice of a priest or shaman, such transcendant beings made superb go-betweens with the spirit world. They could advise, counsel, intercede, and wield their considerable influence on behalf of their kin. The Chinchorro must have happily poured out their troubles to them, for it was natural for families to speak to their ancestors. In time, the dead became almost as essential to life as the living, and so intimately linked were the two that this bond lasted almost as long as the Chinchorro themselves. When the mummy makers finally vanished under mysterious circumstances from northern Chile around 1100 B.C., they left behind their greatest treasures—sandy slopes adorned with painted mummies, which the desert and the wind slowly enshrouded in sand.
THE IMMENSE REVERENCE and love that the Chinchorro felt for their mummies did not die with them, however. It became deeply embedded in the lives of Andean people along the coast and nearby mountains, although later societies took a simpler approach to preserving the dead, well aware that dry desert air would do much of the work for them. Many chose to bundle up cadavers in immense absorbent cotton shrouds that soaked up the body’s moisture, speeding the drying needed for mummification. It is possible that some went further still. On Peru’s southern coast, archaeologist Julio Tello found evidence that the Paracas people removed the internal organs from their illustrious dead and dried their remains by fires before wrapping them in some of the finest woven cloth ever produced in South America. Other researchers have disputed these finds, however.
Be that as it may, no Andean society kept the faith in mummies burning as fiercely as the Inca. The Inca believed that the preserved dead were still alive. They also believed that these withered bodies were willing to offer their wisdom and lend their life force to that of nature to ensure bountiful harvests. In return for all this, the living had to treat them with respect and tend to their physical needs. They had to give them coca leaves to chew and beer to quench their thirst. They had to help them urinate by lifting the hems of their tunics at appropriate moments. They also had to ensure that they were properly dressed and sheltered, and, in the view of some scholars, this explains why each new Inca king built his own palace and acquired his own servants and estates through taxation. The splendid house and property of his predecessor would be needed for his predecessor’s mummy and commemorative cult. “Some people have argued that that’s the reason the Inca kept expanding their territory until the Spanish arrived,” said Arriaza. “They had to look for new places to conquer. Their previous lands belonged to the dead.”
Indeed, it could be said that the might of the great Inca empire, which stretched from the rain forests of Colombia to the deserts of northern Chile, rested on mummies, for seldom did Inca emperors make a major decision without first consulting the preserved bodies of their ancestors. Deeply grateful for their advice, Inca sovereigns paid them every possible respect. When Atahualpa fell captive to the Spanish during a treacherous ambush at Cajamarca, he sent one of his own lords with a small party of Spanish officers to Cuzco to gather up the ransom. In the Inca capital, the officers set to work immediately on the temple of the sun, prying off its outer golden plaques with copper crowbars. Then they entered a large house nearby. There the plunderers found a woman in a golden mask fanning two royal mummies. The bodies were dressed lavishly in rich ornaments and held beautiful gold staves in their arms. Pizarro’s men immediately set about stripping them of their finery. But avaricious as they were, they stopped short. Atahualpa, a proud man, had begged them not to take everything: one of the mummies was his own father.
With this rich ransom in hand, the Spanish leader Francisco Pizarro had little further need of his royal captive. He tried and convicted the Inca emperor on trumped-up charges, then sentenced Atahualpa to death by fire, the Spanish punishment for idolators. For Atahualpa, this was an unbearable thought. Being reduced to ashes meant that he could never become a mummy or enjoy eternity as an honored ancestor among his descendants. To escape this miserable fate—one that the Inca had reserved only for their most detested enemies—the emperor converted to Christianity just shortly before his execution, taking the baptismal name of Juan de Atahualpa. This entitled him to death by strangulation and a Christian burial in the ground, where his body might naturally mummify.
In the months that followed, Pizarro tightened his hold over the Inca, until at last he secured the city of Cuzco. His army looted the temple of the sun, and Pizarro himself moved into the largest of the Inca palaces, which had housed the mummy of Atahualpa’s father. But the stories of the mummified sovereigns disquieted many of Pizarro’s men: they reminded them uncomfortably of the saintly Incorruptibles they had left behind in Europe. How, they wondered, could such miraculous preservation have taken place among such blatant heathens? The Spanish priests hastened to set their minds at rest. Trained during the Spanish Inquisition, the priests had learned to detect any whiff of the devil’s work. Demons, they explained, were masters of deception. They were capable of assuming many forms to hoodwink the naive—even that of an Incorruptible. As such, the mummies had to be stamped out. And this had to be done with all the efficiency the new Spanish colonial authorities could muster, which was considerable.
Alarmed, the Inca quietly spirited away as many of the royal mummies as they could into the countryside. The word for these bodies in Quechua, after all, means “something precious and carefully kept.” And for nearly two decades, they concealed the mummies of their imperial family in small villages outside Cuzco. But in 1559, a clever Spanish official in Cuzco, Juan Polo de Ondegardo, began a concerted search for them. He managed to ferret out the hiding places of several, retrieving the bodies of at least three Inca emperors and two of their consorts. The Spanish were astonished by their appearance. “The bodies were so intact,” wrote the chronicler Garcilaso de la Vega later, “that they lacked neither hair, eyebrows, nor eyelashes. They were in clothes just as they had worn while alive, with llautas [bands] wrapping their heads, but no other sign of royalty.”
Polo and his associates made little secret of their discoveries, creating quite a stir. According to de la Vega, “They carried them in white shrouds through the streets and plazas, the Indians dropping to their knees, making reverences with groans and tears, and many Spaniards removing their caps.” Still Polo couldn’t quite bring himself to destroy the Inca sovereigns, even though he knew they were a potent political force. Under orders from the Spanish viceroy, the Marquis de Canete, he dispatched the bodies to Lima, where they were put on public display in 1560, forming a kind of early mummy museum. Finally in 1580, the Spanish authorities decided to dispose of the withered cadavers. They gathered up five of them and buried them beneath the courtyard of one of Lima’s earliest hospitals.
But that was not the end of the Inca mummies. Unknown to the Spanish, the love of the preserved dead permeated the length and breadth of the Inca empire. Far beyond Cuzco, there were thousands of humbler mummies, each as intertwined and enmeshed in the lives of ordinary people as veins and arteries are in human flesh. The mummies were just as essential. In the Andes and the Atacama Desert, people did not see death as the end of life. Instead they believed it was just the beginning of a new and more influential phase as a revered ancestor who could lend assistance to the living. In mountain caves and burial houses across the Andes, humble farmers visited mummies of their local leaders by moonlight, bringing corn beer and coca leaves for their comfort. They mended the mummies’ clothes and spilled out the sorrows of their time. They sought advice from them on all important matters, even soliciting their opinions on marriage partners for their children.
When the Spanish authorities finally understood the extent of this mummy religion in the Andes, they were horrified. They believed—rightly—that Christianity could never take root in a land possessed of such powerful beliefs. So the Spanish clergy embarked on a campaign modeled upon the Inquisition. They decided to extinguish the ancient worship of mummies and other idolatries in the region. They rode out into the countryside and began searching for mummies hidden in caves and remote mountain shrines. Slowly, one by one, they confiscated the ancient bodies and arrested their tenders. Their successes gave them confidence. They wrote detailed how-to guides for finding mummies, complete with a list of ready-made interrogation questions for their protectors.
These guides greatly honed their skills as mummy hunters. In 1607, for example, one well-trained Spanish clergyman went to work in the small Peruvian town of Huarochiri. Francisco de Avila sought out and arrested native priests, seized a large pile of mummies, and carted the whole lot off to Lima for an auto-da-fé in the city’s largest square. At Avila’s beckoning, soldiers tied one of the unrepentant native priests to a stake at one end of the plaza and stacked mummies and other sacred objects in a bonfire pile at the other. As Peru’s viceroy looked on, Avila preached to the people of Lima in Quechua, exhorting them to give up their mummies and other idols. Then he theatrically lit the bonfire. As the dead bodies crackled in the flames, he ordered the recalcitrant native priest brought forward for a public flogging. This done, he exiled the unfortunate man to a Catholic house hundreds of kilometers away in Chile. Then Avila dismissed the somber crowd.
In the decades that followed, there were many other similar spectacles, and these, even more than the conquest itself, took the heart from the Andean people. They couldn’t bear to see their beloved mummies so brutally treated. “See, these people did not fear death,” said Arriaza. “What they really feared was death without the possibility of coming back. So when the Spanish burned and buried the Inca mummies and other mummies, the Andean people were devastated.”
Some colonial officials in Lima knew that they would never be able to track down and destroy all of the mummies. The bodies were too well hidden and the Andeans would never give them up willingly. So as a further measure, the officials came up with another plan. They ordered the removal and resettlement of entire villages, thereby severing the ties between the people and any remaining mummy shrines and local gods. The scheme sounded foolproof, but it had one major flaw. There was nothing to stop inhabitants from creating new shrines with new mummies. So the Spanish clergy forced their reluctant parishioners to begin burying their dead as Christians did theirs in Europe—beneath church floors.
The descendants of the Inca hated to do this. They confided to local priests that they were tormented by the voices of their dead parents and grandparents, who called out to them piteously through the church floors. Unable to rest comfortably in their new tombs, the dead told them they felt like prisoners. They could no longer sit upright and move around as they had in their old shrines: they were pinned down in graves that felt like straightjackets.
In time, the plaintive voices of the dead began to fade in the Andes. The descendants of the Inca embraced Catholicism and prayed fervently, as the Spanish did, to the Incorruptibles. But in Chile, said Arriaza, they did not forget the ancient religion of the land. Nor did they shed their old beliefs about the dead. This more than anything else, he said, explained why the country remained so troubled after the rule of General Augusto Pinochet. During the general’s regime, army officers arrested hundreds of Chilean activists and dissidents, who subsequently vanished without a trace. The executions had taken place decades ago, but Chileans were incapable of closing that chapter of their history. Pinochet’s greatest wrong, said Arriaza, was not in arresting and murdering his opponents, as terrible as that was. It was in destroying and hiding the bodies, for this meant that Chileans could never bring the dead dissidents back into the world of the living.
And that was something the descendants of the Inca could never forgive nor forget.