Mummies in Mexico City

*** WARNING - POTENTIALLY DISTURBING PHOTOS BELOW ***

Yesterday was my first Spanish class, and I was too tired afterward to write a blog post.  So I have to go back two days to describe my encounter with mummies in Mexico City.

Now, there is a far more famous collection of mummies in Guanajuato, but I skipped that city on my way South.  I was alerted, however, to another group of preserved dead bodies available for viewing right here, in the neighborhood of San Angel, at the Museo del Carmen.  I followed my morbid interest on down to check it out.

The museum is in a former church of the Carmelite order, built between 1615 and 1628.  In those days, like many churches, they offered temporary burial in their crypt for a price; after a certain time, the bones would be removed to an ossuary to make way for new, er, residents.

Well, the residents of 1861 got a great deal.  Due to the Reform Laws, designed to cut back the authority of the Catholic Church, the Carmelite chapel was first secularized, in 1857, then in 1861 closed.  The bodies then in the crypt were simply sealed up and left in place to rot.  This they did not do.  In 1917, when a group of soldiers from the Mexican Revolution raided the chapel and opened the crypt, they found that soil conditions had naturally preserved the bodies.  For a while knowledge of the mummies remained local, but in 1929 the crypt’s longest-term residents were finally removed and placed in wood-and-glass caskets for display.

It was a little eerie simply being in the old monastery, whose warren of small rooms and miniature courtyards still bore, to me, the claustrophobia of permanent seclusion.

I wandered around for a while, not wanting to make too boorish a beeline for the dead bodies.  Eventually, however, I found the stairs going down to the crypt.

The sign, “Momias No Identificadas,” refers to the fact that no one knows the mummies’ identity, and is really the only discreet indication of where in the monastery the mummies are.  A little trepidatiously I headed down, past a just-visible wall shelf in a far corner holding two human skulls.  And then, quite alone, I entered the dim room where the twelve glass-fronted caskets are arranged.

There is a horror element, of course, in seeing any dead body, and it’s only increased by their still being dressed in their mid 19th Century clothes, which seemed about as well preserved as they were. 

But the more I stayed in the room with them, the more I felt that viewing a dead body is something of an invasion of privacy.  I think the clothes helped with that feeling as well.  At any rate, I felt that such transitions, no matter how unusually arrested, should occur out of sight.  I almost sensed the embarrassment of their spirits to be so displayed.

Then, however, I remembered that these had been deeply religious people, and it’s true that looking at a mummy can’t help but remind you of your own mortality.  The illusions of the body are removed, and you wind up contemplating the eternal, including whatever spirit still endures.  I decided that maybe these spirits approved of the lessons they were there to illustrate.

All this was just a projection of my imagination, I suppose, based, like I say, partly on the familiar clothes.  If asked, for example, how Otzi’s spirit feels about HIS snakeskin celebrity, I would draw a blank—that mummy is too distant.

Back upstairs, I stepped outdoors into the church’s grounds, which were lovely, especially the old aqueduct.  As rewarding as it can be to contemplate the permanence of death, I had the same reaction I usually have when I leave a stone church for the green world outside: I love life, and I’m happy to be part of it.

On one wall of the garden I found the curious brick design below.  I particularly liked the window at the top. 

To me it was almost a comment on life: rooted in the soil, expanding upward almost like a self-built speech balloon, with, at the top, the bright window of what see and what we have to say.

There's a point to it.