PJ Vogt

There's a 17th century book called London Pharmacopoeiae, which includes a recipe describing how to do this.

I've read about it in Shutt's book, but the recipe recommends that, quote, a mummy be made of the cadaver of a redheaded man, age 24, who'd been hanged.

The corpse is to lie in cold water in the air for 24 hours, after which the flesh was cut in pieces and sprinkled with a powder of myrrh and aloes.

This was soaked in the spirit of wine and turpentine for 24 hours, hung up for 12 hours, and again smoked in the spirit mixture for 24 hours, and finally hung up to dry.

My guess is the latter, although I'm also not sure how you get from...

there's something special about an Egyptian mummy to whatever is special about an Egyptian mummy is also special about a red-haired person, except for maybe red-haired people were rare.

Yeah, and I have to say, in my whatever internal kind of taboo radar I have inside of me,

Killing people so you can eat them feels like way worse than doing weird things to corpses.

Like if they were hanging.

I mean, as someone who does not want to be killed so he can be eaten, I absolutely agree with that.

Okay, so remembering Otto's question, why can't we eat people?

I think what's nice about the carob story is it's kind of like the fact that we have this taboo against cannibalism.

We would have the taboo anyway.

I feel very confident about that.

But the language we have for it, like the fact that we call cannibals cannibals, and the mental image that's in Hannah's mind and in my mind of the explorer in the Stephen Cauldron with the islanders going around him, that comes from this historical moment.

There was a reason to have cannibals.

political propaganda in 1493, well after Columbus sort of completed his mission of taking over this land and wiping out lots of people, we're left with this little artifact.

And I just find that interesting.

Anyway, that is our first story.

Before we go to the next story, I just want to say that one aspect of cannibalism I'm not going to spend very much time on this week is survival cannibalism.