BCAA Travel Blog

We are standing outside a cemetery on the outskirts of Guanajuato, a colonial city located 370 kilometres northwest of Mexico City, preparing to enter Museo de las Momias (the Museum of Mummies). Our guide warns us that we may not like what we are about to see. She says that a number of tourists that she took inside on previous occasions were sickened by the displays. Since our guide does not seem prone to wild exaggerations, I can’t help but wonder just how creepy an experience awaits us. Very creepy, as it turns out.

The museum’s macabre collection of human cadavers, all of them frozen in various states of decay, packs a visual jolt. Mummies are posed behind glass cases, either standing upright or lying flat on velvet pillows. Small plaques announce their names, when they were buried and when they were exhumed. In an unsettling touch, their biographies are presented in the first person. Some of the mummies are fully clothed, others are clad only in shoes and stockings, some have head and body hair still intact, some have a limb or a head missing, and many have their mouths stretched open as if screaming. One of these is a woman who was reportedly buried alive; her expression of terror, her crossed arms and the scratches on her forehead, support the theory.

All of the mummies were discovered between 1896 and 1958, after a new burial tax went into effect. Anyone wishing to bury a deceased relative in one of the tiered nooks in the municipal cemetery had two options: they could buy the nook outright (for 170 pesos) or rent it (for 20 pesos per year). If the nook was rented, the family had to keep their payments current. If the tax was not paid for three successive years, then the remains would be exhumed and the bodies cremated after five years. During these exhumations, a number of corpses were found, mysteriously preserved by a combination of the high altitude, dry climate and chemicals in the soil. The mummies were initially put in storage, but later began to be exhibited as a tourist attraction. No one is certain how many mummified bodies were removed from the crypts, but 119 are presently on display in the museum. It is quite possible that many more natural mummies are lying in the cemetery.

Beyond the mummies’ ghoulish appearance, many foreign visitors will be offended by this offhand treatment of the dead. It is a feeling clearly not shared by Mexicans, who have a very different attitude to death. “The word death is not pronounced in New York, in Paris, in London, because it burns the lips,” wrote Mexico’s Nobel-prize winning poet Octavio Paz. “The Mexican, in contrast, is familiar with death, jokes about it, caresses it, sleeps with it, celebrates it; it is one of his favourite toys and his most steadfast love.”

Mexican culture’s fascination with death has its most vivid expression during the festivities of Dia de los Muertos (Day of the Dead). The holiday, which is celebrated on November 1st and 2nd, is a time at which Mexican families honour their deceased love ones. People will go to cemeteries to communicate with the souls of the departed, and will build beautiful private altars containing the favorite foods and beverages, photos and memorabilia of the departed. The intent is to encourage visits by the souls, so that the souls will hear the prayers and the comments of the living directed to them.

Scholars trace the origins of the modern holiday to indigenous observances dating back thousands of years, and to an Aztec festival dedicated to a goddess called Mictecacihuatl (The Lady of the Dead). According to Aztec culture, the soul lived after death and, 40 days after death, then returned to earth for one day of remembrance each year. These lost souls were seeking nourishment and community, finding their way back home by the scent of their favourite foods.

The major symbol of the Day of the Dead is the calavera or skull, represented in masks and foods such as sugar skulls, inscribed with the name of the recipient on their foreheads. Other holiday foods include pan de muerto, a rich coffee cake decorated with meringues made to look like twisted bones. As well, Mexicans exchange costumed calaveras in much the same way that Canadians exchange Valentines in February.

The most popular of these calaveras, La Catrina, an elegant lady with a feathered hat and formal clothing, is based on the etchings of Mexican artist José Guadalupe Posada, who in the late 1880s began to use the skeleton image to comment on the social inequities of his time. The skeleton in a general’s uniform or in the elaborate flowered hat of a grande dame showed the rich and powerful as nothing more than cloth and bone.

Cloth and bone, of course, is what all of us come to in the end, as the mummies of Guanajuato so dramatically attest. Perhaps the most disturbing of all the museum’s specimens are the babies–two infants, and what is believed to be the youngest human mummy ever recorded–a 24-week-old fetus, removed from its mother during a botched Caesarian section. While the rest of the corpses were naturally preserved, scientists recently determined that these three mummies underwent basic embalming, having some of their organs removed and replaced with packing material.

It is believed that this was done as part of a regular practice that still takes place in rural Mexico. Catholic infants who die are often dressed as angelitas, or little angels, for girls, and as santitos, or little saints, for boys. The girls are clad in lacy dresses, sometimes including angel wings, while the boys are outfitted in colours corresponding to the saint representing the month in which they died. They are then photographed alone or with their families, as if they were still alive.

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