Warning: This post contains pictures of mummies. But really of corpses. Some of the corpse-mummies are infants. It’s weird.
I didn’t do any research on Guanajuato’s Mummy Museum (el Museo de las Momias) before going there because I didn’t feel that it was necessary. The name of the museum seemed pretty self-explanatory and I’ve grown accustomed to museum exhibits containing plenty of explanation in the exhibit rooms themselves. Well, you can be right about something up until you’re wrong and this was my day to let complacency get the best of me.
The museum entrance is pretty nondescript. I walked into a wide, unadorned front room, where I bought a ticket to enter and then turned a corner and immediately confronted the first exhibit.
Each mummy had a tag on it with some categorization number, a date and a name. It was never made clear whether these were the actual names of the people, whose bodies were now on display, or just nicknames given them by…someone else. An archaeologist? Museum staff? The curator’s kids? Like pretty much everything that followed, no explanation was offered. At any rate, this was just the entry gallery, so maybe the other exhibits would add some background to these unearthed corpses.
Nope.
The murdered people were weird, but the exhibits were just building steam. Next up were the infant corpse mummies. This is a good point for another graphic image warning.
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These were again presented with virtually no information, except to say that dead infants were often dressed to look like angels. This makes for a pretty sweet tradition on one hand, but nightmare fuel on another. My main takeaway was: don’t dig up dead babies.
The tour continued…
It was really fascinating seeing bodies up this close, but the lack of any background information was weird. Some of the bodies were interred as late as the seventies. The stabbed guy had only been in the ground for six years before being dug up. It’s pretty interesting to see what six years of natural mummification can do to a body, but why was he disinterred after only six years?
Every now and then, there was mention of bodies being “discovered”. I can piece together that in the first decade of the 20th century, when some of the bodies were supposedly laid to rest, this was a very poor area with little access to other cities, so sure, some burial sites probably got lost. But what’s the story with the bodies of people who died in the fifties through the seventies? Was the stabbed guy “lost” for six years?
An “informational” plaque stated that the reclining skeleton/corpse pictured at the top of the last gallery was the only one in the exhibit to have been buried below ground. So where were the others hiding??
When I met back up with Jordan after my foray into the world of the dead, her first question was “but why?” I had to confess that I had no idea. I had hoped that there would at least be a book or two on the mummies in the museum gift shop. Wrong again.
I went to the museum’s website to find more information but was yet again disappointed. The homepage states that the mummies “represent the different stages that have allowed this city to reinforce its position today as an important domestic tourist destination.” In what way do they represent these stages? What am I supposed to learn from them?
I saw a tab at the top of their homepage for “Research”. Seemed promising. It led to link to a news article entitled “Professors present findings on Mexican Mummy Research“. Sounds very promising! This link led to a page from Quinnipiac University that stated “MAT graduates achieve high pass rates on Foundations of Reading test.” Foiled again.
The website does mention the mother and fetus mummy. It brags that the fetus is the world’s smallest mummy. It explains nothing else.
This was a really weird experience and one that I still can’t fully explain. I went to see mummies and basically paid to take pictures of a bunch of corpses that some people had, for inexplicable reasons, dug up and put on display.
If you find yourself in Guanajuato and feel that life isn’t weird enough, you should definitely check this horrorshow of a museum out.
Update: I found the backstory for the mummies on Wikipedia. According to them, “Authorities began exhuming bodies in 1870, when a new law required residents to pay a tax for perpetual burial. If survivors didn’t pay the tax, they exhumed the body. If the body was mummified, they stored it in a building above ground and people began paying to see them in the late 1800s.”
So yeah; the museum is a showcase for the bodies of people whose families couldn’t or wouldn’t pay a tax. So, just a bunch of corpses. =/