Are you My mummy?

[pasithea]

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2009/06/090626-us-mummies-video-ap.html

...

Fascinating how there are at least three possibilities they don't even seem to consider. I mean, even mummies of young boys are typically depicted with a beard.

Perhaps the person was intersexed or transgendered. Most non-judeochristian have been pretty accepting of trans* people instead of burning them as witches.

Or maybe the real lady Hors wanted to escape her life and a body double guard was sacrificed and buried so that she could escape.

Or perhaps the embalmer really really wanted his brother to survive well in the afterlife and figured no one would know once the wrapping was on.

I dunno. I guess the penis=man thing sort of bugs me. I can't think of any mummies that are depicted as withered and aged. The sarcophagus generally seems to portray the occupant in the prime of their life; how they wish to be seen and the body they wanted to live in for eternity even if it was the body they no longer had on the mortal plane. What if that is the case here and our culture has just robbed this person of her eternal identity?

EDIT: Seems I was right. Listen to the person speaking here.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/brooklyn_museum/3655744562/in/set-72157620271417600/

Fucking mainstream America
WE FUCKING EXIST!!!

Comments

[ff00ff.livejournal.com]

Sigh. I'd at least go through some of the motions of a religion if it had a reasonable pantheon, a not too-dogmatic clerical class, and accepted obvious parts of the human condition, such as the existence of oddly gendered celestial beings to be patrons of oddly gendered people.

Hell, if we had religion like that I'd probably have recruiters for some shrine to one god or another who needs male virgins as clerics beating down my door. My failure to attract amorous attention isn't a character flaw, it's a divine calling!

[dv-girl.livejournal.com]

Yeah. I've considered that before. Of all the colorful religions available, why'd the mainstream american culture get stuck with such a bland and dull one.

I mean Jesus isn't even a burning bush or wheels within wheels he's just some guy with a foot-washing fetish and some latent vorephile tendencies. Lamest deity ever. He'd never get laid on Tapestries. At the very LEAST he could have some giant tits or something.

Christianity is seriously lacking in style and imagination. It's like the TV sitcom version of religion. Not really designed to be very interesting. It's just set up to market to the lowest common denominator so some corporation can get in more advertising hours.

[enochsmiles.livejournal.com]

Whoa, don't let the Puritans fool you. Jesus was pretty damn cool. (When I'd recount Bible stories, with my own take on them, to an ex of mine, she swore I had a calling as a Sunday School Teacher in Hell, but I mean, the Bible says Jesus was a necromancer, dammit!

[dv-girl.livejournal.com]

I thought for a while he was a sith lord named Darth Nazareth. There's that part in Matthew where he's out on the road and comes across a fig tree that has no figs on it and he says, "If you shall not serve me, you shall wither and DIE!" and then he casts out his hand and lightening flies from his fingertips and kills the fig tree. That's classic sith lord right there.

[enochsmiles.livejournal.com]

Hey, it's a stressful life being pressured into being the herald of a new age -- I mean, the guy didn't even get a chance to have his umbilical cord snipped before three Zoroastrian priests came knocking to fill his head full of several millennia-old Babylonian esoterica. Even the Jedi get stressed out every now and then -- I bet Yoda levitated alligator-things and dropped them to help with boredom when he thought the Force wasn't looking. And come on, the guy was hungry -- haven't you ever bitched out a waitress when you've had low blood sugar? (And the Bible is silent on the topic of what the tree said to provoke him, too.)

(Yeah, sure, he managed to dodge his training as the last and greatest of the Magi for a little while until the damn governor decided he wanted this star-baby dead so he started rounding up his entire preschool class and pretending they were veal, at which point the current Bible goes silent, but if you've studied the historical Jesus for the last 15 years as I have, I don't think you can help but come to the conclusion that he was off receiving some form of rather unorthodox training that the Sanhedrin would certainly have called pagan.)

In all seriousness, it kind of makes me sad to read comments like the one I originally replied to. I doubt you'd be saying that had the Jamesian Church beaten the Pauline Church to the title of Christianity, or had the "Good Christians" (or Cathar Heretics, as their enemies called them) not been slaughtered in one of the most brutal and sudden culminations of meme-wars in history. Either of those two religious traditions were far more in line with what Jesus taught (even when you don't incorporate the redacted texts and sections of the approved texts that were removed 300 years after the dude died). I'm extremely glad that the Cathar tradition survived (or at least, the parts that did anyway).

Jesus was pretty radically leftist (in the modern sense) in his politics and personal life, too. Despite being descended from both David and Aaron, he hung out with the "racially inferior" lower classes, approved of sex work, did free clinic energy healing on the HIV patients of the time (lepers) as well as anyone who wasn't getting their Medicare checks, and had no problem getting up in the faces of the religious authorities, calling them hypocrites and telling people to have their own personal relationship with the divine.

I could go on, but you get the point. I strongly believe that if Jesus ever came back from the dead (ahem) and saw what was going on with the religion Paul founded in his name, he'd rip the hat off the Pope's head and stomp on it, and say "bitch, please" to any Baptist preacher.

[dv-girl.livejournal.com]

You're spot on for the last bit. A few years ago, I posted a big long rant about Paul and at some other point, when dealing with someone going on about how 'persecuted' christians are by having to tolerate gays and political correctness and whatnot, I went into a big rant about how the biggest persecutors of 'good christians' have traditionally been mainstream christians and cited the eradication of the Cathars as an example.

I'm not sure having read about groups like the Cathars have been entirely good for me though. Due to *bad family relationship stuff and spending a lot of time on/around the reservations when I was younger, where the 'joke' was: "What's missionary position?" ... "That's where one Christian holds you down while another rapes you." I have historically had a LOT of very aggressive negativity towards Christians. So hearing that modern christians had wiped out other groups of 'decent' christians really didn't do much for me.

But that stuff is really all a bunch of excuses for judgmental thinking and forming negative preconceptions about people, so I've been actively working on fixing that for a while. About six months ago, I built a new mental model for myself that has a much more tolerant and forgiving view of Christianity and lets go of about 99% of the anger and 70% of the condescension. Not perfect, but progress.

However, I don't think that even perfect acceptance would greatly change my saying stuff like that. I understand and respect sacred space, but in my own space, I don't feel a great need for restraint. I think any god that's worth anything would have a pretty solid sense of humor and take it as it was meant, and honestly, as an artist, Jesus just isn't very much fun to draw compared to many of the other gods.

[enochsmiles.livejournal.com]

I understand and respect sacred space, but in my own space, I don't feel a great need for restraint.

I fully respect that. I hope you didn't take my comment the wrong way; my goal was not to inspire restraint, but hopefully to impart some perspective or understanding.

I think that what happened to the Gnostics and the Manicheans and the Cathars and the Arians &c. would likely have happened in similar ways to any of the other religions you wistfully wish were the dominant religion. The simple fact of history is that a peaceful philosophy of life is always going to struggle for survival against a violent philosophy. Look at contemporary Islam, for example -- they're about 500 years behind Christianity in their political evolution, and the backdrop is rather different than the 1500s, but the similarities are there.

The Cathars may be gone; the last perfecti may be hundreds of years buried. But their influence survived, and with it, the true spirit of the teachings of Jesus and the many other rabbis of his school. Between the lines and buried in the sand for millennia, perhaps, but as long as I can offer sound examples as to why the Southern Baptists are not anything like the historical Christians in belief or action, I feel compelled to. If these kinds of replies bother you (they don't seem to) let me know and I'll stop.

I think any god that's worth anything would have a pretty solid sense of humor and take it as it was meant, and honestly, as an artist, Jesus just isn't very much fun to draw compared to many of the other gods.

*snort* Well, you got me on that one. :)