Tuesday, June 04, 2013

It should not have come as a surprise, I suppose, but it turns out their are other options in the self-mummification game than eating seeds and drinking poison. I won't say that I've discovered a self-mummification rabbit-hole, because gross, but in the usual way of things one anecdote seems to have lead to another. The universe is always on the side of patterns.

And so this is how mellification came to my attention, through the interference of the universe. The self-mummification aspect is what makes it different from any other human body preserved in honey, I guess, since that's where it all starts--with honey. To become mellified an elderly man near the end of his life would stop eating and bathing in anything but honey. At his inevitable death he would be buried in a stone coffin filled with honey and and buried for a century. Once he turned into mummy candy he'd be sold in markets in pieces for curing broken limbs and other wounds.

In my head this looks like those lollipops with crickets inside of them, but really none of this should be news. We've been eating the dead to cure the living since forever, if not usually with living volunteers. Since mellified men have never been officially acknowledge they also haven't been officially banned, which leads to the remote but still creepy possibility of old men out there honeying themselves up in order to save the world. And in all cases I think the moral of all of this so far is to never open mummy boxes, not even if they promise to have candy inside. You're never going to like what you find inside a mummy box.

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