Field Notes on Fire Mummification

It was only four in the afternoon but Dr. Gabriel had already decided he would have to work through the night. The opening ceremony was a mere 48 hours away but there was still much to be done. He had a staff of five including the two interns, but he did not trust them to get his life’s work right.

He rearranged several leaves on a low table and dropped some of them into a wooden mortar. He posed the pestle on top, partly to keep them from being blown away. He adjusted the information card.

The leaves of bayabas, tibig, patani, and besudak are renowned for their antibacterial properties, which are important for preserving bodies. Try crushing the herbs like the Ibaloi would have done in preparation for the mummification process.

Allowing the visitors to play around with the leaves was his research partner’s idea. The leaves were freshly picked from his own garden and would need to be replaced every couple of hours. He made a mental note to remind Michael, his graduate student.

“Doc? Do you need anything before I go?” Michael asked, slouching by the doorway. Dr. Gabriel noticed he hadn’t cleaned his glasses.

He scanned the empty display cases, waiting for their occupants to settle in for the summer exhibition. “We could transfer one of the mummies into the case now. I want to see how it looks in this light,” he replied.

He picked up a hammer and walked towards the large wooden crates stacked and roped off in the corner farthest from the entrance. Michael followed his lead and helped him lift one of the top crates and settle it on the floor. The first crate revealed a walnut shell-shaped coffin on a bed of packing foam.

“Oh that smells weird,” Michael said, coughing into the crook of his elbow. “Like the books that got wet in the flood last year.”

Dr. Gabriel wrinkled his nose too. “Well… Let’s see how you smell after five hundred years. Ready?” On three, they lifted the coffin lid.

An Ibaloi mummy is a curious thing, men and women preserved in fetal positions, their hard-earned tattoos still visible on leathery skin. Some had their arms hugging their legs, others had their hands to their faces. The position of the limbs and the sight of the face, with its mouth open as if to scream, is jarring to the uninitiated.

Slowly, the two lifted the coffin out of the crate and carried it into the glass display case. They closed the case and stepped back a few feet, behind where the belt barrier would be.

I’m not sure if we should put one of the textiles around it, or off to the side. Speaking of which, can you see if Dr. Almeda from Clothing Tech still has those…”

He lifted a yard of textile carefully folded in one of the crates. It bore the pattern common to the Luzon highlands, red and indigo stripes alternately woven and embellished with yellow twills and white triangles, ending in knotted selvages. He admired the weight of it, a traditional textile dyed with the juices of plants only found in the mountains.

The loom, too, was a thing of beauty. It didn’t look like much without the threads in the weaving lines but once he sets those up, it will be, as printed on the card, highly immersive against the replica of the interior of an Ibaloi hut, the nipa sourced and woven by the indigenous community themselves. It took a lot of convincing and promises of several conference abstracts for the department to give in to that one. The logistical costs alone! And where will you store it afterwards? He had almost forgotten he wasn’t alone until Michael cleared his throat.

“Yes?”

“Doc Almeda? You wanted me to get something from her?”

“Ah. Ask her if the department will let us borrow a few mannequins.”

“Got it. Anything else Doc?”

“No, that’s it, you can take the night off. You need to work on your thesis anyway. How’s the writing going?”

Michael took a deep breath and let it out very slowly. “Hay Doc, It’s been tough without Doc Perez. Ever since he left I haven’t really been able to do much. He always gave me quick feedback. ‘Course, I rarely liked his feedback but…”

Dr. Gabriel nodded in commiseration. “He was supposed to work on this too. Frankly, this would have been much easier if he were here. A lot of this was his idea.”

“So where do you think he is, Doc?”

Dr. Gabriel thought about it for a moment and shrugged. “If he didn’t tell you, I don’t think he would have told me either. We had a pretty big argument the night before he left.”

“About what Doc?”

“Well you know him, just the usual, he was berating me for being behind on liquidating the expenses. I tried to tell him it was only because I had to grade those juniors’ papers on material culture in Oceania but he wouldn’t have it.”

“Sounds like him nga po.”

“Anyway, we’ll just have to get the exhibit right, so he doesn’t bite our heads off when he does show up.” Dr. Gabriel pulled a cigarette out of a small silver container and reached for a lighter.

“Doc… I thought you didn’t smoke?”

He lit the stick and took a drag before answering. “I took it up recently, heard it relieves stress. Takes your mind off things too.”

Michael stared at him, as if wondering whether or not to bring up that the building was strictly smoke-free. But Dr. Gabriel made that rule two years ago so he already knew that.

“Sige po Doc, I’ll go ahead. But I’ll just be at the dorm if you need me.” He paused. “That writeup we’re still missing on the procedure, will you need me to draft that? I already started but Clarissa said you wanted to do that one personally.”

“Right, the mummification procedure. I’ll have it done by tomorrow, don't worry. And tell Clarissa I need her documents by next week, that Erasmus application won’t write itself. She already missed the deadline for Fulbright.”

Michael’s suppressed laughter made his nostrils flare out. “She missed it because Doc Gerry wouldn’t give her a recommendation letter, said her understanding of Lévi-Strauss will always be shallow and incomplete until she reads him in the original French. It pissed her off so much she scrapped her proposal.”

“That doesn’t sound like a very good reason.”

“It was more of the way he said it, Doc. Like a jagged rock ripping through your best tent right before it rains. On the first day of fieldwork. With the nearest barrio twenty miles away. Doc Gerry has a way with words.”

“That he did.”

Michael said good night just as Dr. Gabriel became distracted again, this time by the polymer clay wall sculpted and painted to look like a Sagada cave. It provided a convincing backdrop for the empty coffins they borrowed from the Archeology department, which were now nestled into the wall. “Nestled safely,” Dr. Gabriel said out loud to an imaginary university administrator, “without damage to the wood of course, we can’t have that!”

He practiced his laugh as he pulled a chair out, opened his laptop, and clicked on a file.

Human Mummification Practices Among the Ibaloi of Kabayan, North Luzon, by Perez, G. and Gabriel, A. His lips moved quietly as he read the title to himself. He scrolled down and located the section on Mummification Methods.

The Ibaloi mummification process can begin before death. A dying person undergoes a “saltwater purge,” where they are made to drink copious amounts of salt dissolved in water to cleanse the intestines and halt decay. This is crucial to the process as the Ibaloi preserved bodies whole, internal organs intact. Once the person has passed, he or she is washed in cold water, seated on the sangachil (death chair) and held in place with a kolebao (funerary blanket) and a sinabulibo (head scarf). Once secured, a low fire is lit under the corpse to hasten the dehydration process — this is where the name fire mummy comes from.

That was all he had managed to write so far. Perhaps it was because he had been up most nights, going through the details of the exhibit’s opening, from securing permits, all the way to printing labels and checking that the caterer understood what to serve at the reception. Perhaps it was the constant interruption every time he tried to put his thoughts together. It was towards the end of the semester, after all, and every other student needed advice on where to find a source or what constitutes a theoretical framework. Or perhaps it was the fact that his name went second on the byline even though he did most of the writing.

Creating the low fire is tricky but is achievable with charcoal and some patience. In a traditional mummification process, the corpse, with its head tilted backwards on the death chair, is placed near the entrance of the house. If neither funerary blanket nor head scarf are available, any available textile may be used.

He paused, took another slow drag on his cigarette, and ignored the ashes that fell onto his keyboard. The text reminded him of one his last conversations with Dr. Perez during dinner at a conference.

“Adrian,” he said, addressing him by his first name. “We could do it, you know. Make our own mummy… For qualitative research.” He drank cold Coke straight from the bottle and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.

“And where would we get that body?”

“We’d buy one from the medical college.”

Dr. Gabriel smirked, making the obnoxiously large mole near his left eye more obvious. It sat just halfway to the ear that was too small for his face.

“It wouldn’t work, the formalin would have already ruined the body. We won’t get much out of it, research-wise.”

“Well then dig one up, use your imagination. We’ll do the whole thing right in your garden,” he said, swallowing before he continued. “This is your problem, Adrian. You lack the ability to think beyond the assignment, even for the fun of it. That’s all well and good if you just want to keep languishing in obscurity in this department. If you want to get noticed you’re going to have to be a little bolder than this. And in your case even the slightest show of spontaneity would shock a five hundred year-old mummy back to life. You’re becoming the most boring member of the department and you don’t even have the excuse of age.”

Dr. Gabriel didn’t answer, he only stared at the half-empty bottle in Dr. Perez’s hand as he tapped the bottom against the table, thud, thud, thud, thud.

Thud.

The sound didn’t come from his memory.

A box of exhibit souvenir postcards tipped over. He walked over to it and took his time putting them back in the box. Then he took one and propped it against his laptop screen.

It was the image of a steep valley wall against a clear blue sky. Foliage jutted out of its outcrops here and there but it was stark gray for the most part, providing great contrast to the numerous coffins hanging against it. In this particular part of the valley the coffins were newer, quite unlike the walnut-shaped hollowed pine logs they had on display, which were typically found deeper in the caves. Here some were made of plywood, constructed similarly to modern coffins albeit much smaller in size, and painted in shades of green and blue. They bore the names of their occupants, in bold letters on the wood itself. And on the valley wall, too, a smattering of graffiti.

While it was not greatly representative of the exhibit, they thought of using it as the image for some of the souvenir postcards because it was highly recognizable. Anybody who has ever visited Sagada would have seen this valley. He had fond memories of that area, having visited it as a teenager, and often thought it played a part in his decision to study anthropology and archeology. The photo on the postcard was actually his. Truthfully he had been working on this exhibit far before he ever knew Dr. Perez: before he moved to Diliman for college, before the constant assault of papers and grading deadlines and faculty meetings, before he started languishing in obscurity.

He set the postcard aside and resumed typing.

During the long drying process, bodily fluids are expressed and collected in a jar. There is no information on what is done with the jars afterwards, but a researcher attempting to replicate the process themselves can keep the jars in their home study where it will likely go unnoticed among the other odds and ends collected over the past twenty years. Once the dripping has stopped, the body can be removed from the death chair. The next phases of the process are done to minimize insect-related decomposition. The epidermis is peeled off by close relatives. The body is also “dewormed” by manually removing the worms and insect maggots infesting the skin. Then the entire body is bathed in the juice from pounded leaves of local plants.

He looked at the exhibit near the entrance again, where those plants were sitting. He had more of them at home, in carefully kept bottles. He thought himself somewhat of a herbalist and admired many indigenous methods and recipes. The Ibaloi concoction in particular proved a highly effective antibacterial bath. He knew this well as he very recently had to make vats of it.

For qualitative research.

Some reports suggest that tobacco smoke was blown into the mouth to assist the mummification of the internal organs. If the researcher does not smoke, he could take it up for the sake of authenticity. However, we must note that there is little evidence that tobacco smoke contributes to the successful mummification process.

After several months of continuously tending to the body, it will be ready for burial.

If the researcher does not have several months to tend a slow fire to completely dry the body out, the process can be sped up by exposing the body to the hot Manila sun during the day and with modern implements such as an industrial blow dryer at night great care must be taken to make the body look authentic the researcher experimented with other non-traditional substances such as varnish and leather paint to achieve the look of a fire mummy such that it will pass scrutiny pass suspicion pass peer review pass the committee pass –

The sound of his fists slamming into the keyboard echoed in the exhibit space. Several keys stuck to his hands. He brushed them off and they clattered onto the floor. Only then did he notice how quiet it was. The low hum of the injured laptop faded into the occasional thrumming noise of the last jeepneys on the academic oval. The students had all gone, even the ones who usually hung back to use the free library internet. They were probably out drinking at the many kiosks that lined the outskirts of the campus or else asleep in their dorms. In a couple of days they would wander into the exhibit.

He could see them now, entering through the main double doors, fiddling with their phones or looking around for the most interesting display. They would see the interactive table first. Some of them would play with the leaves, most would not. They would move through the room, textiles first, Michael would be hanging around telling them to stay behind the belt barrier. Undergraduates would be milling around handing out postcards and pamphlets. Others would be watching Dr. Perez’s documentary on the mummification process on the flat screen TV. The crowd would make their way to the fire mummies in their large glass cases. They would stay here the longest, a mix of fear and fascination on their faces.

He wandered over to the large glass cases himself, still empty for the most part. He figured he could set up one more mummy before closing up for the night. Crossing the room to the wooden crates, he dragged a particular crate out from behind the others. This one smelled different. Less like Michael’s old books after the flood and more like the smoke of a forest fire that had just burnt itself out. He had no difficulty picking it up and wrapping it in one of the brightly dyed textiles before placing it into the glass case, just another mummy with its knees to its chest, mouth open as if to scream.

If you looked closely enough, an obnoxiously large mole was visible, between the left eye and the ear that was too small for its face.

To the right of the glass cases was the simulated cave wall with the empty wooden coffins. Before exiting the room they would be asked to sign up for the department’s mailing list.

He was pleased with the space and how it flowed, a logical journey from start to finish, not just an academic but an immersive experience — or at least that’s what he hoped they would write in The Collegian.

At his opening speech he would, of course, dedicate their efforts to Dr. Gerardo Perez, who would always be part of the exhibit.