by Jack Turner
Shrouded in cloth of state, balm’d and entreasur’d With full bags of spices!
A generation later the English poet Robert Herrick expressed the sentiment that to be buried with his Anthea would be spice enough: ‘For my Embalming (Sweetest) there will be/No Spices wanting, when I’m laid by thee.’ For the better part of three millennia spices were, for those with the cash, an integral part of dying.
As tends to be the way with spices, the origins of the custom are a matter for guesswork and speculation. In the case of Ramses, the contents of his nose are known only thanks to the efforts of researchers in the Musée de l’Homme in Paris, where his mummy, or what was left of it, spent the winter of 1975–76. The mummy had been sent to Paris in collaboration with the Cairo Museum, its home for the last hundred or so years, where it had lain in a glass box, looking for all the world like a large, leathery locust, slowly decaying under the humid breath of tourists and nibbled by borers. The last century had been harder on Ramses than the previous thirty-two, which time he had spent in no fewer than three graves, enduring repeated robberies and relocations within several decades of his death. These were indignities the Egyptians viewed with the utmost horror (grave-robbing Egyptians excepted), and elaborate precautions were taken to prevent their occurrence, by means of secrecy and sorcery. Shortly after the pharaoh’s death, a team of priests and embalmers set about preparing the body for burial, accompanied by prayers for the future and curses against any malefactor so bold as to lift a hand against the royal cadaver. It was during this time that the pepper was inserted up the pharaoh’s nose, where it was sealed in place with plugs of an unidentified resinous substance. And there it remained, hidden and forgotten, swimming into view only with the benefit of x-ray examination, its identity confirmed after an exhaustive process of elimination of native African species, some three millennia after its harvest somewhere in the tropical south of India.
How it got there, or who brought it, is unknowable. The most tantalising possibility is that there was even then a direct traffic between Indians and Egyptians. More likely, the spice was shuttled from one obscure market to another, ferried west by an assortment of traders whose names and origins are now wholly lost to history. That the pepper came from India is certain; the rest is pure surmise.
But while the presence of the pepper came as a shock, that the Egyptians should have seen fit to insert it up the nose of a dead king should not (researchers also found traces of the spice in his abdominal cavity). Slowing or killing the bacteria that cause decomposition, spices seem custom-made for the quintessentially Egyptian custom of mummification. In an age without the benefits of formaldehyde or arterial embalming, let alone the refrigerated morgue, spices played the crucial role of keeping a corpse fresh and presentable when otherwise it would soon have putrefied.
There was a good deal more to the Egyptians’ legendary attentiveness to the mortal remains than a desire for preservation for preservation’s sake. According to Egyptian belief, death was not so much the end as a transition. As they understood matters, the priests and embalmers charged with mummifying the pharaoh’s body were preserving a home to which the pharaoh’s immortal ka, or life principle, could return. Though the Egyptians held that the ka was immortal, they also believed that even after death it still needed a physical frame if it was not to wander aimlessly through the afterlife: an everlasting, living death far more horrible than the death of the body. Hence, in short, the extraordinary importance the Egyptians attached to preserving the mortal remains, and hence the colossal energies they expended on building houses and cities for their dead. The raison d’être of mummification – and the best explanation of the use of the preservative pepper – was to guarantee the pharaoh’s eternal life. As the sacred formulae put it, to keep the body from the smell of corruption was to keep the dead free of the ‘sweat of Seth’: death’s stamp. It was in all likelihood the supreme metaphysical importance of this end that accounts for the Egyptians’ extraordinary efforts to obtain a spice all the way from India.
Before there was pepper, other substances did a similar job. Ramses’ pepper was apparently grafted into the mortician’s repertoire by a process of analogy with gums, aromatics and resins available closer to home. The use of myrrh, balsam and bdellium* is documented from the early third millennium BC. When Howard Carter examined the mummy of Tutankhamen, interred almost exactly a century earlier than Ramses, he found that the corpse had been treated with coriander and resins. When the Greek traveller Herodotus passed through Egypt in the fifth century BC he found three grades of mummification on offer, the most expensive version of which used a variety of spices, the names of which Herodotus either was ignorant of or omitted to note. The only Eastern spice he mentions by name is cassia. But this, he tells us, was for the rich. The poor made do with simply eviscerating and desiccating the body, leaving the dry Egyptian climate to do the rest.
The Egyptians were not alone in sending their dead to an aromatic grave. Although customs varied, spices, resins, flowers and aromatics were used by all the major cultures of antiquity, whether the body was mummified, buried or incinerated.† A Phoenician inscription on a sarcophagus in Byblos states that the dead person ‘lies in myrrh and bdellium’. In the Iliad Aphrodite rescues Paris from death and returns him smelling of balm and incense. Later the same goddess anoints the dead Hector with rose-scented oil. The Israelite King Asa, slain by a disease of the feet, was incinerated in a fragrant pyre: ‘And Asa slept with his fathers, and died in the one and fortieth year of his reign. And they buried him in his own sepulchres, which he had made for himself in the city of David, and laid him in the bed which was filled with sweet odours and divers kinds of spices prepared by the apothecaries’ art: and they made a very great burning for him.’
While perfuming the body in one form or another was common to the ancient Mediterranean, it was the Romans whose use of spices is best documented. To Tacitus (AD 56–C.120) the practice of spicing the dead was a recent, and un-Roman, import – he sniffs at a ‘custom of foreign kings’ – yet by his day it was reasonably widespread. Cinnamon in particular was a regular feature of burials; apart from a solitary reference to spiced wine in Pliny’s Natural History, there is no sign that the Romans ate the spice. On the demise of the dictator Sulla in 79 BC, after a slow and hideous death caused by worms devouring his flesh, an effigy of cinnamon was constructed in his image. ‘It is said that the women contributed such a vast bulk of spices for the interment that, aside from what was carried on 210 litters, there was enough to make a large figure of Sulla, and that an image of a lictor [staff-bearer] was moulded from expensive frankincense and cinnamon.’
At this time the attractiveness of spices apparently had more to do with their aroma than any preservative effect. By the time of Christ the prevailing custom among the Romans was incineration, and the more fragrant the send-off, the better. Martial writes of a patron all set to expire, with his bier prepared with cassia and cinnamon at the ready, who recovers at the last minute thereby denying the poet a promised inheritance. By the end of the second century it was customary to cremate the dead emperor ‘with every perfume and incense on earth’. The body of the emperor was set on a bier in a large wooden tower erected on the Field of Mars, a little like a lighthouse. ‘The whole structure easily catches fire and burns without difficulty because of the large amount of dry wood and aromatic spices which are piled high inside.’ The rite was a conscious re-enactment of the spiced inferno of the phoenix, that fabulous bird of sun, spice and eternal life that according to myth died and was reborn in a pyre of cinnamon. In the case of imperial deaths the symbolism was echoed more literally still by the release from the burning pyre of an eagle, soaring up to heaven with the dead emperor’s soul in tow.*
There was a good deal more to these aromatic obsequies than merely aesthetic considerations. To Romans cinnamon in particular not only smelled of sanctity, but sanctified. These sacral associations were apparently understood quite literally. Burn
ed with or applied to a corpse, the spice was believed to play a redemptive role – just as it did with the mythic death and rebirth of the phoenix. There is a poem of Sidonius (c.430–c.490) in which the phoenix is captured by Dionysos and brought back to Greece from India, fretting that without cinnamon he will be unable to be reborn in his fiery holocaust. Elsewhere the same poet calls the spice ‘resurrecting’, the ‘cinnamon that brings life while dying’. In this sense the sweet smell represented the triumph of life over death, symbolising if not actually conferring immortality. Death smelled of corruption, but infinity, like the deathless gods and phoenix themselves, smelled divine – and spicy.
Yet however theologically charged the symbolism, social concerns, as tends to be the way with spices, lurked not far beneath the surface. When Herod the Great was buried he was seen off with a procession of five hundred freedmen and a vast quantity of aromatics. When Nero’s consort Poppaea died from a kick he dealt to her stomach – according to the historian Suetonius they had a row after he came home late from the races – her body was cremated in a colossal pyre of cinnamon. The near contemporary Pliny had it on good authority that Arabia did not produce so large a quantity of cinnamon and cassia in a year as went up in smoke in a single day for her funeral rites. Her send-off was as much an economic as a theological statement.
For the poor, on the other hand, a spiced burial was probably not an option. It is probably no coincidence that memorials of spiced deaths tended to occur with the grand personage, particularly the emperor. St Augustine (354–430) writes of the custom as a rich man’s privilege. A satire of Persius (AD 34–62) features a rich man fretting that if he should die without leaving as much money as he might have to his heir, the latter, disappointed by the paltry inheritance, will consign his bones to the tomb without perfume, content to use weak or insufficient cinnamon on the pyre and second-rate, adulterated cassia. Among truly wealthy Romans even a prized pet merited a send-off with cinnamon. The poet Statius (AD 45–96) writes mock-seriously of the sweet smells accompanying the obsequies of a pampered parrot, punning on the spicy death of the phoenix:
… his ashes redolent of Assyrian cardamom,
His slender feathers exhaling Arabian incense
And Sicanian saffron; he will ascend the perfumed pyre,
A happier Phoenix, unburdened by wearisome age.
The most famous spiced corpse of them all was not a rich Roman but a poor subject of Roman Judaea. According to the gospels of Luke and John, the body of Jesus was wrapped in linen and anointed with spices, ‘as the manner of the Jews is to bury’.
The spiced entombing of Christ was, of course, the most influential precedent of all, and in the Christian epoch many followed where he had led. Among the early Christians there was a preference for embalming over cremation, though there are signs that this was a direction in which pagan Romans were already moving. (Before the Turin shroud was shown to be a medieval fake, some argued that its image might have been made by the embalming spices leaching into the cloth.) What more Christian exit than to be buried in the manner of the Messiah? The Acts of Peter and Andrew, composed early in the Christian era but later discarded as apocryphal, record similar ends for the two apostles. When St Luxorius was martyred in Sardinia during the persecutions of the emperor Diocletian, his followers buried him with hymns, torches and the embalmers’ sweet spices. To spice the dead was to make them Christ-like.
Yet such an eminent precedent notwithstanding, that Christians should have embraced embalming and spices so wholeheartedly is surprising. In the eyes of the Church fathers spices had a problematic past, redolent of paganism and vain luxury – they were, after all, no less luxurious on a corpse than as condiments. St Augustine writes approvingly that his mother spurned an expensive burial with spices. The more polemical Tertullian (c.155–220) noted that pagans were in the habit of offering spices to their gods, for which reason Christians who used them for solace at funerals were aiding and abetting idolatry. The Christian apologist Lactantius (240–C.320) agreed, seeing the spiced funeral as a pagan hangover hidden in Christian guise. Favouring dead flesh was not easily reconciled with the notion that the flesh was dross. Augustine asked, ‘What does it avail if the corpse has cinnamon and spices, wrapped in precious linens?’ In the Testament of Ephraim the Syrian, purportedly composed shortly before the saint’s death around 375, he stipulates, ‘Lay me not with sweet spices: for this honour avails me not.’ His reasoning was apparently more practical than spiritual: ‘What can goodly odour profit to the dead who cannot perceive it?’
But eminent as these authorities were, there were other and apparently more compelling considerations. Most early Christians seem to have been more inclined to accord the embalming of the dead the status of a sacred duty. Some clung to a literal belief in the imminent physical resurrection of the body, from which it followed that preserving the soon-to-be-resurrected corpse was a task of the utmost importance. In his encyclopaedic history of Christian ritual, the great French Benedictine scholar Edmund Martène (1654–1739) cites the cases of martyrs whose bodies were gathered by other Christians, then spiced and buried in the manner of Christ. But whereas Christians were inclined to take the greatest possible care of the mortal remains, from the perspective of those doing the martyring, to deprive their victims of a Christian burial was to inflict a double death. When St Calepodius was martyred in an uprising in the time of Pope Calixtus I, sometime in the early decades of the third century, the Prefect Maximus threatened to take the body away from the ‘little women’ who hoped to embalm his body with aromatics and destroy it utterly, so depriving the martyr of both life and afterlife.
In this sense spices, as among earlier cultures, kept the Christian dead alive – when the last trump sounded and the graves were emptied it would pay to be in good shape. The rule is proved by the exception, an occasion when failure to spice the body brought deliverance. The Dialogues of Pope Gregory the Great, who reigned from 590 to 604, relate the strange tale of a certain Stephen, an eminent person who died while on a business trip to Constantinople in the sixth century. His soul was promptly dispatched to Hades, where he was brought before the infernal judge, who thereupon declared – such is the lineage of the knocking-at-the-pearly-gates joke – that there had been a case of mistaken identity, his infernal minions having brought him the wrong Stephen: it was his neighbour, Stephen the blacksmith, that he was after. Fortunately for the other Stephen, back on earth no spicer could be found in the meantime to eviscerate and spice the corpse, so the mistake could still be rectified. Stephen’s soul was sent back to his still-intact body, and that of the blacksmith dragged down in his place.
Certain myths inherited from outside Christian tradition also lent themselves to Christian adaptation, none more so than the ancient myth of the phoenix. In the bird’s cinnamon-scented resurrection there were obvious affinities with Christian belief, for which reason the phoenix was a popular subject of Christian poetry and art in late antiquity.* It was perhaps with the phoenix in mind that cinnamon was used in burials and in the aromatic anointing oil, the chrism, with which the dead were occasionally anointed. The ancient belief in a pleasant aroma as marking the triumph of life over death had apparently survived more or less intact, an impression reinforced by archaeology. While on a sojourn in Rome during the pontificate of Paul III in the mid-sixteenth century, the Spanish scholar Andrés Laguna witnessed the opening of an early Christian mausoleum exposed during construction work for a side chapel in the new basilica of St Paul. Inside the builders found a type of cinnamon Laguna knew as red or mountain cinnamon, terms by which the Iberians of the day referred to the inferior coarse cinnamon of the Malabar coast. The tomb containing the spice housed the remains of the Empress Maria, the wife of the emperor Honorius, ruler of the western half of the Roman empire from 395 to 423, her body easily identified by a golden necklace bearing her name. Also among the grave goods were thirty different cosmetics and unguents, which Laguna remarked had retained their sw
eet odour, ‘as though they had been mixed only yesterday’.
Christian or pagan, the Romans ultimately owed these customs to the Egyptians, and so too Rome’s Germanic conquerors acquired them from the Romans. In what had once been the Roman province of Gaul the Frankish dynasty of the Merovingians (476–750) apparently made regular use of spices and embalming. Gregory of Tours (538/9–594/5) writes of the saintly Queen Radegunda being embalmed with spices, and thereafter the custom remained a feature of royal burials. In treating the body after death the real intention was not lifelike preservation as sought after by the Egyptians – indeed, increasingly rudimentary techniques of embalming were not up to the task. The appeal probably had much to do with the odour of sanctity that by now was a commonplace of the religiosity of medieval Christendom, the spices being seen as proof of God’s favour, symbolic evidence of special status. To lie among spices was to lie in the odour of the saints.
Such scarce evidence as has survived suggests that the spices were now employed as much for their supposed redemptive potency as for any preservative effect. A sixth-century Merovingian coffin unearthed in Alsace contained two cloves inside a little golden box. Since the cloves were not in contact with the corpse they were clearly not there to preserve or for that matter to deodorise. Midway through the eleventh century, Jotsaud, disciple and hagiographer of St Odilo, abbot of Cluny, wrote an extraordinary lament on his patron’s passing, in which he describes the transfigurative powers of his deathbed of ‘mystical spices’:
Beloved Odilo, now fair and blushing,
With a steady tread follows in Christ’s footsteps.
