The rulings
What Three Thousand Years of Mummies Establishes, and What Was Invented in 1940
Eight rulings graded against the register: the curse was fiction in 1869 and press in 1923, the shuffle was invented for a supporting player in 1940, and one of these claims is the only rule in this archive anybody has ever tested against a control group.
By Casimir Vane The Registers · Filed Under Protest 2026-10-14
These are the rulings on the Storage Register, which is where the evidence is.
Fifty-two works is enough to stop taking the folklore on trust and start grading it, under the paper’s standards rather than mine, which is to say I could not put a thumb on the scale even where I badly wanted to. A rule is established when the record carries it consistently and can say why, attested when everybody repeats it and nobody explains it, contested when the works disagree and both sides have documents, and unsourced when it turns out to have been invented once and believed ever since.
The rulings
Confirmed, contested, or made up in 1940
Every citation is a filing on the register.
| The rumour | Verdict | The desk's finding |
|---|---|---|
| Opening the tomb brings a curse | FICTION 1869, PRESS 1923 Unsourced | A magazine story, then a novelist's letter to a newspaper. No inscription, ever. The long versionThe most obeyed rule on the register entered fiction from a New England weekly in 1869 and entered fact from a novelist's letter to the papers in 1923, a few weeks before the excavation's patron died in Cairo of what the newspapers gave as an infected insect bite. There is no curse inscription in the excavation record of the best-documented tomb ever emptied, and the man who opened it died in 1939. A detective story answered the claim within six months. A cohort study answered it in 2002 and found nothing it could measure: the exposed group's mean age at death is the lower of the two, by five years, and at P = 0.87 a gap that size in a group of forty-four is what chance looks like. And the tomb's own paperwork was on the table the entire time. Enters the record MM-1869-ALC in fiction; MM-1923-COR against a real excavation Carried by Contradicted by |
| The mummy shuffles, arms out, dragging one foot | MADE UP IN 1940 Unsourced | Not Karloff. A supporting character in a B picture, made four times. The long versionThe image every reader can draw is Kharis, and Kharis is not the founding filing. In 1932 Karloff is wrapped for one sequence and spends the rest of the film upright, dry and immaculately dressed, and there is no shuffle in it anywhere. The gait, the dragged foot, the useless arm and the outstretched hands all enter in 1940, in a sequel that reused its predecessor's footage, and they became law because that film was made four times. Nor is it a property of the character: in 1959 the same character crosses a room at speed and comes through a door rather than round it. Enters the record MM-1940-HND, eight years after the founding film Carried by Contradicted by |
| Tana leaves keep it moving | UNIVERSAL, 1940 Unsourced | A studio invented a plant and ran four films on it. The long versionThree leaves brewed to keep the heart beating and nine to put him in motion is the most specific piece of procedure anywhere on this register, and it is a botanical that does not exist, invented for a supporting character in 1940. No document names the plant. The one filing on this register that describes the actual method names a salt, counts seventy days and has no such leaf in it. The founding film of 1932 runs on a scroll, which is paperwork. The desk files the leaves alongside the vampire register's synthetic blood, as a supply-chain invention that solved a writer's problem and then outlived the writer. Enters the record MM-1940-HND, with a dosage Carried by Contradicted by |
| Mummies were consumed as raw material | TRUE FOR MEDICINE AND PAINT; UNPROVEN FOR FUEL Contested | Two of the four uses have a price list. One has a punchline. The long versionThe medicine is documented by the man who prescribed it and then withdrew it, and by an essayist who records in 1658 that the trade had already settled to a price. The pigment is documented by the firm that sold it, which discontinued the colour in 1964 for want of supply and said so to a magazine that asked. Those two are established and uncomfortable. The locomotive fuel is a joke Twain labelled as hearsay in the same paragraph he told it in, and the mummy-paper story has produced no invoice in a hundred and fifty years of people looking for one. Enters the record MM-1582-PAR, in a surgeon's retraction of his own prescription Carried by Contradicted by |
| The Victorians held mummy-unwrapping dinner parties | LECTURES, NOT DINNERS Contested | The unrolling is real, ticketed and published. The dinner is later. The long versionTrue that they unrolled mummies in front of an audience; the audience had bought tickets and the man doing it was a surgeon who published his method so that others could check it. The dinner is a later addition. The whole documentary basis for it is one printed invitation to an unrolling at half-past two, which is not a dinner hour, and the accounts of the day that survive describe a lecture. The desk grades the claim contested rather than false because the unrolling itself is entirely real, ticketed and published, and because this paper has been accused of adding the dinner too. Enters the record MM-1834-PET, in front of a paying audience Carried by |
| The tomb's own inventory was the first thing stolen | ROBBED BY STAFF, c. 1110 BC Established | The seal held. The person with the keys did not. The long versionThe tombs on this register were built to be maintenance-free for eternity, and where the record shows one opened early it is unusually clear about who did it. A royal commission went out in about 1110 BC, inspected ten tombs, found most of the seals sound and one tomb broken into, and reported that the people getting in were the workmen of the necropolis. Three thousand years later the best-documented excavation in history found its own tomb entered twice in antiquity and resealed by the officials responsible for the necropolis. The fiction files the same way: the foot is bought over a counter, the dig is run as a treasure hunt, and the contents are exhibited for money. Enters the record MM-BC1110-ABB, in an inquiry conducted at the time Carried by |
| The mummy wants its reincarnated bride | SINCE 1890, NEVER EXPLAINED Attested, unexplained | Everyone repeats it. Nobody has said why waiting is a courtship. The long versionThe register's romance is older than its horror. The plot arrives in a short story of 1890, in which an immortal priest waits three thousand years for his love's mummy, in the museum that holds it. A film strikingly like it reaches the screen in 1932, though whether that film took the plot from this story is a question the desk has not checked against a source and does not rule on here. From 1932 the plot is simply assumed. The desk grades it attested rather than established because nobody, across the whole length of this file, has explained why three millennia of waiting constitutes a courtship rather than a filing error. The counter-cases are instructive: where a filing thinks about it, the occupant turns out to want nothing at all, or a body rather than a bride, or a building, or better catering, and the bride is what gets written in when nothing else has been decided. Enters the record MM-1890-RNG, in a magazine story set in a museum Carried by Contradicted by |
| Natron dries the body, and it takes seventy days | CONFIRMED, WITH THE DAYS COUNTED Established | A salt and a drying time. No secret, and not one of the screen filings shows it. The long versionThe only procedure this desk has ever seen quoted at three price points, with the days counted and the drying agent named on the invoice. Twenty-five filings on this page reached the screen and not one of them shows the method: the founding film replaces it with a live burial, the 1999 remake does the same at greater length, and the 1940 cycle replaces it with a plant that does not exist. Eighty-five years of cinema about preservation, from 1932 to 2017, and not one minute of it about drying. Enters the record MM-BC430-HER, priced in three grades Carried by Contradicted by |
Findings
The curse has two authors, and I take this personally for reasons of my own. My own most obeyed law, sunlight, was invented by a film in 1922. Theirs reached the front pages in 1923. Two of the best-known rules in this archive, invented a year apart. I find that companionable and I resent that too.
Somebody eventually ran the numbers, which has never happened to me. The table prints the direction of the result as well as its size, because it would look evasive not to. I would give a great deal to have mine done properly.
The walk is not Karloff. What he does in the founding film is conduct a long and entirely procedural pursuit through conversation, which I recognise and approve of. A studio then put a different man on a permanent night shift and a brewing rota and called it a curse. Repetition is how a rule gets into the record. It is also how a paper gets a circulation, and I have never been able to decide which of those facts is the more depressing.
The paint is the one that stayed with me. I had assumed a fit of conscience, and the table says otherwise. I have run corrections on less.
The staff ruling is the one I went looking to disprove, partly out of professional solidarity, and could not. In my register the threshold is everything and somebody has to say the words. Here there is no threshold at all, only a loading bay.
We would have preferred a result that flattered the locks.
Two desks write in
Iris Petty sends a note from Provisions, which is that grave goods are provisioning for a journey with no resupply, and that this makes a tomb her brief stated at its absolute limit. Bread. Wine with the vintage written on the jar. Linen, furniture, and spare sandals. One tomb on the register is the only household in any of this desk’s files whose entire contents were recorded object by object on numbered cards as they came out, and those cards are still consultable. Petty declines to print the round total that circulates for the object count, on the grounds that she has not counted it off the index herself and neither has anybody quoting it at her. Her finding stands without it: the labelling was better than yours, and the room was robbed twice anyway.
Vera Stipple, from Hygiene and Maintenance, would like the word “secret” struck out. It is a hygiene problem and always was, and the bodies are still there to be scanned, which is the strongest evidence anybody could ask for that it worked. I note only that a trade with three published price tiers has been more forthcoming about its methods than my own has ever been about anything.
The reading behind these rulings is at Selected Mummy Readings.
— Casimir Vane
