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Between Life and Death: The Significance of Egyptian Mummy Masks

Egyptian mummy mask, painted wood, Egypt, circa 700 BC.   Height: 10"

Egyptian mummy mask, painted wood, Egypt, circa 700 BC. Height: 10" Palmyra Heritage; Gallery 16/:212.319.1077

Tonight is Halloween, an evening seemingly reserved for drunken debauchery. Yet, like many light-hearted cultural rituals, Hallowe’en, or All Hallows’ Eve, has somber roots. Actually a contraction of the term “hallowed evening,” Halloween likely originated in the ancient Celtic festival of Samhain (“summer’s end”), held around October 31 at the end of the harvest season and before the start of the “darker half” of the year. This was considered a time when the proverbial “veil between worlds” was thin, and spirits as well as the souls of the dead, could pass between the plane of the living and that of the gods. Similarly in ancient Egypt, burial masks, such as those featured here, played an important role in the journey between life and death. Really, for Egyptians, as for the Celts and other ancient peoples, death was only one step in an eternal life. Mummification was a means to “transform the bodies of the dead into dwellings for the ba (spirit) in the afterlife.”

Ptolemaic Kingdom Carthanage mummy mask. Egypt, 3rd century BC. Height: 12.75"  Width: 8"

Ptolemaic Kingdom Carthanage mummy mask. Egypt, 3rd century BC. Height: 12.75" Width: 8" Palmyra Heritage; Gallery 16/:212.319.1077

The 70-day mummification process purged the corpse’s fluids and “endowed it with the attributes of gods,” who had the power to grant eternal life. Besides protecting the deceased’s face, the mummy’s mask was used to present an idealized image of the dead for their existence in the afterlife. You may note the painted face above bears no resemblance to a real person’s visage–it wasn’t meant to. The gilded/yellow color of the mask was meant to connect the deceased with the gods, who were said to have flesh of pure gold, and the eyes are painted wide open to indicate a youthful vitality as the deceased moved toward their new divine life. Often, the masks explicitly invoked the gods with the “Spell for the Head-of-Mystery:” The crown of your head is Anubis, the back of your head is Horus, your fingers are Thoth, your lock of hair is Ptah-Sokar. In times when death was an even greater mystery than it is now, rituals like mummification and the celebration of Hallowe’en were crucial ways to make sense of a fragile life.

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