The Spell Against Mummies

I watched too many mummy movies when I was a kid. They were the old black and white ones with scary music and a mummy who rises up out of his sarcophagus to right some horrible wrong. They usually came on TV just before my bedtime and left me unable to sleep.

They frightened me so much that I was afraid to walk into dark rooms, sure that mummies would fall out of the walls. In museums I was always nervous walking past mummy cases, expecting to see the top slide open out of the corner of my eye.

My fear lessened as I got older, but only a little. I stopped expecting mummies to fall out of walls but my stomach still got queasy around mummies or mummy cases in museums.

When I got to college I snapped at the chance to take a course in Egyptian language, partly because of my love of things Egyptian but also with a secret hope to discover some magical spell that would protect me against mummies. And I found it!

The "Spell Against Mummies", as I've come to call it, is useful against any sort of evil or harmful creature, not just mummies. It comes from the Book of the Dead, where it appears over and over directed against the wide range of creatures the soul was expected to meet in the underworld.

So enough suspense. Here is the "Spell Against Mummies":

     rech-kwi tju, rech-kwi ren-ek

In English: "I know you, I know your name". That's it. That's all it takes to make mummies powerless against you. The Egyptians believed that their name was as much a part of themselves as their soul, and if someone knew their name they would have power over them.

You might think you would need to know the mummy's name to make this work, and in fact the various creatures' names are given in the Book of the Dead, but just saying this much will scare off any mummy. They don't know whether you know their name or not, and their name is usually written right on their mummy case.

The funny part about this is that it works. After saying it for the first time in a museum, standing inches from a mummy, I felt free and easy and not at all nervous or scared any more.

It even works if you say it in English. I suppose a mummy can understand any language once it is dead.

Try it for yourself, and good luck!