Greetings to Gold and Silver Level Templar Knights. We continue our look at the boy-pharaoh Tutankhamun in celebration of one hundred years since Howard Carter opened up his long lost tomb. The funder of his expedition was Lord Carnarvon who died as a result of a mosquito bite not long afterwards. Many saw something sinister in the death of the British aristocrat. There were warnings of a curse at the time - not least from the author of the Sherlock Holmes stories - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle is well known as the author the Sherlock Holmes novels. But in his lifetime, his obsession with the occult and spiritualism was just as well recognised. Conan Doyle was convinced that Lord Carnarvon’s death was a direct result of opening the tomb of Tutankhamun. Dark powers from the past had exacted a terrible revenge.
Visiting the United States in April 1923 to deliver a series of lectures on spiritualism, Conan Doyle was adamant that an “evil elemental” released from the tomb had killed Carnarvon. Simply put, elementals were a kind of spirit that could include fairies, for example, and capable of being good or evil.
“The Egyptians knew a great deal more about these things than we do. If they could put these elementals on guard over their dead bodies, they certainly would have done so.”
Conan Doyle’s adherence to spiritualism was unshakeable. Today, he would undoubtedly have been a TV talking head on many paranormal documentary series. Sadly during his own life, he was duped by some notorious fakes - in particular, the doctoring of early photographs to show fairies and ghosts.
On his 1923 speaking tour in the US, he displayed a now infamous photo of the spirits of dead soldiers hovering above the Cenotaph in London. Apparently, this reduced World War One widows in the audience to tears and “even scoffers were thrilled”.
In February 1923, Conan Doyle was interviewed by a journalist in the study of his Buckingham mansion. The interview didn’t seem to go very well. The journalist asked - rather sarcastically one suspects - whether the spirit of Tutankhamun might be up for an interview!
Possibly by means of one a seance. After all, Conan Doyle claimed his own wife could channel the voices of the long dead. The great author bristled. Stupid question - the boy-pharoah was far away on his celestial journey by now! Possibly even on another ‘planet’.
“Tutankhamun’s spirit left his body that I suspect he has forgotten he ever had such a thing as a body.”
The author then raised objections to the display of Tutankhamun’s corpse reflecting a modern debate about what is acceptable for museums to display. Should we respect the religious beliefs of our ancestors and desist from turning their bodies into morbid entertainment? Conan Doyle thought so and condemned the British archaeologists who he referred to as “grave robbing foreigners”.
“The remains which they ghoulishly dug up at Luxor are no more to him than a discarded overcoat.” He was furious that this ‘overcoat’ could now be gawped at. “It is a sacrilege to dig them up. They ought to be allowed to rest where he ordered them, not be placed in a museum on a slab for prying sacrilegious eyes.”
Belief in a curse wasn’t restricted to western, establishment Christians. In Paris, the imam of the Mont-Martre mosque, Abdullah Ben Aliba, thundered in 1923 that an ancient curse had been fulfilled and that nobody would think of tampering with any more tombs after Tutankhamun. Justice would be delivered not by the ancient Egyptian gods but by the god of Islam:
“It was forecast that Lord Carnarvon would die in the full of the moon. The curse of Allah was upon him for disturbing a sacred tomb. The tomb of Tutankhamun was not an ordinary one. The king had reposed in peace for nearly 4,000 years. Then he was disturbed. But 4,000 years is nothing when Allah becomes angry.”