In the early decades of the twentieth century, as the sun cast its last imperial rays across the world and the Western powers stood atop their empires, a curious specter haunted the pages of cheap magazines and popular adventure tales. It was wrapped in linen and carried the scent of ancient tombs. It moved slowly, sometimes imperceptibly, and yet its presence was felt with a mounting dread, a tension that grew with each turn of the page. The mummy, drawn from fascination with ancient Egypt, emerged not only as a monster of the pulp imagination but also as something more profound: a symbol, a warning, a cultural backlash to the unchecked arrogance of empire. In the world of early pulp fiction, the mummy was not simply a creature awakened from its tomb but a force rising against those who believed the past was theirs to plunder.
The Western world’s obsession with Egypt had been well established by the time these stories began to appear. The opening of tombs, the removal of relics, and the silent theft of mummies to be displayed in drawing rooms and museums were not seen as theft by the Western powers, but rather as acts of scholarship, preservation, and even benevolence. Beneath that veneer, however, was something more troubling. There was a quiet awareness, perhaps unspoken but deeply felt, that the treasures being taken did not belong to them. The past was not dead, and the mummies of fiction became vessels through which the ancient world struck back. In this way, the early pulp writers created stories that were not only horror tales but reflections of imperial guilt.
Bram Stoker’s The Jewel of Seven Stars, published in 1903, is one of the earliest and most revealing examples of this literary phenomenon. In it, a group of British characters attempts to resurrect an ancient Egyptian queen, Tera, whose tomb they have violated and whose body they have stolen. What follows is a tale of possession, of psychological haunting, and mysterious deaths. Queen Tera is not simply a passive figure in the story. She is powerful, commanding, and seething with anger, a force to be reckoned with. Stoker’s tale may have all the trappings of Gothic horror, but beneath its supernatural surface lies a tension rooted in imperialist assumptions. The story does not punish Tera for her ancient sorcery. Instead, it punishes those who dare to control her. The invaders who try to manipulate her power find themselves undone by it. Through the Queen’s slow return to life, Stoker dramatizes a reversal of imperial control. The conquered refuses to remain silent.
Arthur Conan Doyle, better known for his creation of Sherlock Holmes, contributed another key story to this growing genre. In Lot No. 249, published in 1892, a university student acquires a mummy at auction and uses it to commit acts of violence against his rivals. This mummy is not a wild beast but a carefully deployed weapon. The story unfolds in the genteel world of Oxford academia, yet it is haunted by something alien and ancient. The implication is clear. Even within the heart of British intellectual life, the foreign object retains power. The mummy, summoned into modernity and bound to a new master, ultimately reveals how little control the West truly has over the forces it pretends to possess.
As the twentieth century progressed and pulp magazines gained popularity, mummy stories proliferated. They became staples of Weird Tales, Ghost Stories, and other publications that fed a growing public appetite for supernatural adventure. Writers like Sax Rohmer and Seabury Quinn helped shape the mummy as a figure of retribution. Their stories often followed a familiar pattern. A tomb is violated. An artifact is removed. A curse is unleashed. And one by one, those responsible are tracked, haunted, and brought to justice. The horror in these tales did not arise from mindless violence. It came from the slow, methodical return of justice. The mummy did not lash out randomly. It was punished with purpose. Its targets were always those who had transgressed.
In Sax Rohmer’s fiction, mummies often whisper from behind locked doors or move in silence through darkened halls. In stories like The Whispering Mummy, ancient secrets resist exposure, pushing back against the archaeologists who would strip them bare. Seabury Quinn’s detective, Jules de Grandin, encounters mummy cases more than once, each time uncovering layers of theft, arrogance, and spiritual unrest. These writers understood that the mummy could be more than a monster. It could be a symbol of ancestral memory, of cultural endurance, and of a buried world that refuses to be forgotten, a testament to the enduring power of the past in shaping the present.
Another layer of these stories involved reincarnation and possession, which blurred the lines between the past and present, between colonizer and colonized. In stories like Conan Doyle’s "The Ring of Thoth," the mummy is not merely undead but ageless, a soul that remembers lifetimes and waits for the moment to reclaim its identity. These tales hinted at a more profound anxiety. What if the self-assured modern man, confident of his place at the top of civilization, was not so modern after all? What if he, too, was a reincarnation of something older, something darker? This suggestion of blurred identity strikes at the heart of colonial logic. It undermines the notion of Western superiority by suggesting that the ancient world still pulses within the veins of modernity.
What makes these stories endure is not just their horror but their honesty. Beneath their pulp surfaces and sensationalist titles, they reflect a struggle with cultural trespass. They do not always criticize empire directly. They rarely name colonialism in open terms. Yet the structure of their horror reveals their awareness. The dead do not stay dead. The past is not gone. The artifacts carried home in triumph are not quiet. The mummy rises because something has gone wrong. The tomb was not a mystery to be solved. It was a resting place that should have been left alone.
By the time Hollywood adapted The Mummy into film, starting with Universal’s 1932 release, the image had been softened in some ways and hardened in others. The cinematic mummy was a tragic figure as well as a threat, often portrayed as a former priest or lover whose resurrection came with emotional pain. Yet the central idea remained. The mummy’s rise was not random. It was provoked. The stories that preceded the film had already cemented this idea. Westerners had taken too much, dug too deeply, and now they were being followed.
In a sense, the mummy stories of early pulp fiction did what history often refuses to do: they provided a narrative that was both compelling and accurate. They gave voice to the silent. They imagined that the dead, whose bodies had been looted and displayed, might have one final message. They might speak not with words, but with their presence. And that presence would not be benign.
These stories hold up a mirror. They ask what it means to enter a grave not with reverence but with hunger. They explore the price of taking what was never ours. They suggest that some things should remain buried, not because they are inherently dangerous, but because disturbing them reveals something dangerous within us. The early mummy stories are not only tales of horror. They are moral fables dressed in gauze, dripping with guilt and steeped in a silence that is about to be broken.
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