Short stories by Mace Styx.

While the image of Boris Karloff slowly shuffling across the screen with wraps of what looked like toilet paper wound around him may not have frightened me. The less well lit corners of esoteric magic did.

As a scholar of history and particularly folklore, I had occasion to research the origins and uses of ritual magic within the Middle Ages. I was stunned by how much of what we think of as "medieval" magic actually finds its roots with the Ancient Egyptians. While the common image of the alchemist or sorcerer is some wizened bearded man in a long robe, tracing sacred geometries on to the floor in chalk. Filling chafing dishes with salt and feathers, or mixing chemicals in exact proportions while taking measurements about the movement of the moon. Much of what was actually performed has far older origins.

The books and grimoires in which these esoteric rites were scribbled were based on texts lost to the west for many centuries. But which had originally found a home in the library or Alexandria or had been inscribed centuries and even millennia earlier. While many have at least a superficial knowledge of Egyptian religion and beliefs. Any Eyptologist will tell you that closer examination reveals an incredibly complex fabric of beliefs and superstitions woven together from a mix of tribal deities, syncretism with influences from foreign religions, and older traditions that predate even the first dynasties.

Included within these belief systems and of particular interest to me was a strong emphasis on black magic, and what we would now refer to as "occult" wisdom. It was an interest in these aspects of ancient Egyptian studies that led me to take a greater interest in the dorm room shocker story known as the Candeston Mummy. And to investigate what, if any, truth lay behind the story. What I uncovered added new depth to what was in danger of becoming an urban legend.

The so called "Candeston" Mummy was actually the body of a royal priest known variously, depending upon which source you consider accurate, as Ehlotep or Ehualotep. Housed in the museum since the early 1920s the mummy is usually displayed with the casket closed. Firstly because the casket itself is a beautiful artefact, sculpted as it is to show a man with a gorgeously carved ram’s head. Fitted with actual ram’s horns and exaggerated in the proportions so that the things snout dips into an awful leering stare. Secondly, because the mummy itself was considered by the sensibilities of the day to be somewhat too shocking to be seen as is.