X-Message-Number: 14007
Date: Tue, 27 Jun 2000 20:22:49 -0400
From: Jan Coetzee <>
Subject: Modern mummies
Modern mummies
Salt Lake City - If burial
sounds boring and cremation
leaves you cold, here's another idea:
mummification.
This isn't your standard wrap, either. We're
talking
high-tech interment, a combination of ancient art
and
tomorrow's science. The basic procedure can run
about
$63 000, according to Summum, a Salt Lake City
religious
that says there is little use in shopping around.
We're the only ones world-wide that do modern
mummification," said Corky Ra, Summum's founder
and
leader.
Think of mummification as just another option for
those
who don't want to go out the old-fashioned way.
There are already burials at sea, burials in
space,
chrome-edged caskets for Harley-Davidson buffs and
coffins customised with computer software. The
ashes of
the dearly departed can be dropped from a plane,
entombed in a coral reef or used to grow bonsai
trees.
"There has been a trend in funeral service over
the past
decade or so toward more personalised and
individualised
funeral service rituals," said Kelly Smith,
spokesman for
the National Funeral Directors Association.
Summum started researching mummification in 1979,
practising on 30 cadavers contributed by a local
medical
school. Its method is more advanced than
traditional
mummification, which involved a salt-like
preservative
called natron and yards of linen.
In a warehouse behind the gleaming metal pyramid
Summum uses for its services, modern-day mummies
are
cleaned and drained of blood before being soaked
for up
to six months in a vat of preservation fluid that
Ra calls
his "secret formula." Afterward, the corpse is
covered
with lanolin and wrapped with gauze.
Then comes a dozen coats of polyurethane rubber,
which
dries as tough as a tyre, followed by layers of
fibreglass
bandages, which are used to set the body in the
desired
position. A bronze mummiform much like those found
in
the ancient pyramids provides the final layer of
protection, and the body is sealed inside with a
resin.
Ra got a patent for the procedure, and in 1985
showed it
off at a funeral directors' convention in Las
Vegas. The
reaction was chilly.
"Getting a funeral director to do something
different is
like moving a mountain," Ra said. "And this is
really
different."
Summum's general philosophy incorporates aspects
of
organised religion into a sort of new-age
spirituality that
includes meditation, science fiction and
reincarnation.
Summum, a non profit organisation, has mummified
several pets ($9 000 per cat, $20 000 per dog),
but is
still waiting for its first human body. Ra said
137 people
have paid in advance to be mummified once they
die.
Sue Menu, who leads a meditation class, signed up
10
years ago.
"It just felt like it was what I wanted to have
done," she
said. "To be honest, I hadn't really thought much
about it
because I was fairly young and I hadn't really
even
thought about death."
The average traditional funeral costs about $7
000,
including burial. Basic cremation is between $1
100 and
$1 500.
Mummification is far pricier - $12 000 for the
basic
mummification process, plus $36 000 for the
simplest
bronze mummiform. Then there's the cost of
shipping a
body to Salt Lake City, about $5 000; and
arrangements
and mausoleum space, which the group estimates at
at
least $5 000.
"The advantage to mummification unravels when you
compare prices," Smith said.
Ra likes to joke that everyone who signs a
contract
seems to live forever.
"People always ask, When is your first person
going to
die so you can mummify them? Ra said. "All of
our
people are in really good health. I don't know
anybody
even near death."
On the Net: http://www.summum.org/mummification
National Funeral Directors Association:
http://www.ndfda.org - Sapa-AP
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