Episode 54 - Case of Chas Dexter Ward pt 1

[old book]

Hermes Trismegistus is a mythical figure, from what I understood of it. Hermeticists sort of signed his name to stuff. It goes back to the Thoth/Hermes thing, and I guess Hermeticism grew out of the Plotinus school of thought at the Library in Alexandria. Anyone who's interested can find good coverage in the Gnosis Archive, or the G R S Mead collection at sacred-texts.com

fwiw August Derleth spelled it wrong, "Hermes Trismegistos" or something, in Lurker at the Threshold. But I probably spelled it wrong myself above, so whatever.

Good podcast, I enjoyed it multiple times.

This probably belongs in the What We Should be Reading thread, but here's a link that seems relevant to the story or at least the milleu:

http://www.sacred-texts.com/ame/lol/lol104.htm

It's Myths and Legends of Our Own Land by Charles M. Skinner, 1896, the Salem and Other Witchcraft chapter. Danvers was where the first case came to light in the Salem Witchcraft apparently. Interesting, because I assumed the mental hospital in CDW is actually Danvers. There are other points of agreement between CDW and this chapter, but the curious are free to look for themselves (as long as the Sacred Texts website lasts, it seems to be going bankrupt right now. Buy a CD there if you like the site, some of them are priced fairly cheap).

Preparing to listen to part 2, just downloaded...

[JoeViturbo]

In reference to the use of mummies to cure diseases and ailments:
"Stiff: The curious Lives of Human Cadavers" by Mary Roach contains a chapter called "Eat Me".  It focuses on historical evidence of medicinal uses of cadavers.  It includes the process for turning someone into a "mellified man" which of course requires lots and lots of honey. 
Additionally, it lists various human derived "cures" for diseases.  It even contains a section on mummies. It says, "The medicinal use of mummified... humans is well documented in chemistry books of sixteenth-, seventeenth-, and eighteenth-century Europe, but nowhere outside of Arabia were the corpses volunteers,".  Also, "Others claimed the mummy's medicinal properties derived from Dead Sea bitumen, a pitchlike substance which the Egyptians were thought, at the time, to have used as an embalming agent,".  The text continues to relate that this demand for mummies became so great that, when they became scarce, druggists "began concocting fakes". 

"So common was this black market trade that pharmaceutical authorities like Pomet offered tips for prospective mummy shoppers: 'Choose what is of a fine shining black, not full of bones and dirt, of good smell and which being burnt does not stink of pitch.'"

Finally, it relates, from A.C. Wootton's 1910 Chronicles of Pharmacy (paraphrasing Ambrose Pare): "ersatz mummy [sic] was being made right in Paris from desiccated corpses stolen from the gibbets under cover of night."

[old book]

It made me think of Mummy Brown, a colour painters used about a century ago made from real mummies. Prussian Blue didn't contain real Prussians, though.