Some Words With A Mummy Analysis

ALCHEMY AND JUNGIAN PSYCHOLOGY

H.G. Wells – The New Accelerator vs E.A.Poe – Some Words with a Mummy

There has never been anything as lasting in the world as the human search for knowledge and the desire to preserve it and enhance it as time goes by. New experiments lie at the basis of new discoveries, and discoveries lead to experiments, thus creating a never-ending cycle of transformation of both physical matter and human consciousness.

Edgar Allen Poe, recognizable for his dark, macabre and mysterious settings and often disturbing stories, the father of the detective novel and also one of the masters of Science Fiction, “can [also] be credited with the first real short story about a mummy” (Joshi 384). In his short story Some Words with a Mummy, he

Instead of prolonging life in order to preserve knowledge, he aimed to focus on a certain speck of a moment in which a person could live an infinitely larger amount of time. Indeed, he managed to create this mixture, which he placed in a green phial, color which is representative for the alchemical stage of transformation between “death [and] a new growth” (Raff 12), and in Gibbern’s case, between the usual life and the unusual experience, between the ordinary and the spectacular. The substance was to be taken with water, element which, in alchemy, “is either a healing factor, or poisonous and destructive” (Franz 101). Gibberne’s meddling with time was not only extremely dangerous because of the possibility to catch fire, but the discovery in itself would represent a great threat should it fall in the wrong hands. Such knowledge is rarely contained and most often abused – the Mephistopheles of Wells might have released into the world a poison far more damaging than anyone