What do you get when you mix tribal weapons possessed by ghosts and women possessed by tiny humans? Possibly a curse. Definitely a public relations mess. At least, that’s what one Wellington, New Zealand, museum discovered in October 2010.
The Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa (Te Papa, for short) is the country’s national museum. The M–aori half of its name translates to “container of treasures.” Those treasures, or taonga, are a massive array of important artistic and cultural artifacts spanning the history of New Zealand, including those of the indigenous M–aori people.
One fateful day that October, the museum was planning a tour of some of the M–aori taonga that are kept behind the scenes. Normally these types of events come with the usual stipulations — no touching the artifacts, wear comfortable shoes, no flash photography. However, at Te Papa, the rules stipulated that pregnant women and menstruating women should wait until they are neither of those things before joining the tour.
People were upset by this rule.
The museum tried to push back, explaining that many of these taonga were borrowed from indigenous people and that the museum needed to abide by the rules of those cultures.
People got more upset.
The museum explained that some of these taonga were weapons that had killed men on the battlefield, and if menstruating or pregnant women came into contact with them, a curse would be unleashed. And the museum insurance, presumably, didn’t cover that.
People got even more upset. Some escalated to livid.
And that’s understandable. Many cultures and religions have rules of varying rigidity regulating what women of childbearing age can and can’t do. The Old Testament has stringent rules about menstruation. As does the Koran. Buddhism, Hinduism, all the -isms have something to say on this topic, and most of them amount to the idea that periods are yucky. The M–aori prohibition on pregnant and menstruating women around weapons is…maybe more complicated than that. But maybe not.
M–aori and other Polynesian peoples subscribe to a concept called tapu. It’s where English gets the word taboo from, thanks to eighteenth-century British explorer Captain James Cook who imported it. Tapu means something sacred that should be avoided. To violate tapu is to become cursed, more or less; the gods either directly aim bad juju at you or remove their protection from you, making you susceptible to all manner of natural and supernatural ills. And, obviously, nobody wants to hang out with you.
Anything can be tapu. A lake, a forest, a house, a tool, a weapon, a person, a person’s leg. Whatever is tapu needs to be avoided, lest that tapu becomes violated and contaminates whoever violated it. For instance, if your left hand becomes tapu, you’re not allowed to feed yourself with it. An opposite force, called noa, which is sort of but not really like the idea of a blessing, can counteract tapu.
Still, tapu isn’t bad intrinsically. Tapu was often asserted to protect lands from misuse, such as water sources and burial grounds. It can elevate people and objects to a protected status. But violating tapu is bad. Really bad. Every tapu object has the potential to be a cursed object if it’s not treated appropriately.
In the case of the M–aori taonga on display at Te Papa, many of these items were weapons that had killed people in battle. In M–aori culture, when a toa — a warrior — dies on the battlefield, his spirit enters the instrument of his destruction. Basically, Te Papa had a bunch of possessed objects in its back rooms. And like many implements associated with death in M–aori culture, they are tapu.
Pregnant and menstruating women are also tapu. For instance, pregnant women aren’t supposed to give birth inside their homes because doing so would make their homes tapu. They are supposed to do so in purpose-built or specially designated sites.
Another thing about tapu objects is that they can violate each other if they come into contact or close proximity. When that happens, a curse is unleashed that yields all the usual curse results: death, disaster, misfortune. So having a tapu spear in close quarters with a tapu woman would be bad news for the museum and the people who had entrusted those objects to its care.
These beliefs were what the museum was defending. Eventually, after the backlash reached an annoying-enough level, the museum leaders explained that the rule was merely a suggestion, not a prohibition. If a woman wanted to risk unleashing a curse, she could feel free. Whether any pregnant women or women on their periods ignored the suggestion is uncertain. Accounts of the event, which avidly document the situation up to that point, end when the rules were retracted. So we don’t know if any tapu were crossed.
But we do know what happened to the museum in subsequent years. In 2015, Te Papa suddenly realized that many items on display had been damaged by visitors touching them. In 2016, fire sprinklers malfunctioned, damaging precious artifacts. Later that year, Te Papa was rocked by an earthquake, damaging both the facility and its holdings. And in 2018, staff discovered that the museum’s impressive whale bone collection had contracted a harmful species of mold.
I mean, sure, maybe those incidents are the normal trials and travails of any museum. But who knows? When much of your collection is inextricable from a system like tapu, the risks of violating it are always there.
The Tomb of Tutankhamen
LOCATION:
VALLEY OF THE KINGS, LUXOR, EGYPT
SIGNIFICANCE:
BURIAL SITE OF THE FAMOUS CHILD PHARAOH
YEAR OF DISCOVERY:
1922
AGE:
3,300 YEARS
NUMBER OF ITEMS:
MORE THAN 5,000
When King Tut’s tomb unleashed its ancient curse across the desert sands of Egypt and into the modern world, it wasn’t in the form of Biblical plagues or killer mummies or natural disasters. It came in the form of…a shaving accident.
Tutankhamen was an Eighteenth Dynasty pharaoh from the early 1300s BCE. Perhaps the most interesting thing about his reign is that he was nine years old when he ascended the throne. Perhaps the second most interesting thing about his reign is that it ended ten years later with his death, the cause of which has been lost to history. But that’s okay, because we have his mummy.
In 1922, his preserved body was pulled from its ancient sandy slumber within a surprisingly intact tomb in the well-looted Valley of the Kings. We all know him by his nickname, King Tut, and he made ancient Egypt cool again in the Western world.
The tomb of Tutankhamen was discovered by British archeologist Howard Carter. But it took some time. He probed the sands from 1917 to 1922, looking for the boy king. In November 1922, his last season before his funding was due to be pulled by his patron, George Herbert, the Fifth Earl of Carnarvon, one of his Egyptian crew tripped over a rock that turned out to be the first in a series of sixteen steps buried under the sand. After excavating a doorway at the bottom of those stairs, Carter dutifully ordered that everything be reburied. Then he called up the earl and said, “I found the kid’s tomb. Let’s crack it open together.” (To paraphrase.)