by RICK DANLEY // October 12, 2016
Muffy Fehr’s sixth-grade social studies class brought the elaborate rituals of the Egyptian funeral to the third floor of Iola Middle School on Tuesday. Employing a teddy bear as corpse, the students reenacted, from mummification to burial, the funerary rites of the ancient civilization. Each of Fehr’s students had a role in the ritual.
Spread prostrate on a baking sheet, the teddy bear’s brain was removed and discarded (in the Egyptian hierarchy of innards, the brain was viewed as least important). He was then disburdened of his other vital organs, which, once removed, were stored in a series of canopic jars that would accompany the perished bear into his afterlife. The inside of his body was lined with linen and filled with a salt-and-herb mixture. Finally, his body was wrapped in a fresh layer of toilet paper.
A crowd of mourners surrounded the body and placed amulets on the mummified bear.
A student read from the “Book of the Dead,” whose incantations (“Hail, thou who dost consume blood, who comest forth from the house of slaughter…”) would guide dead Teddy into the Great Bearond.
Having overseen the entire ceremony, the Anubis priest — wearing a canine head — placed the finished mummy in the sarcophagus.
The celebration concluded with a mourning procession, in which the students were invited to follow the coffin down the hallway and into the Valley of the Kings (the principal’s office). They moaned with grief and rent their garments and spilled fake tears, until the disemboweled bear was at last laid to rest.
They continued to wail and grieve all the way back to the classroom. “Just remember,” instructed Mrs. Fehr, “when you get to my room, the mourning stops.”
This article first appeared on October 12, 2016.
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