Why We Prefer Our Mummies Angry

When Women Found Their Voice in the Dark

Based on a Podcast with Dr Eleanor Dobson BA, MA, PhD, FHEA and host Philipp Kobald

Every modern spiritual trend has a history — and most of that history is far stranger than the trend itself.
We like to imagine our practices are timeless, pure, transmitted intact from ancient deserts and forgotten temples. But when you peel back the layers, as Dr Eleanor Dobson does with sharp academic calm, you discover something awkwardly liberating: spiritual knowledge is a palimpsest. Each generation writes over the last. Nothing arrives untouched.

That is exactly why this conversation belongs in a spiritual podcast.
To understand how we seek today, we must understand who constructed the path beneath our feet.

The Victorians: The First Spiritual Influencers No One Asked For

If you strip away the romance, the Victorian obsession with Egypt was a collision of boredom, empire, travel writing, and imagination. No TV. No radio. No casual flights. Books were the only escape hatch — and Egypt became the fantasy destination of choice.

From crushed mummies inhaled by clumsy travelers to dramatic tales of cursed tombs, the public devoured every story. Eleanor explains how this context created the perfect soil for spiritual movements to sprout. This was not simply curiosity; it was hunger. A society tightly laced needed somewhere to breathe.

And here is the key insight for spiritual seekers:
Our contemporary spiritual ideas were not born in isolation — they were built on the emotional needs of a particular time.

When we forget that, everything looks eternal.
When we remember it, everything becomes understandable.

The Rise of Spiritualism: When the Dead Became the Only Ones Listening

Spiritualism didn’t appear out of nowhere. It erupted because people needed it.
Women with no voice found one in the seance room. Men disillusioned with rigid religion searched for a space that allowed imagination and personal agency. Social rules melted in the dark, and mediums — often young women — suddenly held authority no institution granted them.

Eleanor notes how these gatherings weren’t necessarily sinister. They were dreamlike, absurd, comforting, theatrical. “A lobster appearing on a table out of nowhere” is not horror; it’s surrealism with candles.

And this is where layering begins.

One generation tells stories.
The next generation spiritualizes them.
The following generation forgets the origin and assumes sacred tradition.

Understanding this cycle allows us to gently ask:
What part of our modern spirituality is genuine insight — and what part is inherited theatre?

Egypt Enters the Chat: And Everything Changes

Tourists brought home fragments of temples, scraps of mummy wrappings, shards of stone. Soon these objects appeared in seance rooms, and the spirits obligingly adjusted their accents. Egyptian princesses. Priests. Guardians of ancient rites. The Victorians weren’t uncovering ancient wisdom — they were creating a new spiritual genre.

This is not a critique. It is clarity.

Every spiritual movement absorbs what a culture finds mysterious, exotic, or emotionally useful. Egypt became the backdrop onto which the West projected its desires, fears, and unspoken longings.

Which means:
Our modern fascination with “ancient Egyptian spirituality” is partly ancient — and partly Victorian fan-fiction.

Knowing that frees us.
It doesn’t make the practice less meaningful.
It simply returns its humanity.

The Dark Turn: When Stories Stop Being Harmless

Eleanor traces how political tension and imperial violence deepened the tone. The stories grew sharper, more threatening. And by the time Tutankhamun’s tomb was discovered in 1922, the world was primed for a curse.

Arthur Conan Doyle — spiritualist, believer, and bestselling author — fanned the flames by suggesting an “elemental spirit” guarded the tomb. Meanwhile, Howard Carter endured letters from people insisting he appease the dead with honey and milk. He did not. But the myth exploded anyway.

This is the second great lesson for spiritual practitioners today:
Spiritual trends expand not only through longing, but through fear.

When a society is unsteady, it reaches for stories that give structure to chaos — even if those stories bite back.

The Golden Dawn and the Theatre of the Sacred

Secret orders, rituals, robes, Egyptian symbolism — these movements were part spiritual search, part theatre production, part rebellion. They allowed women to step into priestess roles long denied elsewhere. They allowed men to explore forms of mysticism beyond church walls.

Most members weren’t summoning darkness. They were experimenting with identity.

The problem began, as always, when the performance was taken literally.
Some broke away. Some doubled down. Some pushed the entire movement toward the shadows.

Generations layered belief upon belief until the original ideas blurred.
That is the point: clarity is only possible if we peel the layers back.

Where All This Leaves Us Now

Curses continue mostly as jokes.
Spirituality continues as practice.
Museums continue as pilgrimage sites for the devoted and the curious.

But the deeper trend survives:
Women still use spiritual spaces to reclaim agency.
People still build meaning from inherited symbolic worlds.
Every generation adds its own shape to the spiritual story.

And this is why exploring history matters.
It’s not archaeology for its own sake.
It’s a map of how humans build belief — and how belief builds us.

Spirituality has never been pure.
It has always been living, layered, revised.
And that doesn’t weaken it.
It makes it honest.

Guest Bio

Dr Eleanor Dobson BA, MA, PhD, FHEA is a 19th-century literary specialist whose research explores the stories, symbolism, and cultural imagination surrounding Tutankhamun, Egypt, and spiritualist beliefs.

Watch the full episode on the @HolisticCircle YouTube channel.

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