It’s a Wrap for All Eternity

Corky Ra poured a glass of red wine and cleared his throat. He was about to make a peculiar pitch, selling a death fit for a king.

“The moment between life and death is a pause,” he said, sitting inside the 30-foot-high pyramid in his front yard. “It’s the moment of rest before the next life.”

Some of the 18 people in the room nodded knowingly, others seemed baffled.

“Tell them what happens when you get buried in a grave,” Ra said, looking over at fellow funeral director Ron Temu.

Temu explained the gory business of human decomposition, leaving some wide-eyed and ashen.

The point made, Ra told the audience how to avoid such a fate.

“You can be like a moth that wraps itself in silk,” he said. “You can be a chrysalis, and a chrysalis is a mummy.”

Ra knows mummies. He doesn’t unearth them from ancient tombs, he makes them at home. And so far, he says, 1,400 people have agreed to sign over life insurance policies worth at least $74,000 each to be mummified by his patented Permanent Body Preservation System -- one he says exists nowhere else in the country.

For that kind of money, Summum Mummification offers this kind of guarantee.

“You will stay like this for eternity,” Ra promises. “There will be no decomposition.”

At a time when people are seeking novel ways to commemorate the deaths of loved ones, when ashes are being blasted into space and urns have taken on the shape of dolphins and sailboats, some are looking back at the funerary practices of one of the world’s oldest civilizations and finding comfort there.

Shunning cremation as barbaric and repulsed by the thought of decomposing underground, they have arranged to be preserved in death like Egyptian pharaohs of antiquity.

“If you are embalmed with formaldehyde, two weeks after you go into the casket, the cells decompose and the body begins to eat itself,” Ra said. “So you have a decomposing body in a $15,000 casket, 6 feet underground.”

So far, he says, he’s received requests from football players looking to be preserved in athletic poses, military men wanting to be mummified in uniform and a radio talk show host hoping to grasp a microphone for eternity. Some do it for religious reasons, while others think it offers a bit of immortality.

“Mummification seems a more civilized way to go than burning or burying,” said Donna Gray, 60, of Salt Lake City.

Gray, like the others who have agreed to the process, signed a contract with Summum. Like them, she will pay for her eventual mummification by making monthly payments on a standard life insurance policy she took out, naming Summum as the beneficiary.

“My kids think I have gone to the devil,” she said.

After much experimentation, Ra perfected his mummification formula in 1985. Since then he has promoted the process in lectures, on the radio, in documentaries, on the old Phil Donahue show and on the Internet.

The former Mormon missionary and heavy-equipment salesman even changed his name in 1980 from Corky Nowell to Corky Ra, which he says means “worker on creation” in ancient Egyptian. Later, he founded a church espousing the beliefs of pharaonic Egypt.

Ra said he tested his formula on animals, and after nearly 20 years there has been no cell decomposition. Temu said their colleague, John Chew, former head of mortuary science at Lynn University in Boca Raton, Fla., mummified human cadavers using Ra’s recipe. Chew, who met Ra at a funeral industry convention, has been a collaborator ever since and has been selected by Summum to do its first human mummy.

“It’s not rocket science but [it’s] a very difficult process to know what chemicals preserve the human and animal tissue without destroying the genetics and DNA,” Ra said.

Yet his zeal for mummification has one major hitch: None of his customers has died yet.

There have been close calls. One client with cancer recently began deteriorating rapidly. Ra readied the stainless steel vat, the death mask, the rolls of gauze and the patented secret chemicals.

“He was going to be our first, but he seems to have pulled it together,” said Ra, 59, looking vaguely dejected. “Many of our clients are young, so they aren’t dying.”

While they wait, Ra and Temu have mummified smaller fare -- more than 200 dogs, cats, parrots, cockatiels, a pet rat and a finch.

“The finch was the smallest thing we did,” Temu said. “I’d love to do one of those big white tigers from the Siegfried and Roy show.”

He hasn’t done any white tigers, but he did mummify Sue Menu’s white poodle. The once vibrant pooch and boon companion now stands encased in bronze in her Salt Lake City living room.

“Every once in a while when I dust her off I say, ‘How’s it going, Mags?’ ” said the 52-year-old piano teacher, staring into the dog’s metallic eyes. “I felt it was a fitting memorial for Maggie for all her companionship and loyalty to me.”

Temu, a bespectacled man with an encyclopedic knowledge of the world’s burial practices, looked proudly at his work.

“It really is an art piece, that’s what makes it so expensive,” he said of the $27,000 mummy. “If you take her out now, she will look the way she did the day she died.”

Temu explained that taxidermy is cheaper, but it preserves just the skin, not the whole body and internal organs.

For Menu, Maggie is an advance scout in the netherworld.

“When I first heard about this, I felt it was a little far-fetched, but the more I learned, the more it connected with me,” she said.

Menu attended a lecture by Ra at the University of Utah, where he once taught philosophy. She has since signed up to become a mummy, paying $100 a month for a life insurance policy.

“I don’t think the traditional burial lets your body go through the transference to the next life,” Menu said. “I don’t want to jump into the next life right away, I want to take my time.”

Mummification for most clients begins while they are still alive. A plaster death mask is made of their face, providing a perfect likeness that will be affixed to the mummy. When they die, the mummifiers, or thanatogeneticists, travel to the place of death and take the body to a local funeral home.

The blood is drained and organs removed. Everything is submerged in a vat of chemical preservatives for at least 60 days to let the cells absorb the substance. The contracts include agreements with local funeral homes to allow the mummification on their premises.

The organs are sewn back inside the body, which then is wrapped in layers of gauze and coated with lanolin. Finally, a blue polyurethane membrane is painted on, a fiberglass coating is added and the death mask is placed on the face. The body is put in a sarcophagus and laid in a mausoleum. So far, Temu said, about 100 people are trained in mummification.

The technique is quite different from that used by the ancient Egyptians, who cured bodies with salts and resin, said John Pollini, professor of classical art and archeology at USC.

“Cremation was a rite practiced in ancient Greece and Rome, but in Egypt it was mummification,” he said. “You would go to the afterlife and try to re-create life on Earth for eternity. For that you needed a body.”

The Egyptians removed the internal organs, placing the lungs in canopic urns with lids bearing the likenesses of gods. The body was bathed in a salt solution, coated inside and out with resins and perfumes and left to dry and be prayed over for 70 days, Pollini said.

Ra said his technique and that used by the ancient Egyptians have the same goal but use substantially different methods.

Mark D. Musgrove, president-elect of the National Funeral Directors Assn., said the “death care” industry may be undergoing major changes, but mummification remains very much on the fringe.

“What we are seeing is an increase in cremation,” Musgrove said. “More and more baby boomers are designing their own funerals, but I wouldn’t say mummification is catching on.”

Some question the price and uniqueness of the process.

“This is an expensive vanity, but it doesn’t mean there is anything wrong with it,” said Joshua Slocum, interim executive director of the Funeral Consumers Alliance, a Vermont-based group that monitors cost and fraud in the funeral industry. “I have no problem with Summum; they have been around for about 18 years and we have never had any complaints. They may have a preservation process that lasts a long time, but it’s not new, it’s been done.”

He cited Vladimir Lenin and Eva Peron as examples. The leader of the Communist revolution in Russia died in 1924 and his body was preserved using still-secret chemicals. Peron died in 1952 and was also preserved in a lifelike state.

“My guess is that you can pickle anybody,” said Lisa Carlson, a consumer advocate who has written books on funeral law and the funeral industry. “If people want to make a museum piece out of themselves, so be it. There is a certain segment of the population that likes to spend money wildly.”

For Ra, the issue has always been about spirituality, not vanity.

He grew up in Utah, where he was an active member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and ran missionary programs in the Midwest. He later worked for a welding company, a gun manufacturer and as a salesman before finding his calling preaching the gospel of eternal preservation.

“I was 27, selling heavy equipment and had 200 employees working for me,” said Ra, who sports a long, gray ponytail. “I would come home from work and sit in my den and just think.”

During one of these meditations, Ra had what he called a “personal awakening.” He said he met spiritual beings who taught him the mysteries of creation. These beings, he said, told him the world was governed by proportions and mathematical equations.

His beliefs eventually led to excommunication from the Mormon Church. Undaunted, he founded a group called Summum, meaning the sum total of all things. He became increasingly interested in mummification as a way to safely house the soul after death and to preserve DNA should human cloning become feasible.

Visions invaded his head.

“In my mind I saw this pyramid, so I built one here,” he said. “I like the space inside a pyramid.”

His copper-plated pyramid stands beside his home near a warehouse in Salt Lake City, not far from the headquarters of the Mormon Church. Inside, the walls are illustrated with scenes from ancient Egypt.

There is an altar with peacock feathers, incense and Egyptian statuary. A huge painting of suns, moons and galaxies graces the ceiling. Also in the pyramid is Ra’s Doberman, Butch, mummified along with his cats, Vincent and Oscar.

A smaller, wooden pyramid outside has a less cosmic function, housing rakes and a lawn mower.

Aside from making mummies, Ra earns money selling books on philosophy, giving lectures and making Summum Nectar Wines.

An Internet radio station -- KPHI -- operates from a small building on the property. It’s run by Bernie Beichart, who has also signed on to become a mummy.

Beichart, 44, a Webmaster for a loan company, attended a lecture given by Ra and was intrigued. Raised Catholic, he was dissatisfied with church teachings on creation and the afterlife.

“All religions talk about a transition at death and all religions have certain rites,” he said, sitting in the radio studio. “The common theme is the life source or spirit carries on. I see mummification as a guided destination, not being at the mercy of events.”

As Beichart spoke, people began arriving at the pyramid for Ra’s regular Saturday lecture. The talks are shown live on the Internet and involve Ra dispensing wisdom on creation, death and, as always, mummification.

The guests sat on couches drinking Summum wine. Ra talked for an hour about his beliefs before saying goodnight. He had to leave early the next morning for California to sign up some new mummy candidates.

Al Martin, 55, walked out of the pyramid not entirely convinced.

“I have thought about mummification for a long time, but it’s so remote from real life,” he said. “I have to take it in stages.”

Ra knows he’s bucking a trend, that most people today are reducing themselves to ashes at death, not preserving themselves for eternity.

But he’s so confident in his product that he plans to build a small mausoleum beside his pyramid, housing the mummies of his friends. The blueprints will be ready in two weeks.

“Everything changes and evolves,” Ra said.

He sees a market for mummies, one that is small but growing, “like the market for the Bentley motor car.”

First, someone needs to die.

“We’re sort of paralyzed until then,” Temu said. “You know what it’s like when you wait for water to boil, it never happens.”