A couple of years ago I read Norman Mailer’s baffling, immense Ancient Evenings. The novel, which is set in Ancient Egypt and went on to inspire William S. Burroughs’ final novel The Western Lands, is about a thousand pages long, and by the time I finished it I think I chucked it out of the window of a speeding train (accidentally killing a large cow). But it did sometimes succeed in transporting the reader not only to the time of Ancient Egypt, but also into the mind of the place, giving you the intermittent suspicion that, perhaps this riddling civilization knew a thing or two about the afterlife—and that the “cunning of their tombs” (as Mailer memorably puts it) was fumbled knowledge rather than pseudo-science…

Such superstitious manias gradually pass into the unconscious, waiting for a delicious story like this one to stir them up again. Yes, according to the Daily Mail, in Manchester Museum a 4000-year-old, ten-inch-tall statuette, an offering to Osiris long ago purloined from a mummy’s tomb, has been observed, and has now been filmed, slowly turning 180 degrees to face an Egyptian prayer for “bread, beer, oxen and fowl” recently erected behind it.

The statuette’s slow about-turn has been captured on film by a time-lapse camera, and curator Campbell Price, 29, says he believes there may be a spiritual explanation. ‘I noticed one day that it had turned around,’ he said. ‘I thought it was strange because it is in a case and I am the only one who has a key. I put it back, but then the next day it had moved again.’ The 10-inch tall relic, which dates back to 1800 BC, has been at the museum for 80 years but curators say it has recently starting rotating 180 degrees during the day. ‘In Ancient Egypt they believed that if the mummy is destroyed then the statuette can act as an alternative vessel for the spirit. Maybe that is what is causing the movement.’

Disregarding any possible scientific explanations (c’mon—who needs em???), wouldn’t this kinda make Ancient Egyptian sense in so far as the spirit is traditionally thought to make use of such prayers for sustenance? In other words, might this inconvenienced (and starving) spirit be be angling his first good meal for a very long time?