Zombie

In the Vodou religion, zombie (Haitian Creole: zonbi) is an animated corpse raised by magical means, such as witchcraft.^[1]

Africa

According to the West African tenets of Vodou, a dead person can be revived by a bokor, or sorcerer. Zombies remain under the control of the bokor since they have no will of their own. "Zombi" is also another name of the Vodou snake lwa Damballah Wedo, of Niger–Congo origin; it is akin to the Kikongo word nzambi, which means "god". There also exists within the West African Vodun tradition the zombi astral, which is a part of the human soul that is captured by a bokor and used to enhance the bokor's power. The zombi astral is typically kept inside a bottle which the bokor can sell to clients for luck, healing or business success. It is believed that after a time God will take the soul back and so the zombi is a temporary spiritual entity.^[2] It is also said in vodou legend, that feeding a zombie salt will make it return to the grave.

The idea of zombies is present in some South African cultures. In some communities it is believed that a dead person can be turned into a zombie by a small child.^[3] It is said that the spell can be broken by a powerful enough sangoma.^[4]

It is also believed in some areas of South Africa that witches can turn a person into a zombie by killing and possessing the victim's body in order to force it into slave labor.^[5] After rail lines were built to transport migrant workers, stories emerged about "witch trains". These trains appeared ordinary, but were staffed by zombie workers controlled by a witch. The trains would abduct a person boarding at night, and the person would then either be turned into a zombie worker, or beaten and thrown from the train a distance away from the original location.^[5]

Haiti

In 1937, while researching folklore in Haiti, Zora Neale Hurston encountered the case of a woman who appeared in a village, and a family claimed she was Felicia Felix-Mentor, a relative who had died and been buried in 1907 at the age of 29. However, the woman had been examined by a doctor, who found on X-ray that she did not have the leg fracture that Felix-Mentor was known to have had.^[6] Hurston pursued rumors that the affected persons were given a powerful psychoactive drug, but she was unable to locate individuals willing to offer much information. She wrote: "What is more, if science ever gets to the bottom of Vodou in Haiti and Africa, it will be found that some important medical secrets, still unknown to medical science, give it its power, rather than gestures of ceremony."^[7]

Several decades later, Wade Davis, a Harvard ethnobotanist, presented a pharmacological case for zombies in two books, The Serpent and the Rainbow (1985) and Passage of Darkness: The Ethnobiology of the Haitian Zombie (1988). Davis traveled to Haiti in 1982 and, as a result of his investigations, claimed that a living person can be turned into a zombie by two special powders being introduced into the blood stream (usually via a wound). The first, coup de poudre (French: "powder strike"), includes tetrodotoxin (TTX), a powerful and frequently fatal neurotoxin found in the flesh of the pufferfish (order Tetraodontidae). The second powder consists of dissociative drugs such as datura. Together, these powders were said to induce a deathlike state in which the will of the victim would be entirely subjected to that of the bokor. Davis also popularized the story of Clairvius Narcisse, who was claimed to have succumbed to this practice. The most ethically questioned and least scientifically explored ingredient of the powders, is part of a recently buried child's brain.^[8][9][10]

The process described by Davis was an initial state of deathlike suspended animation, followed by re-awakening — typically after being buried — into a psychotic state. The psychosis induced by the drug and psychological trauma was hypothesised by Davis to reinforce culturally learned beliefs and to cause the individual to reconstruct their identity as that of a zombie, since they "knew" they were dead, and had no other role to play in the Haitian society. Societal reinforcement of the belief was hypothesized by Davis to confirm for the zombie individual the zombie state, and such individuals were known to hang around in graveyards, exhibiting attitudes of low affect.

Davis's claim has been criticized, particularly the suggestion that Haitian witch doctors can keep "zombies" in a state of pharmacologically induced trance for many years.^[11] Symptoms of TTX poisoning range from numbness and nausea to paralysis — particularly of the muscles of the diaphragm — unconsciousness, and death, but do not include a stiffened gait or a deathlike trance. According to psychologist Terence Hines, the scientific community dismisses tetrodotoxin as the cause of this state, and Davis' assessment of the nature of the reports of Haitian zombies is viewed as overly credulous.^[12]

Scottish psychiatrist R. D. Laing highlighted the link between social and cultural expectations and compulsion, in the context of schizophrenia and other mental illness, suggesting that schizogenesis may account for some of the psychological aspects of zombification.^[13]

Slaves brought to Haiti in the 17th and 18th centuries, believed that when they died, Baron Samedi would gather them from their grave to bring them to heaven, unless they had offended him in some way, such as committing suicide, in which case they would be forever a slave after death, as a zombie.^[14]

In popular culture

Participants of a 2009 zombie walk in Moscow

As fictional undead creatures, zombies are regularly encountered in horror and fantasy themed works. They are typically depicted as mindless, reanimated corpses with a hunger for human flesh, and particularly for human brains in some depictions. Although they share their name and some superficial similarities with the zombie from Haitian Vodun, their links to such folklore are unclear. Many consider George A. Romero's film Night of the Living Dead to be the progenitor of these creatures.^[15][16] Zombies have a complex literary heritage, with antecedents ranging from Richard Matheson and H. P. Lovecraft to Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, all drawing on European folklore of the undead. The popularity of zombies in movies has led to them sometimes having been taken out of their usual element of horror and thrown into other genres, for example the comedy film Shaun of the Dead. The "zombie apocalypse" concept, in which the civilized world is brought low by a global zombie infestation, has become a staple of modern popular art. By 2011 the influence of zombies in popular consciousness had reached far enough that the United States government's Center for Disease Control used the idea as a theme to promote disaster preparedness.^[17]

See also

References

Further reading

• Ackermann, H. W.; Gauthier, J. (1991). "The Ways and Nature of the Zombi". The Journal of American Folklore 104 (414): 466–494. doi:10.2307/541551. JSTOR 541551. 
• Bishop, Kyle William (2010) American Zombie Gothic: The rise and fall (and rise) of the walking dead in popular culture McFarland, Jefferson, North Carolina, ISBN 978-0-7864-4806-7
• Black, J. Anderson (2000) The Dead Walk Noir Publishing, Hereford, Herefordshire, ISBN 0-9536564-2-X
• Christie, Deborah and Sarah Juliet Lauro, eds. (2011). Better Off Dead: The Evolution of the Zombie as Post-Human. Fordham Univ Press. p. 169. ISBN 0-8232-3447-9
• Curran, Bob (2006) Encyclopedia of the Undead: A field guide to creatures that cannot rest in peace New Page Books, Franklin Lakes, New Jersey, ISBN 1-56414-841-6
• Davis, E. W. (1983). "The ethnobiology of the Haitian zombi". Journal of Ethnopharmacology 9 (1): 85–104. doi:10.1016/0378-8741(83)90029-6. PMID 6668953. 
• Davis, Wade (1988) Passage of Darkness: The ethnobiology of the Haitian zombie University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill, North Carolina, ISBN 0-8078-1776-7
• Dendle, Peter (2001) The Zombie Movie Encyclopedia McFarland, Jefferson, North Carolina, ISBN 0-7864-0859-6
• Flint, David (2008) Zombie Holocaust: How the living dead devoured pop culture Plexus, London, ISBN 978-0-85965-397-8
• Forget, Thomas (2007) Introducing Zombies Rosen Publishing, New York, ISBN 1-4042-0852-6; (juvenile)
• Graves, Zachary (2010) Zombies: The complete guide to the world of the living dead Sphere, London, ISBN 978-1-84744-415-8
• Hurston, Zora Neale (2009) Tell My Horse: Voodoo and Life in Haiti and Jamaica, Harper Perennial. ISBN 978-0-06169-513-1
• Littlewood, R.; Douyon, C. (1997). "Clinical findings in three cases of zombification". The Lancet 350 (9084): 1094–1096. doi:10.1016/S0140-6736(97)04449-8. 
• Mars, Louis P. (1945). "The Story of Zombi in Haiti". Man 45 (22): 38–40. doi:10.2307/2792947. JSTOR 2792947.  (Copy at Webster University)
• McIntosh, Shawn and Leverette, Marc (editors) (2008) Zombie Culture: Autopsies of the Living Dead Scarecrow Press, Lanham, Maryland, ISBN 0-8108-6043-0
• Moreman, Christopher M., and Cory James Rushton (editors) (2011) Race, Oppression and the Zombie: Essays on Cross-Cultural Appropriations of the Caribbean Tradition. McFarland. ISBN 978-0-7864-5911-7.
• Moreman, Christopher M., and Cory James Rushton (editors) (2011) Zombies Are Us: Essays on the Humanity of the Walking Dead. McFarland. ISBN 978-0-7864-5912-4.
• Russell, Jamie (2005) Book of the dead: the complete history of zombie cinema FAB, Godalming, England, ISBN 1-903254-33-7
• Waller, Gregory A. (2010) Living and the undead: slaying vampires, exterminating zombies University of Illinois Press, Urbana, Indiana, ISBN 978-0-252-07772-2