Zombie – From Haiti to Halloween

Fear, Faith & Mysticism Conspire to Create the Walking Dead

Oct 14, 2009

It's time to hack up that old suit, slap on the corn syrup blood & get your stagger on. But what are the origins behind one of Halloween's most favored characters?

Stories of the walking dead have long cross-pollinated cultural and geographical divides. The most potent of which can be found deep within those Afro-Caribbean societies that continue to adhere to the mystical tenets of voodoo. Here, ingrained folk tradition details the zombie as a soul-starved laborer; subservient creation of Houngan high priests. They epitomize helplessness, bound and gagged within a body’s husk – void of reason or control; the ultimate living hell.

Cinematic Zombies

The film world’s horror genre built on these early folk traditions and gifted us a trademark in terror; lull eyed rotting death inching lazily in search of human flesh. It is strange however, considering how fertile the original premise, that the cinematic zombie retained so little of its ancestral substance. Gone was the inclination to serve, zombification by way of ritual, the deletion of souls – even mention of voodoo culture is largely absent. But, it is reality that truly chills as Hollywood’s latex layers are stripped away and we again look at the stories from which they were derived.

Haiti’s’ Walking Dead

The origins of the scab faced floppy necked slow walkers of popular horror lays in West African folklore. But it is Haitian tradition, in particular, that has fascinated and drawn in those in search of a ‘True Zombie’. The most controversial of these ‘hunters’ is Harvard ethnobotanist, Wade Davis. His two books on the subject Passage of Darkness and The Serpent and the Rainbow had both illuminated the subject and drawn harsh criticism.

Voodoo Priests and Secret Haitian Societies

Central to the hypothesis behind Davis’s work is the existence of a Haitian secret society, the Bizango.

These little known clandestine networks are thought to have originally been formed as a survival instinct by slaves escaping Haitian history’s dark chapters in human trade. It is contended that the Bizango perpetuated an adjacent social structure that retained much more of the substance of its African ancestry. Part of this inherited knowledge was the use of naturally produced poisons to heal and illicit certain physical responses.

Zombie Inducing Drugs

Davis postulates that a powder, primarily derived from a chemical found in puffer fish, is used to induce a profound state of trance. This substance is administered by a Bokor, voodoo high priest, to certain individuals who have violated Bizango law. The result is described as a victim void of emotion that teeters on the edge of consciousness; docile yet compliant. It is further contended that this servile state is perpetuated by the use of additional drugs and continued exposure to ritual.

Davis stresses that zombification is a culmination of a series of essential conditions. Certainly the intake of the special powder, but perhaps more importantly a social and environmental mindset that binds the victim and allows the process to firmly take hold.

Zombie Theory not Embraced by Mainstream

Davis’s theory has been criticized by many for being medically inaccurate and scientifically infeasible. The puffer fish drug (tetrodotoxin), for instance, is not believed by many ‘experts’ to have the ‘zombie-like’ effects that the theory describes. Intoxication by the drug is documented to produce degrees of nausea, paralysis, unconsciousness and even death in extreme cases, but nothing that speaks of perpetual trances or the like.

Davis defends his position and makes much in the explanation of his theory that the process is far from an exacting science; in that differing doses and conditions may have varying effects on specific recipients.

"All that the formula of the powder suggests is a means by which an individual might, under rare circumstances, be made to appear dead." Wade Davis[1].

There is much continued debate regards Davis’s findings but they nonetheless offer up intriguing possibilities for a non-supernatural reason behind the myth of the living dead.

The True Power of Zombie Myth

Truth or fiction it is testament to the suggestive power of the zombie that their mere mention continues to instill dread. The brain starved masses that first sought us out in George Romero’s seminal 1968 horror 'Night of the Living Dead' continue to intrigue. They have steadily evolved to take their place firmly amid the echelons of vampires, werewolves and serial maniacs that mainstay cinema’s modern horror. But maybe the true fear continues to reside in the communities where ritual belief still very much holds sway. This is a dread that does not dissipate as the final reel concludes; here it is a part of life.

Therefore, it may be that the darkest truth that zombie belief offers lays in the harnessing of this fear; religious control via the stoking of localized hysteria. In which case, the only thing more frightful than the zombie itself is the bokor and the fevered conviction that they truly do have the ability to suck the life spirit from the living.

Resources:

Davis, Wade; ‘Passage of Darkness: The Ethnobiology of the Haitian Zombie’ - Chapel Hill. (1988) [1]

Hines, Terence; ‘Zombies and Tetrodotoxin’ - Skeptical Inquirer; May/June 2008; Volume 32, Issue 3.

Sources:

The copyright of the article Zombie – From Haiti to Halloween in Social Anthropology is owned by Hari Navarro. Permission to republish Zombie – From Haiti to Halloween in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.