Zombies

The island region of Haiti has long been a thorn in the side of those with a lust for power. For foreigners: it is the site of the only successful slave revolt in history, and the only independent black country for a century. For its own people, it has one of the most intriguing forces for social equality in the world: a religion known as Vodoun; popularly misunderstood by foreigners under the name 'Voodoo.'

It wouldn't be so remarkable if this was just ignorance, as this could be expected of outsiders. But Voodoo has been so maligned that it is often considered a black-magic cult. The US Marine Corps had a 20 year presence in Haiti early in the 20th century, after which all above the rank of Sergeant got book contracts, for titles like “Cannibal Cousins,” “Black Baghdad,” “Voodoo Fire in Haiti,” “A Puritan in Voodoo Land,” and “The Magic Island.” This was the era of Jim Crow, yet another period in history when all it took to be evil was to be different. All this pulp fiction and the movies of the 1940s they inspired held up the imperial banner that the only way to redeem the people was through military occupation.

They described such fantastic things as zombies crawling out of the grave to attack people; pins, needles and voodoo dolls that don't exist. The truth is much stranger, and anything but evil.

If I asked you to name the great religions of the world, what would you say? … What is the continent that is always left out? Sub-Saharan Africa. Which is absurd - more generations of humans have lived there than anywhere else on Earth. Sometimes I get the impression that – being without such disruptive technological changes – for a long time its cultures could attend more to what it meant to be human. That if eyes are the window to the soul, Africa would be the window to human nature. To understand Zombification is to realise a great deal about the strong links between the living and the dead, and just how blurry the distinction can be.

Similar ideas have been finding their way into modern medicine under the name of “suspended animation.” For Haitians, the distinction is not to be found in medical journals or TED talks, but as a constant presence in their conscience.

The closest Europeans have got to this was in the Victorian Era, when people became obsessed by the threat of premature burial. Coffins were fitted with a contraption that detected the slightest movement of the diaphragm. Its inventor was inspired visiting the funeral of a young Belgian girl, where “as the first shovelfuls of dirt landed on the wooden coffin, a pitiful scream rose from the earth, staggering the officiating priest and causing a number of young women to faint.” Those embracing the invention were responding to an epidemic of premature burials that coloured the popular press. One account talks of a “Reverend Schwartz, … who was reportedly aroused from apparent death by his favourite hymn. The congregation celebrating his last rites was stunned to hear a voice from the coffin joining in on the refrain.”

In Haiti, Zombification is used (now illegally) as punishment for serious selfish and antisocial behaviour. The guilty individual is poisoned to put them in a death-like state even skilled physicians have trouble detecting. After witnessing their own burial during the day, they are dug up at night, and from then on kept in servitude.

The folk preparation used to create zombies eluded outsiders for a long time. Uncovering it would mean infiltrating the secret societies – special judicial bodies inhabiting the Haitian countryside. While different bokor – witch doctors – would use different preparations, four common ingredients were found: extracts from puffer fish, a marine toad, a tree frog, and human remains.

Puffer fish is famous as a deadly Japanese delicacy, containing a nerve toxin called Tetrodotoxin or TTX, a toxin a hundred times more potent than cyanide. Its symptoms stand out for so neatly matching the accounts from the known cases of Zombies.

There are a number of accounts of unfortunate Japanese diners:

After “[a] dozen gamblers voraciously consumed fugu, … Three of them suffered from poisoning, two eventually died. One of these being a native of the town was buried immediately. The other was from a distant district … under the jurisdiction of the Shogun. Therefore the body was kept in storage and watched by a guard until a government official could examine it. Seven or eight days later the man became conscious and finally recovered completely. When asked about his experience, he was able to recall everything and stated that he feared that he too would be buried alive when he heard that the other person had been buried”

The second case was equally dramatic:

“A man from Yamaguchi … suffered from fugu poisoning at Osaka. It was thought that he was dead and the body was sent to a crematorium at Sennichi. As the body was being removed from the cart, the man recovered and walked back home. As in the case previously cited, he too remembered everything.”

Perhaps the most intriguing fact is that knowing the ingredients of the drug is not enough. Those who succumbed to puffer fish were not zombies, but merely poison victims. Any psychoactive drug  provides only the potential for certain results: how it will actually work is strongly influenced by individual psychology and expectations. For example, in Oregon there are a number of species of hallucinogenic mushrooms; those who go out to deliberately ingest them generally experience a pleasant intoxication, those who inadvertently consume them while foraging for edible mushrooms always end up in the poison unit of the nearest hospital. Haitians who believe in Zombies tend to think they are the result of sorcery, not substances, and you can imagine what difference this could make.

But it does raise a question; what was the first zombie thinking when paralysis started creeping through their body? Perhaps the history of Zombies reflects the history of Voodoo, just as the history of Voodoo is the history of Haiti. It's easy to imagine that they all tell us something about ourselves.

[ This speech borrows liberally from the wonderful Wade Davis, famous for his book "Serpent and the Rainbow" ]