by Lionel
Expressionless face mask. Does it represent a zombie?
Fraud also needs to be considered as a possibility. There are accounts of a bokor — also referred to as a hungan — being caught out after opening a grave and apparently reviving the corpse lifted from it. The “corpse” turned out to be the bokor’s accomplice, and a sharp-eyed examining magistrate found that an air tube had been connected to a hole in the coffin.
In Haiti again, back in 1937, a folklore researcher, Zora Hurston, came upon the case of a girl named Felicia Felix-Mentor. Felicia had officially died in 1907 when she was twenty-nine. Witnesses reported to Zora that they had seen Felicia wandering about in a zombielike state thirty years after her body had supposedly been laid to rest. Some of Zora’s informants suggested that powerful drugs might have been responsible for zombifying a victim like Felicia.
Another account covers the story of a hungan who was strongly sexually attracted to a girl who wanted nothing to do with him. He promptly cursed her, and a few days later she became ill and died. Her grieving family bought a coffin, then found it was too short. They pulled her head down hard to one side so that her body would fit the inadequate coffin. During the family funeral party, a candle set fire to the lower end of the coffin lining and burned her left foot quite severely.
Several weeks after being buried, the “dead” girl was reported to have been seen with the bokor whom she had firmly rejected before her death. The family ignored these rumours and said that the hungan clearly liked girls of similar appearance and must have found a new one. Several years later, however, the girl’s brother saw a woman who looked very much like her. When questioned, she had no idea who she was and no memory of any past life as his sister. She did, however, have a badly twisted neck and there were severe burn scars on her left foot. Taken home to what her brother believed was her family and his, she was loyally cared for until she died. During all this time, however, she failed to recall anything of her past life, and was able to exercise only the most limited mental functions.
The famous British anthropologist Francis Huxley reported a well-authenticated case of Haitian zombiism from the late 1950s. Huxley, a remarkable adventurer, had travelled thousands of miles in the Amazon basin studying the indigenous population and their religion. He was also a friend and colleague of the brilliant and dauntless Canadian medical research scientist Humphrey Osmond, who had immigrated to Saskatchewan in 1951 and done much to help patients at the Weyburn hospital.
A Catholic priest reported to Huxley in 1959 that what appeared to be a zombie had been found wandering in a Haitian village street and taken to the local police station. It seems that the police did not wish to take any action, but eventually the apparent zombie managed to mumble the name of a woman living in the village. When enquiries were made, she recognized him as her deceased nephew, who had been buried four years ago in 1955. The priest took a keen and sympathetic interest in the zombie, who — unusually — was able to name the bokor who had enslaved him. The priest duly informed the police, but they were still apparently very unwilling to confront and antagonize a powerful hungan. Instead, they sent him a message offering to return the stray zombie to him. Two days later the zombie was found dead — really and finally dead. The hungan was arrested but later released.
An equally impressive zombie report dating from the 1980s comes from the village of L’Estère in the Artibonite Valley in Haiti. A lurching, robotic figure with a blank facial expression and staring eyes crossed the market square and spoke to one of the local women, Angelina Narcisse. Suddenly she recognized him and gave out a terrified scream. She identified him as her brother, Clairvius Narcisse, whom they had buried nearly twenty years ago in 1962.
The head of the psychiatric centre in Port-au-Prince at the time was Dr. Lamarque Douyon, a gifted and rigorously professional Haitian psychiatrist who had trained in Canada. With proper professional scientific detachment, he had studied the phenomena associated with zombiism for over a quarter of a century. During the later stages, assistance came from his equally gifted colleague, E. Wade Davis, a botanist from Harvard.
When the case of Clairvius Narcisse was investigated in depth, it was found that he had been officially recorded as dead in the Schweitzer Hospital in Deschapelles in Haiti on May 3, 1962. Clairvius had arrived at the hospital three days earlier with a high fever and a body that ached all over. He was also spitting up a lot of blood. After the doctors officially pronounced him dead, he was placed in cold storage in the mortuary for a day before being handed over to his family for burial.
When giving an account of his grim experiences, Clairvius said that he remembered hearing the doctors announce that he had died. He also remembered his sister Angelina in tears beside his hospital bed when his death was pronounced. He was able to recall being buried, he said, because despite being conscious he was totally unable to move or cry out. As he listened to shovelfuls of earth landing on his casket lid, he had the strange feeling that he was hovering above the grave.
There was a scar on his right cheek, and he said that this had been caused by a nail driven through his coffin lid when he was being sealed in. He then vividly recalled how a bokor, or hungan, had taken him from his coffin, revived him, and transported him to a sugar plantation in the north of the island. Here, with a several other zombies, he had worked in slave conditions until their overseer had died. This provided the zombies with a chance of escape, and Clairvius had finally found his way back to L’Estère.
As Douyon’s researches continued, he found that there was a socio-cultural factor in zombiism: in some areas it was regarded as a form of punishment for people who had contravened the social norms and mores of their community. From this perspective, it was apparent that Clairvius had appropriated land that was not legally his — at least its title was disputed. Had those who thought they had a better claim to it arranged for him to become a zombie?
Another apparent punishment zombie case concerned a woman named Francina Illeus, who was nicknamed Ti-Femme. She had allegedly been zombified for refusing to marry the man who had been selected for her, and for giving birth to the child of another man. Hospitalized with symptoms similar to Clairvius’s but sent home again on February 23, 1976, she died there a few days later.
It was almost twenty years later that her mother recognized the female zombie walking uncertainly through the village as Francina because of her distinctive birthmark. Her coffin was exhumed but there were only stones inside it.
In the course of this chapter, an examination has been made of the nature of hypnotism, together with the use of hypnotic liturgies and rituals in Santeria, Obeah, Candomblé, Voodoo, and the other syncretistic mystery religions. In the light of research in these areas, it seems increasingly likely that the power of the human mind is far greater than is realized — and has never yet been fully exerted. In the next chapter a similar examination is made of the strange, magical powers inherent in music, drumming, and dancing.
Chapter 8
THE POWER OF RELIGIOUS MUSIC, DRUMMING, AND DANCING
The power of music can be analyzed into two broad categories: pitch elements and time elements. The pitch elements include the timbre (sometimes called the colour) of the music, its melody, and its harmony. Melody is a succession of notes of different pitch and duration. Harmony is the combination of those notes, played simultaneously with other notes in a way that sounds pleasing to the listener. The time elements consist of rhythm, metre, and tempo: the way that sounds are repeated again and again in a recognizable pattern of beats, the way that those patterns can be identified by the number of beats that constitute a sequence, and the speed at which they are sounded.
The brilliant musician Daniel Barenboim gave the BBC Reith Lectures in 2006 during the course of which he said, “music has a power beyond mere words … I would like to explore the power that music has over us.” That mysterious power of music that Barenboim recognized so perceptively is an essential ingredient of Santeria, Obeah, and the
other syncretistic religions.
Pythagoreans like Archytas (428–347 BC) discovered important insights into the power of music. He said that mathematics itself could be analyzed into four major sectors: arithmetic, astronomy, geometry, and music. Boethius (AD 480–524) wrote that the first three focused on rationality, but music involved human behaviour. He went on to quote Plato’s famous comment: “The soul of the world is knit together by the harmony of music.” There was a sense in which he saw music as “the fulcrum between the material world and the meta-reality of number.” The Pythagoreans also observed that vibrating strings produced musical tones that were in harmony with one another provided that the ratios of the lengths of the strings were simple, whole numbers.
Pythagoras of Samos (560–480 BC) travelled extensively in Egypt and Babylonia, where his brilliantly fertile mind acquired and processed vast amounts of ancient wisdom. Long before it was generally understood and accepted, Pythagoreans believed that the Earth was moving. They also theorized about the music of the spheres, which they believed the planets generated.
In the Pythagorean schools in Crotona and Delphi, where music was studied in great depth, it was reported that certain sequences of notes and harmonious combinations of tones induced particular human responses. Pythagoreans understood that music could change human behaviour and reinforce the body’s natural healing processes.
An essential part of this mysterious power that music possesses is its ability to stimulate human emotions. Once emotions have been aroused, they affect the way that a person perceives the world and the way that he or she responds to stimuli in the environment as seen through those coloured screens of the various emotions. Emotions dramatically affect behaviour. A soldier with fixed bayonet charging through battery smoke to kill the enemy gunners will charge faster and strike harder when inspired by loud, stirring, military music. A shopper on a limited budget will spend more than intended while the shop plays cheerful, encouraging background music. A fretful infant distressed by teething problems will settle down to sleep in mother’s arms when she sings him a gentle lullaby. Santerian worshippers will lose themselves more deeply in their ceremonies as they dance and sing among the Orishas and saints they believe in.
There is an enormous range of human responses to music: clearly, different people will respond to the same music in different ways, but even the same person may respond differently on different occasions and in different circumstances. The First Book of Samuel, Chapter 16, verse 23, relates how when King Saul was in a dark and dangerous mood “David would take his harp and play. Then relief would come to Saul; he would feel better, and the evil spirit would leave him.”
Another way to analyze music as it reinforces Santeria, Obeah, and similar religions is to consider its role as a medium of communication as well as an influence over emotions. Not only does music stimulate, pacify, or quiet emotions: it can also carry messages. It says things that can be interpreted and understood. Some of these musical statements are as clear and simple as speech or writing, while others are deeper, more complex codes. They seem to bypass cognitive mind and thought and go directly to what poets and musicians would describe as the listener’s heart and soul. Those who have experienced this musical fullness can only say that it cannot be thought about rationally; it has to be felt. It has a genuinely mystical quality.
David with his harp.
There are times when it is the timbre, the melody, the harmony, or the rhythm acting alone that can carry the messages and stir the emotions; but there is also a holistic quality in the power of music. The whole really can be greater than the sum of the parts. There is also, perhaps, a sense in which the greatest power within music is its ability to lift the listener to anticipate something higher and greater.
This relates again to the idea of the subconscious, conscious, and superconscious minds being like a house with a superbly furnished upper floor and a lived-in ground floor as well as a cellar containing a powerful generator. The sublimity of music seems to suggest that the human mind can choose not only between “ordinariness” and “something lower” — no matter how potent the contents of the cellar may be — but between normal consciousness and an altogether higher and infinitely more powerful state of awareness and being.
To what extent does modern neurobiological research reveal how music affects the mind? There is evidence, for example, that areas in the right hemisphere of the brain can respond to melody more readily than they respond to language. It also appears that when a particular musical tone or sound pattern is associated with something significant to the listener — such as food, sex, or danger — the brain’s response to that stimulus increases in line with the importance of the associated goal.
Other research findings have suggested that learning how to play an instrument has long–lasting beneficial effects on the brain. Cases have been recorded where Alzheimer’s patients have retained their ability to play, long after other skills have been lost. There is also significant evidence that learning to play an instrument enhances brain function throughout life.
The indications are that the playing and singing that occur during Obeah and Santeria ceremonies are beneficial to the participants and have positive effects on brain function as well as influencing emotion and conveying messages.
The importance of rhythmic drumming during Santerian ceremonies, and those of similar religions, is extremely significant. Expert drum therapy practitioners maintain with some justification based on their case studies that drumming rhythms can promote self-expression and healing. The technique has been understood and used for millennia, especially in Africa. The ancient Egyptians were also experts in dancing to drum rhythms. According to expert percussion therapists, rhythmic drumming — especially when shared by groups of like-minded people — seems to accelerate healing and boost the immune system.
Academic studies have suggested that drum therapy can help disturbed children and teenagers, as well as Alzheimer’s victims. Drumming has also been shown to be beneficial in reducing stress, hyper-tension, anxiety, and tiredness. It appears that participation in group drumming as practised in Santeria, Obeah, Voodoo, and similar syncretistic religions helps participants to relax. Blood pressure is lowered and this helps to prevent heart attacks and strokes. Other research has shown that percussion group therapy seems to help control pain and assists the body to produce endorphins. Defined scientifically, endorphins are endogenous opioid biochemical compounds that are manufactured in the pituitary gland and the hypothalamus. They control pain and produce feelings of happiness and well-being. In addition to these benefits it has been shown that being part of a drumming circle can stimulate and encourage the body’s natural immune system. Dr. Barry Bittman of the Mind-Body Wellness Centre of the Meadville Medical Centre in Meadville, Pennsylvania, co-author of Maze of Life (TouchStar Productions, 2003), has said, “Group drumming tunes our biology, orchestrates our immunity, and enables healing to begin.”
Other research has demonstrated that when rhythmic energy such as drum beating reaches the brain — via touch, vibration, or sound waves — the left and right hemispheres begin to work more closely together. Neuropsychology indicates that the left side of the brain is largely responsible for rational, cognitive thinking, while the right hemisphere is associated with emotion, instinctive behaviour, and intuition. In theory, then, when their ability to communicate and co-operate is enhanced by drumming, the brain’s overall performance is vastly improved. It has also been theorized that rhythmic drumming enhances the communication between those basic areas of the brain that deal with non-verbal functions and the “higher” zones that process data and solve problems. This drum-facilitated communication could also be a source of insight and inspiration.
Egyptian dancing.
These neuropsychological ideas related to rhythmic drumming are germane to the analysis of what happens to the worshippers during Santerian and similar religious services. The repetitive drum rhythms enable their hearers to reach a
higher state of consciousness in which the different areas of the brain are harmonized. Colourful religious imagery of saints and Orishas, and the worshippers’ feelings of enhanced spiritual, mental, and physical power, can be better understood when considered in the light of the neuropsychology of drumming. However, when the music and rhythmic drumming are accompanied by dancing, their effects are reinforced still further.
Specialist dance historians have suggested that the simplest and most basic forms of dancing are probably as old as human beings. These earliest forms may have been stylized movements associated with the sympathetic magic paintings on ancient African cave walls, depicting hunters and their prey. These early dances may also have included simple mating rituals and courtship displays.
Drawings estimated to be at least nine thousand years old have been studied in the Bhimbetka rock shelters. These are approximately fifty kilometres south of Bhopal, close to the Vindhyachal Hills in Madhya Pradesh in India. Their geographical coordinates are 22° 55| N and 77° 35| E. They are named after Bhima, one of the sons of King Pandu and his two queens, Madri and Kunti. Even in these early times, the Indus Valley Civilization had a fully developed dance culture.
As time passed, dancing became inseparable from human culture and especially from rites of passage. In the sixth century BC, the Mahavamsa document records how King Vijaya reached Sri Lanka, listened to music, and watched the dancers at a wedding. Although much younger than the evidence from Bhimbetka, Sri Lankan dances are still among the earliest ever recorded. Known as Kandyan dances, they are accompanied by special cymbals referred to as thalampataa and recognized by characteristic rhythms called tala.
Homer also describes dancing in the Odyssey, and the many theories about where Odysseus really went on his long voyage home to Ithaca include the theory that he might even have ventured up into the Indian Ocean. Whether they found dancing in very distant lands like the Indus Valley and Sri Lanka, or whether it came to them from ancient African cultures south of the Mediterranean, the early Greeks were the ones who systematized it in their own characteristic way. For them, dancing became a method of expressing the full range of human thoughts and feelings.