The Serpent and the Rainbow

by Wade Davis

  The addition of these irritant plants recalled Marcel Pierre’s use of Mucuna pruriens, the itching pea. It was of interest that several of these additives could produce such severe irritation that the victim, in scratching himself, might quite readily induce self-inflicted wounds. I knew from the results of the laboratory experiments in New York that the powder, though topically active, was particularly effective if applied where the skin had been broken. Mme. Jacques had suggested that ground glass might be used. And of course I had reason to believe that when the powder was administered the skin of the victim was quite deliberately broken. It had been stated that the powder might be applied more than once, so it was possible that the irritant plants directly increased susceptibility to subsequent doses.

  It was the list of animals added at the third degree that gave me the greatest sense of satisfaction. Tarantulas of two species were ground with the skins of the white tree frog (Osteopilus dominicencis). Other ingredients included another bouga toad and not one but four species of puffer fish (Sphoeroides testudineus, S. spengleri, Diodon hystrix, D. holacanthus). Thus, in common with the poison prepared by Marcel Pierre, we had the toad, the puffers, including the sea toad, and the seeds of Albizzia lebbeck.

  Over the course of that week our relationship with Herard Simon warmed considerably. There was no one dramatic turning point, as there had been in the case of Marcel Pierre; Herard was far too clever and wary for that. Rather, it was a number of small incidental things that he appreciated—the fact that we drank from his well, that we shared his plate, that we curled up beside him on the stony ground.

  For one reason or another, in time, he chose to loose three critical pieces of information. First, he gave me the names of four preparations used to create zombis—Tombé Levé, Retiré Bon Ange, Tué, and Levé— and though he refused to describe the specific formulae, he did offer the facts that one killed immediately, another made the skin rot, and a third caused the victim to waste away slowly. He also commented that these virulent preparations had one ingredient in common—the crapaud de mer, the most toxic of the puffers found in Haitian waters.

  Secondly, Herard told me that the best powders were made during the hot months of the summer, and were then stored and distributed throughout the year. At the same time, he cautioned that some of these were excessively “explosive,” that they killed too completely. From the research I had done in Cambridge I knew that levels of tetrodotoxin within the puffer fish are not consistent. They vary not only according to sex, geographical locality, and the time of the year, but from individual to individual within a single population. A puffer from Brazilian waters, Tetrodon psittacus, for example, is only poisonous in June and July. Among Japanese species toxicity begins to increase in December and reaches a peak in May or June. The species used in the zombi preparations show a similar pattern—Sphoeroides testudineus, the sea toad, is most toxic in June, precisely the time when Herard said the poison was strongest.

  Finally, Herard told us that when the zombi is taken from the grave it is force-fed a paste, with a second dose administered the next day when the victim reaches its place of confinement. The ingredients of the paste were three: sweet potato, cane syrup, and, of all things, Datura stramonium.

  It was a startling piece of information. Since the beginning of the investigation, the role of this potent psychoactive plant, so suggestively named the zombi’s cucumber in Creole, had eluded me. Now a dozen incongruous facts crystallized into an idea. So far the search for a medical antidote for the zombi poison had turned up nothing of pharmacological interest. Each zombi powder had its locally recognized “antidote,” but in each case the ingredients were either inert or were used in insufficient concentration. Moreover, there was no consistency in either their constituents or the means of preparation between the various localities. Now, with Herard’s revelation, I had reason to believe that if there was an actual antidote, it was the zombi’s cucumber!

  Tetrodotoxin is a most peculiar molecule. No one is exactly sure where it originated. Generally, such specialized compounds pop up just once over the course of evolution, and as a result are only found in closely related organisms, derived presumably from a common ancestor. For the longest time, tetrodotoxin appeared to be isolated to a single family of fish. Then, to the surprise of biologists, it turned up in an amphibian, the California newt, a totally unrelated creature. Subsequent research found it in the goby fish from Taiwan, atelopid frogs from Costa Rica, and the blue-ringed octopus from the Great Barrier Reef of Australia. Such an erratic distribution suggested to some scientists that the toxin originated lower in the food chain, perhaps in a small marine organism.

  Within the puffer fish themselves, toxicity is correlated with the reproductive cycle and is higher in females, but the remarkable variability in toxin levels among separate populations of the same species has prompted similar suggestions that the concentration of the toxin may be linked to food habits. Puffer fish grown in culture, for example, do not develop tetrodotoxins, and it is possible that the puffer fish, in addition to synthesizing tetrodotoxins, may serve as transvectors of either tetrodotoxin or ciguatoxin, a different chemical that originates in a dinoflagellate and causes paralytic shellfish poisonings. The symptoms of ciguatera poisoning are similar to those of tetrodotoxin and include tingling sensations, malaise, nausea, and digestive distress, with death resulting from respiratory paralysis.

  In Australia, still today as throughout their history, the aborigines have a very strange plant, actually a tree, that they call ngmoo. They carve holes in its trunk and fill them with water, and within a day have an interesting beverage that produces a mild stupor. The branches and leaves, they have also learned, when placed in standing water quite effectively intoxicate eels, forcing them to surface where they can be killed. Knowledge of the remarkable properties of this plant found its way north to New Caledonia. There the native inhabitants discovered that the leaves could be used to make an effective antidote to ciguatera poisoning, an observation that modern science has confirmed. The plant is Duboisia myoporoides, and like many members of the potato family it has a number of potent chemicals including nicotine, atropine, and scopolamine. There is no known medical antidote for tetrodotoxin, but in the laboratory it has been shown that, as in the case of ciguatera poisonings, atropine relieves certain symptoms.

  Datura stramonium, like its relative from New Caledonia, contains atropine and scopolamine, and hence could be serving as an effective but unrecognized counteragent to the zombi poison.

  The investigation had come full circle. Ironically, the plant I had originally suspected to be the source of the drug that allowed an individual to be buried alive turned out to be, if anything, a possible antidote, which, at the same time, was instrumental in actually creating and maintaining the zombi state. For if tetrodotoxin provided the physiological template upon which cultural beliefs and fears could go to work, datura promised to amplify those mental processes a thousand times. Alone, its intoxication has been characterized as an induced state of psychotic delirium, marked by disorientation, pronounced confusion, and complete amnesia. Administered to an individual who has already suffered the effects of the tetrodotoxin, who has already passed through the ground, the devastating psychological results are difficult to imagine. For it is in the course of that intoxication that the zombi is baptized with a new name, and led away to be socialized into a new existence.

  Further evidence of the makeup of the zombi poison came two days later south of the capital near the town of Leogane. Several weeks previously we had established contact with a houngan named Domingue. His son, named Napoléon, was a well-known malfacteur, and he had a message for me at Beauvoir’s. My meeting with Napoléon was brief, but it yielded two poisons of note. The most toxic, by Napoléon’s account, was made from human remains alone. It consisted of a ground leg bone, forearm and skull, mixed with dried and pulverized bits of dried cadaver, and it was the first and only poison I encountered administered in the reputedly
most traditional way. Having rubbed one’s hands with the protective lotion—again a mixture of lemons, ammonia, and clairin—the killer sprinkled the powder in the form of a cross on the ground, while naming the intended victim. The recipient need only walk over that cross to be seized with violent convulsions. If the powder was placed in the victim’s food, the action would be immediate and permanent.

  The second preparation was a more familiar mixture of insects, reptiles, centipedes, and tarantulas. In place of the bouga toad, two locally recognized varieties of the tree frog were added. Napoléon also included the sea toad, the crapaud de mer. The onset of the poison was characterized by the feeling of ants crawling beneath the skin, precisely the way that Narcisse had described his first sensations. Besides evidence of yet another preparation based on the puffer fish, Napoléon gave further indication of the importance of correct dosage. He mentioned that the animal powder was most effective if ingested by the victim, and he cautioned that his two preparations should never be mixed. Together they would act too explosively; the victim would be too dead and would never rise again.

  I left Leogane confirmed in my conclusion that tetrodotoxin was the pharmacological basis of the zombi poison, a conviction that was reinforced by subsequent collections at various localities along the coast of Haiti. Finally I felt I could let the issue of the poison rest. It was time to move on to other matters that had claimed my interest since returning to Haiti.

  Herard Simon called early the next day and insisted on seeing Rachel and me immediately. We left that afternoon, picked him up in Gonaives, and drove directly to Petite Rivière de l’Artibonite. Arriving at the army caserne by dusk, we followed Herard past the sentry and into the private quarters of the commander. After sending the commander on an errand, Herard asked his orderly to bring us food and a bottle of rum. Then we waited. Past a broken shutter, the rain poured down, and inside a long row of cells I could just make out the prisoners clinging to the bars, trying to keep their feet out of the water.

  Herard is not a man who likes questions. I tried three. I asked first about the astral zombi that had been brought by the mountain peasants.

  “In that bottle was the soul of a human being,” Herard replied, “the control of which is an ominous power. It is a ghost, or like a dream; it wanders at the command of the one who possesses it. It was a zombi astral captured from the victim by the magic of the bokor.”

  “What about the poison you gave me?”

  “A poison kills. You put it in food. I gave you no poison.”

  “But the powder?”

  “Yes. Powder is powder, poison is poison. The powder is the support of the magic. Only the truly great work magic alone. Small people pretend, but watch and you’ll see the hand of powder. There are some, and I know them, who can stand in front of an army and throw a spell on anyone.”

  “To steal the soul?”

  “What else? If you want the flesh to work, you can’t fool with a little powder dust on the ground. You take a bamboo tube and blow it all over him and you rub it into the skin. Only then shall the zombi cadavre rise.”

  With the realization that there were two kinds of zombis and two means of creating them, many of my loose ends came together. Clearly what LaBonté and Obin had offered was a powder that, embued with sorcery and triggered by a magical act on my part, would kill my enemy. That was what Mme. Jacques had been telling me—“the magic makes you the master.” It was, in effect, voodoo death, the Haitian equivalent of the aboriginal practice of pointing the bone. It would not have been particularly effective within the mindset of my society, but that wasn’t their problem, it was mine.

  There was another possibility. If your spiritual force was strong, Marcel Pierre had told us, you could resist a spell, but the powder promised to get you anyway. Mme. Jacques mentioned powders that were rubbed into the skin or placed in wounds; she had talked of glass ground in the mortar, of the skin ripped by a thorn. These had to be the pharmacologically active powders that allowed the zombi to rise. It was what Narcisse had said. On the Sunday before his death, they took him before the basin and pricked his skin, and the water turned to blood! Herard was right. If you wanted a zombi of the flesh to rise, a little powder sprinkled on the ground would never do!

  My third question was interrupted by the arrival of the president of the local secret society. At that point the army commander, who had returned while I had been questioning Herard, was reduced to serving us rum and food. Herard discussed the possibility of obtaining a zombi cadavre for medical study. It was not until the middle of the night that we finally agreed on a price. Herard arranged to meet again with the president and his people the next afternoon. As we drove out of town, I attempted to arrange a time to meet the following day.

  “No. No,” Herard laughed, “we don’t return tomorrow. I just wanted to measure their force.”

  “But how will they bear the insult?” I asked, recalling the somewhat ominous warning of LaBonté at Petite Rivière de Nippes. “Are not the societies everywhere?”

  “Yes, they are powerful,” he agreed. “That’s why you had to come here with someone who is stronger. I, too, represent a secret society. Mine is a society of one!”

  Then, as if to emphasize that there were limits to even his own authority, he warned me that around Petite Rivière de l’Artibonite anything could happen. The road forked and he pointed to the shadows.

  “Be especially careful at the crossroads. Never leave your car after dark. They move by night.”

  As we approached Gonaives, I felt compelled to ask a final question, the one that I myself would be asked so often. Why was he giving me all this information? He laughed, but did not respond until we reached his house. Then, just as he left the jeep, he looked back at me.

  “Mon petit malfacteur, you are not a fool, but you still do not understand. You may gather your powders; in fact, I will give you all the powders you want. You will meet zombis, you may see zombis come from the earth, you will even think that you understand zombis. But you will never make a zombi, nor will you leave here with the magic.

  “Someday when you stop asking all these questions, you will begin to see. Only then will you begin to know vodoun, and only then will you step into the path of the loa.”

  For all his gruff manner, Herard had provided more information concerning the poison than anyone else; yet of all my contacts in Haiti, he had, expressed the most disdain for such powders, and the least interest in zombis. He was a deeply religious man, a theologian really. Sometimes when Herard said things I had no idea what he meant; at other moments his words seemed like a beacon. It was time I tried to understand the spirit world of his people.

  10

  The Serpent and the Rainbow

  ON JULY 16, 1843, and then again on the same day in 1881, the Virgin Mary appeared on the top of a palm tree near the village of Ville Bonheur in the rugged mountains of central Haiti. She said the world was going to end. This was most convenient for the Roman Catholic church, for the palm tree grew not far from the base of a cliff where the La Tombe River dissolves into mist, a waterfall named Saut d’Eau that had been a sacred vodoun pilgrimage site for a good many years. The Catholic priests, then as always anxious to purge the nation of what they considered a pagan cult, took immediate advantage of their good fortune. A chapel and shrine were erected, the legitimacy of the apparition was verified by church authorities, and thenceforth the miraculous event was commemorated annually with a full day of religious celebrations. But a strange twist was soon added to the saga. With increasing frequency, the officiating priests found small plates of food placed alongside the votive candles at the Virgin’s shrine. Once they realized what was going on, their initial enthusiasm faded rapidly. Rather than their co-opting a traditional vodoun pilgrimage, quite the opposite had taken place. For the peasants, the apparition of the Virgin Mary was none other than Erzulie Freda, the goddess of love, and her presence was less a miracle than an expected blessing that only added to the
reputation of the sacred waterfall.

  The Virgin next appeared during the American occupation, and by then the clergy was prepared. A local priest dismissed the apparition as idle superstition and called upon a Marine captain stationed in the region to help suppress the worship. The Marine complied, ordering a Haitian sergeant to shoot into the blinding light. As he did so, the vision moved to another palm, and then another, until the exasperated priest ordered the trees cut down. The vision rose above the canopy, and as the last of the palms fell, it changed into a pigeon. For a moment the priest was satisfied, but just as he turned to leave word came that his house had burned down, destroying all his possessions. This calamity was only the beginning for him; within a week the priest lay dead, the victim of a paralytic stroke. The American was similarly punished, and the Haitian sergeant went insane and was found sometime later wandering alone in a forest near the village. From what the townspeople say the pigeon remained close to Ville Bonheur for several days and then flew to Saut d’Eau, where it disappeared into the iridescent mist.

  The waterfall at Saut d’Eau carves a deep hidden basin from a limestone escarpment, and by the time I arrived shortly after midnight the entire vault was bathed in the soft glow of a thousand candles. Already in the depths where no moonlight could fall, huddled together, or darting in and out of the water, singing the vodoun songs or serving the many altars, were dozens and dozens of pilgrims. On all sides, people saturated with a lifetime of heat shivered and trembled, drawing in their hands against their naked skin. High above on the trail along which I had passed, other seekers had abandoned themselves to their goal and drifted along the horizon with the motion of night clouds. Overhead, beyond the crown of the towering mapou tree that hovered over the basin, the branches of heaven spread and the stars scattered as thick as blossoms in the northern spring.