by Wade Davis
But I was tired of simply documenting plants recognized by a particular culture. Once compiled, these academic reports seemed to me little more than grocery lists, devoid of scientific content. I wanted to use plants, and the genius of people who manipulated them, to ask larger questions. In part, this impulse was driven by intellectual aspirations, simple curiosity, really, but it also reflected a certain impatience, a reflexive tendency to move on just as things were becoming comfortable. The more experience I had as a plant explorer, the more I yearned for something completely novel. Fortunately, I was based at the right institution, for a new challenge always loomed at Harvard’s Botanical Museum, in the fourth-floor aerie of Professor Schultes.
One morning, as I was attempting to explain to an undergraduate student the nuances of Xavante kinship, word came that the professor wanted to see me. As soon as I could, I abandoned my young charge, raced up the iron steps of the museum and burst into his office only to encounter the university president, Derek Bok. Spewing apologies, I retreated for the door, but was stopped by Schultes, who politely asked Bok to step outside for a moment as he had a student to see him. As the president of Harvard shuffled out, a smile on his face, I took his place in a chair across from the great professor’s desk. At this point, I would have done anything for him. So when he asked if I might be interested in travelling to Haiti to seek the formula of a powder used to make zombies, I didn’t hesitate. I accepted the assignment, not knowing that it would, in the end, consume four years of my life.
4
The Face of the Gods
ON EASTER SUNDAY, 1982 , I RETURNED FROM HAITI to New York and was strolling through the customs hall at John F. Kennedy Airport when, suddenly, I was accosted by a nearly hysterical agent of the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Word had reached her that an anthropologist, with some knowledge of Vodoun, had just passed through immigration. I expected her to ask for permits. In my suitcase were dried toads and snakes, seeds and herbs, powders made from toxic fish, a small collection of amulets, fetish symbols, and bits and pieces of human bones destined for chemical analysis. Ignoring my luggage, she reached her hand into the cleavage of an ample bosom and withdrew a large silver crucifix. With breathless urgency, she asked, “Will this help?”
“Excuse me?” I replied.
“The Haitians!” she roared. “The Haitians!”
Only then did I realize that the fate of American agriculture was the last thing on her mind. What she wanted to know was whether the cross would protect her from the Haitian immigrants, voodoo and devil worshippers all, as she put it, then entering the country. I told her not to worry and walked on. In my backpack was a live toad, six inches (15 cm) across, with enough venom in its glands to kill half a dozen people.
My visit to Haiti had been prompted by an unusual assignment. A team of physicians and scientists, led by Nathan Kline, a pioneer in the field of psychopharmacology, had discovered the first documented instance of zombification. What made the case unique was the fact that the putative victim, a middle-aged man named Clairvius Narcisse, had been pronounced dead at an American-directed hospital that kept impeccable records. The demise of Narcisse had been documented by two physicians, both American trained, one an American, and witnessed by a sister of the deceased. Many years after the burial, to the horror and astonishment of family members, Narcisse had wandered back into his native village, where he presented a chilling tale of having been victimized by a sorcerer and transformed into a zombie. Lamarque Douyon, Haiti’s leading psychiatrist, conducted a thorough investigation and, in collaboration with Nathan Kline, went public in 1980 with the stunning conclusion that Narcisse’s account was true.
A zombie, according to folk belief, is the living dead, an individual killed by sorcery, magically resuscitated in the grave and exhumed to face an uncertain destiny, a fate invariably said to be marked by enslavement. Kline and Douyon, of course, did not believe in magic, and knew there had to be a scientific explanation. They focussed their attention on reports of a folk preparation, mentioned frequently in the popular and ethnographic literature, which was said to induce a state of apparent death so profound as to fool a Western-trained physician. The Haitian people evidently accepted the existence of the poison, for it is specifically mentioned in the penal code of the country and penalties for its use are severe. Since the medical potential of a drug capable of inducing apparent death could be considerable, especially in the field of anaesthesiology, Kline, after contacting Schultes at Harvard, dispatched me to Haiti in the spring of 1982 with the goal of securing the formula of the preparation.
FROM THE START, I pursued two avenues of research. To satisfy Kline and his colleagues, I sought to document the elaboration of the poison, in the hope of identifying a natural substance that could actually induce apparent death. But the higher goal was to make sense out of sensation, to provide a context for a folk belief that had been exploited in a lurid, even racist, manner to discredit an entire people, their culture and their religion. Though sent to Haiti to seek the chemical basis of a social phenomenon, I would, in the end, explore instead the psychological, spiritual, political and cultural dimensions of a chemical possibility. As it turned out, the zombie phenomenon was one small dark thread woven through the rich and colourful fabric of the Vodoun worldview.
When I arrived in Haiti, I knew little of the culture. But it did not take long to realize that a chasm existed between reality and the popular misconceptions that had sent the agricultural agent at Kennedy Airport into a paroxysm of fear and anxiety. The capital of Port-au-Prince was a sprawling muddle of a city, but life in the streets had a rakish charm. Street-side vendors in alleys damp with laundry hustled their herbs, market women sauntered with exquisite grace along broken boulevards while down by the docks where the cruise ships glittered, men with legs as hard as anvils dragged carts piled high with bloody hides. Children were everywhere, their angelic faces laughing. As I drove into the city, a solitary figure, dressed in white, quite sane and perfectly harmless, stepped into the road, halting all traffic as he stood alone, dancing with his shadow.
That evening, I visited Max Beauvoir, a Vodoun priest, or houngan, whose name had been given to me by Nathan Kline. An organic chemist by training, Beauvoir had worked in the United States and France, but had found his calling in Vodoun upon his return to Haiti, in a moment of revelation inspired by the death of his grandfather. A man of great charm and generosity, fluent in several languages, Max would over the course of many months lay his country before me as a gift.
He began that very night with an invitation to a ceremony at his hounfour, or temple, located south of the city along the Carrefour Road. There, with the wind coming off the sea, I watched in awe as white-robed initiates invoked the spirit. Responding to the rhythm of the drums, the invocations of the priestess, the resonance of songs, they moved as a single body, circling the centre post of the temple. The dance was deceptively simple: feet flat to the ground, small shuffling steps, shoulders and hips moving with a fluidity that seemed to have all of nature swaying in sympathy. The voice of the priestess was clear and powerful, slicing through the joy and celebration. Libations were blown to the wind. Small clouds of dust hovered above the dry ground. A continuous battery of sound drove each moment forward.
As the energy rose, the rhythm of the drums unexpectedly shifted to a highly syncopated, broken counterpoint that created a moment of excruciating emptiness. A void enveloped the dancers, who slipped into stillness only to explode in spasmodic pirouettes that carried them, still spinning, into the glow of burning fires. They danced on the red-hot coals with impunity. A young man took an ember the size of a small apple into his mouth, tight between his teeth. His hot breath sent sparks throughout the temple. The ritual was theatrical and strange, impossible to understand except on its own terms.
“White people go to church and speak about God,” a Haitian friend later told me, “we dance in the temple and become God.” Once possessed, the believer loses all con
sciousness and sense of self; he or she becomes the spirit, taking on its persona and powers. How can a god be harmed?
The fact that the coals do not burn the believers is an astonishing example of how the mind, unleashed during a state of extreme excitation, can affect the body that bears it. But perhaps more profoundly, it offers a raw demonstration of the power of faith, a visceral experience of the metaphysical. Within hours of arriving in Haiti, I had witnessed a phenomenon that had eluded me in the Amazon for a decade: a window open wide to the mystic.
IF ANY OF us were to be asked to name the great religions of the world, how would we respond? Buddhism, Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Hinduism? What continent would be left out? No doubt sub-Saharan Africa, the tacit assumption being that African peoples had no organized faith. But, of course, they did, for what is religion but a set of ideas and beliefs that satisfies the spiritual needs of a people?
Vodoun is a Fon word from Dahomey meaning simply “spirit” or “god,” and the practice of Vodoun is but the distillation of profound religious ideas that came over from Africa during the tragic diaspora of the slavery era. Sown in the fertile soil of the New World, brought into being by dreams of redemption and sacrifice, the spiritual intuitions of the ancient homeland burst forth in a dozen original forms. There is Obeah and Cumina in Jamaica, Candoblé and Macumba in Brazil, Hoodoo in the American South, and, with its rich overlay of Catholicism and medieval magic, Santaria in Puerto Rico, Cuba and the other Hispanic countries of the Caribbean.
The image of Vodoun as something evil, a black magic cult, grew out of fear rooted in ignorance, reinforced by pernicious clichés. Beginning in 1915 , the United States Marine Corps occupied Haiti, and for the next twenty years, or so it seemed, nearly every visitor landed a book contract, unleashing a slew of pulp fiction titles such as Black Baghdad, Cannibal Cousins, The White King of La Gonave, A Puritan in Voodooland. These, in turn, inspired a succession of Hollywood horror movies: I Walked with a Zombie, The Night of the Living Dead, Zombies on Broadway. Replete with images of the macabre, zombies crawling out of the ground, children bred for the cauldron, these otherwise forgettable books and films, produced at the height of the Jim Crow era, essentially suggested to the American public that any country that tolerated such abominations could only find its redemption in military occupation.
In truth, Vodoun is a benign faith that, like all great spiritual traditions, encompasses a complex metaphysical worldview. In many ways, it is the quintessentially democratic religion, for the believer not only has direct access to the spirit realm but actually receives the gods into his or her body and becomes transformed. Vodoun essentially acknowledges the reciprocal relationship between the living and the dead. Those of this earthly plane must honour their ancestors, who give birth to the gods. The dead, in turn, if properly served, are expected to assist the living. Death is not feared for its finality but is regarded as a crucial and vulnerable moment when the spiritual and physical components of men and women separate.
A proper death is one in which the ti bon ange, “the little good angel,” the element of the soul that creates personality, character and willpower, goes beneath the Great Water, only to be ritualistically reclaimed a year and day later by a priest who places the departed spirit in a small clay vessel, which is stored in the inner sanctuary of the temple. In time, this spirit, initially associated with a particular individual, becomes part of the vast ancestral pool of energy, out of which emerge the loa, the 401 spirits of the Vodoun pantheon. Yet, in this remarkably dynamic faith, even the dead must be made to serve the living; and in order to serve the living, they must be invoked by ceremony to become manifest, returning to Earth to displace the soul of the living. For the believer, spirit possession is the touch of divine grace, a moment of transcendence, the epiphany of the Vodoun faith.
The spirits live beneath the Great Water, dividing their time between Haiti and the mythic homeland of Guinée, of Africa. But they often choose to dwell in places of natural beauty. Those who serve the loa are drawn to these sites much as Christians are drawn to cathedrals, not to worship the place or the building, but to be in the presence of God. In the north, there is the festival of Plaine du Nord, where once each year a mud pond spreads over a dry roadbed, and pilgrims gather to fill their bottles with curative potions derived from the earth. Around the periphery, initiates light candles and worship at the roots of a sacred tree, as men and women slip into the basin and emerge transformed, bodies coated with clay, eyes wide, hands reaching out to feed herbs to cattle waiting for the machete of Ogun, god of war, to strike and spread their blood across the surface of the pool. Young women straddle the dying animals, as boys and fathers wallow in the mud, singing, laughing, playing.
Farther south, there is the waterfall of Saut d’Eau, where Erzulie, goddess of love, escaped the wrath of the Catholic priests by turning into a pigeon and disappearing into the iridescent mist. The cascade is also the domain of Damballah-Wedo, the serpent god, repository of all wisdom and the source of all falling waters. When the first rains fell, a rainbow, Ayida Wedo, was reflected. Damballah embraced Ayida, and their love enveloped them in a cosmic helix from which all creation emerged. Thus, once each year, Vodoun acolytes, ten thousand strong and dressed in white robes, gather at the sacred waterfall. Arriving on foot, they drift across the limestone escarpment with the motion of night clouds and descend by a trail to a basin carved into the rock face.
There, beneath the spreading branches of a sacred mapou tree, illuminated by the glow of a thousand candles, they enter the water. Merely to touch the cold thin blood of the divine, to step behind the veil of the falling water, is to become possessed by Damballah-Wedo. At any moment, there are dozens of pilgrims, possessed by the spirit, slithering across the wet stones like snakes.
In the radiant light of the waterfall, all thoughts of Vodoun as something fearful disperse. There are children laughing, women shamelessly naked, men whose power and devotion defy the force of the falls. One man steps forward in trance, fully clothed, and enters the most thunderous place in the cataract. The entire weight of the waterfall strikes his body. The water is cold, frigid to a Haitian. He stands like a statue, face to the rocks, as his clothes are literally torn from his body. Stripped bare, he turns, an act of both defiance and surrender. Like a serpent that has shed its skin, he waits patiently for renewal. There are shouts from the children, and houngan and bokor, priest and sorcerer, rush to his side to pay homage to his courage. Everything flows away into the promise of another year.
IT WAS AGAINST this backdrop of faith, this sacred alignment of the light and the dark, that I set out to examine the phenomenon of the Haitian zombie. The formula of the elusive poison was the key. From preliminary reports, I knew even before leaving for the Caribbean that the preparation had to be topically active, capable of inducing a prolonged psychotic state, and that the initial dosage had to bring on a deathlike stupor. It had to be extremely potent and, because both the toxin and its purported antidote were likely to be organically derived, the sources had to be plants or animals found in Haiti.
Many plant and animal substances can kill, but if the Narcisse case was to be believed, the preparation had to be capable of provoking the misdiagnosis of death, a far more curious outcome. Although each sorcerer had a unique formula—crushed seeds and leaves, spiders, snakes, toads, magical powders and human bones—the consistent and critical ingredients turned out to be species of marine fish, all belonging to an order known as the Tetraodontiformes, whose viscera and skin contain a nerve poison known as tetrodotoxin. Among the most poisonous substances known from nature, tetrodotoxin is roughly a thousand times stronger than sodium cyanide: a lethal dose of the pure toxin could rest on the head of a pin. More compelling than the sheer toxicity of the drug is the manner in which it affects the body, causing metabolic rates to fall dramatically low. The pulse becomes imperceptible and peripheral paralysis is total. Though quite unable to move, the victim remains fully conscious unt
il the moment of actual death.
In Japan, several species of fish closely related to those sought by the sorcerers in Haiti have long been eaten as a delicacy. Specially trained chefs, licensed by the government, carefully remove the toxic organs, reducing but not eliminating the poison, so that the connoisseur still enjoys the exhilarating physiological effects of a mild intoxication. For the Japanese, consuming fugu, as the fish are known, is the ultimate aesthetic experience. It is also highly dangerous. On reviewing Japanese and Australian medical literature, I was astonished to find case after case of individuals who, having been pronounced dead by physicians, had returned to the realm of the living. In one instance, a man, sealed in a coffin ready for burial, awoke in the darkness to a unique world of terror. Only by chance did a passing attendant hear his screams and come to the rescue. To avoid such a fate, folk tradition in rural areas of Japan dictates that those who succumb to fugu poisoning be laid out beside the grave for three days to make sure that, before burial, they are really dead.