Zombies

by Bob Curran

  This ribaldry may well have affected the decisions of another such character: the celebrated Irish murderer Half-Hanged McNaghten. His real name was John McNaghten, but in 1752 he was convicted of murdering his former sweetheart Mary-Anne Knox. When the rope broke at his execution in Lifford, he called for a fresh one. “I will never be known as Half-Hanged McNaghten” he declared, which, ironically, he was.

  America, too, had its own versions and poems of the “half-hanged.” In the 1680s, Mary Webster was hanged near Salem, Massachusetts, on a charge of witchcraft, predating the famous Salem witch trials. When cut down, she was still alive, and, although she seems to vanish from the pages of history, her name lived on in an old American ballad called “Half-Hanged Mary.”

  The notion of executed corpses rising again spread a kind of fearful interest all through 18th- and 19th-century societies. Indeed, the sight of Margaret Dixon rising from the mortuary cart had created panic in all those who saw it, and the event was celebrated long after she had actually died. This was perhaps linked in folklore to the ancient medieval ideas of the Viking draugr and other such horrors in the public mind, and kept the notion of the walking dead very much to the fore. Coupled with this were some of the religious notions current at the time.

  Calling of the Dead

  In the religious fervour that characterized the era from 1730 to 1740, in what became known as “The First Great Awakening” on the American east coast, there was much debate about the status of those who had “died in Christ.” There was a persistent conviction—not only in America but in Europe as well—that mankind was living in the “End Times,” and that Christ would soon return to call the faithful to Paradise. But what would be the state of the bodies? The debate raged for many years, and seemed to be brought into a sharper focus following the Dark Day on May 19, 1780, when the entire east coast of America witnessed a solar eclipse. This was taken as incontrovertible proof that the end of the world was fast approaching. However, slightly before this event, some of the more eccentric religious groups had taken steps to ensure that when Christ arrived, they were there in physical body to greet him.

  One of these groups was the followers of Shadrack Ireland—a bizarre preacher who had originally been a follower of the early Methodist George Whitefield. However, in the 1760s, he formed his own church, and the members were known as the Perfectionists. Sometimes described as a Baptist, sometimes as a Primitive Methodist, Ireland preached that the bodies of the “saints” (the Godly) were incorruptible, and that even after death they would not decay. Consequently on the Last Great Day, Christ would expect his followers to rise, whole and undecayed from their graves, to join him. He did not, Ireland taught, expect the righteous to claw their way through grave earth in order to answer the last trumpet, and so Perfectionist followers began to construct great stone-lined chambers under the New England hills, in which stone slabs were placed for the dead to lie upon while they waited for the call. His message was taken up by other smaller groups who did something similar. The idea of uncorrupted, unshrouded, and un-coffined bodies lying beneath the hills, ready to rise must have prayed on early American minds even after Ireland and his followers were long gone, because following his death, many of them joined Mother Ann Lee’s Shakers.

  All of these strands—the medieval notions of the violent risen dead, the later activities of the Resurrectionists, the half-hanged, and the holy corpses awaiting the Final Call—came together in the human psyche to create a notion of the dead who were “merely sleeping” and might rise from their tombs and walk about at any time, for whatever purpose. There was now only one more element needed to complete the picture, and that came from ancient Egypt.

  Egyptian Hangings

  Similar to many other ancient peoples the Egyptians did not view death as the end of all things. Certainly it marked the termination of physical involvement in this world, but beyond the tomb the body could be renewed and continue to live very much as it had in this world. In order for the renewal process to take place, the body had to descend into the Underworld—a realm known as Nun—where it would be submerged in the primal waters, reemerging to begin a new life beyond death. In order for this to happen, the body had to be preserved intact. Therefore, the ancient Egyptians mummified their dead by drying the cadavers out, coating them in natron (a sodium-based element that aided the “drying out” process and that prevented bacteria from forming in the organs together with preservative gums, and wrapping them in bandages before placing them in their tombs in preparation for the next world. This was an incredibly expensive process, and in many cases it was the rich, noble classes who embraced mummification in a wholesale way—especially the Pharaohs or rulers of Egypt who believed that they would come back as incarnations of the god Osiris and therefore needed to be whole in body. Although the Egyptians were not the only ancient people to mummify their dead—the Chinchorro races of the Peru/Chile border in South America had been doing something similar from about 5000 BCE—they are unquestionably the best known, largely through much publicized excavations of their tombs.

  Although Egyptology—the study of Egyptian antiquities and relics with reference to both Egyptian history and archaeology—had been considered a science since the early 19th century, it was during the early 20th that it really came to prominence in the Western mind.

  On the western bank of the Nile, just across from the ancient capital of Thebes (modern-day Luxor), lay a large valley system known as the Valley of the Kings. Wadi Biban el-Muluk, or Gate of Kings, signified a portal into the other world through which Pharaohs might pass. This was a vast necropolis in which many of the ancient kings of Egypt were laid to rest. In fact most of the Egyptian pharaohs who reigned over Egypt following the fall of the Hyksos (a group of foreign rulers who controlled the Middle Kingdom for 108 years in the 17th century BCE are interred there, many of them in great splendor.

  In the late 18th and 19th centuries, many explorers and archaeologists were drawn to the Valley, lured there by stories of fabulous treasures that had been allegedly buried with the dead monarchs (although this was not always the case). In order to protect the Valley and its tombs, many rumors were spread. The most prominent was that many of the tombs were cursed, and that those who attempted to break into them would meet a horrible end. This was the “Curse of the Pharaohs,” a supernatural retribution on all of those who dared defile the sacred burial sites. And the idea of a bandaged, shrouded dead body fitted in well with that. Similar to the ancient Viking draugr, the swathed mummy would rise from its sarcophagus and pursue the defiler wherever he or she went, eventually wreaking violence and murder on them for their crime.

  Such stories had remained in localized Egyptian folklore for a number of centuries, but it suddenly and rather spectacularly shot to prominence in the Western mind in 1922. In this year Egyptologist and archaeologist Howard Carter finally discovered the tomb of Tutankhamen after a 15-year search. Although many of the tombs of the Pharaohs had been discovered and explored in previous centuries, Carter was still certain that the boy-king’s tomb lay still undetected in the Valley of Kings; in 1907, backed by the wealth of Lord Carnavon, he set out to find it, and in November 1922, he did so in some style. The opulence of the tomb was staggering and caused great excitement in the archaeological and Egyptology worlds. However, it was here that the alleged Curse of the Pharaohs came to haunt him. It was said that an inscription in hieroglyphics had been found in the tomb: “Death shall come on swift wings to him who disturbs the peace of the King.” Thus, having broken into the site, Carter and his backers were at risk from some ancient retribution that stretched out of the aeons to destroy them. In actual fact, there had been no such warning, but there had been a number of local legends about Tutankhamen’s tomb, and these fed into a popular mythology that seemed to grip the imagination of many people in the West. Egypt was still an ancient and mysterious land to many people and the idea of some ghastly curse, perhaps backed by the physical “presence” of some shroude
d mummy, held an awful appeal. The curse seemed to gain some credence when Lord Carnarvon, who had financed Carter’s expedition, suddenly and mysteriously died. Fanciful stories began to circulate: He had been somehow strangled by a guardian mummy and this face was deliberately being kept from the public; or some sort of ghastly figure had come out of the tomb and followed him halfway across the world.

  The Mummy

  In reality, Lord Carnarvon had been bitten by a mosquito while he was in Egypt—the wound had almost healed, but he accidentally cut it while shaving. Blood poisoning set in, leading to His Lordship’s eventual demise. The curse seemed to strike again in 1924 when another financier—George Jay Gold—appeared to die in mysterious circumstances after visiting the tomb. There were also rumors that many of those who had been present at the opening of the tomb, including Carter himself, had met bizarre and untimely ends. In reality, only eight of the 58 people who had been present at the opening died shortly afterward, and all of those were from natural causes. Carter himself lived until 1939, when he died of lymphoma at the age of 64. Nevertheless, the idea of a curse, inextricably linked to the notion of a bandaged cadaver rising from its tomb, had become indelibly imprinted on popular imagination.

  Hollywood’s Interpretation

  One of the more influential areas that was captivated by these stories was Hollywood. The Curse of the Pharaohs might have been suspect, but it was still a moneymaker for the film industry. With Carter’s fabulous discovery still creating news and excitement many years after, the film companies turned their attention to the horror that allegedly rose out of the Egyptian desert. Even though there had been a number of lesser films dealing with the subject before, the first of the great “Mummy movies”—simply entitled The Mummy—appeared in 1932. It was directed by Karl Freund and starred the legendary Boris Karloff, long considered to be a “Master of Horror.” This placed the image of the shambling corpse, bent on vengeance against unwitting Westerners, firmly within European culture. A number of other films were to follow—The Mummy’s Hand (1940, starring B-movie cowboy hero Tom Tyler as the Mummy); The Mummy’s Tomb (1942, starring the celebrated Lon Chaney, Jr., who would also star in subsequent mummy movies); Mummy’s Ghost (1944), and Mummy’s Curse (also 1944). Although not as popular as the vampire or werewolf, the mummy was still able to create terror and certainly established itself in horror culture of the era.

  Recently, the idea of the mummy seems to have gained a fresh impetus with the release of Stephen Sommers’s The Mummy (1999) and The Mummy Returns (2001). The films generated a mass of tie-in books and merchandise, much of which is still circulating. In the commercial world, it seems, the notion of the shambling corpse is still a lucrative one.

  With the addition of the mummy, the perception of the walking cadaver was now almost complete, and the returning dead were now inextricably linked with evil and threat in the public perception. They further represented all that was alien and terrifying, and their appearance signaled no good for ordinary people. But there was one last—and important—element to add to the mix, an element that would, for many people, define the walking dead and what they were about. This element came out of Afro-Caribbean religion and folklore; it was the concept of the zombie.

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  Le Gran Zombi

  Arguably, the most prevailing image of the walking dead is that of the zombie—the walking dead man of Haitian and African culture. Through the years, the zombie has been inextricably linked with voodoo, which is usually taken to be an African/Caribbean spirit religion with overtones of black magic. Similar to the mummies or the walking cadavers of medieval lore, the zombies are usually looked upon as being extremely violent and may even resort to cannibalistic practices at times. This is the impression that has come down to us through countless books and films, but is it actually true? Can such things truly exist? And is the zombie a physical manifestation of some old and dark religion, carrying out the orders of its mysterious priests? The answer is more complex than it might at first appear.

  Walking Dead Man

  Although it is quite fashionable in most films and stories to portray voodoo (or hoodoo, as it is sometimes rendered in American fiction) as some sort of Pagan religion that worships evil gods and employs Questionable rituals—some allegedly involving cannibalism and human sacrifice—the actual voodoo concept is rather different. Before considering the walking dead of African or Caribbean lore, something needs to be said about the voodoo idea as a whole.

  Voodoo

  Even though it is often portrayed as such, the concept of voodoo is not actually a religion at all. Rather it is an umbrella term for a number of spirit-based beliefs and interpretations that have emerged out of Africa and South America. These beliefs include candomle and umbanda (Brazil); arara (Cuba); shango (Cuba and Puerto Rico); and santeria, lukumi, and Mama Wata (the Caribbean and parts of West Africa). There is also a belief system known as voudoux or voudou, which is today the official religion of the West African country of Benin (formerly known as Dahomey and part of French West Africa until 1975). And although such perceptions certainly owe their origins to the tribal religions of the African peoples who traveled across the Caribbean as slaves, they have absorbed many traditions from Western Christianity as well. So although the central core of the religion may well lie in the African spirit world, much of the structure and ritual of the belief may run parallel to Catholic Christianity, which was, after all, the faith of the slaver owners and of those who brought the Africans to Latin America and the Caribbean as slaves.

  And just to complicate matters even further, there are a number of different strands of voodoo belief, each influenced by the area in which it has grown up. We often associate voodoo beliefs with the Haitian Republic, a section of the island of Hispaniola in the Caribbean, which once boasted large slave plantations and which many consider to be its ancestral home, but there are other variants. For example, there is a slightly different belief system in New Orleans and in the bayou country of western Louisiana. Another variant comes from South Carolina, where the Gullah peoples from Angola worked as slaves on the plantations. And yet another variation is to be found in West Africa itself where it takes a number of forms.

  Although the central feature of voodoo is that it is spirit-based (that is, spirit beings come and go through the world interacting with humans as they see fit), all of the aforementioned forms have drawn from a whole range of African and Creole influences. Thus, variants of Caribbean voodoo may contain the healing elements of the water spirits of Mama Wata, a belief found in parts of Burkina Faso (the former West African Republic of Upper Volta). Although New Orleans voodoo may contain some fortune-telling and precognosticatory elements of santaria and lukumi, found on many of the Caribbean islands and in South America. Many have been adapted to suit the perceptions, hopes, and aspirations of the situations in which the believers found themselves.

  Furthermore, although it drew on the central tenets of the “pure” spirit religions from places such as Dahomey, Nigeria, and Angola, voodoo was in many respects a slave perspective. It was the “religion” of many of those who had been brought from Africa, mainly by European and Islamic slaves to work on the great plantations in Southern and South America as well as in the Caribbean. These slaves picked cotton and gathered sugarcane and rice for mostly Christian employers who owned them outright, and who, in some cases, forced them to accept the Christian faith, which some did in a token capacity. However, their real belief was voodoo.

  Given its fragmentary nature and the fact that it was mostly practiced by slaves, voodoo lacked the religious structure that characterized other faiths and belief-systems. It did not, for example, have official ministers or priests in the conventional sense—although there were unofficial “priests,” both men and women, among its practitioners; it did not have regular, established, or recognizable meeting places, and its gatherings were often held in secret and in isolated places on the various plantations. This, of course, led to allegat
ions among some people that the voodoo worshippers were engaging in some sort of Satanic practice such as summoning up devils or consorting with dark primal forces.

  Voodoo was also considered to be a “political” belief. This was quite understandable. Many Caucasian planters lived in great and sprawling estates on which large numbers of slaves also dwelt. The balance between owner and slaves was often an uncertain one at best—the slaves might rise up (as they did in some parts of the Caribbean) and overthrow the owners, taking over the plantation for themselves. This was always a great fear amongst the Caucasian, slave-owning populace and anything that stirred the slaves up was to be discouraged. Voodoo was counted among these incendiary beliefs. Most plantation owners knew very little about it, but it was considered to be a heady mix of Pagan religion and African nationalism, perhaps fuelled by the consumption of raw alcohol, which was believed to form a part of its ritual. The so-called “voodoo priests” were whipping up their followers into some sort of murderous frenzy, and were urging them to turn on their owners. Such ideas only added to the belief that voodoo was somehow connected with evil and black magic, which was trying to subvert the truth and purity of Christianity. Stories circulated in major Christian churches that the Devil gave the followers of the belief supernatural powers through which they could do harm to their owners and create mayhem in God’s ordered world by magical means.