Real Zombies, the Living Dead, and Creatures of the Apocalypse. Brad Steiger
happen without any warning. No one—not even the wisest adult—knew the exact time when this awesome event might occur. As children, some of us envisioned terrible images of decaying corpses and skeletons pushing aside rotting coffins and reaching up through graveyard dirt to begin to run around in a kind of Halloween gone mad.
Because of our early religious conditioning, some of us, at some level of consciousness, have long expected a sudden onslaught of the undead rising from their graves.
And now, in a vast number of contemporary films, it seems as though the zombie is bringing on the Apocalypse, heralding Armageddon, the last great battle between the forces of Good and Evil—and if these zombie films are accurate, there won’t be many unsullied humans left to fight the undead who will pursue them for their blood and their souls. To make matters worse, in these many dramatic presentations of a Zombie Apocalypse, there appears no sign of help from the promised legions of angels who are to arrive like the heavenly cavalry and save humanity from total destruction.
Real Zombies, the Living Dead, and Creatures of the Apocalypse posits that a real zombie is not the victim of biological warfare, a blast of radiation from a space vehicle, or an unknown virus that escaped a secret laboratory. A real zombie is a reanimated corpse which has most often been brought back to life to serve as slave labor. Originating in West Africa as the worship of the python deity, Voodoo was brought to Haiti and the southern United States, particularly the New Orleans area. Voodoo holds that a supernatural power or essence may enter into and reanimate a dead body.
As my friend Lisa Lee Harp Waugh, a noted necromancer and writer, put it: “A Zombie is a soulless human corpse, still dead, but taken from the grave and endowed by sorcery with a mechanical semblance of life. It is a dead body, which is made to walk and act and move as if it were alive.”
Voodoo lore actually has two types of zombie—the undead and those who died by violence. Those who adhere to the Afro-Caribbean spiritual belief of Vodun, popularized as Voodoo, are very cautious in their approach to a cemetery, for it is there that one is most likely to encounter the unfortunates wraiths who died violently and without adequate time for a proper ritual.
There is a third spirit that may be classified as a zombie—that of a woman who died a virgin. A terrible fate awaits her at the hands of the lustful Baron Samedi, Master of the Netherworld.
For those who embrace the teachings of Voodoo, the zombie, the living dead, are to be feared as very real instruments of a priestess or priest who has yielded to the seduction of evil and allowed themselves to be possessed by negative forces and become practitioners of dark side sorcery.
Waugh said that some Southern zombie-making rituals consist of digging up a fresh corpse from its tomb or deep grave: “The body is then fed strange potions and whispered to in strange chants,” she explained. “Many individuals who have witnessed the evil, dark deed say that it is disturbing to view. You stand frozen in the shadows as a voyeur to some devil dark secret spell. You see a recently dead man being made into a zombie before your eyes.”
Allowing that disturbing scene to linger a moment in one’s mind, Waugh came up with an image much worse: “Picture the image of a beautiful Voodoo Queen riding a rotting corpse like a wild banshee, having dark magical sex in a graveyard. Certainly this would be a sight that you will never forget. Imagine the strange image as candles flair, and mosquitoes bite hard into your skin. Then the spell comes to a conclusion as the zombie corpse comes to life. At that moment the Voodoo Queen takes him into what seems to be a deep kiss—and bites off his tongue to make him her eternal slave.”
Most contemporary experts on New Orleans Voodoo and zombies agree that the legendary Dr. John, believed to be a zombified Voodoo master, created the perfect zombie juices and powders to make a living, breathing zombie that will not die or age and be truly immortal.
Waugh commented that the most dangerous zombies are those that stay infants.
“Voodoo midwives often play this cruel trick on unsuspecting mothers who are about to give birth,” she said. “The Voodoo Queens sit between the legs of the soon-to-be mother, as any midwife would, but they are chanting a secret spell.”
“When the child is emerging from the womb, they will snatch them up at the second of birth. The cunning Midwife Queen will then break the child’s neck and bite off the tip of its tongue as its soul hangs between the point of living and dead, thus making the enfant diabolic as they were called.”
According to Voodoo lore, zombie children taken straight from the womb never age as mere mortals do. They may take over 30 years to grow into a beautiful girl or a handsome boy in its teens. Many Voodoo cultists insist that Marie Laveau, the queen of New Orleans Voodoo, never grew old because she was of zombie birth. Dr. John himself had performed her zombification at birth.
Zombie gumbo is a concoction that some people say Black Cat Mama Couteaux, a Voodoo Queen from Marshall, Texas, made to feed her zombie army each month. It usually consisted of dead animals found on side of the road, onion peelings, and scraps her dogs would not eat.
Marie Laveau fed her zombies a fine gumbo made with fish heads and scales and bones—and anything except banana peels which tend to constipate a zombie.
Some historians of Voodoo suggest that the origin of the word “zombie” may have come from jumbie, the West Indian term for a ghost. Others scholars favor the Kongo word nzambi, “the spirit that has resided in the body and is now freed” as filtering down through the ages as “zombie.” Although the practice of Voodoo and the creation of zombies was familiar to the residents of Louisiana before 1871, a number of etymologists believe that year is about the time that the word “zombi” entered the English language. The word that was originally used by the Haitian Creole people, these scholars maintain, was zonbi, a Bantu term for a corpse returned to life without speech or free will. There are others who argue quite convincingly that Zombi is another name for Damballah Wedo, the snake god so important to Voodoo. In other words, a zombie would be a servant of Damballah Wedo. A common ritual that creates a zombie requires a sorcerer to unearth a chosen corpse and waft under its nose a bottle containing the deceased’s soul. Then, as if he were fanning a tiny spark of fire in dry tinder, the sorcerer nurtures the spark of life in the corpse until he has fashioned a zombie.
In Haiti the deceased are often buried face downward by considerate relatives so the corpse cannot hear the summons of the sorcerer. Some even take the precaution of providing their dearly departed with a weapon, such as a machete, with which to ward off the evil sorcerer.
There are some who say that some Voodoo-Hoodoo Priests can “zombify” someone with a hypnotic stare and words chanted from Dr. John’s “Black Book” (art by Ricardo Pustanio).
There are many terrible tales of the zombie. There are accounts from those who have discovered friends or relatives, supposedly long-dead, laboring in the fields of some sorcerer. One story that went the rounds a few years back had the zombified corpse of a former government administrator—officially dead for 15 years—as having been recognized toiling for a sorcerer in the fields near a remote village in the hills.
The connotations of evil, fear, and the supernatural that are associated with Vodun (also “Voudou” and, popularly, “Voodoo”) originated primarily from white plantation owners’ fear of slave revolts. The white masters and their overseers were often outnumbered 16 to one by the slaves they worked unmercifully in the broiling Haitian sun, and the sounds of Voudou drums pounding in the night made them very nervous.
Vodun or Voudou means “spirit” in the language of the West African Yoruba people. Vodun as a religion observes elements from an African tribal cosmology that may go back 10,000 years—and then it disguises these ancient beliefs with the teachings, saints, and rituals of Roman Catholicism. Early slaves—who were