Golems, zombies and familiars – three cultures worth of mystical servants rendered, willingly or by force, from the wilds of nature and the bare, lumbering essence of humanity. This Monday, Wednesday and Friday – His Master’s Voice. Look back at Monday’s post about Golems.

Today: Zombies

Prior to George Romero’s 1968 film “Night of the Living Dead,” zombies weren’t the brain-craving herders that modern corpse reanimation flicks portray. The rudiments of Romero’s bitey stumblers have always been there – walking corpse, glazed expression, inchoate moans and indifferent shamble – but traditional zombies are far less assertive. The classic Haitian zombie (or “zombi”) is supposedly the reanimated corpse of a recently deceased person who has been bodily resurrected to serve the will of a bokor – a powerful voodoo sorcerer. Unlike rabbis, who are thought to attain golem-creating abilities only after years of prayer, atonement and meditation, bokors are believed to innately possess powerful mystic abilities, including the capacity to trap specific aspects of departed human souls, which can then be bottled and sold as “zombie astrals” (e.g., an aspiring artist could buy the bottled artistic aspect of a famous artist’s soul).

To those waiting for the part where the zombies turn on their bokors and go all eat crazy – it doesn’t happen. The controversy surrounding zombies isn’t based around some legendary undead rampage that got everyone feeling iffy and nervous about necromancy; the controversy surrounding zombies is the probability that the so-called “walking dead” servants are actually living people who have been pharmacologically enslaved by covertly administered neurotoxins. According to ethnobotanist Wade Davis, who wrote two pioneering and heavily disputed books on the topic, zombies are created using a combination of two powerful neural agents (one of which, tetrodotoxin, is most famously found in blowfish) to dull a subject’s consciousness and autonomic function, creating both the illusion of death and a totally spaced-out, barely sentient obedience (Note that the power and longevity that Davis ascribed to these chemicals is scientifically dubious).

In truth, zombies probably result as much from mind-altering powders as from Haitian voodoo culture, in which they have always played a significant role. It wouldn’t be unfair to suggest that zombification is far more voluntary than it appears, with the toxins used to induce a prolonged stupor during which the participant, consciously or sub-consciously, fills the socio-cultural role of the zombie, thereby, legitimizing the bokor’s power and reinforcing sorcery’s role, even in a depressingly magic-less modern world.

Friday: Familiars

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