zombies

Z O M B I E S,
THE SECRET OF THE LIVING DEAD

By A.Lissoni (for kind concession of: www.ufoitalia.net )

The vodoo Gods in the pantheon of Benin. Haiti: politics and magic. The ritual of the "deadsender". William Seabrook meets the non-dead. The terrible poison of the blow-fish. The technique to create a Zombie was finally uncoverd.
By A.Lissoni

January 1996, in the remote African republic of Benin, in the Guinea gulf, President Nicephoro Soglo announces to the population that " a secular injustice has been finally repaired. The v odoo, traditional religion of the country, becomes an official creed, with its own festivity, on par to the two main other creeds practiced in Benin, Christianity and Islam . Four hundred years ago, right from these shores sinisterly called Coast of the Slaves, a million men were abducted from their native land, enslaved and brought to other continents, to die in the cotton plantations. But the ancient religion, the vodoo, never got lost, and comes back more powerful that ever... ".

POLITICS AND RELIGION IN HAITI

        Vodoo, word that in African dialect means God, is a sincretic religion, born during the period of colonialism from the mixture of the spiritualistic and animistic sideboards of the black populations (Malgasci, Bantu, Dahomey, Mandinghi) shipped off to America. This creed, which includes all deities of the African religions, is currently practiced to Haiti and Cuba, in Brazil, in the Antilles and even in parts of the USA, mainly by the black communities of Florida and Louisiana, known by the name of hodoo. This creed is a magical religion. Its clergymen are called hungan if dealing with white magic, or bokor if practicing black magic. They can indifferently invoke the Rada spirits, benevolent home deities, and the Petrò, demoniac spirits. The latter though are difficult to control, and their summoning is generally prepared only by specially skillful black wizards. These satanist wizards had, during the dictatorship of the Duvalier family (Papa and Baby Doc), a fundamental political function. The Duvaliers, as a matter of fact, used black magic (or, at the lowest, the terror that it aroused) in order to submit the superstitious population of Port-Au-Prince. Besides, black magic would be used to drive away from the island both Baby Doc and the American marines sent from the United Nations after the coup d'état.
The most dreadful sorcery, which the prestige and the limitless power of the bokor on the local population is based on , is the obscure and extremely secret ritual of the "deadsender", better known as a zombie's resurrection.

HOW TO RAISE A ZOMBIE FROM THE GRAVE

        Everybody knows, thanks to the fanciful and fictional horror films of George Romero, what a zombie is: an undead magically resurrected and forced to obey forever to its master-wizard.
The resurrection of a zombie is practiced only by those bokor that know the right ritual prayers and have a sufficiently strong mind. To resurrect a dead person, as a matter of fact, it is indispensable to go in the middle of the night to a cemetary and to evoke, in front of the headstone, a demon. Just the power of a demon, as a matter of fact, can give the amount of energy that allows a dead body to come back to life . To be able to command the zombie, the wizard has to possess its soul. This is evoked, captured, and then confined in a vase, similar to that of Aladdin's lamp, whose possession allows the bokor to overrule the willpower of the resurrected. Then Baron Samedi, the lord of graveyards and caretaker of souls, is invoked and put to sleep with the Creole spell "Do' mi pa fumé, Baron Samedi", "sleep well Baron Samedi". As soon as the lord of graveyards lowers his guard, the bokor can steal the zombie's soul , calling it to himself with the sentence "Mortoo tomboo miyi", "dead man, from the grave to me!"
At this point the corpse gets dig up and resuscitated . Without its own spirit, and therefore without his own will , the zombie, moved from the demon, is now ready to carry out, any action, even the most brutal orders. Modern cinematography has invented many false details about zombies (it is said, for example, that they eat human flesh only and that they only die if they are hit on the head); the only faithful report about Haitian sideboards is that of writer William Seabrook, an explorer who in the Twenties lived in Haiti and who was in part introduced to its mysteries.
Seabrook, in the volume "magical island" (1929), tells: "the full moon slowly rose up in the sky, turning hills and cotton plantations white , and I was sitting in front of the house door with Costantino Polinice, a Haitian renter, chatting about demons,werevolves and vampires. The conversation fell on the subject of zombies. I have heard that a zombie is a body without a soul , clinically dead, who magically regains a purely mechanical appearence of life ; a corpse that acts, moves, walks as if it was alive, thanks to the crafts of a wizard. This last one choose s a recently buried corpse that didn't have any time to start decomposing yet, and he submits it so some sort of galvanization. Then he enslaves it either to get it committing some crime, or to commit him to, as it happens in most frequently heavy agricultural or domestic jobs. As soon as the dead man appears to be relaxing, his owner beats it up like a beast of burden. When I told Polinice, my skeptical friend answered to me: ' Believe me, it's not a superstition. It unfortunately is part of our uses and customs. These are such real things that you white men would not even suspect. Have you ever wondered why poor peasants bur y their dead under massive masonry towers? What other reason could there be, but that to defend one's dead?".
Seabrook continues mentioning the case of "Ti-Joseph du Colombier, an old black man, who some morning arrived at the Hasco fields followed by a group of nine ragamuffin with a dopey expression, who were dragging themselves on the road walking at a shuffled pace . Ti-Joseph put them all in a row and the creatures did not oppose his actions, and they remained standing with a gaze and empty look". Afterwards Ti-Joseph set the zombies to work in the fields. Those strange creatures, kept away from the curiosity of the passers-by, worked many hours a day under the sun; they did not speak, they did not show any emotion, and they were limiting themselves to dig the earth. They slept very little and they ate only b oiled and unseasoned bananas. This unusual form of exploitation went on for a long time , until one day, while Ti-Joseph was not there, a woman selling salted pistachio nuts met the zombi es and offered them some food. Now, according to the Haitian traditions, the living dead can eat anything except meat and salty food, penalty the breaking of the enchantment that keeps them alive. "It sufficed for the zombies to feel the salty taste - Seabrook continues - for them to realize that they were dead. With frightful screaming they ran towards the cemetary. As soon as they arrived there they started running through the graves. Everyone, after finding their own grave, started to energetically rasp the stones and the soil, trying to get in. As soon as they got in touch with their graves, they heavily fell in, already rotting corpses... ". The most impressive episode mentioned by Seabrook as authentic is his face to face with a zombie. "One afternoon, in broad daylight, Polinice and I were acrossing the path that leads to Picmy. Suddenly slowing down the pace of his horse, Polinice pointed me out on the side of the mountain, about a hundred of metres away from us, a stony terrace where three men and a woman were digging the earth amongst cotton plants. My first impression on the zombies was strange; sure they did not belong to the natural order of things. They worked like beasts, like automatons. Polinice touched the shoulder of a zombie and this docilely turned the face .
Those that I saw, although being prepared, hit me deeply and made me feel nauseous. Do not believe that I was under the effect of some suggestion, those were the eyes of a dead man indeed, not of a blind person. They were gazing, dull, bare of a glance. This so much was enough to make its face look horrible, deeply empty, as if there was nothing in it. It is not enough to say that it didn't have an expression... Later on I convinced myself that those zombies probably were nothing but loonies, some chronic idiots exploited for the work in the fields. It was a rational explaination. But the story did not have to be concluded here. Days after I found myself talking about it with doctor Antoine Villiers, an iron and pragmatic scientific mind, who told me: ' I don't believe it is possible to resuscitate the dead at all. . I don't believe in the resurrection of Lazzarus and not even in the one of Christ. However, I am not sure that there isn't something horrible in the case of the zombies. I believe it is the case to talk about criminal witchcraft '. And saying this he showed me a page of the criminal code of Ha iti, which said: Article 249. Anyone dispensing to someone else substances that, without being lethal, are capable of inducing a lethargic sleep, either long or short, will be charged of homicide. Anyone who, moreover burying a person who has absorbed such substance, will be charged of homicide... "

THE MAGICAL POWDER OF THE BOKOR

        So perhaps the secret of zombies is just in the dispensing of " substances capable to cause a lethargic sleep". The American anthropologist Wade Davis, author of the book "the snake and the rainbow "(which also inspired a film), claims to have uncovered the trick used by bokors to transform human beings in zombi es. Bokors spray a yellowish powder apparently capable to cause sudden death, in the nostrils of their victims while they're still well alive. This powder, analyzed from an American farmaceutical corporation in behalf of Davis , contains tetrodotoxine, a poison extract from the Haitian blow-fish, able to paralyze the nervous centers. Bokor s mix with this drug other substances, useless as much as common folklore, such as graveyard soil and dust of a black rooster's feathers, just to create a bit of an act . Therefore they spray it against their victim. This one falls in catalepsy and, allegedly dead, gets buried. And, pertified, it assists aware toits own funeral and its own burial, without being able to move!
This traumatic experience, mixed with a good dose of superstizion, destroys the mental health of the victim, who ends up loosing its mind, falling in a state of perpetual and continuous autism.
The very same night the bokor exhumes the unfortunate and resuscitates it giving it an antidote whose formula has yet to be discovered.

The victim, by now dumb and semideficient, actually believes to be a dead person resurrected from the grave. And it yields to this new existence of slavery and labour. In the Seventies, French television managed even to interview a former zombie who managed to successfully retrieve both freedom and part of his mental health (and this occurrs rarely). The man, named Narcisse Clovis, lived however in a psychiatric hospital, not having disposed of all the deleterious effects of the bokor's drug.
Although western medicine has succeeded to partially explain the secret of the zombies transformation, Davis has declared, in 1987: "the zombi powder and its active ingredient, tetrodotoxine, are subject to studies in the United States and Europe; although, the dynamic of action of the powder remains a mystery... ".

by A. Lissoni (for kind concession of: www.ufoitalia.net )
Translated by: Alice "Sionnach"