Origins of the Zombie

The origins of the zombie are debatable if you go by the definition of an “animated corpse”. For this reason, we are going to go with the origin of the zombie from Haitian folklore. This is because it is the forefather of the modern zombie that we all know now. Truly the zombie came about when African slaves were brought to the island of Haiti back in the sixteen hundreds. With the importing of African slaves, the indigenous Haitians and African religions would mingle and eventually “voodoo” would be born.

To understand how this is related to zombies, you need to understand the beliefs. Voodoo practitioners believe that the body and soul are separate. In fact, they believe a person has two souls. One is who they are (called the gros-bon-ange), the other is their life force (called the ti-bon-ange). This is how they explain that a loa (a demigod) has possessed them. During a ritual their gros-bon-ange will leave the body so a loa may possess them, and then later they may return to their body. However, a zombie is created when a bokor (evil sorcerer) uses a mix of magic and powders to draw out an individual’s gros-bon-ange, and capture it. This leaves the body in a death-like state. The bokor will then come to collect the body and “resurrect” it as a mindless slave called a “zombi”.

It was not until the nineteen eighties that an anthropologist named Wade Davis that it was discovered how the powders used by these bokors worked. It had, until that point, been an assumption that these zombies were pure folklore. When Davis went around to various bokors and procured samples of the zombi powder, he found they all had a key ingredient. The powders used a neurotoxin from pufferfish, Fugu, to make their victims go into a state near death. Alongside this discovery was also the first record of a real voodoo zombie. A man named Clairvius Narcisse was declared medically deceased at the American Philanthropic Institution, the Schweitzer Hospital in nineteen sixty-three. This was all witnessed and properly documented that he was dead. Then in nineteen eighty he was discovered back in his village. Scotland yard fingerprint files and family interviews confirmed this was in fact the same man (Vuckovic and Romero, 2011 , 18-24).