Zombie

In the African-Caribbean cult of voodoo, a zombie represents a creature whose soul has been occupied by another person through evil magic and whose body is completely at the disposal of the person who performed the ritual. According to the generally accepted meaning, a zombie is a creature that rises from the dead to commit crimes. The inhabitants of Haiti, the birthplace of voodoo and a country where this cult is very widespread, believe in zombies, dead people who are revived by a black magician with the help of voodoo rituals, which are a mixture of African magic and religion. However, they do not come to life completely. A zombie can breathe, eat, drink, work, even talk; he can perform all the physical activities of a living person, but without being aware of what he is doing. They can be recognized by the look and expression on their faces - their eyes are always motionless, their gaze indefinite, and their face expressionless. Zombies are more dead than alive, they are like robots of flesh and blood, they are deprived of feelings, they have no control over themselves and they do not remember anything from the previous life. Also, they do not understand what is happening to them and they can be easily manipulated, because they do not have intelligence. A zombie is usually a body controlled by a bokor - a cruel sorcerer who magically turns the dead into mindless slaves. The word "zombie" appears in many African languages, and is believed to be derived from the word zumbi, which in Zaire refers to the media, ghosts and spirits of the deceased, while in Congo it means "fetish". The same word, zombie, also refers to the god with the image of a snake, the deity of certain peoples of East Africa. In the modern voodoo sense, it refers to the deity of the serpent who revives the dead when the sorcerer has chosen to be his servant.

There are many stories of zombies in Haiti. Many claim to have seen the dead working in the fields of cotton, sugar cane and coffee. Some say that they saw their relatives wandering the streets of the city like crazy, which would not be strange to them if it were not for the relatives who passed away a few months earlier. There are also those who believe that zombies are not dead but living people whose sorcery was taken away by a magician in order to use them as slaves. In any case, what is certain is that the vast majority of Haitians are afraid of sorcerers who have the power to turn a dead man into a zombie. In order to prevent the possibility of turning their family members into the living dead, Haitians have a custom of covering the grave with massive stone slabs and thus protecting them from desecration. Those who cannot afford such an expensive grave monitor the deceased for days, waiting for the body to rot and become unusable. Sometimes a knife is left next to the deceased so that he can defend himself from the sorcerer. Those most threatened that their loved ones will be turned into zombies apply even more extravagant defensive measures. Some inject poison into the body of the deceased, or mutilate it with a knife, and sometimes kill it another time, just in case. A less drastic measure is to put needles with cut ears and balls of thread in the grave, as well as thousands of tiny sesame seeds. It is believed that then the spirit of the deceased will be busy with unsuccessful attempts to insert the thread into the needle without ears and in counting sesame seeds, so they will not hear the summoning of the sorcerer. Outside the cities, graves are placed as close to the roads as possible so that sorcerers would not steal bodies for fear of being noticed.

Canadian anthropologist and ethnobotanist Wade Davis, a professor at Harvard University, traveled to Haiti in 1982 to investigate the legend of zombies and came to the conclusion that a man can be made a zombie with the help of two magical powder mixtures, popularly known as zombie powder. Using the first mixture, the victim would be brought to a state of clinical death; her relatives and friends, believing that she was dead, would bury her, after which the sorcerer would dig her up and revive her. Then, with the help of another mixture, which has a psychoactive effect, the victim would be managed. Davis was so convinced of the miraculous effect of powder that he wrote the cult book Snakes and Rainbows (published in 1985), which had a huge impact on the rest of the world and sparked a debate about zombies. Davis' book and zombie powder theory have caused a lot of controversy, and it has never been independently confirmed that this mysterious powder really works. According to the book Snake and Rainbow, a horror film of the same name was made in 1988.

Many people believe that there is still a rational explanation for such and similar cases of dead people, buried, and seen months or years later still alive, but without reason and control. Among those who do not believe in the supernatural was Antoine Villiers, a French doctor who lived in Haiti for years. He did not believe that anyone could be resurrected from the dead. According to the theory advocated by Willie, some sorcerers in Haiti know drugs that can cause deep numbness, which can be equated with death. The sorcerers would dig up their victim "after death" and bury him and bring her back to life, but not to a normal life, because under the influence of these drugs, the functioning of the brain would stop. Some evidence confirms that knowledge of such drugs existed in West Africa, from where most slaves arrived in Haiti.