Of The Origin of Zombies!
- A Crazy Little Bird Told Me
- Mar 19
- 4 min read
Considering the widespread presence of zombies in modern movies and television, this article can’t really be a surprise. At some point I was bound to ask myself where and when this all originated.
Let’s start with the origin of the term. The word “zombie” was first recorded in the English language in 1819, in a history of Brazil by the poet Robert Southey, in the form of "zombi", which referred to the Afro-Brazilian rebel leader named Zumbi. Nothing to do with brain eating just yet!
Fast forward almost a century, a Kimbundu-to-Portuguese dictionary from 1903 defines the word nzumbi as soul, while a later Kimbundu–Portuguese dictionary defines it as being a "spirit that is supposed to wander the earth to torment the living". We are getting closer and entering the mildly terrifying!
That being said, while the word itself seems to be pretty recent, the concept of reanimated bodies can be traced back to the Egyptian and Canaanite ancient times, even though such resurrections appeared to have been mostly applied to gods.
One ancient example of flesh eating living dead can be found in the Descent of Ishtar, a Sumerian myth estimated to date from the early first millennium BCE, where Ishtar says:
“If you do not open the gate for me to come in,
I shall smash the door and shatter the bolt,I
shall smash the doorpost and overturn the doors,
I shall raise up the dead and they shall eat the living:
And the dead shall outnumber the living!”
Not scary at all!
But, will you ask, when or where did brain eating zombies come from? The short answer: it came from the imagination of the Western world in the 20th century, based on Caribbean and African folklore.
A little side note, while our modern notion of zombies is descended from Haitian voodoo, the origin can be traced to West Africa, making it to the Caribbean through the slave trade. Some theories go as far as saying that zombies have been in Haitian culture for centuries, possibly originating in the 17th century when West African slaves were brought in to work on Haiti’s sugar cane plantations. Some theories go one step further, stating that the life—or rather afterlife—of a zombie represented the horrific plight of slavery.
In addition to the living dead from ancient texts and from Haitian culture, equivalent notions can also be found in South African cultures, where they are called xidachane in Sotho/Tsonga and maduxwane in Venda.
According to Haitian rural folklore, zombies are real-life individuals that are revived by a bokor (a sorcerer or witch) practicing necromancy (this ain’t no Harry Potter!), who then enslaves and controls them. In order to be a zombie, one needs to be drugged, buried alive, exhumed and then enslaved. The fact there is a specific order to the whole process is once again mildly terrifying!
It would be lovely to believe in magic, even though rather scary if said magic could turn you into zombies, however the truth is that bokors have a tradition of using herbs, shells, fish, animal parts, bones and other objects to create concoctions including “zombie powders,” which contain tetrodotoxin, a deadly neurotoxin found in pufferfish and some other marine species.
To add to that whole scary process, it seems that physical zombies are not the only thing that a bokor can create. They can also create a “zombie astral”, which is a part of the human soul the bokor captures to enhance his spiritual power, but that condition is supposed to only be temporary, as God will then claim the soul back. Let’s not get into a theological discussion about which God, or whether there are requirements for the soul to be claimed back. That would be too big of a controversial discussion!
Silver lining, please notice the absence of super virus or brain eating tendencies!
So how did we go from the Haitian zombie, soul snatching, slave to the bokor to the zombies we now know and love?
It all started during the United States occupation of Haiti (1915–1934), with a book from W. B. Seabrook, called The Magic Island (1929), where the narrator encounters voodoo cults in Haiti and their resurrected thralls. Zombification went international!
Just as an additional fun fact, Seabrooke cited Article 246 of the Haitian criminal code, passed in 1864, which seems (I will let you form your own opinion) to make zombification a criminal offense.
The article states:
“Est qualifié empoisonnement, tout attentat à la vie d’une personne, par l’effet de substances qui peuvent donner la mort plus ou moins promptement de quelque manière que ces substances aient été employées ou administrées, et quelles qu’en aient été les suites.
Est aussi qualifié attentat à la vie d’une personne, par empoisonnement, par l’emploi qui sera fait contre elle de substances qui sans donner la mort, auront produit un état léthargique plus ou moins prolonge, de quelque manière que ces substances aient été employées et quelles qu’en aient été les suites.
Si par la suite de cet état léthargique, la personne a été inhume, l’attentat sera qualifié assassinat.”
Translated loosely, poisoning somebody with a substance that may result in death (no matter how quickly, and no matter if death actually occurs), or may result in a lethargic state (no matter the duration) is considered attempted murder. If the lethargic person gets buried, then the attempted murder turns into murder.
As a side note, whoever is recognised guilty of such poisoning will be sentenced to hard labour for life… they did not mess around at that time!
We are getting close to our modern flesh-eating zombie, which was drawn in part from Richard Matheson's novel I Am Legend (1954) and from George A. Romero's film Night of the Living Dead (1968), even though the term zombie was only used 10 years later in Dawn of the Dead (1978). Fast forward 10 years or so, and we find The Return of the Living Dead (1985), and of course Michael Jackson's music video Thriller (1983), which all introduced the concept of zombies eating brains. Even James Bond embraced them (without brain eating if I recall) in Live and Let Die (1973)!
And the rest, as they say, is history!
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