"To die would be an awfully big adventure..."

I think it’s about time to write about the current object of my affection.

Of course, I’m talking about the book I’ve been reading the past week, The Serpent and the Rainbow: A Harvard Scientist’s Astonishing Journey into the Secret Societies of Haitian Voodoo, Zombies, and Magic by an extraordinary anthropologist/ethnobotonist Wade Davis.

I first came across the topic of Haiti and voodoo society in my cultural anthropology class at OCC (I guess my interlude at community college before transferring to Berkeley paid off). I think our culture’s fascination with macabre topics like zombies and voodoo takes root in our inability to define death.

Sure, we know on a very literal level what death is. But it’s extremely hard to specifically define death; one can say that it is the cessation of the heartbeat or complete brain inactivity, but modern technology makes it hard to actually pin down the moment of death. Refer to wikipedia’s debate over death: Definition of Death

The very concept of death piques our interest because it’s a force that we cannot control. I truly believe that anything outside our human realm of control or understanding increases our culture’s obsession with it, death being one of the more controversial topics because of what follows: the afterlife, or lack thereof.

In Haiti, the vodoun religion can be placed in historical context. In 1791, Haiti was mostly populated by African-born imported slaves. In this year, the black population launched one of the few successful slave revolts in history, lead by Toussaint Louverture, in which the nation overcame the French government and established the only independent black republic in the world. (Louverture is actually a SUPER interesting character, read more about his life here: Toussaint Louverture

Haiti’s African roots were not forgotten. The Haitian peasants organized into secret societies led by vodoun priests, practicing “voodoo” rituals where individuals were able to communicate directly with the many spirits who populate the everyday world. More importantly, Haitians believe that one’s spirit and soul can be captured by a master, a bokor.

This belief is central to the creation or phenomena of zombies. Through his study of Haitian society and interactions with bokors, Wade Davis made the important distinction of how victims of zombification are chosen. In a classic example, a man named Clairvius Narcisse contacted his family 12 years after his supposed death. He had gotten into a land dispute with his brother, who clearly wanted to get him out of the way. Instead of killing him, Narcisse’s brother did something much worse: he paid a bokor to make him into a zombie.

Once someone is poisoned by a bokor, their metabolic heart rate declines rapidly due to an important ingredient in the poison: tetrodotoxin, secreted in the glands of the pufferfish. Actually, in Japanese culture eating small preparations of pufferfish with tetrodotoxin has become a delicacy and a form of art. Culinary chefs have to prepare the fish with just enough of the poison to leave a tingling sensation on the tongue of the consumer, but not enough to cause any actual damage. Read more about tetrodotoxin here: Tetrodotoxin

OKAY, so the person is reduced to a near-death state, pronounced dead undoubtedly, and is buried. BUT THEY AREN’T DEAD. The bokor is able to go to their grave at night, administer a special treatment (still very ambiguous of the ingredients) to revive the person, and take them as slaves. The newly created zombie will have clearly suffered psychological brain damage due to the poisoning, and because of frequent doses of the poison administered every so often, are reduced to a trance-like state in which they cannot control their own actions and are at the whim of their master.

You see, for Haitians, slavery is much worse than death. Think about the African slave trade and the history of all the ancestors who came to Haiti seeking freedom from enslavement. In creating a zombie, the bokor is essentially able to steal the person’s free will, one of humanity’s greatest treasures.

So those like Narcisse who are ousted by their family or local criminals often suffer the fate of angry families or communities. The priests are acting in the collective interest of the village; zombies are therefore created within the social matrix of Haiti’s complex religious society. It’s fascinating to me that politicians have very little control over the citizens of their country in Haiti. Because of their fervent vodoun beliefs, people put more trust in priests and bokors than their government; and many of those with political power are also extremely reliant on the advice of religious leaders.

It’s only been recently that the creation of zombies has been acknowledged by the government of Haiti and by anthropologists around the world, perhaps in the past 20 years or so. Here’s an excerpt from Haitian Penal Code:

Article 249. It shall also be qualified as attempted murder the employment which may be made against any person of substances which, without causing actual death, produce a lethargic coma more or less prolonged. If, after the person had been buried, the act shall be considered murder no matter what result follows.

To avoid the creation of zombies, many people will pierce the heart of family members who have recently died in order to ensure that they are actually dead and cannot be brought back to life.

I guess the fear of being buried alive was a worldwide phenomenon back in the day. Wade Davis talks about Count Karnice-Karnicki, who apparently invented a device to prevent premature burials. He attended the funeral of a young girl, and just as the first pails of dirt landed on the coffin, “a pitiful scream rose from the earth.” I guess from that moment on, premature burials terrified Karnicki, and he invented a contraption made of a box and a long tube fixed into the coffin. On the chest of the dead person a glass ball was attached to a spring in the box, and if the glass ball moved (like if the person started breathing), the spring was released, initiating a chain reaction where a flag sprang above the box and a bell rang for 30 minutes. The long tube allowed oxygen into the coffin while the person inside was being saved from his or her burial.

I had NEVER heard of this device before reading the book. Obviously, you wouldn’t see one adorning many graves today, but back in the late 1800s thousands of Frenchmen left specific instructions in their wills to ensure it would be placed in their tombs, and it was so popular in the US that societies formed to promote subsidized use.

I guess premature burial is probably a fear that not many of us have today, but our fascination with the chilling reality of death still holds.

So apparently, The Serpent and the Rainbow was made into a cheesy 1988 horror film. I would advise against seeing that, and instead urge you to read the book instead: The Serpent and the Rainbow

I promise you it’s worth it.

P.S. Kudos to those who can name the source of the quote in the title of this post. :)