It took us a long time to run across a real walking zombie. You’d think it would have happened sooner, given all the other kinds of strange beings we’ve seen, but no. Twenty years on the hunt, give or take, and finally we get our first zombie. She was cute, too, until she started killing people.
The thing about zombie and revenant lore is that there’s so much of it that you almost can’t sort through and find out what’s really true. Everybody’s seen Night of the Living Dead, but trust us: as far as we know, getting bitten by a zombie doesn’t turn you into one. It might get you dead, though. And anyway, most zombies don’t bite. Some of the other ghoulish revenants do, but we’re talking about zombies here.
The word itself comes from nzambi, used in Bantu languages to talk about spirits of dead people or ancestors. In some West African religions, Nzambi is also the name of a creator god, the kind who presided over creation and then stepped back to watch things unfold. On its way to the West Indies, the word came to be used for the prototypical Haitian zombie, famous from voodoo lore.
Creation of a zombie in this tradition involves a combination of sorcery and nerve poison extracted from the pufferfish. The bokor (more about them when we talk about witchcraft) who concocts the potion just has to sit and wait once it’s administered. The victim suffers from increasing lethargy and finally lapses into a state virtually indistinguishable from death. Often the victim is buried, and the bokor can then exhume him and put him to work. Haitian history is full of zombies—hell, the big sugar companies all used them as an uncomplaining workforce. The only problem is that if you feed one of these zombies salt or meat, it will be triggered to recognize its state and will shuffle off to the grave. (There’s salt again.)
But back to our zombie. She was reanimated by a deft bit of Greek necromancy, which is more often a tradition of communicating with the dead and using them for divination. Even Odysseus got up to this in Book XI of The Odyssey, which interested Dad enough that he copied the relevant passage into his journal.
Here Perimedes and Eurylochus held the victims, while I drew my sword and dug the trench a cubit each way. I made a drink-offering to all the dead, first with honey and milk, then with wine, and thirdly with water, and I sprinkled white barley meal over the whole, praying earnestly to the poor feckless ghosts, and promising them that when I got back to Ithaca I would sacrifice a barren heifer for them, the best I had, and would load the pyre with good things. I also particularly promised that Tiresias should have a black sheep to himself, the best in all my flocks. When I had prayed sufficiently to the dead, I cut the throats of the two sheep and let the blood run into the trench, whereon the ghosts came trooping up from Erebus—brides, young bachelors, old men worn out with toil, maids who had been crossed in love, and brave men who had been killed in battle, with their armor still smirched with blood; they came from every quarter and flitted round the trench with a strange kind of screaming sound that made me turn pale with fear. When I saw them coming I told the men to be quick and flay the carcasses of the two dead sheep and make burnt offerings of them, and at the same time to repeat prayers to Hades and to Persephone; but I sat where I was with my sword drawn and would not let the poor feckless ghosts come near the blood till Tiresias should have answered my questions.
This is the standard kind of Greek necromancy, although some of the more powerful practitioners added katabasis to their repertoires. In katabasis, a spirit projection of the necromancer travels to the underworld. A related practice, known as katadesmoi, is one of the more dangerous things you can do. A spirit is summoned and the necromancer imposes a quest on it. As you can imagine, most spirits aren’t thrilled with the idea, and few things can go wrong faster than katadesmoi.
Another thing you can do in various necromantic practices, of course, is take katadesmoi one step further and fix your summoned spirit inside a body. Agrippa’s Three Books of Occult Philosophy mentions this, and it’s a staple of occult tradition. Dad’s take on it is pretty sharp:
Death is the separation of the soul from the body. The creation of a zombie is the rebinding of body and soul via necromancy. The animated body can move, speak, even think, but it still can’t outrun physical decay. Zombies don’t last very long, and the more able they are to think, the more they suffer from the same derangement that eventually gets any spirit that’s been prevented from moving on. It’s a rule: if spirits can’t move on, the tug of the afterlife sooner or later drives them mad.
Yep, this is exactly what happened with our zombie. A young woman died in a car crash while arguing with her cheating boyfriend on her cell phone. That’s a recipe for an angry spirit right there, but this time the dead girl had an admirer who just happened to know a little bit about Greek necromancy from his studies with a prominent classics professor. He brought the girl back for a little forbidden love and stood by while she killed the boyfriend and then tried to get the girl the boyfriend had cheated with. We stepped in there and plugged her with silver bullets, but they didn’t take her down. Then her loverboy necromancer rubbed her the wrong way and she killed him, too.
Meanwhile, we were trying to figure out what to do with her. She’d already survived silver bullets, and she’d fallen on a pair of scissors while trying to kill her roommate, so we were at a loss.