When we hear the word zombies immediately come to mind those clumsy beings from horror movies whose lack of intellect they compensate with a relentless ferocity. “Living Dead” has earned a place within the popular imaginary driven by cinema and television, and its presence has given rise to a whole subgenre within the seventh art and graphic novels.
But, in reality, the assumption of their existence is not the work of film scriptwriters, and their presence can be traced back several centuries to ancient occult sciences. On the other hand, it is believed that the image of the zombie has social connotations derived from the slavery that prevailed in Haiti, when this figure began to be known (this is only one of the stories).
The Origins of Zombies
Far from the explanation that movies and television series have popularized to justify their creation, generally related to biological pandemics, in Haiti it is believed that zombies are created by a spell derived from the voodoo cult, although there is no direct relationship between the two. The fact is that the voodoo cult has a high impact on the culture of the country, which is considered an ancestral sociological and religious phenomenon.
The tradition in Haiti, regarding this subject, assures that the sorcerers of the voodoo rite have powers that grant them the possibility of reviving the dead to turn them into slaves completely subjected to the will of the sorcerer.
How Zombies Are “Born”
The sorcerer chooses his victim while he is still alive and visits him during the night, riding a horse against the grain. When he arrives at the house, he sucks the soul of his victim through a door or window and keeps it in a jar prepared for that purpose. The ritual indicates that once this is done, the chosen person is immersed in a kind of stupor that leads to death.
When the victim has been buried, the sorcerer goes to the cemetery and invokes Baron-Samedi, lord of the dead, since his consent is necessary to take control over the body of one of his subjects. When consent has been granted, the sorcerer pronounces “Sleep peacefully, Baron-Samedi.” He immediately goes to the grave of his victim and pronounces the command: “To me the dead from the graves.”
Once the body has been disinterred, the sorcerer moves it to the site where the transformation will take place, but not before having passed the corpse in front of what was once its home, so that when it awakens from its lethargy, it will be unable to recognize any detail from when it was alive, including its relatives.
When the sorcerer finally arrives at the place destined for the transformation, he uncovers the container in which he has kept the soul of the deceased and places it under the nose of the dead person so that the spirit of the deceased re-enters the body. From this moment on, the sorcerer performs a series of incantations to reanimate the dead person, and as soon as he gives a slight sign of life, he makes him drink a potion with which his old personality is annulled forever.
Once the ritual is completed, the sorcerer becomes the absolute master of the living dead, a being lacking all intelligence and reasoning who, from now on, will slavishly obey his master’s orders without the slightest objection.
This story was originally published in Spanish in Cultura Colectiva
