Conclusion

Knowing this first, that in the last days there will come scoffers walking after their own lusts. ~ St. Peter¹

~

Our sleep is interspersed with macabre visions. We howl amidst our nightmares. We awaken to the bitter purges. False hopes. Rusty daggers. Gangrened flesh. Paraded before our carnivalesque strings. We swallow the pungent oil of failure. Poison of lightning paralyzes our muscles. Perforation of the intestines. Zombies head slowly adjacent to shadows; approaching heavily, rocked by the soft, deaf music of their half-hearted souls. ~ Frankétienne²

In November of 2009, “a voice both familiar and mysterious” spoke to the great Haitian writer and painter Frankétienne (b. 1936),³ imploring him to pen a play about an earthquake. He duly complied by writing Melovivi ou Le Piège.⁴ It was scheduled to be first staged in Haiti’s capital city of Port-au-Prince, where he lives, on January 29, 2010. But during a rehearsal on January 10, the whole world came tumbling down, literally, with a massive earthquake crushing the city and environs and killing a quarter of a million people in a few terrifying minutes. I lost people dear to me that day, as did he. Frankétinne’s home was seriously damaged, as was mine. Living in Philadelphia at the time, I felt dreadfully helpless, awaiting news from loved ones, which was mournfully slow in coming. I thought, What else to do but pray?

In a way, for me at least, writing is like prayer, as I imagine it is for Frankétienne and it was for St. Peter. So, once I regained some composure, the next morning, in tears, I wrote a short essay for the Philadelphia Inquirer, stating that “several reports from Port-au-Prince tell of people gathering to pray and to sing hymns. The healing process begins immediately in Haiti; it always has, and this is reflected every time when someone says—a common expression in Haiti—‘Bondye bon’ (‘God is good’).” That same day, Haiti’s president, René Préval (1943–2017), lamented that “once this first wave of humanitarian compassion is exhausted, we will be left as always, truly alone, to face new catastrophes and see restarted, as if in a ritual, the same exercises of mobilization.” Like the day before, the sun set over a crushed city, only now it was “covered with rising smoke and human wailing.”⁵ How could this not be the end of the world? Though most Haitians probably had no concern then about zombies, from afar others would wonder if zombies would soon arrive or emerge out of the rubble and dust or out of mass graves to finish us all off, “scoffers walking after their own lust.”

One thing that zombies and earthquakes have in common—beyond their capacity to upset, overturn, transform, or annihilate us and the sacred order, whether that be the status quo, orthodoxy, cushiness, the episteme, or privilege—is their association with the apocalypse. Zoroastrianism, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, as we have seen, all prophesy that a catastrophically destructive earthquake is a sign that the end is at hand. Interestingly, though, Haitian Vodou does not; in fact, Vodou harbors no apocalyptic concerns. But Vodou did concoct the zombie, who has subsequently been appropriated by the wider world and metamorphosed into the other, into a contagion, an agent of culminating doom. A soldier in a war to devour us and bring our world to an end, perhaps by biting you, infecting you, and transforming you into one of them before it is truly over. We hear often of ways to survive the zombie apocalypse, and we might manage to evade or eliminate the contagious, but there is no surviving the apocalypse. The infected other bites, infects, and portends the end. Though formerly human, it is thus okay to slaughter them, deport them, demonize them, ghettoize them, or imprison them to preserve that order and all the social, racial, religious, cultural, and economic privileges that it cocoons. For its part, the apocalypse doesn’t bite, of course. It simply swallows everything in creation: Muslims, immigrants, walls, America, the sacred order, the homeless, the affluent, the master, the slave, and even zombies—all.

God is great…. Allah hu akbar. This is the most important thing, the most sacred thing, that a Muslim utters every day, that Muslims first hear at birth and last hear at the moment of death. Recall from Chapter Four that the Quran warns us that a massive earthquake will harken the End and Judgment Day. In fact, there is an entire sura (99), or short chapter, in this world-transformative text that reads as follows:

When the earth is shaken with its (final) earthquake.

And when the earth throws out its burdens,

And man will say: “What is the matter with it?”

That Day it will declare its information (about all what happened over it of good or evil).

Because your Lord has inspired it.

That Day mankind will proceed in scattered groups that they may be shown their deeds.

So whosoever does good equal to the weight of an atom (or a small ant), shall see it.

And whosoever does evil equal to the weight of an atom (or a small ant), shall see it.

Islam is a culmination of monotheistic revelation on many levels, so it is unsurprising that the Hebrew Bible, “The Book,” contains earlier apocalyptic references to an earthquake at the End of Time. To cite just one example, in the book of Isaiah (9:6) we read: “Thou shalt be visited of the LORD of hosts with thunder, and with earthquake, and great noise, with storm and tempest, and the flame of devouring fire.” In that part of their Bible that Christians often refer to as the “New Testament,” such trembling prophecies are reiterated echoingly, as in this passage from the Gospel of Matthew (24:7): “For nation shall rise up against nation, and kingdom against kingdom: and there shall be famines, and pestilences, and earthquakes, in diverse places.” Furthermore, in the book of Revelation, the last book of the(ir) Bible, we read that the end of the world will be accompanied by “swarming imagery of trumpets, thrones, seals, vials of wrath, lamps of fire, angels, plagues, lightning, thunderings, earthquakes, falling stars, fire, blood, black sun and bloody moon, a menagerie of fantastic beasts.”⁶ That is robustly telling and terrifying, but there is no mention of zombies here. Thankfully. I think vials of divine wrath, earthquakes, and plagues are more than enough already. Along with the “menagerie of fantastic beasts.” But who knows? Perhaps zombies will be part of this menagerie, like St. Peter’s lustful deriding walkers.

In the aforementioned religions, save Vodou, plagues are also signs of the end, the apocalypse, doom, gloom, and Judgment Day. As I conclude this book, we are in the midst of a plague that has killed millions throughout the world. And there is still more destruction and pain swirling all around us. Earthquakes recently killed more than 50,000 people in Turkey and Syria, for instance, and floods throughout the world thousands more There has always been this swirl of pain and destruction. In this time of devastating human-induced climate change—which, when you think about it, is kind of like a slow earthquake—it is so striking that the Quran speaks of the apocalypse as being in part the fault of humanity: “when the earth throws out its burdens.” As in, cast off the perpetrators. It is arresting to consider here that “climate crisis is killing many more people around the world than coronavirus, but there is no panic about this,” as Slavoj Žižek (b. 1949) points out. There will come a day when such panic, should it awaken, will be muted, powerless, and pointless, whether regarding a dying earth that kills us or the latest pandemic that does the same on a lesser scale. In the latter, and thinking speciocentrically with the great Slovenian philosopher, “the present crisis demonstrates clearly how global solidarity and cooperation is in the interest of the survival of all and each of us.” It is a “sad fact,” furthermore, “that we need a catastrophe to be able to rethink the very basic features of the society in which we live.”⁷

From the biblical prophet Daniel to the sixteenth-century false messiah Sabbatai Sevi (1627–1676) and the toweringly influential modern philosopher G. W. F. Hegel (1770–1831), throughout history many sages have thought, preached, and taught that we human beings have a crucial role to play in bringing about the apocalypse, and millions have listened and heeded their call. They surely did not have global warming in mind, but that is precisely what we are doing, playing a role that perhaps Daniel, Sevi, and Hegel did not have in mind when receiving visions and ideas of the apocalyptic stripe. So, as the Quran prophesizes, we will indeed be thrown out, a tired burden that can no longer be endured and thus must be done away with and judged. The will of God salvaging the earth, transforming it into a kingdom or garden over which to rule and revel eternally with the righteous believers, the reviled be damned—literally.

Or perhaps humans will (or already do) make or become zombies to do the work of God in annihilating humanity as we know it and transforming the world into a heavenly paradise for the righteous? In one of the first, if not the first, short stories to give zombies at least a fuzzy/furry apocalyptic role, the 1961 “Doctor Zombie and His Furry Little Friends,” Robert Sheckley’s (1928–2005) narrator and, I guess you could say, protagonist is a vague though pensive man (seemingly a professor doing research), who lives alone in an apartment in Mexico City. This nameless American is called by the locals “Doctor Zombie” because he won’t eat salt. (Recall that in Haiti, salt has the power to wake zombies up to their condition and either drive them back to their graves or awaken them to a life of seeking revenge against their oppressors.) Doctor Zombie faces eviction when suspected by a local police magistrate of breeding puppies in his small dwelling, where pets are strictly forbidden. However, neither the magistrate nor the landlord suspects that, in fact, Doctor Zombie is using his “small permeable apartment for secret ungodly experiments of a terrible nature”: breeding his little furry friends to, in effect, play the role of zombies during the apocalypse. The point: “You see, something must be done. I intend my hybrids to act as a counterbalance, a load to control the free-running human engine that is tearing up the earth and itself.”⁸

We have covered too much ground in this book—3500 years, five plus religions, numerous novels, scriptures, video games, zombie walks, and now zombie puppies in Mexico City—for me to provide a suitable summary of the key points, but please let me try, albeit briefly. The ancient Persian religion of Zoroastrianism is the origin of the idea of the apocalypse, and its central ideas were picked up in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Of course, there are differences in these great religions’ eschatologies, but several key beliefs are shared across all these faith traditions.  Most people in the world today, and most people since the advent of Christianity and the remarkable emergence of Islam, have accepted these key beliefs as truth. Therefore, we are talking here about some of the most momentous ideas in world history. To provide an ecumenical sketch:

• God is the creator of all and prescribes laws for us to follow.

• We are to worship God and God alone (though in Christianity this gets a bit complicated with the notion of the Trinity, One God in Three Persons, as it does in Zoroastrianism with Mithra).

• How we live, think, act, worship and feel should be in accordance with said laws.

• Our eternal fate depends on the whole of our thoughts, acts, devotions, and feelings.

• The world as we know it will end one day, and it will be cataclysmic, apocalyptic.

• There is a heaven and there is a hell, the former for the righteous and the latter for the unrighteous.

• The living and the dead, the latter to be resurrected for this moment, will be judged at the End of Time.

• Heaven will be paradise eternally, while hell will be fire and suffering eternally (though each of these ethical monotheistic religions has a long history of theology that debates the permanence of hell—hopefully, in the longest run, we will all wind up in heaven!).

There is nothing about zombies in these religions. So the question is, how, when, and why did they crash the apocalyptic party? It really was in 1968, a most turbulent and trying year for America and much of the Western world, when George Romero launched his epochal film Night of the Living Dead. It is providentially or otherwise downright fitting that Pennsylvania would be the place for the collision of the zombie and the apocalypse, a place that its founder William Penn (1644–1718), an English Quaker, referred to as a “Holy Experiment.” Penn first arrived in America in 1682, but already there was apocalyptic fervor here, fueled by a widespread belief that this was where the Second Coming of Jesus Christ would occur. There was also an obsession with monsters in the “New World.”

Virtually all schoolchildren in the United States learn that Philadelphia is named as the City of Brotherly Love, something that is echoed by docents and guides for the thousands of tourists who visit this city each year. Though that is not terribly incorrect, the truer fact is that Penn had in mind the book of Revelation, Chapter Three, in choosing a name for the capital city of his commonwealth/colony: “And to the angel of the church in Philadelphia write: He who is holy, who is true, who has the key of David, who opens and no one will shut, and who shuts and no one opens, says this: . . . I am coming quickly.” And, as we saw in some detail earlier in our book, Revelation is altogether replete with monsters, some of whom make witches and sorcerers and even zombies pale pitifully in comparison. Penn, who owned slaves and officiated over the only known witch trial in the history of Pennsylvania, thus envisioned his colony as ground zero for the apocalypse: “God will plant in Americha & it shall have its … Glorious day of Jesus Christ in us Reserved to the last dayes, may have the paste part of the world, the setting of the son or western world to shine in.”⁹

English Puritans in Massachusetts had executed their first “monster,” their first “witch,” a few decades earlier, in 1648, while religious leaders there, like Cotton Mather (1663–1726), would construct a “New World mythology” that “imagined the Christian experience as a war with monstrous beings inspired by the devil,” as W. Scott Poole explains. “The Puritans embodied the American desire to destroy monsters,” while their witch hunts reflected “the American tendency to desire the monster, indeed, to be titillated by it.”¹⁰ When you read both Mather and Penn, it almost sounds as if the two would have been excellent co-screenwriters for Hollywood’s next zombie apocalyptic blockbuster. A line from Mather’s rather gripping 1698 thriller The Wonders of the Invisible World : “An army of Devils is horribly broke in upon the place which is the Center, and after a sort, the First–born of our English Settlements: and the Houses of the Good People there are fill’d with the doleful Shrieks of their Children and Servants, Tormented by Invisible Hands, with Tortures altogether preternatural.”¹¹ Entertaining, indeed.

It is also fitting for the collision of zombies and the apocalypse to have occurred in the United States during one of the most horrendous years in the nation’s history, 1968, a year when thousands of Americans were dying in the Vietnam War and thousands of others were returning home maimed and/or suicidal. A year of protests against the war and against racial injustice, race riots, and the tragic assassinations of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Senator Robert Kennedy. The collision of the zombie and the apocalypse seemingly also could only have happened in a nation that had by then become the world’s greatest bastion of capitalism and that was, of course, home to Hollywood, and responsible for the theft of the zombie from Haiti. Out of this sociocultural cocktail, the colonial millenarian theologies of the likes of Mather and Penn, and the obsession with monsters, zombies found the perfect time and place to become contagious and seize the day as barely but adequately agentival beasts of doom for the End Time. And entertaining and profitable, to boot. Zombies’ incorporation into apocalyptic thought, which is thus quite recent, has been forcefully driven by capitalism. It has been driven by the quest to take advantage of humanity’s subconscious (or conscious) fears to sell movies, books, video games, and Zombie Pillow Pets (which are currently out of stock, but presumably can be purchased at Walmart for a mere $31.25).

The undead have changed dramatically over the years, and they have been appropriated and culturally stolen from Haiti as cash-churning others, monsters, unpaid slave laborers. I cannot help evoking President Préval, who could just as well have been speaking about zombies as the earthquake: once the zombie has been culturally stolen and generated billions for foreigners, “we will be left as always, truly alone, to face new catastrophes and see restarted, as if in a ritual.” Never in Haiti have zombies been fast or contagious, but Hollywood didn’t care, leaving Haiti “truly alone” and speeding them up and sending them out as the fictitious infectious other who pulls the strings of our deepest fears of the real other. Fear is profitable, after all, and so, obviously, are zombies. As are slaves.

Zombies do make lots of money, not for themselves, of course, but for filmmakers, toy makers, video game makers, actors, artists, and musicians, to the global tune of five billion dollars a year. Slaves in a capitalist system of exploitation. Our fears are among the most profitable things in life, alas, just as our fears have made people religious throughout history. Death is mysterious, after all, and to most people, I believe, terrifying. Thus, beliefs about the apocalypse and, much more recently, the zombie captivate without consoling, titillate without tenderness, unless, of course, you have faith. For faith wards off “the menagerie of fantastic beasts” and at times effaces the haunting depths into which nightmares can plunge us, at least when we awaken. Yet faith itself is born in fear and, paradoxically, it is faith itself that created the zombie.

For many scholars in the neurosciences and evolutionary biology, fear is elemental to our survival and has been throughout the history of our species. We are, in fact, prewired to fear unseen things, and in our mind exists something enduring from our evolutionary past and survival instinct, something referred to by scholars as the HADD: Hyperactive Agency Detection Device. What is this? Out of the instinct to survive, our earliest ancestors detected agency in things that were uncertain but, in some way, real, like ruffling leaves in a bush. Perhaps it was caused by the wind but, for the sake of survival, better to pick up the baby, abandon your effort to gather berries, and run like hell when the bush starts making noise. Recent advances in cognitive science have piqued the attention of some scholars of religion, and, per Anders Lisdorf, “The consensus in the cognitive science of religion is that some sort of hyperactive agency detection in the human mind is responsible for the spread of beliefs in supernatural agents, such as gods, spirits, and ancestors among human populations.”¹² Zombies have replaced the wind, just as death is wind, Kundabu. It is all about fear—of ruffling leaves, death, the other, the end of the world—and about survival, at least until the zombies come to usher in the apocalypse.

With or without zombies, there is so much that is utterly dreadful in our world that each day one can find signs of the apocalypse, surely. But Men anpi, chay pa lou: “When there are many hands, the load is not heavy.” Solidarity can take many forms and is altogether vital during times of crisis, and one can engage in it each day and hopefully make the world a better place or make someone else smile or feel touched by your love. With or without zombies, the end is inevitable, though. This we know, and there is a potential zombie in each of us, vaguely tuned in to deaf music resonating from our halfhearted souls and our prehistoric ancestor running from some barely imaginable phantom that makes a bush shiver, shish, and shake. This fear is central to all the great religions covered in this book. With the exception of Vodou, they might not feature zombies, but they have no shortage of evil beasts that are even more terrible. Some of them, like the zombie itself, used to be us—living, breathing human beings—becoming what we once were and still might become, agents of contagion, destruction, dehumanization, and the apocalypse itself.

Notes