4
Introduction
I am Cap’tain Zombie
I drink with my ears
I hear with my ten fingers
I have a tongue that sees all
A radar of smell that captures
The waves of the human heart ~ René Depestre
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Mountains will crumble, but the emptiness of space . . . will never crumble away because it was never born. The world you see is just a movie in your mind. ~ Jack Kerouac
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God is going to invade, all right: but what is the good of saying you are on His side then, when you see the whole natural universe melting away like a dream and something else? ~ C. S. Lewis
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This is how the world ends; not with a bang or a whimper, but with zombies knocking at your backdoor. ~ Amanda Hocking
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One day the world will end. How, when, and why this might happen are questions that have captivated humanity for thousands of years. What are the signs of this impending doom? Earthquakes? Locusts? Wars? Demons? A moon split in two? Crumbling mountains?1 The universe melting?2 The sun rising in the west? Zombies who eat with their ears and bang at your backdoor?3 COVID? Beliefs surrounding such signs portending the apocalypse and the judgment of souls have enthralled humanity and shaped lives throughout history, perhaps more so than any other belief but that in God, a God who is behind all of this. That there might be an almighty God who will destroy the world as we know it, judge us, and thereby determine our eternal fate is especially relevant as I write this book, as by the summer of 2024 nearly seven million human beings have died of COVID-19 across the globe, nowhere more so than in the United States of America.
Is this a sign that the end is near? Will there be a rapture, leaving tribulation saints on earth to struggle against the wicked and the afflicted? Will zombies be part of the apocalypse? They are contagious, after all, quite viral, and, like the afflicted and the wicked, they were once fully human and had a chance at salvation. Are they still human, the wicked, the afflicted, the zombies? Is it okay to kill them? What does it all mean, and how did zombies gain a role in the apocalypse in popular imagination in the first place? This book seeks to provide answers to these and related questions, along with some urgent historical perspective on what we are going through today, during the COVID pandemic and its sputtering aftermath, even if that wasn’t the initial plan, and even if some officials have declared the pandemic over, although one never knows when the next variant of the virus will surge.
Because the idea of the apocalypse is much, much older than the idea of the zombie, our story opens at that very place on Earth where the idea of the end begins. Today this place straddles Iran and Afghanistan. Most historians of religion agree that the oldest recorded teachings about the apocalypse are those of Zoroaster (c.1500–1000 B.C.E.), a mystical priest of an ancient Persian religion, for whom is named the great faith tradition of Zoroastrianism. His teachings would be amplified by later Zoroastrian prophets and absorbed into and adapted by Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. As of 2021, more than half of all people on Earth belong to the latter two religions. The, four chapters in Section One thus introduce each of these religions and provide analyses of their respective eschatologies—their teachings about the end of time, the end of the world as we know it, the apocalypse, Judgment Day, and the afterlife.
The idea of the zombie has mostly African roots, though a few of its first sprouts were European. That said, the zonbi is originally and really a Haitian phenomenon, embedded in and emerging from the African-derived Caribbean religion of Vodou. Therefore, the four chapters in Section Two will introduce Vodou and explore its notion of the soul and the ways in which zombies are made and understood in Haiti. Thus, five religions are covered in the first half of our study. By way of introducing them, the late great Scottish scholar Ninian Smart’s “seven dimensions of religion” will be selectively employed in discussions of Zoroastrianism, Judaism, Christianity, Islam, and Vodou.4 The seven dimensions are as follows.
Practical and Ritual: What people do in a religion, especially rituals, but also practices that are not necessarily ritualistic, like spontaneous and solitary prayer, yoga, meditation, chanting, sacrificing chickens, and such.
Experiential and Emotional: One’s experience of the transcendent or of divinity, “the food on which all other dimensions of religion feed,” especially mysticism (the personal experience of the sacred) and collective rituals that stir deep emotions in one’s heart and soul.
Narrative and Mythic: Myths and beliefs as recorded in scripture, art, or memory, which Smart refers to as “the story side of religion.”
Doctrinal/Philosophical: This dimension of religion is largely interpretive and codifying. Myths are interpreted in the pursuit of truth, and the results often become codified as doctrinal beliefs, doctrines and creeds to which religious people adhere and authoritative teachings by which they live.
Ethical and Legal: Some religions feature laws that are central to the orientation of their believers, while others might “be less tied to a system of law, but still display an ethic which is influenced and indeed controlled by the myth of doctrine and of the faith.”
Social and Institutional: This dimension consists of the ways in which religion “is embodied in a group of people” (e.g., a church, synagogue, or mosque) and the social relations and shared beliefs that intertwine them.
Material: The “social or institutional dimension of religion almost inevitably becomes incarnate in material form, as buildings, works of art, and other creations.” On a smaller but no less important scale, other material things like wax, bread, wood, water, metal, and incense are required for some of the holiest rituals in most religions.
The point of Smart’s scheme of categorization is “to help characterize religions as they exist in the world.” However, these categories are not necessarily universal across humanity’s vast religious landscape and through the course of its deep and amazing religious history, for “there are religious movements or manifestations where one or other of the dimensions are so weak as to be virtually absent.”5 In Haitian Vodou, for example, there is no single creed that all believers recite, nor any scripture to which they refer, nor a collection of codified doctrines to follow. Hence the doctrinal dimension of this religion will not be explored—there simply is none. In Zoroastrianism, meanwhile, the ethical dimension will be foregrounded because the entire religion revolves around the belief that all will be judged in the end based on their negotiation of and participation in the cosmic struggle between good and evil that frames our existence and our ultimate fate.
There are no zombies in Section One of our book, as its four chapters “only” treat the end of the world as understood in four of the greatest religions in world history; historically, that is, way before there were really any zombies. The first chapter treats Zoroastrianism, the second Judaism, the third Christianity, and the fourth Islam. All these momentous religions are deeply apocalyptic, and this dimension is the main focus throughout Section One. At the same time, the chapters serve as basic introductions to these religions, which is necessary because of the diversity of the student population for which this book was designed. In 2007 the Princeton Review ranked Temple University as the most diverse institution of higher education in the United States.6Hence, some of this book’s first readers are lifelong devout Muslims from countries far from the United States who know much more about Islam than I, while others are from small American towns who may have never met a Muslim nor had the opportunity to learn about Islam. In Section One, this diverse readership meets. At least that is the hope.
In Section Two, zombies finally appear—and rather forcefully at that—as we largely move away from Smart’s categories of religion, save for in the chapter on Haitian Vodou. Vodou is an African-derived religion that emerged in the eighteenth century in the French Caribbean plantation colony of Saint-Domingue, which would become the independent Republic of Haiti following the triumph of the Haitian Revolution in 1804, the only successful national slave revolt in human history. The practice of African religions was outlawed in the colony, with Catholicism being the only recognized and legal faith tradition. But that did not stop African spirituality from flourishing and blending with Catholic practices, symbols, and beliefs, a process known among anthropologists and historians as “syncretism.” To understand the origins of the zombie, it is thus necessary to consider the African ethnic and religious composition of victims of the transatlantic slave trade who wound up in Saint-Domingue. That is the focus of Chapter 5, the first chapter of Section Two. Beyond that discussion and the aforementioned introductory chapter on Vodou, two other chapters round out Section Two, one on notions of death, dying, and the soul in Haitian Vodou and the other on the varieties of zombies that one might encounter, or at least hear rumors about, in Haiti.
As will become abundantly clear in Section Three, following the cultural theft of a ghoulish “monster” from Haiti—from its lucrative launch on the Hollywood silver screen to its presence on zombie walks—this victim has been transformed into a fearsome sort-of-human being, the undead, that millions around the world have come to dreadfully cherish. This creature is altogether different from its culturally stolen Caribbean ancestor. Zombies in Haiti do not eat brains, nor do they swarm in hordes or seek to turn normal living people into the walking dead or the living dead. Historically speaking, the zombie was a replacement slave, someone who was poisoned, ostensibly died, and was then exhumed from the grave to sluggishly and mindlessly labor without pay or to do the bidding of a sorcerer. They would be carefully but sparsely fed—carefully, because if they could eat salt, they would gain awareness of their zombic state and either revolt against their masters or return to their respective tombs. Haitian zombies are also not fast, but in their abducted and capitalized forms—in cinema, fictional literature, and video games, ad infinitum— they surely and profitably have become rapidly mobile in places.
These and other ideas and developments in zombie history, profit, globalization, and lore are covered in Section Three, which also includes four chapters: Chapter 9, “How Did the Zombie Wind up in America?”; Chapter Ten, “History of Zombie Cinema and Literature”; Chapter Eleven, “Gaming and Walking the Undead”; and Chapter Twelve, “Why Zombies? Sociophobics, Contagion, Othering.” Like the chapters in Sections One and Two, each of these four chapters contains extensive citations, a bibliography, and a glossary. I have my students to thank for suggesting the glossaries, as we counted terms from over a dozen languages that are introduced throughout the manuscript and during our class, which is a bit sprawling, admittedly. Then again, so is the end of the world, which implicates all of us—in countless languages—whether we are dead or alive. And so is contagion: a sprawl that speaks all languages. The end of the world and pandemics are, by definition, universal and polyglottic, after all.
This textbook is long, so I have kept the introduction short rather than providing an extensive preview of the twelve chapters that follow. Zombie Apocalypse: Holy Land, Haiti, Hollywood is structured for a fifteen-week fall or spring semester class, with each chapter read during a particular week. The class was launched in the spring semester of 2020—great timing, I know!—and I am the sole designer, though I did have the good fortune to review materials from courses on zombies already being taught at several other colleges and universities. My class differs from the others in first exploring historically the idea of the apocalypse; this is, after all, a class in a department of religious studies, though it is quite interdisciplinary and draws on a wide range of fields of academic inquiry, including biblical studies, Africana studies, anthropology, sociology, philosophy, historiography, literary criticism, and feminist theory.
Finally, this is an open access textbook, meaning that it is gratis not only to students at Temple University but to anyone in the world with internet access. All are free to read the whole thing or only portions, revise sections, swap out images and maps—whatever they wish and however they wish—just as I might make changes to the text down the road. (I doubt that, though, as I am tired of zombies and doom.) Hence, though the book is primarily intended as a text for a course called “Zombie Apocalypse,” it will hopefully be of interest and use to a wide and diverse range of readers, teachers, and seekers, and maybe even to recovered zombies.
Bonne lecture!
Notes
Jack Kerouac, The Portable Jack Kerouac. Ed. Anne Charters. New York: Penguin, 1955. The quote is from a 1957 letter by Kerouac to his first wife, Edie Kerouac Parker. ↵
C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996 (1952), 38. ↵
René Depestre, Un arc-en-ciel pour l’occident chrétien: Poèmes, mystère vaudou. Paris: Présence Africaine, 1967, 55 (my translation); Amanda Hocking, Hollowland. Charleston: Createspace, 2011 (2010), 5. ↵
Ninian Smart, The World’s Religions, Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1992, 11. ↵
Ibid. ↵
“Temple Student Body Ranked Most Diverse in Nation,” Temple University, September 12, 2007, https://news.temple.edu/news/temple-student-body-ranked-most-diverse-nation; last accessed October 13, 2021. ↵