Passing through the Dark

Wade Davis’ scientific approach to the Haitian zombie is quite different from the religious and magic aspects in Seabrook’s “The Magic Island.” Davis uses his “Passage of Darkness,” to explore the many possible ways to turn one into a zombie, mostly poisons, whether they are plant or animal based, with effects that range from merely psychotropic to lethal.

Davis himself is an anthropologist and an ethnobotanist (studying plants in relation to people and culture) whose work focused on the indigenous cultures around the world, particularly involving the beliefs and uses of psychotropic plants in rituals and the like. So of course his eye would eventually fall on Haiti and their use of such plants and even animals to somehow drain a person of their will, their mind and ability to do anything but follow orders.

The idea of being buried alive or somehow rising from the grave after death is a thought that permeates most, if not all societies. Even ancient cultures had their legends of something animating the dead and bringing them back to the world of the living, and stories about someone being mistaken for dead and subsequently being buried or entombed alive. As Davis points out, even Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet has such a drug, one that puts Juliet into a death-like trance so convincing it causes young Romeo to kill himself. Drugs that can cause one to stop, or appear to stop breathing, have no heartbeat, etc etc; even human beings can do this under the right circumstances and with enough training. So it makes sense that even in Victorian England, as Davis tells us, these beliefs and fears were prevalent, and people went to great lengths to ensure that they wouldn’t be buried alive, or come back once dead. In fact, we still have these fears today.

Davis concludes that a poison must be the key to the “zombie mystery,” as he puts it, but that if such a thing were possible that it would suggest “the existence of men and woman who actually created the poison and decided how, when and to whom it should be administered… undoubtedly involve[ing] explanations rooted at the very structure and beliefs of the Haitian peasant society.” In other words, he asserts that there must a type of secret society, beyond even the priesthood. Beyond that, he asserts that he has met with some of the leaders of said secret society, and that they have poisons and powders that can not only kill, both quick and slow, some that only give pain and some that “make you the master.” One can assume the last is the one that could create a zombie.

With such borderline outrageous claims, along with the few quite unethical practices he professes to in these pages, not the lease of them unburying the body of a small child and aiding in using it to create one of the many zombie powders he learned the ingredient lists too, it’s no wonder that he was criticized by his peers. But at the very least, his research can help us understand the context around the Haitian zombie, and make the concept even a little bit more believable.