The Secret Origin of Zombies-Part Three

February 6, 2017, 3:00 am

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The Missing Piece: Zombi(e) Stories in Weird Tales

U.S. Marines went into Haiti on July 28, 1915, and came back out again on August 15, 1934. That nineteen-year-long episode is almost forgotten in the United States today. It's probably better remembered in Haiti. The invasion force that Americans remember came from the opposite direction, for sometime during the occupation of Haiti, zombies arrived on our shores. They have never left.

 I have an article from 1932 that asks the question: Do zombies really exist? 

Rumors have been seeping in for years [the article reads] from the island of Haiti about dead bodies being exhumed and, through a process of sorcery, put to work in the fields and mills, but is there any truth in the rumors? (1)

If there were rumors seeping in from Haiti, they must have come from Americans on the island. William B. Seabrook (1884-1945) was one of them. In 1928, he returned dispatches to an American syndicate for publication in the nation's newspapers. These were reports on zombies, men who had been enslaved and put to work in the sugar cane fields of Haiti. Seabrook published his reporting in a book, The Magic Island, in 1929. The book proved a sensation and led to a stage play, Zombie, in early 1932 and a far more successful film, White Zombie, released on July 28, 1932 (the seventeenth anniversary of the marine landing at Port-au-Prince). You might call William Seabrook the father of zombies in America, except that there was another American writer in Haiti in the 1920s who wrote stories of the island nation and its folklore. And he was sent there as an officer in the U.S Marine Corps. So not so fast, William Seabrook.

Arthur J. Burks (1898-1974) was born in Waterville, Washington, and served in the U.S. Marine Corps from 1917 to 1927. In the early 1920s, he was stationed in what one newspaper article described as "the unknown fastnesses of Santo Domingo," from which "he mailed story after story to the States." These were returned to him, but after taking a correspondence course in short-story writing and returning to the United States in 1924, "he sold scores of short stories and novelettes" and even a novel. (2) One of those stories was "Thus Spake the Prophetess: A Tale of Haiti," published in Weird Tales in November 1924 under the byline Estil Critchie. It was Burks' first story in "The Unique Magazine" and the first of several set in Haiti and on the island of Santo Domingo or Hispaniola. Many if not all of these stories were reprinted in the book Black Medicine in 1966. (3)

There was yet another American writer in the West Indies during the 1920s. This was Henry S. Whitehead (1882-1932), a native of Elizabeth, New Jersey, a graduate of Harvard University (where Franklin D. Roosevelt was one of his classmates), and an Episcopal priest. From 1921 to 1929, Whitehead was acting archdeacon of the U.S. Virgin Islands. (4) Like Arthur J. Burks, Whitehead collected tales of West Indian folklore, turning them into short stories for the pulp magazine market in America. His first story for Weird Tales was "Tea Leaves" for the triple May/June/July 1924 issue.  His story "Jumbee," from the September 1926 issue, is the first in Weird Tales that I know of to use the word zombi. That's only in passing, though. The main part of the story is about a jumbee, a West Indian spirit of another type, although the derivation of the word is almost certainly the same. (5) Sadly, Whitehead died young, at age fifty. His death in 1932 was perhaps the first great loss suffered by readers and fans of Weird Tales. August W. Derleth remembered him with Jumbee and Other Uncanny Tales, published by Derleth's Arkham House in 1944.

The key words in the previous paragraph are "that I know of." I don't have access to most of Henry S. Whitehead's stories, and I have never read anything by Arthur J. Burks. My suspicion is that the word zombi, and possibly zombie (William Seabrook's spelling), appeared in Weird Tales between 1923 and 1928 (other than in "Jumbee"). It's also possible that Seabrook's version of the zombie as a mindless, soulless slave--a walking deadman--is in Weird Tales. On the other hand, maybe the Seabrook zombie was not in Weird Tales before 1928. Whatever the case may be, this is something we should know for sure. So with that in mind, I would like to offer a list of stories, poems, and articles about zombi(e)s and voodoo from Weird Tales, and I would like to ask everyone who cares to do it to begin searching for the occurrence of zombi(e)s in those stories. I hope we can meet with some success.

Stories, Poems, and Articles about Zombies and Voodoo in Weird Tales, 1923-1939
Plus a Few Maybes and Probably Including Some Stories That Shouldn't Be Here and Probably Missing Some That Should Be

• "Voodooism" by Bill Nelson (article, July/Aug. 1923)
• "Thus Spake the Prophetess: A Tale of Haiti" by Estil Critchie (Arthur J. Burks) (Nov. 1924)
• "Death-Waters" by Frank Belknap Long (Dec. 1924; reprinted Sept. 1933)--I have read this story, and there are no zombi(e)s. However, there is a black sorcerer who has power over serpents, perhaps like those in the cult of Li Grand Zombi.
• "Voodoo" by Estil Critchie (Arthur J. Burks) (Dec. 1924)
• "Luisma's Return" by Arthur J. Burks (Jan. 1925)
• "Strange Tales from Santo Domingo: 1. A Broken Lamp-Chimney" by Arthur J. Burks (Feb. 1925)
• "Strange Tales from Santo Domingo: 2. Desert of the Dead" by Arthur J. Burks (Mar. 1925)
• "Strange Tales from Santo Domingo: 3. Daylight Shadows" by Arthur J. Burks (Apr. 1925)
• "Strange Tales from Santo Domingo: 4. The Sorrowful Sisterhood" by Arthur J. Burks (May. 1925)
• "Strange Tales from Santo Domingo: 5. The Phantom Chibo" by Arthur J. Burks (June 1925)
• "The Return of the Undead" by Arthur Leeds (Nov. 1925)
• "Ti Michel" by W.J. Stamper (June 1926)
• "Jumbee" by Henry S. Whitehead (Sept. 1926; reprinted Feb. 1938)--Mentions the word zombi, but focuses on the spirit of the title. A weird and creepy tale well worth reading.
• "Strange Tales from Santo Domingo: Faces" by Arthur J. Burks (Apr. 1927)

The Magic Island by William B. Seabrook published, January 1929

• "Le Revenant" by Charles Beaudelaire (poem, May 1929)--This is a poem about a ghost rather than a zombi(e) or the undead.
• "Black Tancrede" by Henry S. Whitehead (June 1929)
• "The Corpse-Master" by Seabury Quinn (July 1929)
• "The Drums of Damballah" by Seabury Quinn (Mar. 1930)
• "Voodoo" by A. Leslie (poem, Apr. 1930)
• "Hill Drums" by Henry S. Whitehead (June/July 1931)
• "The Venus of Azombeii" by Clark Ashton Smith (June/July 1931)--The Azombeii of the title is a fictional place in Africa. The people of Azombeii are described as "a pagan tribe of unusual ferocity, who were still suspected of cannibalism and human sacrifice." I have not read this story all the way through, but the word Azombeii seems to be a combination of Zombie and Pompeii, and is almost certainly meant to evoke images or awareness of zombies.
• "Placide's Wife" by Kirk Mashburn (Nov. 1931)

White Zombie released, July 28, 1932

• "The Last of Placide's Wife" by Kirk Mashburn (Sept. 1932)
• "In Memoriam: Henry St. Clair Whitehead" [by H.P. Lovecraft] (article, Mar. 1933)
• "Voodoo Song" by Mary Elizabeth Counselman (poem, July 1933)
• "Dead Men Walk" by Harold Ward (Aug. 1933)
• "Voodoo Vengeance" by Kirk Mashburn (Nov. 1934)
• "Isle of the Undead" by Lloyd Arthur Eshbach (Oct. 1936)
• "Pigeons from Hell" by Robert E. Howard (May 1938; reprinted Nov. 1951)
• "While Zombies Walked" by Thorp McClusky (Sept. 1939)--This is the first story in Weird Tales with the word zombie(s) in the title. It is set in the South. The zombies are slaves of a white zombie-master who has learned his craft from a black Voodoo man. The zombie-master uses Voodoo dolls to control people.

By the way, the first short story chronologically in the Internet Speculative Fiction Database with the word zombie(s) in the title was "White Zombie" by Vivian Meik from his collection Devils' Drums (1933). The first serial in a magazine was "Z Is for Zombie" by Theodore Roscoe in Argosy, February 6-March 13, 1937. And the first short story in a magazine was "Zombies Never Die" by Richard Tooker in Thrilling Mystery, November 1937.

To be continued . . . 

Notes
(1) From "At the Elwood" in The Call-Leader, Elwood, Indiana, Dec. 23, 1932, p. 6.
(2) From "Marine Officer, Rising Author, Finds Pen Mightier Than the Sword" in the Monroe News-Star, Monroe, Louisiana, July 23, 1925, p. 10.
(3) Black Medicine was issued by August Derleth's Arkham House with a cover design by Lee Brown Coye. See the image below.
(4) The United States acquired the Virgin Islands from Denmark in 1917 during the administration of Woodrow Wilson. If you're still looking for connections between American colonialism/imperialism and zombies, you're right back at Woodrow Wilson. Yeah, a Democrat and a Progressive. Sorry. The date, by the way, was March 31, 1917, so we're nearing the centennial of the U.S. Virgin Islands.
(5) The title in Italian is, tellingly, "Zumbi": the Italian alphabet lacks the letter j.
Finally, the subject of zombies and the U.S. Marine Corps gives new meaning to our most recent ex-president's pronunciation "corpseman." He's the smartest man in the room, you know. Probably one of the smartest presidents ever. Just ask people who speak the Austrian language or who live on the Maldive Islands in the South Atlantic.

Black Medicine by Arthur J. Burks (Arkham House, 1966), a collection of his stories for Weird Tales. Cover art by Lee Brown Coye.

Jumbee and Other Uncanny Tales by Henry S. Whitehead (Arkham House, 1944), a posthumous collection of his stories, including the proto-zombie story "Jumbee." Cover art by Charles Frank Wakefield.

Text copyright 2017 Terence E. Hanley

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The Secret Origin of Zombies-Part Four

February 9, 2017, 3:00 am

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A Zombie Taxonomy

At the beginning of January, I wrote an article in this space called "A Retreat of the Totalitarian Monster." In it, I quoted Dr. Stephen Olbrys Gencarella of the University of Massachusetts at Amherst as follows:

The zombie trope in the United States emerged with the zombie-as-slave phenomenon around the turn of the 20th century, when American capitalism and colonialism led to ethical conflicts about labor and human rights.

I dismissed what Dr. Gencarella said about "American capitalism and colonialism" as "typical leftist claptrap." I confess that I haven't read his original paper, "Thunder without Rain: Fascist Masculinity in AMC's The Walking Dead" in Horror Studies from 2016 (7 [1], pp. 125-146). I would like to. But unless I see some evidence that "[t]he zombie trope" came into American popular culture around 1900, moreover that there is actual evidence in the texts of that time of some connection between zombies and capitalism/colonialism, I will stick by what I wrote: It's all a bunch of leftist claptrap, unsupported by evidence, based on a confirmation bias, and spoken from a position of authority.

So when did zombi(e)s come into American popular culture? I'll do some hypostulatin' here and say that it happened at least four times and possibly five (or maybe four and a half).

1. Li (or Le) Grand Zombi--Zombi(e)s probably first arrived in America as Li (or Le) Grand Zombi, the serpent spirit or serpent god of Voodoo. The place would appear to be Louisiana, in which case the time was probably the eighteenth century, when Louisiana was a French colony and as black slaves were imported from the West Indies. It's interesting that the zombi(e) in the Western hemisphere, brought here from Africa, is a creature of colonies that were largely Catholic and largely French: Haiti, Martinique, Louisiana. African slaves were of course imported into British colonies as well, but zombi(e)s seem not to have gained a foothold here. Catholicism has its aspects of mysticism and has historically tolerated and eventually assimilated pagan beliefs. The British in America were Protestants, however, some of them pretty harsh and strict. I don't think they trucked with that kind of thing, so no zombi(e)s in the Colonies. (One place to test that theory is Maryland, a colony settled by Catholics but which was also a slave colony and a slave state. My guess is that there aren't or weren't any zombi(e)s in the folklore of Maryland: the Catholic influence may have been too minor or short-lived and there probably wasn't a large enough African/Caribbean community to have given rise to them, plus Maryland was not an island or "island." To that point, I can put forth the idea that the different versions of zombi(e)s developed on different islands or "islands" of African/Caribbean culture--the slave-zombie in Haiti, the spirit-zombi in Martinique, and Li Grande Zombi in Louisiana--something like speciation in the Darwinian scheme of evolution.)
2. The Zombi as Spirit--The word zombi came into American popular culture in 1838 with the publication in American newspapers of "The Unknown Painter." The zombi in that story (who is only mentioned and never makes an appearance) is a spirit, and zombis remained spirits--evil spirits--throughout the nineteenth and into the twentieth century. Lafcadio Hearn was the most prominent author to write about zombis, but there were others, including authors of popular novels and short stories after 1900.
3. The Zombie as Slave--Zombies with an -e arrived in 1928 with William B. Seabrook's dispatches from Haiti, which were collected in book form in The Magic Island in 1929. The book was a sensation and led to a stage play, more stories and novels, and a number of zombie movies, beginning with White Zombie in 1932. There is no evidence that zombies first arrived in America around 1900, nor that they had anything to do with American capitalism, colonialism, or imperialism, except that Americans in Haiti sent back or carried back stories of zombies to their native country. It's more likely that the slave-zombie dates to the French colonial period and that, as a representation of slavery, zombie-ism is far more ancient than any capitalist institution. It's worth noting that if the first zombie-as-slave in literature was in The Magic Island, then that slave was a black man who was the slave of a black man. If we can believe Seabrook, zombie slavery was an affair for black men, and as Lamercie, a black woman in his book, says, "Z'affai' nèg pas z'affai' blanc'." (Roughly, "The affairs of blacks are not the affairs of whites.") As I have pointed out, slavery is not a capitalist institution. It predates capitalism and is in fact anathema to capitalism. Slavery and related forms of servitude are ancient and medieval institutions. Capitalism is a later development, an invention of free and prosperous people, and one that thrives on free and prosperous people and free exchanges of goods, services, labor, etc. Further still, to say that zombies came to America around 1900 and that they are related to capitalism and colonialism/imperialism may be to suggest that they are also related somehow to the Republican Party. (There were Republican presidents from 1896 to 1912, the period "around the turn of the 20th century.") We should remember that the Republican Party was founded explicitly as an anti-slavery party; that the Republican Party was the driving force behind emancipation and the passage of the anti-slavery amendments to the Constitution; that the Democratic Party was historically the party of slavery and other ancient or medieval institutions of servitude; and that the majority of Democratic presidents from Thomas Jefferson (1800-1808) to Woodrow Wilson (1912-1920) were either slaveholders or the sons of slaveholders (including, strangely enough, Martin Van Buren). In any case, zombie slaves, or at the very least, zombies as "dead bodies walking, without minds or souls," as William Seabrook described them, seem to have been the predominant version of the zombie from 1928 into the 1950s or 1960s, possibly into the 1970s or '80s. (Let's call him the Seabrook zombie.)
4. The Zombie as One of a Mass of Scientific Anthropophages, aka the Matheson-Romero Zombie--Okay, that first label is really long and cumbersome, so I'll offer an alternative, a label after the two men who gave us our current version of zombies: Richard Matheson in I Am Legend (1954) and George Romero in Night of the Living Dead (1968) and its sequels (1978-2010). If my hypostulatin' is right, then the zombie-as-slave or soulless automaton faded away sometime during the late 1950s to the late 1970s or early 1980s and was replaced by the Matheson-Romero zombie that we have today. That zombie has two distinguishing characteristics: 1) It is one of a mass or horde; and 2) It is explained by scientific or materialistic means. The Matheson-Romero zombie is also an anthropophage, a fancy word for cannibal (except that zombies aren't people anymore, so they can't really be cannibals). And because of those three characteristics--because they are hordes of cannibals who carry a virulent disease--zombies went from being harmless slaves to being things to fear. It's as if the slaves were in revolt except that they are never released from their zombie-state. There are two other things to consider here regarding the Matheson-Romero zombie: 1) It was the version of the zombie current when popular culture became a legitimate subject of academic or scholarly inquiry, that is, during the 1960s and '70s; and 2) It is the version that has become politicized. The second development probably has a lot to do with the first, as the academics who came up at the same time as the Matheson-Romero zombie tended to be--and still tend to be--leftists, and they tend to see things through the badly cracked and very foggy lens of either: a) The old left, meaning Marxism; or b) The New Left, especially critical theory. As evidence, I'll offer these tidbits from Stephen Olbrys Gencarella's description of his interests and list of publications: "intersection,""critical folklore studies,""activist,""social injustice,""excluded,""democratic,""anti-democratic,""fascist,""commodification," and the kicker, "Gramsci, Good Sense, and Critical Folklore Studies." If you feel like rolling around in your mouth some nonsensical leftist/academic verbal stew, read the abstract of that paper here. (For those who don't know much about him [I don't], Gramsci was a Marxist theorist. In other words, he theorized about how he could take from you the things that are yours.)
5. The Missing Zombie--There's a gap in my chronology of zombies. The gap is between 1910 or so--when the zombi-as-spirit was still the predominant version--and 1928--when William Seabrook first wrote about zombies in American newspapers. What was in that gap? Well, there were some stories about Voodoo and related subjects in pulp magazines, especially in Weird Tales. Were there zombi(e)s in those stories? Yes, at least in a couple. What kind of zombi(e)s were they? Well, at least a couple of them were the old spirit zombis. But was there a new kind of zombi(e), too, a zombie out of Haiti, like the Seabrook zombie? I don't know, and that's what we ought to find out.

To be continued . . .

An illustration for "The Challenge of the Snake" by Meigs O. Frost, a zombi story reprinted in newspapers in 1926 after having first appeared in Short Stories for February 25, 1924. Frost's story is set in Louisiana. The villain is Zombi Le Veau, a powerful Voodoo man who has named himself after Le Gran' Zombi, the snake-god. The story was published long before Short Stories, Inc., acquired Weird Tales. The artist's signature looks like Machamer; there was an artist, Jefferson Machamer (1900-1960), who worked as an illustrator and cartoonist and was active at that time. He's probably our man. In any case, the fact that this story was published in 1924 shows, I think, that the spirit zombi or serpent-god zombi was still the version known by readers of popular fiction. And that was only four years away from Seabrook's jaunt in Haiti.

Text copyright 2017 Terence E. Hanley

The Secret Origin of Zombies-Part Five

February 12, 2017, 3:00 am

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Why Zombies?

I can't say that I have answered the question of when zombies as we know them today came into American popular culture, but it seems like the Internet has it right: it was in the period 1929-1932 (actually 1928-1932). One alternative to that conclusion is that there were zombi(e)s in pulp magazines before 1928, specifically in the period 1910 or 1915 to 1927. If there were, I think Weird Tales in the years 1923 to 1927 is the place to begin looking. Unfortunately, I don't have any issues of Weird Tales from the 1920s, nor do I have reprints of most of the potential zombi(e) stories. (1) I would add that if zombies came from Haiti in the 1920s, and if they represent anything in the real world, then they almost certainly represent slavery--not that the slaves themselves are zombies but that zombie-ism represents the institution of slavery and--to Haitians--the fear of being enslaved. I think that's an important distinction to make.

Everything about which I have written in this series raises other questions: Why zombies? Why are zombies so popular? Why do they seem to have some meaning deeper than that of mere monsters? Why are they so widely studied and interpreted, especially by academics? Why have they become politicized? And why do discussions of zombies raise the hackles of so many people?

I'll start with what I think is the most basic question: What might zombies represent? (An echo of the question--What is a zombie?--posed to so many Caribbean people from the 1800s into the 1900s.) The simplest explanation seems to be that zombies represent the fear of death, perhaps also the fear of the unknown, the unexplained, and whatever it is that lurks beyond the edge of the firelight. These are elemental fears. In the end, maybe all of them are apprehensions of a single mystery, that of life, death, our purpose on earth, and our place in the universe. 

On the next level, the fear of zombies may represent the fear that the dead are restless and that they will come back. That fear places zombies in the same category as ghosts, vampires, and ambulatory mummies, revenants all. It is an atavistic fear and a fear of the supernatural: I Am Legend, Night of the Living Dead, World War Z, and The Walking Dead, despite their science-fictional veneer, are fantasies that tap into ancient fears. That may help to explain their power and popularity.

The idea that the dead will come back resonates. Christianity is based on a defeat of death: Jesus Christ came back to rescue us from death, and His promise is that He will come back yet again. Pagans, too, believe in the coming-back of the dead. The pyramids and tombs of Egypt are storehouses for their return to life in some form. Even atheists must imagine a coming-back or some kind of survival beyond death. The mummified remains of their masters--Lenin and Mao--attest to the hope that they have not died. As for the people who lived under them: theirs is the selfsame fear. Religion . . . atheism . . . communism . . . politics is beginning to rear its head.

Zombies were once caused by magic. We don't have to fear magic anymore because the supernatural has been defeated by science. However, science can also cause zombies, and the fear of them today coincides with a fear of contagion, disease, plague, and pandemic. Those, too, are ancient--and reasonable--fears, and they are alive in us despite our advanced medicine. As for the political angle: science as a replacement for the supernatural can become a political idea. However, I don't think it's enough to tip the discussion of zombies into the realm of politics. I think it takes something more than that. I think it takes seeing zombies not as spirits, monsters, revenants, or people stricken with some hypothetical disease. Instead, I think it takes seeing them, the human beings who oppose them, and their collective milieu as real people in the real world of today. Now we're getting closer to the politicized zombie.

A pandemic is of course a disaster. A large enough pandemic threatens a collapse of civilization. A fear of zombies may represent a fear of the great masses of people who would be on the loose if civilization were to collapse or in the event of a global disaster or apocalypse. (A post-apocalyptic world is a positive fantasy for some and something to fear for others.) This may be the political heart of the matter, for in the event of an apocalypse, some few people will have, while great masses of people will have not, a situation approximating how some people see the real world of today. If some people have, then they can be interpreted as the so-called winners in the lottery of life. They are the few. They are the slaveholders, capitalists, fascists, first-worlders, and one-percenters, in short, the oppressors. And if some people have not, then they are the slaves, the proletariat, the oppressed, the downtrodden, the deprived, and the forgotten. More to the point, they are the many. (2)

An apocalyptic future is a political idea, too, because in the current age every future is a political idea. That's because people of certain political persuasions see the future as theirs. Here I think is their thinking: History is a science. Therefore the future is predictable, and not just predictable but foreordained. It is an extension of history and will prove a simple unwinding of history (once the opposition is removed). Because history is necessarily a history of progress, the future will be a culmination of the pageant of historical progress. It will be a grand and glorious Utopia (again, once the opposition is removed). And because of all that, the future belongs exclusively to those who believe in history. (3, 4) An apocalyptic future--especially a future in which only a few people have anything and the masses are somehow deprived--is an affront to people who believe in history and progress and who make exclusive claims to the future. It's also, of course, an affront to those who believe in material equality. That's another way that the zombie story can be--and has become--politicized, I think.

The zombie apocalypse may represent a fear of or resistance to oppression or to a loss of freedom. Leftists fear the oppression of a ruling economic class or of what they call "fascists." (We're seeing a lot of that right now.) And because leftists tend to see "freedom" as "freedom from," then material want (or envy)--the fact that one person has something and other people don't--stokes in them not fear so much as outrage. Conservatives, on the other hand, tend to fear the oppression of political tyranny, whatever form that might take. They especially fear it in the form of a mob or of governments that come to power because of mobs (as in the French Revolution) or mass movements (as in the Russian Revolution). Mobs and mass movements are destroyers. Before the world can be remade and thrust into the glorious future, it--meaning civilization, its traditions, and its institutions--must be destroyed. Because conservatives see "freedom" as "freedom to," they fear mobs, the majority, and mass movements because of the offenses against order, tradition, natural rights, etc., those forces represent. Once again, these fears--from both sides of the spectrum--are represented in the zombie story, thus making it more readily politicized.

Finally, the fear of zombies may represent the fear of a loss of humanity. If you're a human being alive after the zombie apocalypse, you actually have three fears of this kind. First, obviously, is the fear of death. Second is the fear that you will become a zombie. That's a fear worse than the fear of death, because you will still live, yet you will be a mindless and soulless monster. (5) Third, you fear that the conditions of your existence will ultimately dehumanize you: that you might still be a person with a mind and a soul, and at the same time an amoral monster, just so you might live. (My sister, who loves The Walking Dead, tells me that the title of the show can actually be interpreted as referring to the human beings in the story.) Fears of dehumanization and of recruitment into a mass of men are fears that easily become political. In fact, political movements of the most monstrous kind--especially mass movements--seek those two things: to recruit everyone they can into their movement and to dehumanize and ultimately destroy everyone who resists. The institution of slavery is similar: it dehumanizes the enslaved people and always seeks more slaves.

I don't have to tell you: There is much to fear when it comes to zombies.

To be continued . . .

Notes

(1) I have nothing by Arthur J. Burks, who might prove to be the father of zombies in America. I have read "Jumbee" by Henry S. Whitehead (1926), though. At most, that story might be called a proto-zombie story. It's interesting to note that it was published in the same year that H.P. Lovecraft wrote "The Call of Cthulhu."
(2) I sense that one of the reasons why people on the left end of the spectrum (Population A) don't like the human beings in The Walking Dead (Population B) is that Population A believe that they, Population A, are being cast or characterized as zombies against their will. I can't blame them for being upset about that. I wouldn't want to be cast as a zombie, either. Maybe Population A's discomfort comes from a sense that there is an imbalance of power at work: That Population B, standing in for the creators of the show, perhaps also for the population at large, have the power to cast Population A in that role and there isn't anything that Population A can do about it. It's like when you're a kid playing a pretend game: the older kids get to be whoever they want to be, and they force the younger kids to be the less likable or interesting characters.
So Population A is upset about all of this, hence things like Sean T. Collins' article "The Shameful Fascism of The Walking Dead," posted about halfway between election day and inauguration day. He makes some interesting points about the marketing of Donald Trump to viewers of The Walking Dead. That's evidence. That's what I like to see. But then his argument loses its focus and his article ends up being about gender roles or some other thing. I know he was upset about how things turned out. I have friends who feel that way, too, and I have sympathy for them. I don't like it that they feel so sad or depressed. I would like to offer them some comfort by saying, "It will be okay." I know also that Mr. Collins and people like him see that their little Obamatopia is coming to an end after they were told that it would go on forever. They are upset and angry, and many of them throw fits, as we have seen since inauguration day. They also call names, as Mr. Collins does, not realizing that the word fascist is old. Old and worn out. They have used that word so often for so many things that it doesn't mean anything anymore. My advice: find better words, sharpen your arguments, and act like adults.
(3) One of my favorite moments in The Spy Who Came in from the Cold [1965] is when Richard Burton laughs derisively at Claire Bloom, a communist, for her belief in "history."
(4) How many times have we heard that so-and-so is "on the wrong side of history"? How is there a "wrong side of history"? How does anyone know what is "the right side" and what is "the wrong side"? What kind of arrogance does that take to say that anyone at all knows the direction history will take or what its inevitable result will be? And what is the implication, that history will reach an end point? That, as in the book We, there will be no more revolutions? That human society will reach stasis? If so, isn't stasis ultimately conservative, if not reactionary? Isn't it actually beyond conservative or reactionary? Who then is the true revolutionary in human history? Isn't it the person who believes in freedom over stasis?
(5) This seems to be the fear of the Haitian people, who have zombies in their folklore. For Haitians, added to the fear of becoming a zombie is the fear that they will remain zombies and that they will never be released into the afterlife. They will instead be chained to their bodies-in-slavery forever. One of the ways to be released from zombie-slavery is for the zombie-slave to eat salt. Once he eats salt, he remembers that he is dead and returns to his grave.
In reference to that and the caption of the image below: If you want to find a direct link between zombies and the Haitian Revolution, read "Salt Is Not for Slaves" by G.W. Hutter, a pseudonym of Garnett Weston (1894-1948), who wrote the screenplay for White Zombie (1932). (Hutter's/Weston's story was originally in Ghost Stories for August 1931, making it one of the first zombie--zombie with an -e--stories in the pulps.) Admittedly, Hutter/Weston was a twentieth-century writer and presumably white. His story may not have been taken from life. But it has power, I think, and truth in it. It still lives eighty-five years after its first publication.
In her book The Transatlantic Zombie: Slavery, Rebellion, and Living Death (2015), author Sarah J. Lauro interprets the outcome of "Salt Is Not for Slaves" as a perceived failure of the Haitian Revolution and ties it to the American occupation of 1915-1934. Fair enough. I think you can interpret the story in a different way, namely as a kind of Garden of Eden story in which the zombie-slaves are forbidden salt (equivalent to the knowledge of good and evil), and that when they rebel and partake of it, they become aware of their situation and are freed from their condition of servitude. The irony here is that, unlike Adam and Eve, they are released from earthly toil and returned to Paradise. 

A zombie horde ripping apart a human being? No, a mob of revolutionaries in an illustration from Charles Dickens' novel A Tale of Two Cities (1859). If you're looking for coincidence and associations in the history of zombi(e)s, why not look at the French Revolution and its Haitian counterpart? Zombies as we know them today seem to have come from Haitian folklore. Between 1791 and 1803, Haitian slaves revolted against their French colonial masters. But wasn't the French Revolution in place by 1791 or so? Wasn't feudalism abolished in 1789? Was there not a Declaration of the Rights of Man in that same year? Was not the king deposed, then executed in 1793? If so, why were Haitian slaves not freed? Why did the French revolutionaries and after them Napoleon try to suppress the Haitian Revolution and keep black people in slavery? Why did the French, good leftists that they were, try to keep Haitians as metaphorical zombies? If the Haitian fear of becoming a zombie or of being kept as a zombie is a fear of slavery, isn't it then a fear of either a leftist/statist regime or the fear of ancient and feudal institutions of servitude? If you're going to lay zombies at the feet of a political idea or a political party in America, just whose feet are they? Would they not be those of the leftist/statist party or the party of slavery? Are those parties in America not the same party? And which party is that? As a thin piece of anecdotal evidence: There were violent and destructive protests at UC Berkeley earlier this month. They were carried out by a leftist mob in a successful attempt to suppress free (and dissenting) speech. Among the mob was a man who said: "The cops shot me with pepper balls," adding, "It hurt." (Now there's a guy with a college education.) The people in the mob hid their identities, using instead pseudonyms--noms de protest, I guess. This man called himself Zombie. You can read the story, "UC Berkeley Cancels Right-Wing Provocateur’s Talk Amid Violent Protest" by Michael Bodley and Nanette Asimov, dated February 2, 2017, on the website of the San Francisco Chronicle, here. While you're there, take an especially long, hard look at the chicken-s--t headline that suggests that the protest was somehow caused by a "right-wing provocateur" and not by a leftwing mob and their ideology of intolerance, hatred, violence, and suppression of dissent.

Text copyright 2017 Terence E. Hanley

The Secret Origin of Zombies-Part Six

February 15, 2017, 3:00 am

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A Wrapping for Zombies

From their origins in Africa to their transplantation to the Caribbean to their arrival in American popular culture, zombi(e)s remained supernatural creatures. They were first in print in English in the work of a British Romantic, Robert Southey (1774-1843). (1) They came to America during a period of Gothic and Romantic literature. (2) And they remained within the realm of the Gothic and Romantic into the pulp fiction era of the early to mid twentieth century. Gothicism and Romanticism trade in the supernatural, the magical, the mystical, and the irrational. For as long as zombi(e)s were supernatural and within the realm of the Gothic and Romantic, they were not politicized. Only after zombi(e)s had passed from the realm of the supernatural into that of science and materialism did they become politicized. I have not found any evidence for or example of a politicized supernatural zombie except those made in retrospect.

Zombies as we know them today are not only explained by scientific or materialistic means, they are also characterized by their moving in hordes or masses. The first scientific zombie horde that I know of was in I Am Legend (1954), Richard Matheson's novel about a mass of what he called "vampires" infected with disease. Matheson's vampires are, to be sure, only loosely zombies. They effectively became zombies by way of the inspiration they provided moviemaker George Romero, who identified his creatures as zombies and expanded on the idea that zombies are caused by disease and that they move in mindless masses. That creature, the Matheson-Romero zombie, is the one that haunts the popular culture of today. There are, as far as I know, no longer any mythological, folkloric, supernatural, or magical zombies. The zombie of today has slain all of his competitors. 

Reanimated by disease and acting as one of a mass, the Matheson-Romero zombie is the zombie that has become politicized. My guess is that--Bob Hope's quip in The Ghost Breakers (1940) aside--zombies were not and could not have been politicized until they became scientified. Again, for as long as zombi(e)s were treated in Gothic and Romantic genres, they were not political. The politicization of zombies came only after there was a scientific or materialistic explanation for their existence. This only makes sense, as Gothic and Romantic writers are generally apolitical, or at most, anti-political in their writing. (3) Once zombies were given a scientific explanation, they passed into the realm of science fiction, a genre that leans towards the political.

In their original form, zombi(e)s were solitary creatures or beings that existed on the fringes of the physical world. Even in William Seabrook's version, they were individual slaves made by one man's magic. That's not how we think of zombies today, however. Today zombies are not individuals. They are masses or hordes. They are part or can be seen as part of a social, economic, or political system. That dichotomy--the individual vs. the masses--is essentially a political idea. It gets to the heart of the argument between conservatism, which emphasizes the individual, and progressivism, which emphasizes the masses, or synonymously by its formulation, society or "the system." Here's an illustrative quote attributed to the socialist Che Guevara:

Youth should learn to think and act as a mass. It is criminal to think as individuals! 

The individual zombie is not a political unit. A mass of zombies easily can become one in the right hands. It seems clear to me that, just as zombies were not politicized until they were given a scientific explanation, so they were not politicized until they had become a mass.

There is at least one more reason why zombies have become politicized. In popular culture, the outbreak of a disease that causes zombie-ism always results in a pandemic of zombie-ism. I can't think of a single instance where the infected zombie does not infect other people, nor where one zombie does not become a horde of zombies. This is in contrast to other science-fictional diseases in popular culture. For instance, in The Shrinking Man by Richard Matheson (1956), one man is afflicted and one man shrinks. Why not a whole population of shrinking people? Why not a shrinking disease that spreads throughout the world? I can't say except that in a world where some people are shrunken and some aren't there isn't much opportunity for conflict. Anyway, in the case of the Matheson-Romero zombie, there is always an apocalypse. Despite the religious origins of the word, the apocalyptic or post-apocalyptic story is a science-fictional genre. I'll say it one more time: science fiction, being about the future, tends to become political.

In getting to the heart of the matter, I think that zombies have become politicized because of academia and its interests. Historically, high culture, including academia, did not treat popular culture, which would have been considered vulgar and unworthy of study. At some point, probably in the 1960s, that changed (although Gilbert Seldes, a respected critic, wrote about American pop culture in The Seven Lively Arts, published in 1924). Only after comic books, science fiction, pulp magazines, and similar subjects became of academic interest did university professors begin looking at zombies. And because academics--especially academics in the liberal arts--tend to be leftist in orientation, zombies have been spun to the left. They may be of special interest to people who subscribe to critical theory. Stephen Olbrys Gencarella appears to be one of that group.

The assertion that zombi(e)s were somehow political--i.e., representative of the relationship between the capitalist and the proletariat or between the colonial master and the colonial laborer--as early as 1900 doesn't make much sense to me, and I haven't found any evidence to that effect. Zombi(e)s were at that time still within the realm of the Gothic or Romantic. They were in fact more powerful than human beings and not inferior in status at all. Not many people--maybe no one at all--in academia, politics, or science had any interest in them. Likewise they would not have been of any interest to authors in the schools of Realism or Naturalism. (4) And the people who were interested in them--Lafcadio Hearn (1850-1904) and George Washington Cable (1844-1925), for example--tended to be from outside the worlds of academia, politics, and science. You might instead call them amateur ethnologists and collectors of folklore. William B. Seabrook (1884-1945) carried on in that way, as did writers and investigators after him, including Zora Neale Hurston (1891-1960), a folklorist and anthropologist, who traveled to Haiti and investigated its folklore (5). As for short stories and novels that mentioned zombi(e)s before and during the pulp fiction era: all that I have found so far are in the Gothic or Romantic genres of historical romance, fantasy, ghost stories, weird fiction, and so on.

Through my research, I have started to understand that zombies may actually have something to do with a historical force far older and far more powerful in the human imagination than American capitalism, colonialism, or imperialism. (Although I'll concede that zombies probably came to this country during the occupation of Haiti in 1915-1934.) Instead, I think zombies--more specifically the fear of zombie-ism--dates (proximally) from the French colonial period in Haiti and that it represents the simultaneous fears of being enslaved and of being held as a slave without end. Deeper than that, it represents the fear that, because a zombie does not die, the person who is made into a zombie will never escape slavery and will never be released into the afterlife. If that's the case, then the fear of becoming a zombie is not material or political at all but psychological, if not spiritual and existential. If that's the case, too, then zombie-ism predates American capitalism, colonialism, and imperialism, circa 1900. It actually comes (proximally) from the period of the French Revolution when leftist revolutionaries in France claimed rights and freedoms for themselves while still trying to hold black Haitians in slavery. If Dr. Gencarella wants to find a historical context for the phenomenon of zombie-ism, he should forget about knee-jerk leftism and begin there. Beyond that, he should look deep into human history and pre-history, for that's where slavery and the fear of becoming enslaved almost certainly began.

* * *

People on the left sympathize and identify with the zombies and/or dislike the human characters in The Walking Dead. That seems clear to me. If they imagine that "[t]he zombie trope" in America originated in a time of capitalism and colonialism or imperialism in America, or if they imagine that the human beings in the show are fascist, do they believe that by sympathizing or identifying with zombies, they also sympathize or identify with some kind of "people's" cause? And what if zombi(e)s are not connected somehow to American capitalism, colonialism, or imperialism, or with fascism, which seems to be the case? If zombies as we know them today entered American popular culture not at the turn of the twentieth century but a generation later, what then? Even if they came from the pulp fiction era, the zombies of 1929 or 1932 or 1943 (when I Walked with a Zombie was released) were not the zombies of today. Between 1929 and 1954 or 1968 or 1978 (when Dawn of the Dead was released) and before the scientific age of zombies, they were isolated human beings reduced to slavery by force of magic. They were without mind or will, and they were subservient to their masters. They were not out-of-control masses of shambling undead seeking to rip people apart, devour their brains, and slaver over their entrails. They certainly weren't brought about by material means, i.e., by the effects of a pathogen or, as in The Serpent and the Rainbow (1985), by natural, biological toxins. (6) Finally, they weren't a social, political, or economic unit waiting to be politicized.

The zombies of today are a different kind of creature. The emergence of the politicized zombie or the zombie as a political symbol coincides with the revolutions of the 1960s and '70s, not with the capitalism and colonialism/imperialism of around 1900 or even around 1929. It seems to me that academics are looking past three developments that took place in the 1960s and '70s and projecting the emergence of the politicized zombie into the historical past. The three developments in my mind are these: 1) Academia began to take an interest in popular culture in the 1960s and '70s; 2) Academia, especially the liberal arts, became increasingly leftist in orientation during the same period; and 3) Because of that, they applied leftist interpretations to everything before them, including popular culture. Have they ever considered the possibility that the mark they see is not on history? That it may actually be on the lens through which they view history?

* * *

I think that one of the reasons that so many people on the left dislike the human beings in The Walking Dead is that they see them as a bunch of gun-totin', Trump-votin', Bible-verse-quotin' deplorables. They're bitter clingers who lack college educations and live in horrifying wastelands like Indiana, Kentucky, and Alabama. In The Walking Dead, the zombies outnumber the humans. They have won the popular vote. Yet the humans resist the imposition of the zombie imperative to take away everything that is most sacred to them--their individual human identity, their autonomy, their rights, their freedom, their lives. In other words, they resist literal dehumanization and a kind of metaphorical slavery. Zombies want to overwhelm humanity. Humans use guns to kill them and build walls to keep them out. They also live under a hierarchical--and arguably more traditional--social structure and resist the anarchic or nihilistic society of the zombie mob. And they recognize the truth about human existence, that we are in our nature fallen, and that in the absence of civilizing influences, we revert to savagery--that we must revert to savagery if we are to survive. The leftist, rightfully in his mind, may ask: "How dare they?"

Maybe, too, the leftist's dislike for The Walking Dead comes from its implicit refutation of leftist ideals: That human beings are fundamentally good and that they are corrupted by society (i.e., by civilization); that once traditional (or conservative or reactionary) institutions, including civilization, are overthrown, we will be ushered into a golden age in which our natural selves and relationships will be expressed; that in a state of nature, because of our natural goodness, we will enjoy great happiness and harmony with each other; and that, ultimately, the future will be golden age, a Utopia, and not a nightmarish post-apocalypse. And maybe leftists don't like the idea of an apocalypse at all because of its religious--more specifically, Christian--overtones. As I have written, the Haitian fear of becoming a zombie includes the fear that the zombie-slave is forever denied release into the afterlife and will never be permitted to return to the Haitian's own version of Utopia, Lan Guinée, the African homeland of his imagination. So maybe there is a religious or theological aspect to zombie-ism, an aspect which the leftist--being a thoroughgoing materialist or atheist--is entirely too squeamish and ill-equipped to consider. (7)

Here's another maybe for us all to think about, me included: Maybe The Walking Dead and the zombie story in general are just stories.

Notes
(1) Significantly, Southey's use of the word was in his recounting of a slave revolt in South America.
(2) As an illustration, "The Unknown Painter" first appeared in American newspapers in 1838, the same year in which "Ligeia" by Edgar Allan Poe was published. "Ligeia" is of course a tale of a bodily revenant. Some people consider it a zombie story. Although he wrote proto-science fiction, Poe was essentially an author of Gothic and Romantic works. Weird Tales, which published some of the first zombi(e) stories of the pulp era, was cast in Poe's mold. H.P. Lovecraft, the leading author for Weird Tales, was a great admirer of Poe. He, too, is said to have authored zombie stories, especially in his series on Herbert West, Reanimator. I would say that if zombie and revenant or the undead are synonyms, then maybe. Otherwise, Poe and Lovecraft wrote about two of the oldest fears we have: of death and of the return of the dead. It's worth noting that both Poe and Lovecraft used scientific or quasi-scientific methods to raise or fix life in their deadmen: mesmerism in "The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar" (1845) and injections of a serum in the Herbert West series.
(3) Romanticism and Gothicism, as reactions against the Age of Reason and the French Revolution, are especially in opposition to progressive, leftist, and rationalist ideas.
(4) Theodore Dreiser, a Naturalist author, is supposed to have snubbed William Seabrook, though not because of his subject matter but because of his personality and reputation. That's interesting in that Seabrook was essentially a Fortean, though maybe not formally. Dreiser, too, was a Fortean. He was also one of Charles Fort's best friends, if not his only friend.
(5) She was, by the way, a conservative Republican. There are stories that Harriet Tubman was a Republican, too. That may or may not make much sense, as even as a free woman she would not have been able to vote or hold public office. In any case, Harriet packed a pistol to defend herself and others from the depredations of the slaveholder and slave-hunter. So if you want to close a circle of: human beings as prey to masses of vampires (Matheson) to human beings as prey to masses of zombies (Romero) to the phenomenon of the supernatural zombie-slave based on a memory of real-world slavery (Seabrook) to real-world slave rebellions or revolutions to end slavery (the Haitian Revolution and the American Civil War) to enslaved human beings as prey to masses of slaveholding vampires, then look to Seth Grahame-Smith's novel (more accurately, gothic romance) Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter from 2010.
(6) In The Serpent and the Rainbow (1985), zombies were given an alternative scientific explanation: they are caused by the use of natural, biological toxins of the pufferfish and of Datura, commonly called jimsonweed or thornapple. I have written about jimsonweed and its connection to weird fiction before (link here). I didn't mention in that article the part jimsonweed plays in the 1979 horror movie Nightwing. Anyway, it's not that far to go from Herbert West's serum to a cocktail of toxins as in The Serpent and the Rainbow.
Speaking of cocktails, there is a cocktail called the Zombie. It was invented in 1934 by Donn Beach, also the inventor of the postwar tiki craze. The Zombie has several ingredients, one of which is rum, which was one side of the triangular slave trade and the drink enjoyed by the rebelling zombie-slaves in "Salt Is Not for Slaves."
(7) Remember the question put to the people of the Caribbean: What is a zombi(e)? The rational Westerner was incapable of comprehending the answer because the answer is not rational. The leftist, materialist, or atheist academic of today is even more ill-equipped to understand the nature and meaning of zombi(e)s. He asks the question of himself and can come up only with a materialist explanation, more narrowly, an explanation tainted by Marxism and its relentless criticism of capitalism. In other words, to the critical theorist, zombies must have something to do with capitalism, especially American capitalism, because everything has something to do with capitalism. Here's a question to consider on the other side: What is an academic? The answer seems to be that he is an obtuse navel-gazer, a person with his mind full of theories and empty of imagination.

Poe's Ligeia in an illustration by British artist Byam Shaw (1872-1919), who died of Spanish Influenza in 1919, that pivotal year in the history of the twentieth century and of the pre-history of Weird Tales.

Text copyright 2017 Terence E. Hanley

Zombies, Liches, Corpses, and the Undead

February 18, 2017, 3:00 am

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So far, February has been Zombie Month at Tellers of Weird Tales. I guess I'll keep it up for a while, beginning with all of the covers of Weird Tales showing zombies, liches, corpses, and the undead, plus a couple of creatures that look like they could be from among the undead. I count more than a dozen of these covers. One thing I noticed in pulling them together is that many of the undead seem to have lost their pupils, like Little Orphan Annie. If the eyes are a window upon the soul, I guess that makes sense. Anyway, the first cover is for a story by Arthur J. Burks, who may be the forgotten father of the zombie in America. I don't know for a fact that the taller of the two figures is a zombie, but once I learned a little something about Burks, the cover made sense: in front appears to be a bokor, houngan, or mambo, and in the rear, a zombie? I plan to read this story soon. When I do, I'll let you know for sure.

Weird Tales, August 1925. Cover story: "Black Medicine" by Arthur J. Burks. Cover art by Andrew Brosnatch.

Weird Tales, April 1930. Cover story: "The Dust of Egypt" by Seabury Quinn. Cover art by Hugh Rankin. The creature in the middle looks like one of the undead, plus he doesn't have any pupils. You have seen this cover before in the categories of Egypt and of the reaching hand, but I think it has a place here, too.

Weird Tales, January 1931. Cover story "The Lost Lady" by Seabury Quinn. Cover art by C.C. Senf. Another reaching hand, and in the rear, a zomboid creature. Or maybe he's a ghoul.

Weird Tales, August 1932. Cover story: "Bride of the Peacock" by E. Hoffman Price. Cover art by T. Wyatt Nelson. More than a skeleton, less than alive. In my book, that makes for one of the undead.

Weird Tales, October 1936. Cover story: "Isle of the Undead" by Lloyd Arthur Eshbach. Cover art by J. Allen St. John. There's no doubt about this cover.

Weird Tales, February 1937. Cover story: "The Globe of Memories" by Seabury Quinn. Cover art by Virgil Finlay.

Weird Tales, October 1937. Cover story: "Tiger Cat" by David H. Keller. Cover art by Margaret Brundage. I don't know that the men in the picture are of the undead, but their eyes are blunked out, as MAD magazine put it in its parody of Pogo, so here they are.

Weird Tales, July 1938. Cover story: "Spawn of Dagon" by Henry Kuttner. Cover art by Virgil Finlay. More missing pupils, plus the short guy in front is pretty green and seems to be past his expiration date.

How did Virgil Finlay see the future so well?

Weird Tales, November 1939. Cover story: "Towers of Death" by Henry Kuttner. Cover art by Virgil Finlay. This is a rare cover and one we haven't seen before (if I remember right).

Weird Tales, July 1940. Cover story: "An Adventure of a Professional Corpse" by H. Bedford-Jones. Cover art by Margaret Brundage. This guy wins the prize for the spiffiest corpse so far.

Weird Tales, Canadian edition, November 1943. Cover story: Uncertain. Cover art by an unknown artist. The Canadian edition of Weird Tales had its own look. You would barely know that it was the same magazine as the American edition. And some of the Canadian covers were superior to their American counterparts.

Weird Tales, Canadian edition, March 1944. Cover story: "The Valley of the Assassins" by Edmond Hamilton [?]. Cover art by an unknown artist. More blunked-out eyes. Are these men undead?

Weird Tales, July 1947. Cover story: "Weirdisms: The Vampire" by E. Crosby Michel. Cover art by Lee Brown Coye. This is actually a vampire cover, but Coye's vampire looks more like what we think of as a zombie. Coye tended to draw and paint decrepit people, but I think that with his artist's keen vision, he saw and depicted the true nature of the vampire as an evil and depraved being. People who think of vampires as cute and sexy have forgotten or overlooked that. Why do they have to be reminded that vampires are here to kill us all?

Weird Tales, November 1949. Cover story: "The Underbody" by Allison V. Harding. Cover art by Matt Fox.

Text and captions copyright 2017 Terence E. Hanley

Voodoo on the Cover of Weird Tales

February 21, 2017, 3:00 am

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I have covered zombies on the cover of Weird Tales. Now I'll cover Voodoo and the magic and sorcery of the Caribbean, Central America, and the American South. I have five covers here, but only three are obviously about Voodoo. The first may be related to Voodoo, while the last may not be related at all.

There are still more zombie topics on the way.

Weird Tales, December 1924. Cover story: "Death-Waters" by Frank Belknap Long. Cover art by Andrew Brosnatch. "Death-Waters" is not explicitly a tale of Voodoo, and there are no zombies, but the black man in the story is, evidently, a kind of sorcerer with power to call forth masses of snakes. The man's power may be related to the concept of Li Grand Zombi, the serpent spirit of Voodoo folklore in Louisiana. By the way, "Death-Waters" takes place in Central America, possibly in Honduras, and not in Africa. A few weeks ago, a reader commented on this story. I read it so that I might understand better what's going on in the illustration. I can tell you that the story and its characters are complicated. The reader was right: the man in the middle is the least sympathetic character. (He may also be a more subtle racial stereotype than appears: named Byrne, he is stubborn and quick to anger, matching what many people thought--or think--of Irishmen.) The man in the rear is more or less inarticulate. Though loyal, he's kind of a numbskull. The man in front is not what I would call sympathetic exactly (the narrator--the man in the rear--sees or believes that he sees in the black man horrible things). However, he gets into a battle of wills with Byrne and is made to heel. The snakes come to avenge his humiliation. As you can tell, this is not a simple story and definitely not a simple case of racism or racialism against black people.

Weird Tales, August 1925. Cover story: "Black Medicine" by Arthur J. Burks. Cover art by Andrew Brosnatch. I haven't read this story yet, but I assume that it's about Haiti and that the figure in front is a Haitian magician or sorcerer. That would suggest that the figure in the rear is a zombie. I hope to read this story soon, so I'll let you know.

Weird Tales, March 1930. Cover story: "Drums of Damballah" by Seabury Quinn. Cover art by C.C. Senf. Damballah is a god of Voodoo and may be synonymous with Li Grande Zombi. (I can't say as I don't know much about Voodoo.) The connection to snakes is evident in the illustration. Speaking of connections, I wonder if there is any etymological connection between Damballah and Allah.

Weird Tales, May 1941. Cover story: "There Are Such Things" by Seabury Quinn [?]. Cover art by Hannes Bok. According to Jaffery and Cook's index of Weird Tales, there is no cover story for this issue, but the illustration and the story named on the cover seem to go together.

Weird Tales, July 1951. Cover story: "Flame Birds of Angala" by E. Everett Evans. Cover art by Charles A. Kennedy. I don't know that this is a story of Voodoo. Published in 1951, it actually seems kind of late for the Voodoo/zombie craze of the 1930s and early '40s. But I'm putting it here until I know something different.

Text and captions copyright 2017 Terence E. Hanley

The Uses of Zombies

February 24, 2017, 3:00 am

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In the previous series on the origins of zombies in America, I asked the question, Why zombies? I provided some possible answers, but I'm not sure that I hit the mark. There may be even deeper meanings than what I proposed.

There is something about zombies that has lodged itself in our imaginations. You could say that zombies have devoured the brains of our entire culture. Academics are especially interested in them. That's probably as it should be, for the power of the zombie story and the prevalence of zombies in our culture make the zombie a legitimate object of academic interest. So zombies serve purposes in our popular culture, but they also serve purposes in academia. My next question is this: Academics are watching us, but who's watching them? If zombie-ology, or zombology, is a study, why don't we have a meta-zombology, a historiography of zombies, or a zombography ? Academics study zombies, but why don't they study their fellow academics who study zombies? They are so ready to examine the rest of us and to look into the putative reasons why we like zombies so much. Why don't they examine themselves or their colleagues and ask the hard questions about the academic interest in zombies?

A long time ago, in Mr. Cisco's sociology class, we read a paper called "The Uses of Poverty: The Poor Pay All" by Herbert J. Gans, originally in Social Policy for July/August 1971 (pp. 20-24). The point of the article is that there is utility or positive function in poverty or in the poor. You can agree or disagree with Dr. Gans' thesis. That's not the point. The point is to ask this analogous question: What are the uses of zombies, especially in academia? Why do academics study zombies? What does it do for them? How does believing the things that they believe about zombies satisfy their needs, not only their needs for advancing their careers, seeking tenure, publishing papers, and so forth, but also their psychological needs? What does the study of zombies do for the self-esteem of the academic, for his or her need for recognition and for winning the esteem of his or her peers? How does the study of zombies or the academic's conclusions about zombies signal his or her virtue, political correctness (in both the contemporary sense and the original sense), or moral or intellectual acuity, if not superiority, again, among his or her peers? What opportunities do zombies provide the academic to carry out his or her own conspicuous moral preening before the rest of academia and before a larger society? What does it do towards confirming his or her preconceived notions about the world, human nature, human activity (including political and economic activity), and the meaning of human existence? Academics in the liberal arts tend to be caught up in Marxism and its offshoots, especially critical theory. Their focus is on a relentless criticism of capitalism. But what if we put them under the microscope? What if we defeat their attempts at misdirection and shine the spotlight on them? Academics may see zombies as stand-ins for the supposed exploited peoples of the world and/or see the human beings in the zombie story as capitalists or fascists. But aren't academics themselves exploiting zombies and the popular interest in zombies? Are they not using both for their own intellectual, moral, economic, and political purposes? Far more significantly, are they not using zombies to satisfy their own psychological needs, especially for self-esteem? And if they are, what does that say about them?

Copyright 2017 Terence E. Hanley

Zombography

February 25, 2017, 3:00 am

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In my hypothesizing about zombies, I have speculated that academia would have first been interested in zombies in the 1960s or '70s. I developed that hypothesis based on these suppositions: 1) During the 1960s and '70s, zombies crossed over from the realm of the magical and supernatural into that of the scientific and materialistic. In other words, they were scientified. In the process, zombies also became politicized, or they were shambling towards politicization. 2) During that same period, zombies went from being individual slaves, subservient to their masters, to becoming uncontrollable and very threatening masses. That development also made zombies subject to scientification and politicization. The masses (also called "the people") have been of interest to leftist theorists since the French Revolution and especially since the time of Karl Marx, a materialist who claimed sympathy with the masses and considered history to be a science. I assume that to be the link between zombies as masses and the scientific/materialistic/political leftist interest in zombies. 3) In the 1960s and '70s, academia became more interested in popular culture, especially in the genres of science fiction, fantasy, horror, etc., and in the various pop-culture forms of pulp magazines, comic books, mass market paperbacks, etc. That interest could have remained neutral and appreciative. Instead, it became ideological and critical. 4) During that same period, academics became more leftist in orientation, and academia as a whole began applying leftist interpretations to history, popular culture, and just about everything else you can imagine. Academics were (and are) especially interested in critical theory, which I think of as an odd marriage between Marxism and Freudianism. (One result of that marriage is politicized sex.) In fact, the "critical" part of critical theory appears to be directed almost exclusively at: a) capitalism; and b) traditional marriage, the traditional family, traditional sex roles, traditional sexual morality, and, lately, the immutable fact of biological sex. Very little else seems to exist in the imagination of the critical theorist, such as it is.

So here is my hypothesis: Academia became interested in zombies either in the 1960s or '70s. How do I test that hypothesis? Well, one way is to look at a scholarly bibliography of zombies, or what I'll call a zombibliography. Luckily, I found one. It's called "Zombie Studies Bibliography: Scholarly Research on Zombies in Popular Culture," and it has been compiled by Tyll Zybura, British and American Studies, Bielefeld University, Germany. You can find it by clicking here. The version I have is from September 14, 2016, and everything I write here is based on that version. I think Tyll Zybura should be commended for a very fine piece of work. I would like to point out that the tally and chart (below), as well as all opinions and interpretations here are my own. Any errors I have made are also my own.

There are, by my count, 528 papers and books listed in "Zombie Studies Bibliography." The earliest is from 1987. Assuming the bibliography is comprehensive or nearly so, I'm off on my prediction: 1987 is not the 1960s or '70s. But I dug a little deeper, and I found evidence to support my hypothesis, for the earliest paper listed, from 1987, is by Richard H.W. Dillard, an American poet, author, editor, and university professor. Since 1964, Dr. Dillard has taught at Hollins University near Roanoke, Virginia. From 1973 to 1980, he edited The Film Journal, and he has a special interest in film, especially genre films. In 1976, Monarch Press published Dr. Dillard's book Horror Films. I don't have this book, but I have read the back cover blurb. The text of the blurb confirms that in his book, Dr. Dillard discussed Night of the Living Dead, George Romero's seminal zombie movie from 1968. So, assuming Horror Films, written by a university professor and a well-respected member of academia, is a scholarly work, then the earliest known scholarly (vs. popular) discussion of zombies is from 1976. I'm surprised that there is nothing before that, as Night of the Living Dead has obvious political or racial connotations, but we're still early in this game of zombie historiography, or zombography.

So I tallied by year the scholarly papers and books listed in Tyll Zybura's bibliography of zombies in popular culture and then graphed them. Here are my results. They are formatted as an 8-1/2 x 11-inch sheet, hence all the white space:

The last thing a reader of weird tales wants to see is a graph or chart, but there are some interesting points or interpretations to make about this zombograph. First, academia didn't seem to care very much about zombies between 1987 and 2005. That seems to fit with another of my hypotheses that vampires were the favorite pop culture monster until they were displaced by zombies in the late 1990s to early 2000s. (My sister thinks it happened about 2005 or so.) Second, the number of scholarly papers followed a trend, rising steadily from 2006 to 2015, with three exceptions: 1) Either the number for 2008 is high, or the number for 2009 is low relative to the trend. 2) The number for 2011 is exceptionally high. 3) The number for 2014 also doesn't fit the trend, being higher than the year after it. I think I can explain the number for 2011: The Walking Dead premiered on October 31, 2010; academia then took notice of the vast popularity of the show, and the papers they wrote in response were published in the year following the premiere. (An expert on The Walking Dead might be able to explain the large number of zombie papers published in 2014. I would look for developments from 2013 or early 2014 as possible factors in the increase in the number of papers.)

In political terms, the number of zombie papers is a pretty neutral measure. If you want to know about the content of those papers, you have to read them or their abstracts. Lacking that, you can read their titles, which are in the bibliography at hand. Richard H.W. Dillard's paper, "Night of the Living Dead: It's Not Like Just a Wind That's Passing Through," from 1987, is not obviously political by its title. The title of the next paper in chronological order, however, is another story: "Night of the Living Dead: A Horror Film About the Horrors of the Vietnam Era" (by Sumiko Higashi) suggests a political interpretation. The next, from 1992, is entitled "I Shopped with a Zombie" (by Philip Horne), a paper that would seem to be about Dawn of the Dead (1978), a film that has been interpreted in political ways for its satire of consumerism.

That pattern of neutral or only vaguely political titles continued until 2006, the same year in which the number of zombie papers increased from three to seven, or more than 200 percent, and in which the current trend seems to have begun. The prize for the first overtly political zombie title (by my estimation) goes to Annalee Newitz. Actually she wins a twofer for her paper "The Undead: A Haunted Whiteness," which appeared in her own book Pretend We're Dead: Capitalist Monsters in American Pop Culture (Duke University Press, 2006). Here's a blurb from her publisher:

[In Pretend We're Dead] Newitz shows that as literature and film tell it, the story of American capitalism since the late nineteenth century is a tale of body-mangling, soul-crushing horror.

As the security device in Undercover Brother might say, "Leftness confirmed."

Since then, all hell has broken loose. Just look at these words from the titles listed in the zombibliography: homonormativity, proletariat, imperialist hegemony, multiculturalism, intersections, global capitalism, queered sexuality, capitalist futures, masculinities, fascist masculinity, gendered, queer failure, queering, gendering, advanced capitalism, zombie capitalism, queers, the queer monster, queer zombies, cross-cultural appropriations, capitalist monsters, whiteness, monsters of capital, consumerism, zombified capital, postcolonial capital, corporate zombies. I'm no expert on the topic, but it seems to me that this is the vocabulary of the critical theorist, a person whose interests, like I have said, seem to be limited to two main topics: sex--which came from Freud, I think--and capitalism--which obviously came from Marx. In their constricted vision and imagination, critical theorists (and leftists in general) remind me of the stereotypical Puritan, who sees the devil everywhere he looks. Leftism may very well be a permutation of Puritanism. It's certainly a belief system of religious intensity and with millennialist (i.e., Utopian) goals.

None of this is to say that there aren't scholarly papers of interest or usefulness in the zombibliography. There obviously are, and I would like to read some of them. But the titles of these papers indicate a leftward slant to the research and commentary on and the interpretation of zombies since 2006. That academic interest seems to coincide with a greater interest in zombies among regular people, you know, all of those deplorables who watch TV because reading scholarly journals is out of their intellectual range. That could just be an expression of the academic's natural interest in what's going in the wider world. But how much of it is political theorizing attached to the nearest object of popular interest? And not just interest but extraordinary success, including monetary success. (Those rotten capitalists.) It's as if academics, in writing about zombies, have taken an intellectual selfie to pass around among their friends: "Look at me, everyone, standing next to the phenomenon of The Walking Dead! It's rich and famous, so the fact that I'm in close proximity to it makes me rich and famous, too!" Do they think that by associating themselves with the show some of its renown and success will rub off on them? Who knows. But if that's the case, it would be evidence in favor of my hypostulatin' that people in academia write about zombies more to meet their own psychological and emotional needs than as exercises in genuine and unbiased scholarship. (One bit of evidence that the social "sciences" are not sciences at all is that confirmation bias in these fields is not only permitted but practically required.) I'll close by saying that it's too bad I have to call it hypostulatin'.  I would like to call this a hypothesis--i.e., that academics write about zombies mainly to meet their own psychological and emotional needs--but it just doesn't reach the level of a testable hypothesis. Not until we get them all on the analyst's couch, anyway. Where's Freud when you need him?

There's another zombograph on the way, so be ready for it.

Horror Films by R.H.W. Dillard (Monarch Press, 1976), the earliest presumably scholarly work on zombies that I have found to date, and then only in part. It seems to me that there would have been something before Dr. Dillard's book, but this is what we have for now. By the way, Richard H.W. Dillard married one of his students, who became Annie Dillard and who wrote an extraordinary book called Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (1974), which won her a Pulitzer Prize in 1975. Annie Dillard was born in Pittsburgh, a city close to where Night of the Living Dead (1968) was filmed. Her birth name was Meta Ann Doak, which fact makes me wonder if she was related to Hugh Doak Rankin, who drew pictures for Weird Tales.

Text, caption, and chart copyright 2017 Terence E. Hanley

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Another Zombograph

February 28, 2017, 3:00 am

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I warned you there would be another zombograph. Well here it is. The graph below is supposed to illustrate the concept of the uncanny valley, an easy concept to understand once you have gone through it but harder when you see it in a form like this. The simplest way to explain the concept, I think, is to give an example, and we all saw one recently in the digitized versions of Peter Cushing and Carrie Fisher in Rogue One: they look very much like human beings, but they're not, and your brain knows it. And is creeped out by it. Which is why human characters should not be digitized in movies and cast next to real people.

So in the graph below, a less human likeness is on the left and a more human likeness is on the right. That's the x-axis. The y-axis seems to me to be mislabeled, as it is the axis showing not "familiarity"--whatever that means--but positive or negative emotional response to objects with a supposedly more or less human appearance. The uncanny valley is that area where an object approaches human appearance but is obviously not human. That provokes a very negative response. The extreme dip in the curve (into negative territory) is the uncanny valley.

A graph of the uncanny valley, from Wikipedia.

Now, there are lots of things wrong with this graph and possibly something wrong altogether with the idea of the uncanny valley. I can tell you, if I had turned in something like this to my wildlife ecology professor, he would have had words for me. To begin with, there is no label and no author's name. Next, the graph is confusing. What does "familiarity" mean? What are the units by which it is measured? I assume the horizontal gray line to be the divider between positive and negative "familiarity." If so, why isn't it labeled "0" (zero)? Likewise, the x-axis, labeled "human likeness," is without units of measure, unless "50%" and "100%" are those units. If so, what does that mean? Does a humanoid robot supposedly have a 50% human likeness? Does a stuffed animal have a likeness that is more than 50% human? According to whom?

That leads to a more serious problem, not only with the graph but with the thinking behind it, for aren't all non-living objects actually 0% human? No matter what they look like or what they do, aren't they all equally non-human? And what does it say about a scientist who seemingly believes that something non-human can approach the human when there is actually an infinitely wide gap--an unbridgeable discontinuity--between human beings and all non-living objects, regardless of their appearance or how well they are animated? I know this graph is supposed to show a recovery of positive feelings after a passage through the uncanny valley, but do human beings really respond favorably to a non-living object that looks very nearly like us? Or is that just wishful thinking on the part of scientists who dream of the day when robot relationships will replace human relationships?

Finally, in regards to the graph, healthy persons, puppets, robots, stuffed animals, prosthetic hands, and corpses are all real things. Zombies are not. Why is there a non-existent thing on this graph? What kind of science is that? Going back to my wildlife ecology professor--if I had turned in a graph showing, for example, some kind of comparison of large, terrestrial North American wildlife species and had included Sasquatch on my graph, I would have received a talking to behind closed doors. But here we have zombies and nobody seems to object. Anyway, this is just an example of the uses of zombies in academia. It appears to be politically neutral, so we can be thankful for that at least. But it also appears to show a lack of intellectual or scholarly rigor as in so many of the papers in the zombibliography from the other day. And it shows that zombies have in fact been scientified. Or maybe there's something more behind the concept of the uncanny valley . . .

* * *

Don't get me wrong: I think that the uncanny valley is a useful concept and that it very likely describes something real. If it is real--if we shrink with revulsion from things that look human but are not--then it seems likely to me that our feelings for the uncanny preceded their description by science (or quasi-science) and that they are of use to us as we find our way in the universe. And I don't think we should be trying to bridge the uncanny valley, as some people seem intent on doing. On the contrary, we should strive to keep it deep and wide. If we don't we won't be able to recognize the monsters among us--or in us.

* * *

Very human-like robots are a big thing in Japan, a country that seems to have forgotten how to have human relationships. The originator of the concept of the uncanny valley is also Japanese. His name is Masahiro Mori (b. 1927). I know almost nothing about him, but it is ironic that his last name evokes the Latin word meaning "to die" and nearly echoes the Latin phrase "memento mori," meaning "remember you must die." Dr. Mori seems to believe in the potential for robots to achieve buddhahood or a state of enlightenment. With all of that in mind, I would like to quote from a quote of a quote from a paper by W.A. Borody on Dr. Mori and his concepts of the uncanny valley and the Buddha in the robot:

"What is this, Channa?" asked Siddhartha. "Why does that man lie there so still, allowing these people to burn him up? It's as if he does not know anything."

"He is dead," replied Channa.

"Dead! Channa, does everyone die?"

"Yes, my dear prince, all living things must die some day. No one can stop death from coming," replied Channa.

The prince was so shocked he did not say anything more.

--From The Fear and Terror Sutra (Bhaya-bherava Sutta)

translated from the Pali by Thanissaro Bhikkhu

It goes without saying that robots don't die. In fact, a robot made of advanced technology may very well carry on the personality and character of its maker, whether that maker be a person or a whole nation.

* * *

In addition to originating the concept of the uncanny valley, Masahiro Mori has studied the purported relationships between religion and robotics. He believes, like I said, that robots are capable of achieving buddhahood or a state of enlightenment. I'm not sure that we have an equivalent concept in the West, although there are some people who believe that robots will someday become self-aware, thus rendering Western religions problematic, if not obsolete. Eastern religions may not have that problem. An illustrative quote of a quote from Dr. Borody's paper:

Unlike Christian Occidentals, the Japanese don't make a distinction between man, the superior creature, and the world about him. Everything is fused together, and we accept robots easily along with the wide world about us, the insects, the rocks--it's all one. We have none of the doubting attitude toward robots, as pseudohumans, that you find in the West. So here you find no resistance, just simple quiet acceptance.

--Osamu Tezuka (1928–1989),

Japanese manga artist and cartoonist

If the continuation of a culture is a measure of the usefulness of its ideas, then I think we have to take things like this with a grain of salt. After all, the Japanese are very rapidly not reproducing themselves out of existence.

* * *

It seems to me that one reason we have a sense of the uncanny is so that we can recognize those things around us that are without souls and so that we can differentiate them from ensouled beings like ourselves. The scientist, atheist, and materialist has no use for an idea like that. Practitioners of Eastern religions or members of Eastern cultures may not have the same sense that we do. And maybe that's why the Japanese don't seem to mind having "relationships" with robots and why robots are replacing human beings in the roles of lover, friend, and caretaker in Japan. Robots are simply doing what human beings there are failing to do. Maybe, when there are no longer any Japanese people, Japan will survive as a nation populated (or robulated) by human-like Japanese robots.

* * *

Japan and Germany have different but related problems. Both tried and failed to destroy themselves during World War II. Their prospects for doing so now have improved, for both are in demographic decline, with Japan approaching demographic collapse. I can't diagnose the German problem, but it seems to me a combination of self-loathing, nihilism, secularism (or atheism), materialism, and hedonism. The Japanese problem isn't exactly clear to me either, although Shintoism, the predominant belief system in Japan, is essentially atheist in orientation. (No pun intended.) The Japanese people also have a reputation for being stoic. You might say that both Germany and Japan now exist in a pre-Christian state. In any case, both are on the path towards annihilating themselves in the original sense of the word, meaning reduced to nothing. People in both countries see the threat. The proposed solution for demographic collapse and depopulation in each seems to be different. I can imagine a time in the not very distant future when Japan will be a nation of a hundred people and a million robots. Germany, on the other hand, seems intent on passing itself and its two thousand years of history and culture on to Muslims, who will destroy it just as well as Germans have seemed intent on doing for so long now.

* * *

So there is an uncanny valley in visual terms. Is there also an uncanny valley in auditory terms? Do we recoil from the almost-human voice? I do, whether it's a computer voice from the national weather service or a robot on the phone. Towards the end of her life, my mom lost her ability to speak. She could have used a computer to speak for her but she didn't want it. I think I understand her reasons, although she never told us why she didn't want it: as a human being, she wanted to speak in the voice of a human being or not at all. So will there come a time when robot voices will serve some of the purposes of the human voice? Will we try to speak soul-to-soul to a thing without a soul as with the robot analyst in THX 1138? Will we have robot Facebook friends, for instance, who will mimic very closely the sympathies and sentiments of real people, moreover, who will serve the purposes of somehow affirming our value as human beings and building our self-esteem through a digital intermediary? I don't doubt that there are people working towards these goals. Our acceptance and use of robot analysts, friends, confidants, and lovers would only confirm to me that we have, as Albert Camus put it, a worm in our hearts. It would also confirm to me that any system of belief that does not recognize our humanity and the existence of the human soul is a literal dead end.

* * *

One last thing: I have speculated that zombies are the monster of the twenty-first century and that they are likely to remain so for a long time to come. I have considered the possibility that robots or androids will succeed zombies, and there are indications of that happening. I suppose it depends on which future we prefer, the apocalyptic or the dystopian. But there is a lot of death involved in all of this, and of things beyond death. Maybe the robot will prove to be simply a technological zombie--a thing without a soul that looks human, lives among us, and saps from us--little by little and without our realizing it--our humanity. Beginning as slaves (robot means slave) and without their own will, robots may one day be able to reproduce themselves, creating in the process robot-zombie hordes and precipitating a robot-zombie apocalypse, as in the Terminator movies. Maybe that's why the zombie is on the graph above, actually on the same curve as robots but well along in its supposed likeness to human beings. Remember the zombies in Israel in World War Z? There they are at the base of the walls around humanity, like creatures at the lowest point in the uncanny valley, clawing their way to get at us, keen in their desire to subsume us and destroy us. The difference here is that there appear to be human beings ready to give them a boost, to bridge the valley so that robot-zombies might exist among us, eventually to . . . ?

Text copyright 2017 Terence E. Hanley

The Zombi Did It!

March 2, 2017, 3:00 am

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"The Unknown Painter," from 1838, is the first known zombi(e) story in English. It is the tale of a slave of the painter Bartolomé Esteban Murillo, also called Don Murillo, who was active in Spain in the seventeenth century. Don Murillo and his friends discover that someone is altering the artist's canvases at night. They ask the slave, Sebastián Gómez, who has done this? Sebastián's answer is that it is the work of the Zombi

"Pray, what is a Zombi?" asks Gonzalo, a friend of Don Murillo.

"Oh, an imaginary being, of course," answers Sebastián.

What is unknown to Don Murillo and his friends is that Sebastián Gómez, only fourteen years old and not yet revealed to be an artist, is the unknown painter. Fearing he will be punished for what he has done to his master's work, he blames it on the Zombi. Eventually Sebastián confesses and all is well. He goes on to become a painter who even today appears in art history books.

"The Unknown Painter" was reprinted in American newspapers beginning in 1838. The story was sometimes called "The Zombi Did It!" and appeared again and again for about six decades after its first publication. The version of the zombi(e) from "The Unknown Painter," i.e., a trickster or evil spirit, disappeared from popular accounts after William B. Seabrook's book The Magic Island was published in 1929. In Seabrook's version, the zombie is one of the undead, raised from the grave by a Voodoo sorcerer either to be his slave or to be sold to another person. Unlike Sebastián Gómez, however, the Haitian zombie (or what I have called the Seabrook zombie) lacks a will of his own.

The original fear in the zombie story is not a human fear of zombies. It is the fear felt by human beings--black Haitians--of being enslaved and being held as slaves as they had been held under their French colonial masters. It is a fear not only of the zombie-maker and the zombie-master but also of being denied the chance to enter the afterlife. To become a zombie is to be a slave forever.

In the zombie story of today, zombies still lack a will of their own--they are essentially slaves to a biological imperative--but they are now things to fear, just as the zombie-maker and the zombie-master are things to fear in the original story. The difference now is that the zombie-maker and zombie-master have been combined with the zombie in the figure of the zombie himself. The zombie now is the maker of zombies, the master of zombies, a slave to his own biological imperatives, and a thing to fear, all rolled into one revolting package.

That's how things look at first glance, anyway.

The reality is that the zombie is actually made and driven by a pathogen. The maker and master of the zombie--and the thing ultimately to fear--is not human but microbial. The effect is that culpability is removed from human beings and placed on an amoral organism, thus the moral test passes from the maker and master of the zombie (a human being in the original) to the living humans who are attempting to survive in the midst of the zombie apocalypse. The zombie/zombie-maker/zombie-master (i.e., the zombie carrying the pathogen) is neither good nor evil. He is simply part of the physical environment, the backdrop for a drama acted out by its human characters.

I imagine that the absence of culpability, responsibility, or accountability on the part of zombies is a comfort to some people. There is in fact a whole side of the political spectrum that believes that human beings are not responsible for and cannot be held accountable for their own conduct. (1) The belief is that society, or the system, is to blame, or, as in the original zombi(e) story, "Society Did It!" or "The System Did It!" One of the reasons that the Soviet Union fell so far behind in the field of genetics is that leaders in that country did not believe that heredity or our genes could possibly explain human failings, including material inequality. An imperfect society or a corrupt system must instead be held to account. The solution to this problem is to create a perfect society--a Utopia--for if society is perfected, all people will be happy, and of course all inequality will be eliminated. Sadly for all of those Lysenkoist scientists of the Soviet era, their ideological heirs have cast aside their beliefs. The Western leftist/socialist/statist still believes that people are not responsible for and cannot be held accountable for their actions, but he has embraced genetics (2) as a way of saying, "It's not their fault. Their genes did it!"

I wonder, then: in the zombie story, has the pathogen that causes zombie-ism taken the place of society, the system, or the human genome? The zombie is not responsible for his situation or for his behavior. (1) Any accountability or culpability for his actions must be placed on an amoral and indifferent organism. Zombies are actually victims. They are in fact masses of victims. "You can't blame them. It's not their fault. The pathogen did it!" In fact, zombies are deserving of our sympathy. They have lost the lottery of life and we should sympathize with them. The human beings on the other hand are fascists. Is that what this argument comes to?

On the other hand, if zombies are merely part of the physical environment in a nightmarish world in which society has collapsed, then might the zombie apocalypse stand in for the human condition? Is it essentially a test of our humanity raised to a level of extremes? If so, when have those extremes existed in the world? Perhaps in times of plague or natural disaster. Those are not human-made disasters, however. The only comparable extreme is wartime, especially of the most vicious, destructive, and widespread kind of war. There have been wars of that kind throughout human history, but the wars of the twentieth century are an especially good fit for the zombie apocalypse because they were wars on such a massive scale. Competing ideologies or political systems were the fuel for those wars. So again, we're on our way back to a political interpretation of the zombie story.

There is still more regarding zombies and their meaning. A question comes to me: Where is the zombie's soul? In the original zombie story, the soul is trapped in the body, because the human being enslaved as a zombie wants to return to his grave so that he can be released into the afterlife. In the zombie story of today, the soul must be gone from the body. Otherwise, it would be sinful to kill a zombie. One way around that is to believe that killing a zombie is done in self-defense--not quite a Christian act, but generally accepted. Another is by the atheist belief that there is no soul. But if there is no soul, then there can be no substantial difference between a living human being and a zombie. Both are material. Both are animated by a material life force. Both are driven by biological and evolutionary imperatives. And neither can be considered superior to the other inasmuch as there are no moral, cultural, societal, or even biological absolutes. All things are relative. Zombies just have different ways than we do, ways that must be respected. In fact, they must have rights, too, which also must be respected. In any case, if a zombie is a type of human being but without culpability, then he becomes equivalent to a human who is mentally ill or developmentally disabled, a child or some other category of person who is held to different standards than a fully functioning adult. In other words, the leftist/socialist/statist view of human nature as of people who are not responsible for and cannot be held accountable for their own actions is confirmed, and society, the system, or civilization itself is found to be at fault and must be torn down and remade. People on that side of the political equation seem to deplore the zombie apocalypse, but isn't it just another a kind of revolution? Isn't it the means by which a corrupt system is necessarily overthrown so that we can bring about a new society, one in which all people are equal? And what greater equality is there than among zombies? 

Note
(1) I will always be grateful to Wallace Stegner in his novel Angle of Repose for pointing out the need to use the word conduct rather than behavior in reference to human action.
(2) More accurately, he has Lysenko-ized genetics so that it is no longer a science. For example, biological sex is no longer considered a matter of genetics but a matter of choice. As an aside, I'm sure you have noticed that no one ever uses the word sex anymore to describe biological sex. Gender is the politically correct and biologically inaccurate word used instead. I might add that it's a completely ignorant word.

"Murillo Surprises His Slave, Sebastián Gómez, at the Easel" by whom else but an unknown artist (of the twentieth century). I apologize for the digital watermark.

Copyright 2017 Terence E. Hanley

"All You Zombies--"

March 5, 2017, 3:00 am

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So the scientific zombies of today are animated by and in thrall to a pathogen, a living thing that cannot be detected without the aid of instrumentation. What other unseen, undetectable, or unmeasurable forces might drive the behavior of a zombie or the conduct of a human being? Radioactivity might do it, as in the story of the Incredible Hulk. Parasites might do it, too, as in cattle infested with turning sickness. Genes are held to account by some people for much if not all of human conduct, or what they would call human behavior. Very often what is called "society" or "the system" catches the blame when things go wrong in the world. To that point, isn't "society" or "the system" also undetectable? If you think that it is, please point to "society." Draw a line around it and describe it. Try to measure its effects on the individual. What instruments will you use? What will be your units of measure? How will you test your hypotheses? How will you control for variables? Where is your control group? How will your procedure yield results that are either falsifiable or repeatable? Do you have answers yet? Have you found and measured "society" yet?

The points are these: 1) All of these forces--pathogens, radioactivity, parasites, genes, and "society" or "the system"--are undetectable without instrumentation, or, as with "society,"by instrumentation, and all are basically material, physical, or biological in nature. 2) All remove responsibility and accountability for the actions of the individual from the individual and place them on an outside and uncontrollable force. (1) 3) We have resorted to these forces because we're squeamish about naming others that might better explain human conduct. One I can think of is evil.

So, zombies, despite all their atrocities, must not be evil because of one of three things: 1) They are not human; 2) Their actions are justifiable; or 3) There is no such thing as evil. But if we want to make zombies representative of real people, how do we go about that exactly? Well, either: 1) Zombies represent human beings but are not responsible for their behavior, being as they are victims of external forces; or 2) Zombies represent the evil people who really exist in the world. In the first category--the non-culpable zombies--are included all of the victims of "society": the slave, the colonial laborer, the illegal alien, the exploited industrial worker, the person born without privilege, the outsider, the downtrodden, the deprived, the forgotten, in short, "the people." Zombies of this type are excused from what they do. In the second category--the evil zombies--are all of the victimizers of "the people": the slave-master, the colonialist, the capitalist exploiter, the imperialist, the fat-cat one-percenter, the fascist, and so on. These zombies must be destroyed. The long and short of it is that all sides of the argument use zombies for their own purposes, and their arguments--despite all of the scholarly titles of their papers, the scholarly forms their ideas take, and the scholarly venues in which they are published--come down to a lot of name-calling. We're all like a bunch of children on the playground or in the street:

"You're a zombie!" cries one side.

"No, you're a zombie!" answers the other.

And so it has gone since at least 2006 when the first overtly political scholarly paper on zombies that I know of was published.

* * *

There isn't much in the way of zombie scholarship, such as it is, from the conservative side. After all, academia, especially in the liberal arts, leans hard to the left. (You might say they have turning sickness and turn only in one direction, in a narrowing rather than a widening gyre.) But there are still living conservative commentators who use zombies. Here is a long passage from a recent essay called "The Spiritual Deadness of the Left" by Judah Friedman, from the website of The American Spectator, February 6, 2017:

There is no logic. There are no facts. You can say blue, and they will hear white. One plus one equals cat. Calling the left mentally ill is truly a disservice to those who are mentally ill. At least with mental illness there’s a reason for the madness and a hope for a cure. There is no hope for the left. They are suffering from a deep-rooted spiritual sickness, one for which, I’m afraid, there is no cure. [. . .] The problem with spiritual disease is the fact that it can spread very quickly. Sadly, more and more are getting infected.

The protesters, the media, the celebrities, and the leaders are the “Walking Dead.” How soulless and lifeless can one be, calling for a military coup against a President (Sarah Silverman)? Or, comparing the President to the Taliban (Whoopi)? Anything and everything comes out of Nancy Pelosi’s non-moving mouth. Are you serious, encouraging protesters to be more violent (Judd Apatow)? [. . .]

Plain and simple, their goals are to bite and infect all those who come into contact with them. It is they who have unfriended. It is they who have labeled and ostracized others. It is they who have called for your prosecution, if you question their science. It is they who have shunned and mocked those who don’t conform. It is they, who will not hire or fire, if they find out you are a Yuden (Trump Supporter). (2)

And so on.

In zombies, it seems, we have found a word and a symbol to mean whatever we want them to mean. They're the Swiss Army knife of monsters. They have become the F-word of ideas, i.e., the word that can be used as every part of speech and then some. Whatever intellectual, moral, scholarly, or creative problem you've got, zombies are the solution.

* * *

If you go to the website of the Internet Speculative Fiction Database and do a title search for the word zombie, you will get back a list of short stories, poems, books, and magazines with titles containing that word. One of the most prominent and often reprinted is "All You Zombies--" by Robert A. Heinlein from The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, from March 1959. The story isn't what you might think: there are no zombies in it. It is instead a time-travel story and one of Heinlein's patented solipsisms. It may be, in fact, the most solipsistic and inverted story ever written. (I won't give anything away--you'll have to read it yourself.) But as with so many things, Heinlein was ahead of his time. He seems to have foreseen that we would all someday tend to look at everyone outside ourselves as mindless zombies, perhaps all of them as having meaningless and contemptible lives. The title is in quotation marks for a reason: it is a quote from the story and is directed by the protagonist at everyone.

* * *

I have written a lot about zombies over the last several weeks and there is more to come. The irony is that I don't even like zombies very much, and the reason I don't like them is that they are everywhere. To me, they represent conformity and a lack of imagination on the part of the artist and writer. In my work, I strive to be original, imaginative, creative, and especially non-conforming. (I have to admit to being contrary, too. I am, after all, Irish.) I look for new things, new ideas, and new ways of thinking about, writing about, and depicting these things and ideas. Zombies aren't it (in general). Anyway, if you look at Tyll Zybura's zombibliography from a few days ago, you will see listed title after title and idea after idea that seem worn out and wrung dry. The idea of the zombie is a zombie itself: it's not just dead but past dead. It's a rapidly decaying mess, yet it won't lie down in its grave. It just keeps shambling on, especially in the minds of leftist academics. And though academics may be among the least imaginative of people (artists and writers are pretty bad, too) everyone seems to have uses for zombies, and everyone continues to rely on them. Zombies are used not only in art, literature, and film but also in journalism, political commentary, folklore, critical theory, philosophy, epidemiology, biology, robotics, and on and on. They have become all things to all people. One of the reasons I have written these series on zombies is to show that there is still the possibility of writing something original about them. (At least I hope I have written something original.) But there is so much that is not original, too, and none of it shows any signs of expiring anytime soon. So how much longer will zombies be with us?

Notes
(1) Even genes are considered to be uncontrollable. There are, after all, phrases like "genetically programmed" and "hardwired" to describe human behavior that simply can't be changed because of its genetic origins. The language echoes that used to describe computers and robots. So do computers, robots, biologically programmed zombies, and genetically programmed humans exist all on a continuum or on the same curve, as in the second zombograph from the other day? Are they all simply variations of each other?
(2) "Juden" refers to Mr. Friedman's point (and the source of his outrage) that the left has used--and trivialized--the Holocaust, its perpetrators, and its imagery to describe people who support our current president. The leftist's use of zombies is far more trivial, but it is put to the same use, namely, to malign those who oppose them or disagree with them.

Text copyright 2017 Terence E. Hanley

Hesketh Prichard and the Raised Dead

March 8, 2017, 3:00 am

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I began these several series on zombies on January 31, 2017, with an entry called "Zombies Are Here!" (Click here to read that entry.) Not long ago, John Linwood Grant of the blog Grey Dog Tales left a comment on that initial entry regarding the origins of zombies in popular culture. Mr. Grant quoted from a work by Hesketh Prichard from around 1899:

[The Mamaloi] can produce a sleep which is death's twin brother. For instance, a child marked for the Vaudoux sacrifice is given a certain drug, shivers and in some hours sinks into a stillness beyond the stillness of sleep. It is buried in due course, and later, by the orders of the Papalois, is dug up and brought to consciousness.

The very strong implication is that this is the same process used to make a zombie. If that's the case, then the origin of the zombie as the walking dead might be pushed back a generation. Here is a lengthier and more inclusive quote from the original source:

There is another operation to which the Papalois--or more often the Mamalois--turn their power. They can produce a sleep which is death's twin brother. For instance, a child marked for the Vaudoux sacrifice is given a certain drug, shivers and in some hours sinks into a stillness beyond sleep. It is buried in due course, and later, by the orders of the Papalois, is dug up and brought to consciousness; of what occurs then I have written in another place. It is ghoulish and horrible, but beyond all question human sacrifice is offered up to a considerable extent in the Black Republic at the present time.

The quote is from Where Black Rules White: A Journey Across and About Hayti by Hesketh Prichard, published in 1900 by Archibald Constable and Company of Westminster, United Kingdom, page 93.

Hesketh Prichard (1876-1922) was Major Hesketh Vernon Prichard, an adventurer, military man, and author who is supposed to have created the first psychic detective or occult detective in literature. In 1899, he was sent to Haiti by Pearson's Magazine. According to Wikipedia: "No white man was believed to have crossed the island since 1803, and his trip provided the first written description of some of the secret practices of 'vaudoux' (voodoo)." Consciously or not, William B. Seabrook followed in Prichard's path in his trip to Haiti in 1928.

I did a search for the words zombi and zombie in Where Black Rules White and came up empty. In his book, Prichard alluded to "what occurs" after the drugged child is exhumed and revived, events about which he wrote "in another place." Well, I did a search for the word sacrifice in Where Black Rules White, too, and didn't find anything certain. I'm not sure where that "other place" is. In any case, there are differences between Prichard's and Seabrook's accounts of zombie-making. Although a kind of sorcery is used in both, the purpose is different: In Prichard, the raised dead is used as a human sacrifice in a Vaudoux ritual. In Seabrook, the raised dead--explicitly called a zombie--is used as a slave-laborer. He is raised to go on living rather than to be sacrificed.

I had hoped to find in Prichard the use of the word zombi or zombie, as I think the concept predates Seabrook, but the facts in the case of Hesketh Prichard are informative, for if no white person crossed Haiti in the period 1803 to 1899, then accounts of the zombie are unlikely to have made their way into white culture until at least 1900 when his book was published. And if didn't happen then, it would have had to wait until a subsequent account of life in the interior of Haiti was published. That leaves the period 1900 to 1928 as the only possibility unless: a) Zombies as the walking dead were elsewhere in Caribbean or black culture; or b) Zombies appeared in accounts written by black Haitians in the period 1803 to 1928. It doesn't look like zombies as the walking dead were anywhere else in Caribbean or black culture--remember Lafcadio Hearn's inquiries to Adou. That leaves a question: Was there a Haitian literature before 1928 in which tales of the zombie could have appeared?

Two drawings for the series "True Ghost Stories" in Pearson's Magazine, 1898 to 1899, illustrating the Flaxman Low series by Hesketh Prichard and his mother, Kate Prichard. The pair used the pseudonyms E. & H. Heron. The artist was an Australian, Benjamin Edwin Minns (1863-1937).

Thanks to John Linwood Grant of the blog Grey Dog Tales.

Original text copyright 2017 Terence E. Hanley

The Mamaloi and Hanns Heinz Ewers

March 11, 2017, 3:00 am

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The word Mamaloi is new to me. I searched for it on the Internet and came up with a Doobie Brothers song. Here is a passage:

Gypsy, she say I got the fever

I don't know whether to believe her

But when the wind blow from the sea

My soul start to fly away

She give me charm that will protect me

Necklace with stone from far across the sea

But island magic much too strong

It won't let me go this time

The song is about Jamaica. The group hails from California, I guess, but had, in the early 1970s, a Southern/Cajun/Texan kind of vibe. At least that's how I remember them. ("Mamaloi" is from the album Toulouse Street, named for a street in New Orleans. The album also has a song called "Snake Man.") (1) Anyway, if you keep searching, you'll find out that Mamaloi is a name given to a Voodoo sorceress, priestess, or queen. Her male counterpart is Papaloi. Among their powers are the ability "to produce a sleep which is death's twin brother." That's according to Hesketh Prichard in his book Where Black Rules White: A Journey Across and About Hayti (1900). The Mamaloi and Papaloi can also raise the afflicted person--usually a child--from this state of near death only so that he can be used in a human sacrifice.

The raised dead of the Mamaloi sounds a lot like zombie-ism. It seems to me that following the Mamaloi lead might produce some results. But first, before I even started searching, I thought of the musical piece Ma mère l'Oye, or the Mother Goose Suite, by Maurice Ravel (1910). L'oye or l'oie is French for goose. I don't think that's the right track, though. It seems more likely that Mamaloi is a combination of Mama and loi or law. In other words, the Mamaloi is a person of some authority, power, or prestige.

In searching for Mamaloi in literature, I found that, strangely enough, there is a connection to the German author Hanns Heinz Ewers (1871-1943), a fantasist and seeming decadent who lived a strange and interesting life. According to the book Decolonization in Germany: Weimar Narratives of Colonial Loss and Foreign Occupation by Jared Poley (Peter Lang, 2007), Ewers "was deeply fascinated by what he called the Mamaloi." (p. 99) Ewers wrote about the Mamaloi in at least six works, beginning with "Die Mamaloi," from 1907. The subject of "Die Mamaloi" is a Haitian woman, Adelaide, "who kills her son in a voodoo ritual." (p. 99) In that, Ewers seems certain to have read Where Black Rules White.

According to Jared Poley, Ewers' fascination with the Mamaloi was because of her practice of infanticide. (2) Her use of Voodoo magic to afflict a person with near-death seems less the point, and Ewers' use of the word zombie or zombi is uncertain. I found the full text of "Die Mamaloi" in Spanish and searched it for zombie and zombi. No dice. So, again, a seeming miss in the use of those words before William B. Seabrook of 1928. I would add that Ewers is an interesting figure for students and fans of weird fiction. I would like to find a full-length biography and study of his works. I wonder, too, about discovering his works in English.

Note
(1) Notice in "Mamaloi" the phrase "island magic" with its echoes of The Magic Island by William B. Seabrook (1929).
(2) As a moral transgression and an expression of self-loathing, infanticide is likely a sign of decadence in a culture or society. In fact, it would seem a key sign in diagnosing decadence, as it is demonstrates a lack of vigor, confidence, and hope in the individual and his or her society. Jared Poley ties it to "the Baal and Labartu creation myths from the fertile crescent." (p. 99) I am reminded of sacrifices made by Canaanites to Moloch and of the current worldwide practice of abortion, which--whatever its moral implications--is helping to bring about the dissolution of decadent societies. Cannibalism in the modern world, too, is a decadent practice: William Seabrook is supposed to have partaken of human flesh at least once. Aleister Crowley is also supposed to have been a cannibal. In 2001, Armin Meiwes, significantly a German, advertised for someone who would voluntarily be eaten by him. Bernd Jürgen Armando Brandes, significantly a German, answered the ad and ended up in pieces in Meiwes' refrigerator. In 2012, Floridian Rudy Eugene, of Haitian descent, tried to eat the face of a homeless man in Miami. For a time, some people were alarmed that Eugene's actions were the beginnings of a zombie outbreak. Instead, Eugene was probably using a synthetic drug, although his use of marijuana might be enough to explain his psychosis. That brings us to zombies, which are of course, cannibalistic and an ultimate expression of decadence, although wanting to be eaten by another person is probably even more ultimate.

The Sorcerer's Apprentice by Hanns Heinz Ewers in an English edition of 1927, published by John Day, and illustrated by Mahlon Blaine (1894-1969).

Alraune by Ewers, translated by S. Guy Endore (1900-1970) of The Werewolf of Paris (1933) fame. Published by John Day in 1929, this edition was also illustrated by Mahlon Blaine.

Vampire, the last in Ewers' trilogy of Frank Braun, translated by Fritz Sallagar and published by John Day in 1934. Vampires are associated with zombies as among the undead, moreover, as among the cannibalistic undead.

Blood, a collection of three stories from Heron Press (1930) and including "Mamaloi" from 1907. The pictures were by the children's book illustrator Edgar Parin d'Aulaire (1898-1986).

Although there are many, many more images I might include here on Hanns Heinz Ewers, I have decided to stop with this one, the cover for L'araignée et autres contes fantastiques, a French-language edition with an unknown date. "L'araignée" was originally "Die Spinne," from 1908.

Original text copyright 2017 Terence E. Hanley

The Mamaloi in the 1920s

March 14, 2017, 3:00 am

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The Mamaloi is supposedly a Voodoo priestess, sorceress, or queen. British author Hesketh Prichard (1876-1922) first described her in Where Black Rules White: A Journey Across and About Hayti (1900). According to Jared Poley in his book Decolonization in Germany: Weimar Narratives of Colonial Loss and Foreign Occupation (2007), German author Hanns Heinz Ewers (1871-1943) used the Mamaloi in at least six of his works, from "Die Mamaloi," published in 1907, to "Ich trinke Schlangenbrühe und finde--ein süßes Wort," published in 1927. (Poley, p. 99) At least one American author also wrote about the Mamaloi. His name was Gerald Chittenden (1882-1962), and his story "The Victim of His Vision," published in Scribner's Magazine in May 1921, was selected for inclusion in Prize Stories of 1921 (1922) as a winner of an O. Henry Award. The story opens:

"THERE'S no doubt about it," said the hardware drummer with the pock-pitted cheeks. He seemed glad that there was no doubt--smacked his lips over it and went on. "Obeah--that's black magic; and voodoo--that's snake-worship. The island is rotten with 'em--rotten with 'em."

He looked sidelong over his empty glass at the Reverend Arthur Simpson. Many human things were foreign to the clergyman: he was uneasy about being in the Arequipa's smoke-room at all, for instance, and especially uneasy about sitting there with the drummer.

"But--human sacrifice!" he protested. "You spoke of human sacrifice."

"And cannibalism. La chèvre sans comes--the goat without horns--that means an unblemished child less than three years old. It's frequently done. They string it up by its heels, cut its throat, and drink the blood. Then they eat it. Regular ceremony--the mamaloi officiates."

"Who officiates?"

"The mamaloi—the priestess."

Chittenden's story, Hesketh Prichard's original, Ewers' variations, and the general ideas of infanticide, human sacrifice, and cannibalism among practitioners of Voodoo might seem sensationalistic. Is there any truth in them? There is actually, as in the gruesome case of "the torso in the Thames" from 2001. In any event, Chittenden's protagonist, Reverend Arthur Simpson, is a Protestant and looks at the Roman Catholicism practiced in Haiti with distaste. The sacrifice of children by the Mamaloi and her coreligionists would seem to comport with his seeming anti-Catholic views. I searched for the words zombi and zombie in the text of "The Victim of His Vision." Once again, I didn't find any occurrence of either word. I also did a Google search for "Hanns Heinz Ewers" and "zombi" and came up empty. It looks like the stories, respectively, of zombies and of the Mamaloi, though perhaps from a common origin, diverged at some point, leaving only the inducing of a death-like sleep as a common element. Still no zombies before 1928.

Original text copyright 2017 Terence E. Hanley

Weird Tales Books-Stories of the Walking Dead-Part One

March 16, 2017, 3:00 am

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If you want to build a zombographical library, you might start with a hardbound collection from 1986 called Stories of the Walking Dead. Edited by Peter Haining, it includes many seminal stories and articles on zombies. Almost all are of the Seabrook-type zombie, the version that has come down to us as one of the walking corporeal dead. (As you'll remember, the original zombi is a spirit.) First the contents, then, beginning in part two, the stories and their authors. Two of these stories first appeared in Weird Tales.

Art by Nigel Hills.

Stories of the Walking Dead edited by Peter Haining (London, UK: Severn House Publishers, 1986) 224 pp.; also called Zombie! Stories of the Walking Dead

• Introduction by Peter Haining
• "Dead Men Working in the Cane Fields" by W.B. Seabrook (Originally in newspaper syndication, Mar. 1928; subsequently in The Magic Island, 1929)
• "Salt Is Not for Slaves" by G.W. Hutter (Ghost Stories, Aug. 1931)
• "The Country of the Comers-Back" by Lafcadio Hearn (Harper's New Monthly Magazine, ca. 1888-1890; reprinted as "La Guiablesse" in Two Years in the French West Indies, 1890)
• "Jumbee" by Henry S. Whitehead (Weird Tales, Sept. 1926; reprinted Feb. 1938)
• "White Zombie" by Vivian Meik (Devil's Drums by Vivian Meik, 1933)
• "I Walked with a Zombie" by Inez Wallace (The American Weekly, May 3, 1942)
• "American Zombie" by Dr. Gordon Leigh Bromley (From an unknown magazine, possibly Occult Review, ca. 1936?)
• "While Zombies Walked" by Thorp McCluskey (Weird Tales, Sept. 1939)
• "The House in the Magnolias" by August Derleth (Strange Tales of Mystery and Terror, June 1932)
• "The Zombie of Alto Parana" by W. Stanley Moss (London Mystery #6, 1950; reprinted in A Book of Strange Stories, 1954)
• "Ballet Nègre" by Charles Birkin (The Smell of Evil, 1964)
• "The Hollow Man" by Thomas Burke (The Evening Standard Book of Strange Stories, 1934)

To be continued . . .

Text copyright 2017 Terence E. Hanley

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Weird Tales Books-Stories of the Walking Dead-Part Two

March 18, 2017, 3:00 am

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Stories of the Walking Dead (1986)
Edited by Peter Haining

Stories and Authors
(In chronological order by date of first publication)

"The Country of the Comers-Back" (ca. 1888-1890, 1890)

by Lafcadio Hearn (1850-1904) Irish-American

"The Country of the Comers-Back" was originally a part of Lafcadio Hearn's series of travelogues on the West Indies, written for Harper's New Monthly Magazine and published in 1888-1890. This series was collected and reprinted in Two Years in the French West Indies in 1890 and reprinted again in later years. In that book, Hearn's story was called "La Guiablesse." Peter Haining changed the title to the more evocative (and pertinent) "The Country of the Comers-Back." We should note that Martinique, on which the story is set, is called "the Island of Revenants" or "the Island of the Comers-Back" because people who visit there are supposed to find it so pleasant that they want to return. Although Martinique is also called "the Island of Ghosts," the sobriquet used as the title here has nothing to do with zombies, as when Hearn's story was written, zombis were still spirits and not the undead that we know today.

There are actually two stories in "The Country of the Comers-Back." The first is Hearn's investigation into the meaning of zombi. He asks Adou, the daughter of his landlady, What is a zombi? (Not the first nor the last time that question is asked in the annals of zombiedom. I'm still not sure we have gotten the picture.) Her answers are vague. A zombi is something that makes disorder in the night . . . zombis are everywhere . . . a zombi is a woman fourteen feet high who comes into your locked house at night . . . it is a five-foot tall dog that also comes into your house at night . . . a great fire on the road at night, one that continually recedes as you approach: that is made by a zombi . . . "a horse with only three legs that passes you: that is a zombi." One thing Adou makes clear: a zombi is not "the spectre of a dead person" or "one who comes back."The second story in "The Country of the Comers-Back" is of a Guiablesse, or devil-woman, who lures a man to his death. My friend points out the similarity of the word to diablesse, a female devil. In Caribbean folklore, there is another devil-woman called La Diablesse, probably the same kind of creature.

"Jumbee" (1926)

by Henry S. Whitehead (1882-1932) American

"Jumbee" was written and published before the advent of the Seabrook zombie. It is set in the Virgin Islands and is a tale told by a native to a visitor from the mainland United States. The visitor, Mr. Lee, has read about Martinique and Guadeloupe and has encountered the word Zombi before. (He must have read the travelogues of Lafcadio Hearn, who is mentioned in the story.) He knows about Jumbees, too, for he has read The History of Stewart McCann (evidently a fictitious book, à la Ech-Pi-El). Like Zombis, Jumbees are spirits. Mr. Da Silva, the teller of the tale, describes the Jumbees he has seen: a boy, a girl, and a "shriveled old woman," three together, hanging in the air next to the road. "The Hanging Jumbees have no feet," Mr. Da Silva explains. "Their legs stop at the ankles. They have abnormally long, thin African legs. They are always black, you know. Their feet--if they have them--are always hidden in a kind of mist that lies along the ground . . . . they do not twirl about. But they do--always--face the oncomer . . . ." (First set of ellipses added.) (This description of floating and footlessness reminds me of the Flatwoods Monster and the Mothman.) The tale continues without any further mention of Zombis, for in Rev. Whitehead's tale, Jumbees have taken the place of Zombis as the spirits of the night.

"Dead Men Working in the Cane Fields" (1928, 1929)

by William B. Seabrook (1884-1945) American

"Dead Men Working in the Cane Fields" is originally from William B. Seabrook's syndicated newspaper features of 1928. Like Lafcadio Hearn more than a generation before, Seabrook traveled to the Caribbean to report on local culture, folklore, etc. His articles were collected in The Magic Island, published in January 1929 to immediate acclaim and great success. It is because of Seabrook that we have zombies in America today. You might say that he carried the zombie virus from its isolated tropical fastness into our large, bustling country. After alternating periods of incubation, infection, remission, and reinfection, the virus is now among us and everyone has become infected.

Like Hearn's article, "Dead Men Working in the Cane Fields" is actually two tales told to Seabrook and relayed to us through his writing. The first tale is the paradigm for zombie stories that came after it and that almost fill this anthology: men and women raised from their graves by a zombie-maker, held as slaves without mind or will, and returned to their graves only when they taste salt or eat meat. In short, they are the walking dead that we know now, except that they are not cannibalistic or threatening in any way.

There is a statement in "Dead Men Working in the Cane Fields" that stands out for me. Lamercie, a black female overseer of zombie-slaves, tells Seabrook, "Z'affrai' neg pas z'affrai' blanc'." The affairs of blacks are not the affairs of whites. (1) Zombie-ism is a thing among black Haitians, she is saying. It is not something with which white people should concern themselves. I think that's an important thing to know for two reasons. First, among the zombies encountered in the story are several slaves under Ti Joseph, "an old black headman," who has them work for him at Hasco, the Haitian-American Sugar Company. Leftists might see this as an example of capitalist and imperialist exploitation of zombie-slaves. In actuality, the zombie-slaves are being exploited by a black headman, and it is his affair. Hasco simply employs the people who are presented to them by Ti Joseph, a kind of recruiter or subcontractor. Yes, Hasco is there in the island nation of Haiti and is either providing work or providing the opportunity for workers to be exploited, however you might look at it. But the culpability lies solely with Ti Joseph and similar native slave-masters and overseers. They are the ones who have made the zombie-slaves and/or are exploiting the zombie-slaves. Hasco had nothing to with with either action, for zombie-ism during the American occupation of Haiti was still "z'affrai' neg" and not "z'affrai blanc'." The distinction is an important one. Nevertheless, it may be lost on leftists in academia today, despite their vast erudition.

Second, and more importantly, I think, zombie-ism was presumably practiced in Haiti for generations, if not centuries, before Americans arrived there in the 1910s. It was, again, an affair for black people, and no one outside the island seems to have known about it until William Seabrook sent out his dispatches to the American reading public. (2) Zombies became popular only after they were transferred from their originating black culture into the larger white culture. Remember, the first zombie movie was called White Zombie. Call it cultural appropriation if you like (3), but zombies came of interest to white people only after that transfer, and especially when zombies, zombie-makers, zombie-masters, and Voodoo in general were seen as threats to white people. For as long as zombies were "z'affrai' neg," there was no threat, at least to white people. We see the same thing today where black men are killed or black women go missing and almost nothing is said about it in the mainstream media.

It seems to me that this is the story in general of black culture in its transfer to white culture. For example, when jazz, blues, and rock-and-roll were black forms, they were of little or no interest to white people. As they began being transferred into white culture, they were seen by many people as being negative (neg-ative?) or even threatening. Once they were pretty fully whitified--jazz in the 1920s (under Paul Whiteman, no less), rock-and-roll in the 1950s, and blues in the 1960s--they became less negative and more acceptable in the white mainstream. It reached a point where some black practitioners of these black forms were seen among white people as somehow threatening or hostile. Miles Davis comes to mind as an example. In any case, today, zombies are mostly white and are very popular among white people. White people in the real world see themselves as zombie-slaves or see other people as zombie-cannibals or zombie-deadmen. The black past of zombies seems to have been forgotten. The paradigm of the threat of zombie-ism--perhaps especially of black zombie-ism--to white people began after the publication of The Magic Island and continued for decades in popular fiction, as we'll see in part three of this series.

The second tale in "Dead Men Working in the Cane Fields," by the way, is a Poe-esque tale of a woman who goes to a dinner on the occasion of her wedding anniversary and is greeted with a macabre scene laid out by her husband.

Note

(1) In that, Lamercie echoes the words of Lafcadio Hearn's Guiablesse, who tells a man who asks where she lives, "Zaffrai cabritt pa zaffrai lapin." The affairs of the goat are not the affairs of the rabbit. In other words, none of your business.

(2) As we have seen, British author Hesketh Prichard went to Haiti a generation before Seabrook, and although he wrote about Voodoo and the Mamaloi, he seems not to have known about zombies.
(3) I won't because I don't believe in cultural appropriation. People have been borrowing things from other people's culture for as long as there have been people. If you don't like cultural appropriation, you shouldn't put up a Christmas tree at your house next Yuletide season unless you're of German descent. And quit speaking English if you're not of Anglo-Saxon origin.

To be continued . . . 

A zombie? Maybe. A photograph presumably taken by William B. Seabrook in Haiti, circa 1928. From the El Paso Herald, March 31, 1928, p. 8.

Text copyright 2017 Terence E. Hanley

Weird Tales Books-Stories of the Walking Dead-Part Three

March 20, 2017, 3:00 am

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More from Stories of the Walking Dead, edited by Peter Haining (1986):

"Salt Is Not for Slaves" (1931)

by G.W. Hutter, pseudonym of Garnett Weston (1894-1948), presumably American

"Salt Is Not for Slaves" was one of the first zombie stories, written by the scenarist of White Zombie, a movie not yet released when the story was published. This is one of my favorite stories in Tales of the Walking Dead. It pushes the origin of zombies back to the Haitian Revolution and makes the strongest association of any story here between slavery under French colonialists and zombies. I don't think anyone can say whether that association is accurate or not, as the origins of the zombie in Haiti appear to be lost. In any case, Weston's story is set in the 1920s or '30s in Haiti, but it is mostly about the historical past. It is a tale of zombie-slaves who don't know they're zombies until they taste salt. With that, they return to their graves. It's interesting that in "Salt Is Not for Slaves," the zombies speak and live like normal human beings. Also, the (presumably) white narrator simply reports on his experience and recounts what he hears from the old Haitian woman. Other than receiving a bad scare, he is never under threat.

"The House in the Magnolias" (1932)

by August Derleth (1909-1961) American

You could pretty well count on August Derleth's being on top of developments in weird fiction. His story "The House in the Magnolias" was published before White Zombie was released. It must have been one of the first zombie stories in America, and it incorporates elements of the Haitian zombie story, including the eating of salt. It is set, however, in Louisiana, home of a different kind of zombi(e), the Voodoo serpent god, Li Grand Zombi. In other words, Derleth transferred the Haitian zombie to the American mainland, a key development in the history of zombies in America. The narrator is an artist in the household of a woman named Rosamunda Marsina and her unseen Haitian aunt. Also in the household and in the fields around the house are the walking dead. The threat is from the unseen Aunt Abby, who turns out to be a zombie-master. The people threatened--the narrator and his now lover, Miss Marsina--are white (or she is a very light-skinned mulatta).

"White Zombie" (1933)

by Vivian Meik (1894-1955) British

Vivian Meik saw the movie White Zombie and liked the title. He recycled that title for his story of 1933. "White Zombie" is set in Africa, but there is a connection to Haiti: a missionary claims to have seen a strange mist only in those two places, a mist that haunts and menaces the protagonist. As it turns out, the mist is associated with Voodoo and with zombies under the control of a white woman who has essentially gone native. (The association of mists with Voodoo and zombi(e)s is a continuing theme in fiction.) In short, the zombie-master is a white woman who threatens white people. The black zombies themselves are far less of a threat.

"The Hollow Man" (1934)

by Thomas Burke (1886-1945) British

"The Hollow Man" is a story of the walking dead, though not explicitly of a zombie. The undead man is white, but he has been made by black men--the Leopard Men--in Africa to be used as their slave. Remembering the man who murdered him, the undead man escapes from slavery and sets off to find that man. His quest takes him all the way to England. There is a variation here: the Leopard Men take the place of the zombie-maker, but their victim is white. He in turn torments the man who murdered him, who is also white. In short, "The Hollow Man" doesn't quite follow the conventions of the zombie story, but then it isn't explicitly a zombie story.

"American Zombie" (ca. 1936)

by Dr. Gordon Leigh Burley (1900-1973) British

"American Zombie" is a brief tale inside of a tale. It is told to a journalist by a M. Champney, a Frenchman who has traveled to America and tells of seeing the creature of the title. She is a white woman who lies on a bed behind a locked door in a building on Lennox Avenue in Harlem. She is one of the living dead, made by Voodoo magic and subject to the commands of her master. She is referred to as a guède, a zombie, but also the French word for the plant woad. In Voodoo, the Guédé, also spelled Gede or Ghede, are the loa, or spirits, of the dead, specifically the loa of sexuality, fertility, debauchery, and so on. To continue, in "American Zombie," the zombie as one of the walking dead is associated with the conventions of Voodooism. Though brief, Dr. Burley's story is rich with zombie lore. It even mentions The Magic Island by William B. Seabrook. In "American Zombie" the white victim is a zombie, while the zombie master is black.

"While Zombies Walked" (1939)

by Thorp McCluskey (1906-1975) American

Like "The House in the Magnolias," Thorp McCluskey's story for Weird Tales is set in the American Southland. The protagonist is a Northerner who has gone looking for his girlfriend, who is a resident of a plantation house owned by her great-uncle. Sharing the house is a monstrous white minister, a Rev. Warren Barnes. As it turns out, Rev. Barnes is a Voodoo master, a manipulator of Voodoo dolls, and a maker and master of zombies. He has learned his craft from a black Voodoo-man. Upon Barnes' death the zombies return to their graves, and the way is clear for the protagonist and his girlfriend to be together again. Here, then, is another variation, for the zombie-maker and zombie-master is white, as are the objects of his torment. The story--cruel and less than likable--has a weird-menace atmosphere fitting for its time.

"I Walked with a Zombie" (1942)

by Inez Wallace (1888-1966) American

"I Walked with a Zombie" was written by Cleveland journalist Inez Wallace for The American Weekly, the Sunday magazine of the Hearst chain of newspapers. It's similar to "Dead Men Working in the Cane Fields" by William B. Seabrook and includes most of the conventions of the zombie story, including the eating of salt. There are three short accounts of zombie-ism in Inez Wallace's article. The first is of a white woman who is made into a zombie by a black Haitian woman and is returned to her grave by the white woman's husband. The second is of a group of zombie-slaves held by a black headman named Ti Michel and of the revenge upon that man taken by the still-living. The third is of a black woman in Port-au-Prince who has zombie-slaves dance for her and whom she manipulates with mud figures like Voodoo dolls. (See "Ballet Nègre" below.) By the way, the 1942 film I Walked with a Zombie was inspired by and named after Inez Wallace's article.

"The Zombie of Alto Parana" (1950)

by Stanley Moss (1921-1965) British

"The Zombie of Alto Parana" is not at all a zombie story. The word appears only in the title. I assume it to refer to one of the two main characters in the story, both of whom live on the edge of the world in a backwater jungle of Argentina. One of the two, the German Emil, evidently cannot return to the outside world. His life is like a death-in-life, and that leads me to think he is the zombie of the title. The other, a British man named Clift, is in a kind of exile, too, but he can return and means to return home. Emil has other ideas for him. This is perhaps the most psychologically complex and character-driven of all the stories in Stories of the Walking Dead. It belongs here, I think, only by a stretching of the definition of "the walking dead."

"Ballet Nègre" (1964)

by Charles Birkin (1907-1985) British

"Ballet Nègre" is the most recently published story in this collection. Like "The Hollow Man," it is set in England. The zombie-master is a black Haitian who runs a dance troupe. The zombies are also black. The victim is a white reporter investigating the dance troupe. Before dying, he manages to feed the zombies some meat. The story ends with an image of them making their way westward across the English countryside, in the direction of their Haitian graves.

Summary

So in the conventional zombie story, there are three (or four) main figures: 1) The zombie-maker/zombie-master; 2) The zombies he or she has created; and 3) The tormented, sometimes a man, sometimes a woman, sometimes a couple. Any or all of these figures can be white. It doesn't seem to matter much whether the zombie-maker/zombie-master--the tormenter--is white or black. The zombies of course are among his or her victims--they are obviously among the tormented--but if they are black, they are also depersonalized to a large extent. They are merely bit players in the zombie drama (as seems to be the case in the contemporary zombie story such as The Walking Dead). It seems to be much more significant when a white person is made into a zombie. A white zombie is at the very least a tragedy. It may also be an affront or threat against white people. Here's the kicker, though: it seems in almost every case in the conventional zombie story that the tormented person or persons is white. That may have been the only way that the zombie story could make its way into the white culture of the 1920s through the 1950s or '60s, for a black hero, a black heroine, or the two together would not have appeared in movies, short stories, or novels made or written for white people. (1) That makes me think: There was black cinema in those days--was there ever a black zombie movie? Or was Ben, the black man in Night of the Living Dead (1968), the first black hero in a zombie story? And look what happened to him. Was he killed because he represented an implicit threat to white people, especially in the era of black marches and civil rights? According to Wikipedia, that fount of all knowledge, Duane Jones was cast in the movie because he had the best audition of all the actors considered for the part. So if the screenplay was already pretty well written by the time George Romero was holding auditions, then the hero--even if he had been white--was fated to be shot. That would not have been a racially charged episode in the movie. But because the part was played by a black man, I can't help but see a racial element, however subtle it might be, especially with the sounds of police radios and barking police dogs as the backdrop for the final sequence.

A final note: There are no zombie apocalypse stories in Stories of the Walking Dead. I wonder now what was the first such story in print.

Note
(1) The exception to all of this is "Salt Is Not for Slaves," in which the main actors in a story told by a white man are in fact black.

Duane Jones (1937-1988) in Night of the Living Dead. Was he the first black hero in a zombie story?

Text copyright 2017 Terence E. Hanley

Weird Tales Books-Black Medicine by Arthur J. Burks

March 22, 2017, 10:46 pm

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Black Medicine by Arthur J. Burks was published in 1966 by Arkham House of Sauk City, Wisconsin, in an edition of 2,000 copies. Arkham House books are typically rare, costly, and prized by readers and fans of weird fiction. I was lucky enough to find recently a reasonably priced copy of Black Medicine. I finished reading it on March 11, 2017, and can report on its contents. I had hoped to find zombies in the stories of Arthur J. Burks. I'll cut to the chase and let you know there aren't any.

Burks was born in Washington State and served in the U.S. Marine Corps during World War I. He also served in occupied Hispaniola or Santo Domingo, probably in both Haiti and the Dominican Republic. Burks served in other places as well, possibly in the Pacific. These locales show up in the stories in Black Medicine, of which there are eleven. The first, "Strange Tales of Santo Domingo," is actually in six parts, so it might be more accurate to say there are sixteen stories in the book.

The sixteen stories in Black Medicine fall into three groups, plus one story that stands alone. One group of stories is set in the Dominican Republic. They include "Strange Tales of Santo Domingo" in its six parts and "Three Coffins." Another group is set in neighboring Haiti. These include "Voodoo,""Luisma's Return,""Thus Spake the Prophetess," and "Black Medicine." The third is a looser group of unrelated stories set in different places: a time-travel fantasy called "When the Graves Were Opened"; a dream-fantasy called "Vale of the Corbies"; an oceangoing ghost story, "Bells of Oceana"; and a ghost story set in Burks' own Washington State, "The Ghosts of Steamboat Coulee." I consider "Guatemozin the Visitant" to stand alone for different reasons, first because of its length (72 pages in Black Medicine, or of novelette length); second, because it's the only story in the book not to have appeared in Weird Tales; third, for its setting in Mexico; and fourth for its unusual themes and unusual power.

One very appealing characteristic of Burks' writing is its even-toned and effortless authenticity. As a military man serving on board ship and in exotic locales, he had a rare familiarity with his subjects and settings. He didn't have to do research on what his characters do and where they live and work, for he did those things and lived and worked in those places himself. It's refreshing to read genre fiction of such authenticity and verisimilitude. Burks was given to pulpish and purplish prose at times, but those aspects of his writing are easily outweighed, I think, by his skill at describing real places and real situations.

Arthur J. Burks was one of the first authors--if not the first--to have a story on Voodoo in Weird Tales. His first two stories in "The Unique Magazine," published under the pseudonym Estil Critchie, were "Thus Spake the Prophetess," from November 1924, and "Voodoo," from December 1924. "Thus Spake the Prophetess" is set in Haiti, but there is no explicit mention of Voodoo or any of its practices, figures, or spirits. "Voodoo" is of course a different story (no pun intended). It, too, is set in Haiti and involves the search for a Voodoo priest by an American serviceman. The serviceman, Rodney Davis, infiltrates a Voodoo ceremony, where he sees a Maman Loi, "the priestess of the serpent," a Papa Loi, her male counterpart, and the sacrifice of a "goat without horns," that is, a human being, in this case an adolescent girl. Davis returns to his commanding officer to report, laconically, that justice has been served.

Other tales of Voodoo followed, the longest and most detailed of which is "Black Medicine," the title story of this collection and the cover story for the August 1925 issue of Weird Tales. I had speculated before that the larger figure in that cover illustration might be a zombie. As it turns out, he isn't, for there are no zombies in Black Medicine. As it turns out, the figure is a man, Chal David, "chief Papa Loi of Bois Tombé." The woman in front of him is a Maman Loi, "high priestess of the cult of voodoo." In the background of the cover illustration are the "followers of the Great Green Serpent." If I understand Voodoo (also called Vaudoux and Voudon) correctly, the "Great Green Serpent" of Haiti might also be "Li Grand Zombi" of Louisiana. Nevertheless, zombies appear to be absent from the fiction of Arthur J. Burks, leaving William B. Seabrook as still the father of zombies in America.

One more thing: There are many good and enjoyable stories in Black Medicine, but one of my favorites and one of the most powerful, I think, is "Guatemozin the Visitant," a story of a revenant from the Aztec past who, when his burial place is disturbed, comes back to wreak a terrible vengeance on the Mexico City of 1931. I am reminded of The Plague by Albert Camus, a far more significant work to be sure, but I would not take anything away from Burks except for, again, his occasional pulpish and purplish prose.

Black Medicine by Arthur J. Burks

(Sauk City, WI: Arkham House, 1966), 308 pp.

Contents

"Strange Tales of Santo Domingo"

• "A Broken Lamp-Chimney" (Weird Tales, Feb. 1925)
• "Desert of the Dead" (Weird Tales, Mar. 1925)
• "Daylight Shadows" (Weird Tales, Apr. 1925)
• "The Sorrowful Sisterhood" (Weird Tales, May 1925) 
• "The Phantom Chibo" (Weird Tales, June 1925)
• "Faces" (Weird Tales, Apr. 1927)

"Three Coffins" (Weird Tales, May 1928)

"When the Graves Were Opened" (Weird Tales, Dec. 1925; reprinted Sept. 1937) 

"Vale of the Corbies" (Weird Tales, Nov. 1925) 

"Voodoo" as by Estil Critchie (Weird Tales, Dec. 1924)

"Luisma's Return" (Weird Tales, Jan. 1925) 

"Thus Spake the Prophetess" as by Estil Critchie (Weird Tales, Nov. 1924) 

"Black Medicine" (Weird Tales, Aug. 1925) 

"Bells of Oceana" (Weird Tales, Dec. 1927; reprinted Apr. 1934)

"The Ghosts of Steamboat Coulee" (Weird Tales, May 1926) 

"Guatemozin the Visitant" (Strange Tales of Mystery and Terror, Nov. 1931; reprinted in Magazine of Horror, Sept. 1969)

Black Medicine by Arthur J. Burks (1966), with cover art by Lee Brown Coye.

Text copyright 2017 Terence E. Hanley

Zombibliography-Horror!

March 26, 2017, 3:00 am

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Horror! by Drake Douglas

(New York: The Macmillan Company, 1966), 309 pp.

From the dust jacket of Horror!:

Drake Douglas is the pseudonym of a gentleman who has been deeply involved with horror throughout his life--and prefers to remain anonymous.

I did a search on the Internet and found that "Drake Douglas" is a pseudonym of Werner Zimmerman, but I didn't find any further information on Mr. Zimmerman except that he has written several books:

• Horror! (non-fiction, 1969 [sic])
• Undertow (novel, 1984)
• Creature (novel, 1985)
• Death Song (novel, 1987) (with Stephen Kent)
• Horrors! (non-fiction, 1989)

Horror! is a popular study rather than a scholarly one. If it were scholarly, this book might be a candidate for the first such study of zombies, having been published in 1966. Nineteen sixty-six was also before the advent of the horde of scientific zombies as in Night of the Living Dead (1968), so the zombies described in the book are the old-fashioned supernatural kind, which seem to be of less interest to our contemporary academia. Anyway, zombies in Horror! are covered in a chapter called "The Walking Dead." (I think there's a TV show by that same name.) In it, the author makes a very strong connection between zombies and black slavery in the New World. "According to voodoo belief," he writes, "the zombie is a dead man restored to life as a powerful, emotionless, mindless automaton, an empty shell of a man, complete slave to the will of his master." (p. 187) The author adds: "[T]he zombie poses no great threat to others. He is a monster created by the needs of economy rather than for purposes of evil." (p. 189) Again, there is a strong connection to slavery, but in continuing his discussion, Mr. Zimmerman sounds like he is describing a far more modern creature, the industrial robot:

He [the zombie] is an ideal slave, requiring no attention and little food or sleep. He can be made to work eighteen hours a day at a steady, remorseless pace which never varies from one hour to the next. He need not be paid, he explicitly follows all orders. . . . The zombie is the cheapest source of labor ever discovered. (p. 189)

Maybe that's why zombies are on the same curve as robots (and human beings) in the graph illustrating the uncanny valley, about which I wrote not long ago.

Werner Zimmerman comes to the same realization that I and others have come to, namely, that to become a zombie is a unique fear for the slave or the descendants of slaves, specifically, I would add, for Haitians:

It is not difficult to understand the native horror of the zombie, particularly in the earlier years of slavery. Death was, for them, the only release from a life of brutality and inhumane treatment; they greeted death with open arms. It meant the end of the beatings, of the backbreaking labor, of the heartbreak and misery which were the lot of the slave. Zombieism, on the other hand, was merely another form of slavery which reached beyond death itself. It was the constant fear of the natives that they would be torn from their graves where, at last, they had found rest, to return to a form of slavery even more horrible than that they had known during life. (p. 189)

Mr. Zimmerman also indicts "[t]he white man" for his support of zombie-ism.

He [the white man] was interested in a cheap, reliable labor force and, since only these primitives were involved, did not overly concern himself about its source. The plantation owner became rich, the voodoo priest became powerful, and the black slave had but one more misery to be added to the heavy load he carried. (pp. 189-190)

Again, the critical theorist might see here an indictment of capitalism, or, at the very least, evidence of his idée fixe, the historical "class struggle," but that would be a misreading of the facts, I think. Although Mr. Zimmerman doesn't mention Haiti in this passage, zombie-ism seems to have been limited to that island nation. If there were white plantation owners and black slaves, then the discussion is of colonial times, that is, Haiti before it attained its independence in 1803. That leaves two possible groups of white plantation owners: 1) Those living under the French crown, a feudal, statist, and essentially non-capitalist or anti-capitalist regime; or 2) Those living under the governments that followed the overthrow of the monarchy, which were leftist rather than monarchist or reactionary but were nonetheless statist. By extension, then, the fear of becoming a zombie and of being held as a zombie-slave is a fear of enslavement under either a feudal and statist regime or a leftist and statist regime. Where in this is the capitalist?

Disregarding all of that, the fear of zombie-ism has passed from a fear among black people of being made into zombies and being held in slavery as zombie-slaves--the zombie himself is passive and harmless in this case--to a fear among all of us of being attacked and killed by zombies that are extremely aggressive and dangerous. For white people without a history of being held as slaves, there is no fear of being returned to slavery without end.

Second, the fear of zombie-ism has passed from the realm of the supernatural--which no modern person fears anymore--into the realm of the scientific, which every modern person respects. Third, the fear of zombie-ism has gone from one as on a small scale in a distant and obscure part of the world to one as on a mass scale in one's own modern and advanced society. It is, in short, a fear of hordes of scientific zombies arriving at your door.

Although he described the zombie in 1966 as "a fairly new arrival to the world of monsters" and one "not surrounded by the wealth of legend which has built itself around the more widely known monsters," Werner Zimmerman seems to have predicted something more for this representative of the walking dead. The zombie is, he wrote, "a frightening powerhouse as capable as the vampire of striking fear into the hearts of those who come across him." (p. 194) You could argue that the zombie has actually replaced the vampire in that role.

Original text copyright 2017 Terence E. Hanley

Zombibliography-Zombie: The Living Dead

March 29, 2017, 3:00 am

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Zombie: The Living Dead by Rose London

(New York: Bounty Books, 1976), 112 pp.

Cover art by Robert Ellis

I don't know anything about Rose London. I assume she is a British author of popular works and not a university professor or scholar. Her book, Zombie: The Living Dead, is a popular, pictorial history of the undead in movies. It covers not only American movies but also those from Great Britain, Mexico, Canada, and other countries. The book was originally published in Britain. It's worth noting that, although Ms. London's book covers vampires, mummies, and other undead creatures, it is entitled Zombie: The Living Dead. That indicates to me that zombies were gaining traction in the mid-1970s as a leading monster type. Nevertheless, the author's discussion of zombies doesn't begin until page 76, and about half of that discussion is devoted to science fictional themes, including invasions by aliens bent on controlling the minds and lives of people on Earth. There is, without a doubt, a connection between movies like Invasion of the Body Snatchers and stories of zombies, but I'm not sure that stories of alien invasion belong with stories of zombies in a book like this one.

The zombie section of Zombies: The Living Dead includes a few movies worth mentioning in any history of zombies. One is Revenge of the Zombies (1943), in which "[a] doctor operating in the swamplands of the Deep South tried to create an army of invincible zombies to help the Nazis." (p. 82) Thus, even early on in the history of zombies in America, storytellers recognized the significance of zombies as representative of mass movements, especially political mass movements. Another is Invisible Invaders (1959), an alien invasion movie in which the dead rise from the grave en masse. Thus, as early as the 1950s, there were scientific undead vs. the supernatural undead. And they moved in masses. Still another is Plague of Zombies, a Hammer film from 1966 in which a strange plague kills off the inhabitants of an English town, only for them to come back as zombies. Although there is a scientific explanation for the zombie-ism in the movie, there is also a supernatural explanation in that the man responsible for the plague has been to Haiti and has learned about voodoo there. Having never seen Plague of Zombies, I can't say how those two things are reconciled. In any case, Plague of Zombies seems to have anticipated Night of the Living Dead and all subsequent stories of zombie hordes infected with disease.

So it looks like the zombie in film evolved over the years from a harmless and helpless slave--a walking deadman lacking any will of his own--into a frightening and dangerous monster. That is to be expected, as there aren't very many dramatic possibilities represented by a figure who lives, yet lacks all human personality and attributes, motivation or agency. There was also an evolution from the zombie made by magic to one made by science. And there was of course an evolution from solitary zombie slaves or small groups of slaves to out-of-control hordes or masses. I wonder if there will ever again be a zombie movie based on the original idea of the zombie as one of the harmless (and pitiable) undead. I have a feeling that moviegoers, having forgotten the slave origins of zombies, would complain, "That's not a zombie." That's how far we have come, I think. It seems obvious to me, though, that there was not a first of anything when it comes to zombies in film other than that there was a first zombie movie, which was, of course, White Zombie, from 1932. Instead, there was an evolution of zombies. I'll have more to write on that in an entry I will call "The Island Theory of Zombiation."

Original text copyright 2017 Terence E. Hanley