 "I will knock down the Gates of the Netherworld, I will smash the door posts, and leave the doors flat down, And will let the dead go up to eat the living! And the dead will outnumber the living!" Ishtar - The Epic of Gilgamesh - 1000 bc
How will it happen? The wandering dead can be found in folklore and myth around the world going back thousands of years. but it seems that the origin of the name that we use today starts close to the origin of our pet "real zombie virus" theory. Not in South Africa, but West Africa. In Africa, there are many languages and dialects, and in some, "nzambi" is the general word for a god and the related word "zumbi" means a fetish or image connected with divinity, but not actually divine itself, suggesting that a Zumbi could be an avatar or revenant, a dead puppet of an angry god perhaps. In yet another West African language, Kumbundu, "nzumbe" means "walking dead". And the word "Zombie" was in fact the name of a python-god who was worshiped in parts of West Africa. When West-African slaves were taken to Haiti by colonists in the 1500's, they took their religions with them which included the original voodoo cults which long predate what we know of today. In the hotbed of fear, superstition and persecution created by the colonists on Haiti, these cults functioned in secret and dark variations arose. In the old original West-African voodoo, Zombie was the python-god, in the new secretive and dangerous Haitian voodoo, Zombie became the name for the poor unfortunates who worked as tireless, mindless servants in the sugar plantations, when Zobop Bokors (basically a necromancer) used mystical powders to infuse the "dead" with the python-gods presence and raise them from the dead (see the article on Voodoo Zombies to explain that process in more detail). And now through popular culture, both in books and movies, the word Zombie now has a new meaning, the literal living dead, who hunger for the flesh of the living. In the below links you will find a synopsis of the most common Zombie types as well as some you may never have heard of, and the most likely real-life Zombies... if you have any suggestions for Zombie types for Cassandra to research, please email Cassandra directly - Cassandra@TheZombieZodiac.com - or feel free to join the community and talk to everyone there about your theories.
Zombie Fact - The below articles are based on considerable research and rumination by brain-inna-Jar, Cassandra. And include as much factual real-world sources as possible as well as further study for your own edification. Knowledge is power. Medical
Zombies Zombie Fiction - Below in one big lump are just a small selection of the different fictional zombies origins. Please join the community to share any others that you may know of so that we can be prepared no matter what starts the inevitable outbreak. After all, if fact is often stranger than fiction, ignoring fiction as a possible source of a real outbreak would just be silly. And silly people don't survive. |
