Book: Zombies
author: Dr. Bob Curran
On the Explore Your Spirit with Kala Show, Kala Ambrose speaks with authors, artists, explorers and researchers, delving into topics of ancient mysteries, metaphysical explorations and new discoveries from science and spiritual arenas. Transcribed here is an interview Kala conducted with Dr. Bob Curran about his research and book, Zombies: A Field Guide to the Walking Dead. *Special Thanks to TaDa Transcripts for providing the transcript of this audio interview.
Kala: Welcome to the Explore Your Spirit with Kala Show, I’m your host, Kala Ambrose. Tonight our guest on the show is Dr. Bob Curran, a broadcaster, writer, teacher, and researcher who’s written a number of books including, Vampires, Encyclopedia of the Undead, Walking With the Green Man, Celtic Lore & Legend, and Lost Lands, Forgotten Realms, which is the book that we had Dr. Bob on the show previously to discuss. You can find that interview in the archives on exploreyourspirit.com. Dr. Curran was born in a remote area in Northern Ireland and has held a number of jobs including grave digger, journalist, musician, and hospital porter, among them. He’s travelled in many parts of the world exploring the cultures and traditions of other people’s before returning back to his native home in Northern Ireland to earn several university degrees. Currently he lives in Ireland with his wife and young family. Dr. Bob, welcome back to the show, it’s a pleasure to have you here.
Dr. Curran: It’s a pleasure to be back Kala, a pleasure to hear you again.
Kala: You too, I loved our discussion last time. This evening we’re talking about Zombies: A Field Guide to the Walking Dead. And you know Bob, I’m asking this question for women here... When women mention zombies, we're often referring to our husbands. I think you’re talking about something different here today, Is that right? <<chuckling>>
Dr. Curran: <<chuckling>> We’re talking about the walking dead. (Kala laughs) I was asked to do a book actually on the history of the walking dead. We’re talking about zombies, and whenever you talk about zombies people think, “Oh, here’s where the dead sort of rise from the tomb and wander about at the behest of Bokhors, and Hunguns, and mambos, and people associated with voodoo. But the walking dead have a much longer history. In fact, they stretch way back into very ancient times so that’s what the book covers Kala. That’s what we’ll talk about tonight.
Kala: Wonderful. I come from Louisiana originally and so of course, there’s talk about zombies down there and New Orleans, and voodoo. There’s so much of a culture there, a mixture of everything along with voodoo practice, I have heard about zombies in that way. Like you said they're all over, even in Japan.
Dr. Curran: They stretch back – I mean the tradition of the walking dead stretches all the way back into ancient Egyptian times. The notion of rising from the dead – is found in a whole number of cultures including the Christian culture because we have from the books of the Old Testament, which is part of our Bible. We have stories of some of the prophets such as Elijah and raising the dead and we have of course, Christ Himself, which the Bible tells us raised several people from the dead and rose from the dead Himself. The Bible tells us that. While I don’t wish to denigrate anybody’s beliefs, it appears in a number of other beliefs. For instance, Osiris of the ancient Egyptians, who rose from the dead and who was cut up and scattered all over Egypt, was found and reassembled, and rose again from the dead. This sort of ties in with the sort of Frankenstein myth and maybe that’s where Mary Shelley and her husband picked up some of these beliefs and stuff. The dead seem to come back in other forms.
For instance Kala, we were down in 1993 in southwest Fermanagh here, as you know I come from Ireland, Fermanagh is a county in Ireland. And we were down visiting an old man down there. He talked to us about on Halloween night, his grandfather rising from the dead, and coming back to the house for a glass of whiskey and a smoke of his pipe. He came on Halloween night – we were sitting with this old gentleman in his kitchen and Mary, my wife says to me, she says, “You know he’s having you on” and I say, “Well why should he?” I said, “George,” I said, “how does he come in?” He says, “Well, the door was left latched on Halloween night and we were all sitting at the table and he would come in and he would go over to the fire and he would sit down and he would smoke his pipe and the only difference was that he would never speak.” He says, “I remember as a wee fellow climbing up on his knee and touching his skin.” I said, “Were you not afraid?” He said, “Why should I be,” he says, “he was my grandfather.” He said, “The skin was very, very cold, and my mother brought him over a glass of whiskey. We all went to bed and left him sitting there and in the morning he was gone.” I remember whenever I was growing up in the Mourne Mountains, an old woman down the road put the fine dust of the fire on her hearth stone and if it was disturbed in the morning she knew that her dead ancestors had come back, and had danced on the hearth stone on Halloween night. I remember my grandmother on certain nights of the year, on Halloween and May Eve, that is the end of April, which was considered to be a magical night over here, setting an extra place in case one of the dead would come back and want food; and so an extra place was set at the dinner table.
So the beliefs stretch way back – the Celts believe that the dead could come back. Now we tend to believe Kala, in our own western culture that whenever somebody dies that signals the end of their involvement in the world. For many ancient people that was not the case. The dead sometimes stroll back and forth, especially at times when the veil between the worlds was very, very thin, so they believed. They came back for various reasons, they may come back to warn, they may come back to advise, they may come back as George's grandfather did, simply to enjoy the things they have done in life and see the people who they missed.
Kala: Okay Bob, let’s hang on a second here, I’ve got some questions for you. I’d like to do discuss some definitions here. From what I’m hearing you describe, it sound likes several different categories to me. Let's back it up to in the beginning when you were talking about religion and Elijah and Jesus. To me – a zombie is the walking undead, it’s ust a body that’s been animated. From what I’ve seen of zombies, which would be movies of course, they don’t even seem to have a lot of brain waves functioning, they’re just an animated corpse. That probably goes back to what I was taught in Louisiana and that’s from Caribbean lore. Then you have people that are brought back to life, but when they’re brought back to life – like the story of Lazarus being raised from the dead, and other examples, they weren’t in a zombie state; they were back as they were before. Zombies, as I’ve always heard described were just mindless corpses with just the body animated in that sense but the soul is gone versus when you read about in the Bible like Lazarus, the soul is still in the body and it’s a fully functioning being. Then of course we have walking dead or undead like vampires which is a different category, and then other types of forms that you were mentioning like the grandfather that visited, which I’ve heard stories about that in lore as well, that on certain times of the year, the veil is thinner than other times, Halloween being one of those when the ghosts and our ancestors return; that’s a strong Celtic lore. That's also celebrated in Asian cultures as well when they believe spirits come back, but they come back in spirit form with different levels of how well they come back and materialize into form, from wispy, to full body apparitions. But that would be more of a spirit returning, or in some cases a ghost, a haunting, or a visitation, which from my understanding is different still from a zombie. Let’s hear your definitions... Do you categorize them as well or do you say these all come under zombie?
Dr. Curran: I think it’s very necessary that we categorize what’s meant by zombie. It’s very useful to hear and quite true to hear in what you are saying. The question for many thinkers about zombies was what motivated the zombie. Was the zombie simply a creature without a soul – I mean there are creatures which have been created, for instance, in Jewish lore, there is the notion of the Gollum which is simply a shambling form named Gollum meaning shapeless or formless, simply made out of clay. So and then some people thought that the zombie was motivated by an evil spirit. The word zombie actually does not mean a sort of shambling figure. It means a god and it’s one of the names that was given to the Old Creole notion of (Zambalwado). The question was, “Does zombie simply mean motivated by magic like a sort of robot which was – or an automaton that was controlled by a voodoo practitioner, a mambo, a Hungung, or a Bokhor. Or was it actually the housing an actual spirit form, or simply a ghost which inhabited a body? And then you have, is a zombie really its former self who has died and in some way come back to life? And this was motivated by all sorts of beliefs that have – sort of old physical manifestations where people appear to have died then rose again. And we have sort of a very early medical lore where people go into to what’s called catalepsy and rise up again. So we have used zombie in the book as a sort of catch-all – I have simply written it as – the original title was The Walking Dead, but the publisher decided to use zombie. I said, “Do you not think that would turn people minds to certain ways” and to say, “Well let’s try it and we’ll put this title out.” I think that zombie works as a sort of catch-all ‘cause – and it comes down to whether or not the thing is motivated or whether the thing has a soul, whether the thing has a spirit within it, and part of the book examines that and throws up these questions. As you quite rightly say Kala, from other parts of the world and from other cultures there are different forms of what we might call zombies, or the living, or walking dead.
Kala: I like the way that you explain that. I agree walking dead is a great term because that covers a myriad of different experiences there. Even to a point like – I think back in your area or certainly in parts of the UK, we have the history of the bell-ringers and the people who were perceived dead and buried and they would have strings with bells running from their coffin in case they weren’t. Many people "woke up" and rang the bell from their coffin. I suppose back in those times these people would be considered the walking dead at that point.
Dr. Curran: That’s actually right. In the book I mention some cases like the case of Constance Whitney, which is a great story and quite common right here. Constance Whitney was pronounced dead and laid in her coffin. A sexton thought he would pry off her valuable looking ring before she was actually interred into the ground. In doing so, he cut her skin and a pearl of blood rose up and she sighed and she fluttered her eyelids and she sat up. She lived for many years after that; she hadn’t been dead at all you see. That story is quite common actually here in Ireland, where there were a number of premature burials and I would suspect the same was common in America because Edgar Allen Poe wrote a great story called the Premature Burial, which is about a person being buried before they were actually dead.
If I can give you a personal story, Kala. I became a grave digger and one of the things we did was something called breaking graves. That meant that you’re in the parish where burial spaces are the premium. You’re looking for graves for fresh burials and you came to an unmarked grave and you went to what was called an aplotment book, which gives records of all the burials. If there’s no burial in it for one hundred years and was unmarked you’re entitled to open it and use it for fresh burials. Now you find pieces of old coffins and one time I was digging up a bit of an old coffin and on the inside of the lid, the lid had been lined and the lining had been torn away and the marks of the fingers were still in the coffin lid. Whoemver had been buried there, had been buried alive.
Kala: That’s terrible
Dr. Curran: It was rather chilling. You’re quite right and somewhere you have the bell and that’s where we get the expression, “Saved by the bell.” I remember I was in a house about 2 or 3 months ago where there was actually a bell connected to a family crypt in case some of the earlier members of the family had been buried alive.
So you have that and then of course you have the idea which was put forward in the Caribbean by anthropologists such as with Davis, that people can be drugged and appear to be dead and can be risen again and placed in service of Bokhors or medicine-men or mambos or the female witches. I think there was a very famous film not too long ago based on Davis's book, “Serpent and the Rainbow,” in which zombies were featured. You have a number of notions of people dying and then coming back to life. The question of course is, “What motivates them, are they sort of drugged or are they possessed of some sort of spirit?” You may know coming from around New Orleans that there were two types of voodoo. There was the old voodoo and the rada voodoo which takes its name from a place called Arada, which said the zombie was possessed over the wa or spirit, which therefore stalked about the countryside under the guidance of the spirit which controlled by the Hungung or the Bokhor.
Then there’s another type called the Petro voodoo, and that was a newer type. It comes from around in New Orleans and Charleston areas, which were at one time – well Charleston certainly was a great travellng place for the Spanish. A slave called Don Petro is supposed to have drunk some form of a wonderful potion that was probably rum mixed with gun powder and did a great dance which was the dance, the Don Petro, which was the foundation of Petro voodoo. And that’s what we look at whenever we see all the wild dancers and things like that. And that said that the zombies were people who had been taken over by some form of narcotic or drug, which robbed them of their senses and made them subject to the suggestions of slave owners and things like that, like rohyphnol today. So you have all the queries about zombies whether they are spirit possessed as in rada voodoo or whether they are drugged. Davis suggested there was the liver of the Puffer fish which might be used for the caii-barbing, nobody knows, they said the Bokhors had various powders which they could slip into your food and turn you into a zombie and that was always the great white fear that the slave would maybe use this – and you have films like the 1932 White Zombie and things like that. So the question remains, “What motivates the zombie?” Is it the spirit, is it one of the evil demons that the church taught, or whether it is simply a person that has been robbed of its senses?
Kala: It seems like it’s probably all of the above, depending on the culture and time, and getting back to what you were saying about Davis and the puffer fish. There’s been so much research I think into that, and different cultures according to what properties or neurotoxins or substances they could find, whether it was the puffer fish or the tree frogs or some of the poisonous frogs and others like that they would use in a powder. Others have claimed – and I’ve heard claims in Louisiana that some have that magnetic ability to actually put someone in a trance, and in a sense they call it taking hold of part of their soul, and controlling them for a period of time. But it always seems to be a limited period of time from what I understand. You give a great analogy of the different cultures. You mentioned the living mummies in Japan; I’d love to hear more about that.
Dr. Curran: Yes indeed. That was the supreme sort of aspect of Buddhism, where you had living mummies in Japan. And these were actual living people; these were actually great stages or great manasket figures. I’m actually looking at the various stages and you achieved a mortality because part of the mummy thing – part of zombie thing is the notion of immortality. I suspect that at the back of our mind there’s always is a notion of immortality. So this gave the living-- the living mummies give an idea of immortality, and it was a very holy thing to do. The Japanese mummify themselves with a very slow process and they mummified themselves. This is what the great aesthetic did and he changed his diet. Mainly these were men. I haven’t come across any women doing this but – the aesthetic changed his diet and he would refrain from thing like wheat, flour or milk products, and only subsisted on seeds and nuts. These grew within the immediate vicinity of his temple. He decreased his water intake and limited himself to a cupful every 2 or 3 days. The effect of this of course was to reduce his body weight. – Now I wouldn’t recommend any of your listeners taking this as a diet, because it has fatal consequences. – And he would get rid of all extraneous tissue and a lot of the bacteria which actually caused his body to decay would actually fall away, after death much of these bacteria fell away. He was to live like that for one thousand days, which was about 3 years. Now that was the first stage; and the second stage – that became more restrictive. He was to stop taking in water completely and was only permitted to eat needles and seeds which he found in the pine trees around about. Every 2 or 3 days, I think, he was permitted to drink a special tea made from the bark of a rather poisonous tree. This had been used – the bark was used in ornamental chairs and in the treatment of furniture, and you shouldn’t drink it in great quantities, but he could take small cups of it. The toxins in his body destroyed a lot of bacteria which would decompose his body later on. He became very dehydrated, and all the parasites and maggots began to drop off him. Now he would be a little more than skeleton. So the third – the second process, once again took a thousand days, 3 ½ years roughly. Then by now he was by now skeleton and not able to move very far so he would find himself a spot, and usually in a cave he would wall himself up with a tiny gap in the stonework, which was enabling him to breathe. Now he would not eat or drink at all, and there was a gap left like I said to let him breathe and a bell, which we mentioned earlier, which was attached to the front of it, and this bell was rung once each day by the aesthetic to ensure his followers that he was still alive. When he stopped – when the bell stopped pulling he was dead. This third process was supposed to last roughly another thousand days, although it often varied. And then – when the holy men had died he was removed from his cell and treated with special lacquers and dressed in ceremonial robes and he became an object of great reverence. This mummy was usually placed on display and was supposed to have miraculous powers because the man himself was so holy, and because he had completed this great mummification process of three thousand days. All of which this time he was supposed to been alive and slowly turning into one of the living dead or a sort of mummy. Now the notion of the living mummy I think was stopped – formally stopped in Japan around 1930, I think. By this time in northern Japan, there was somewhere between 16 and 24 of these living mummies either intact or already in the process of dying. I was in Japan about 2 or 3 years ago and they showed me photographs of a great aesthetic from northern Japan that mummified himself and who became essentially one of the living dead. So it was a great honor and a great process, and it was supposed to induce mystical visions and all sorts of things. So the mummies of northern Japan were tremendously revered, and many people still keep photographs of them as good luck charms.
Kala: I think I’ve seen some of those photographs as you mention that, I’m not sure if it was from Japan or other Asian communities, but I have heard that with the self-mummification process and it sounds completely painful to me. You mentioned something that in the beginning – that I wanted to ask you as well – and you mentioned that men seemed to do this more than women. I wanted to get into that topic and what we’re going to do is take a quick break here and we’ll be right back with more of Explore Your Spirit with Dr. Bob Curran, talking about his book, Zombies – A Field Guide to the Walking Dead.
Kala: We’re back from our break, speaking more with Dr. Bob Curran about his book, Zombies – A Field Guide to the Walking Dead, and getting quite an education which is wonderful this time of year, Halloween’s not that far away, and we’ll soon be perhaps getting a visitor ourselves, some of us with the walking dead as the veils lift that time. Bob, before the break I wanted to ask you – we were talking about the living mummies and you had also mentioned that men do this more than women. Here in the U.S., zombies as they’re known in the movies, are extremely popular with men in our culture; women not as much. Women are not typically a fan of the zombie movie; men seem to love zombies. Can you explain that – do you know the fascination there with men?
Dr. Curran: I’m not 100% sure Kala, what’s the reason for the gender difference. What it is – I think in many respects it was a masculine thing in the early days. Because not too far from where I am speaking to you now, there was a well which was supposed to in very early times have a head, it was an old Celtic thing in which the greatest hunter had his head chopped off when he died, and it was placed in the well so that young hunters would come and drink from the well and gain some of his skill or some of his knowledge. It was known as a head well. And possibly that stems back into the old times in which men believed that the spirits would descend on them, and these spirits were often essentially male. These were hunters, and warriors, and thing like that. Although in the voodoo pantheon there are a number of female deities. But these female deities are often outweighed by the male. And it’s possibly a male – dare I use this phrase, “A Man Thing,” because with what associates with hunting, fighting, the great leaders were considered to be hunters, and fighters, and things like that. I’m stretching it way back into the past. So the men still look on the zombies as great men maybe subconsciously, as great men returning from beyond the veil to do great things. Women would look and say, “It’s only that boy that died down the road". So you never know. I’m not 100% sure why zombies should be more popular with women than with men, but if I’m sitting watching a zombie film, my wife is usually doing something else. So you’re quite right.
Kala: I think Bob honestly that’s the best answer I’ve ever heard and that makes sense to me with the hunter mentality. You see that in so many cultures, Native tribes all over have always understood that concept – whether it was the spirit of the animal they were about to hunt, or the spirit of their ancestors, or the other people they were fighting. Also there’s the tendency of the hunter in the man, and in the zombie movies there’s a lot of violence, attacking man to man.
Dr. Curran: …it sometimes translates in the male notion of the hunter-gatherer and the warrior, possibly that’s the way it comes down in the psyche, they pick up on that.
Kala: Also the control I think as well. There’s such a fear that if they bite you…
Dr. Curran: You were speaking about in New Orleans – there were of course, a great number of female – people like Marie LaVeaux, and a number of others in the New Orleans area. It seems that a number of the famous figures seem to be male; people like John Domingo in Charleston, and Dr. John for example in New Orleans, and his lua was supposed to pass into the musician Malcolm Rebennack who is now known as Dr. John. Not long before I was speaking to you there was some Dr. John on my CD. So there you are, I was getting in the mood.
Kala: I love it. I’ve got a question for you, switching gears here. Salt is used in so many rituals and even people that practice with certain rituals they’ll put salt around them in a circle for protection. In some rituals in Haiti they speak about folklore with salt and how that can bring a zombie back or save someone that had become a zombie; that feeding salt to them would alter them... Have you heard anything about that folklore?
Dr. Curran: Yes, it is said that if you feed a zombie salt it throws it into a sort of spin or it loses control of itself. And whoever is controlling it, whether it’s a Bokhor, or a HunGung, or a mambo they have no power, power becomes confused and the zombie goes almost berserk. Now that comes, I think, from belief in the church. Now one of the things the early Christian church thought was that salt was sort of a purifying element within some of the Christian beliefs. It was used – and you may have heard of this – it’s been used in exorcisms sometimes with holy water and salt. In fact, holy water at one time in Ireland had a small amount of salt in it and that’s what made it holy besides being blessed. So salt was considered – see salt was very important among the ancient peoples. Over here and I suspect over there with you, the word salary comes from solarium, which is salt.
Kala: From the Roman times. Yes, when in Rome, people were paid in salt at that time.
Dr. Curran: Up here the Roman armies were paid in salt. Salt was purifying. Whenever people didn’t have fridges and things like that, salt purified meat, and allowed the meat – the meat would soak in it so that it could be eaten. So salt was very important, and salt was a preservative, salt was a purifier, and things like that and it became a Christian ritual.
Now voodoo really borrows – and many of its warrants borrow extensively from the Christian church, particularly Catholicism. That was the religion in which the slaves met whenever they arrived, let’s say Barbados, which was English or English Catholics there. Or in the French islands, there were French and then the Spanish, a place like Santo Domingo. They encountered the Catholic religion and they began to absorb it into part of the voodoo ritual. Salt became a sort of thing which could be used a) to protect yourself against zombies or indeed against any evil thing, so the church taught and you’re quite right when you talk about a circle of salt or it could be slipped surreptitiously into the food to throw the zombie into confusion or whatever. Possibly this comes down from the Catholic Church ritual, the Catholic Church notion of salt, as a central part of purification and preservative. So salt yes, salt can drive off evil and salt can throw the zombies into confusion, and it’s got --even some anthropologists argued – if some sort of psychotropic drug is used, the salt can counteract that and throws the person into confusion as well, and it’s like coming down out of a bad drug trip.
Kala: You’ve heard it here. You need salt for Halloween, everyone should have some on stock you never know when the zombies are coming, and it’s the first line of defense. Can we say that Bob?
Dr. Curran: …always keep salt not only for protection against zombies, but you never know what’s out there.
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