With the popularity spikes of zombies in the past five years, the public conception of “the undead” has gone through a major paradigm shift. What we now perceive as the modern zombie is a shambling, brain-eating husk that roams the wastes in search of its next victim. However, the legend of “the zombie” is a much more intricate thing, stretching well past the works of the famed George Romero into the very dawn of humanity itself.
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| The “modern” zombie as popularized by George Romero’s movies |
Before we begin, we need to get away from using the term “zombie” in this article, just so we can stay clear in what we’re talking about. The term zombie comes from the Creole word zonbi which itself comes from the Mbundu word nzumbe. These words were adapted to the mythology of the Haitian people to describe particular practices and rituals in Voudo. The term has a certain “ring” to it, was right of the coast of the United States, and began with a weird letter, so it quickly became the cooler, trendier name for the older European myths of the walking dead, now carrying the general connotation of being victims of a disease rather than the product of dark magic. Unless we are specifically talking about “voodoo zombies” or “the Infected,” we’re going to refer to such creatures as “the walking dead” for the sake of clarity. We will also be ignoring resurrections, since these aren’t really in the same “realm” as zombies.
The earliest mention of the walking dead is incidentally one of the oldest works of literature known to man, “The Epic of Gilgamesh.” In the particular passage, the Babylonian goddess Ishtar begs her father Anu to give her the resources to kill King Gilgamesh for blasphemous activity, namely for rejecting her sexual advances (because of her long-running history of being a manipulative bitch). In her plea, she threatens to unleash a plague of the walking dead, saying:
“Father, give me the Bull of Heaven,
so he can kill Gilgamesh in his dwelling.
If you do not give me the Bull of Heaven,
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!”
The fact that it’s mentioned here is huge. Almost all of western literature can be traced back to this work, generally considered to be the first epic poem. This one story establishes so many world-changing tropes of literature that it’s actually difficult to believe at times. This is the stuff that served as inspiration to Homer when he wrote his two epic poems, The Illiad and The Odyssey, both of which are mainstays of Western literature and culture. We get a poem of the world’s first Hero’s Journey. We get the first story of a Great Flood, as well as the Genesis of Man and subsequent fall from paradise after being deceived by woman. We have the world’s first Tragic Bromance between Gilgamesh and Enkidu. We Ishtar portrayed the first literary example of a Yandere. The list goes on and on, but we’re here to talk about the walking dead. We’ll be coming back to “The Epic of Gilgamesh” again when we look at other offshoots of the undead in later articles.In classical Europe, we see a decline in popularity of the modern zombie’s ancestors. Stories of the walking dead fall by the wayside in ancient Greece and the Roman Empire, generally favoring creatures more compatible with their idea of the afterlife – namely, the ancestors of modern vampires and ghosts. The closest thing we see are the Spartoí, directly translated as the “sown men.” These creatures are the mythical offspring of Ares, summoned by burying dragons’ teeth in the ground. The first encounter was in the myth surrounding the founding of Thebes, in which Cadmus was tricked by Athena on behalf of Ares into burying the teeth of a slain dragon. The second clash was near Colchis in Jason’s quest to obtain the Golden Fleece, where Athena gave some of the same dragon’s teeth to King Aeetes. You may know these as the claymation skeletons from Ray Harryhausens’s work in Jason and the Argonauts, where his creations have been fueling the nightmares of small children since 1963. While they are depicted as skeletons in the film, we have little indication of their intended form in mythological texts.
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| Look up the skeleton scene on YouTube. It’s actually pretty impressive. |
A thousand years later in medieval Europe, things begin to sound a lot more familiar. By around the eleventh century, we have three different flavors of the walking dead in English and Germanic folklore: the revenant, the draugr, and the Wiedergänger. Each of these types have their own nuances unto themselves, but all share a few common traits. Let’s look at each in brief.
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| You may remember draugr from Skyrim. |
The draugr are the oldest of the three, stemming from Norse mythology. In essence, these are the reanimated corpses of Viking warriors that selfishly guard plundered treasure and sometimes haunt the families of the deceased. They are magical in nature, able to infiltrate the dreams of the living and drive people insane. Impervious to most weapons, it usually takes a “true hero” who is able to wrestle it back into its own grave to defeat them, but there are some stories where a decapitation.
The Wiedergänger (literally German for “again-walker”) is a cursed soul bound to a corpse as a consequence of great injustice. These are actually a broader catch-all term for several closely related monsters of German and Slavic folklore. These serve as a branching node for several other creatures, including werewolves, mylings, and headless horsemen. We’ll have an article on these guys another day.
The revenants are the most traditional of the European walking dead. Summoned from the grave by forces of cosmic justice, the revenants terrorize the living as punishment for their misgivings They are usually described as individuals coming back from the dead to haunt those who have done them wrong, falling into the more traditional form of western horror story and establishing key tropes of Romantic and Gothic horror.
However, this is becoming a pretty long-winded article as is, and we still have 19th century literature to cover! Pretty sure we should pick this up next week in Zombie 102, yes? Same bat-time, same bat-channel.
Doc Watson is a lead editor at the RedShirt Crew and writer for the column GameRx. He’s looking at making “The Undead and You” his other periodical publication here on the blog. You can reach him via the comments section or by tweeting him at @DocWatsonMD
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