Zombis, or zombies, the living dead, have always created much morbid interest. Recent media events have brought the topic to the forefront again. A captivating if sensationalist and problematic book entitled The Serpent and the Rainbow presented a possible pharmacological explanation of zombification (Davis, 1985). This was followed by a horror movie of the same title (1987) and another book, Passage of Darkness, in which certain pharmacological and ethnological findings were more fully explained (Davis, 1988). Wade Davis, the author of both books, was attacked for less than rigorous scientific methodology, and a controversy ensued.
Davis's inquiry was triggered by the discovery, in 1981, of a man named Clairvius Narcisse, who claimed to be a flesh-and-blood zombi who had been drugged, buried alive, taken out of the grave, and enslaved. There was even a medical record to prove it (Davis 1985). There were claims that thousands of drugged slaves worked on the plantations of certain Vodun dignitaries.
Another medical explanation said that Zombis were said to be poisoned and somehow maintained in a cataleptic state. Davis set out to find a pharmacological basis for zombification and, in doing so, obtained several samples of different "zombi powders." One ingredient of these powders could plausibly induce a state of apparent death. Narratives persistent in Haiti were thus vindicated and given a rational basis. However, during his inquiry, Davis soon found that there were two kinds of zombis: a material and an immaterial variety, namely, a zombi of the body and a zombi of the soul (Davis, 1984, 1985, 1988).
Many scholars have long been aware of the dualism of the zombi concept; however, this has gone largely unnoticed by the general public outside of Haiti. Most investigators have focused on the flesh-and-blood zombi, a body without a soul, the same type of........
