Jawnomicon

Zombi

Also called Zombie, Zonbi.

In Haitian Vodou folklore, the Zombi is a reanimated corpse stripped of its own will and bound into servitude by a bokor sorcerer, the source of the modern global "zombie" concept.

At a glance

Tradition
Haitian Vodou

Near this figure

Traits

Read from the figure's description, which a model wrote. Open "why" for the sentence a trait came from.

Behaviour

  • Mute servant no independent will
    why

    In Vodou cosmology a person is held to possess more than one soul-component, and the zombi condition is explained as the bokor's capture or destruction of the victim's ti bon ange, the "little good angel" that carries individual consciousness and will, leaving behind a body that can move, obey, and labor but cannot reason, remember its former life, or resist command.

  • Salt restores memory and breaks servitude
    why

    In folklore, the zombi is said to be kept in a permanent stupor through control of its diet; feeding it salt is widely held to restore memory and awareness, at which point the zombi may realize its own death and return to its grave, or in some tellings turn on its captor.

Curses

  • Supernatural dominion over victim
    why

    leaving behind a body that can move, obey, and labor but cannot reason, remember its former life, or resist command.

  • Death-like paralytic induction
    why

    Wade Davis's controversial ethnobotanical research in the 1980s proposed that a powder used in this process could include pufferfish-derived tetrodotoxin, capable of inducing a death-like paralytic state, though this account has been extensively debated and its details are far from settled.

Roles

Judged from the works' own entries, not from the description. Carries: the figure holds the role. Meets: the role is in its stories, held by something it meets.