by Wade Davis
“Now we can increase dosage and do any number of things,” Roizin told me once we were back in his office, “but I think for now the point is made. Whatever this powder contains, it acts very quickly and completely modifies behavior.” Roizin leaned back in his chair. “I can promise you one thing for certain. For many years I have worked for Professor Kline, and some pretty odd drugs have passed through this laboratory. This, without doubt, is the most peculiar.”
“Do you have any idea what it might be used for?” I asked.
“There’s no way of knowing right now.”
“Don’t you have any guesses?”
“Perhaps cardiovascular surgery. It is curious how the heart remains unaffected while the body is totally anesthetized. Also in psychiatry, it might be of use treating something like psychotic excitement.”
“As a tranquilizer?”
“Of a sort. There is one more thing. Did Nate Kline ever talk to you about experimental hibernation?”
These preliminary lab results should have delighted me. They demonstrated experimentally what all the literature could only suggest as a possibility. Marcel’s powder did contain pharmacologically active compounds that acted very rapidly to lower the metabolic rate of the victim. Yet even as I received congratulatory letters and calls from Kline and Lehman, and from Schultes as well, I was more deeply perplexed than ever. Before these results the entire notion of zombis had remained strictly an idea, a curiosity, an abstraction. I went to Haiti skeptically, knowing nothing about the country or the people, and the assignment dropped me into an enchanted land whose spiritual rhythms took me utterly by surprise and moved me profoundly. Despite this, or perhaps because of it, I had never actually paused to consider whether or not zombis truly existed. It wasn’t that I didn’t believe, and it wasn’t that I did. I just hadn’t passed judgment. The formula of the poison, the correlations from the literature and the case of Narcisse, and now the preliminary but concrete laboratory results changed everything. Now I had to face just how little I understood about a phenomenon that suddenly appeared hauntingly real.
There were so many loose ends. Every report received from Haiti, for example, had mentioned an antidote. Yet while Marcel had prepared a potion that he believed counteracted the effects of the poison, the way it was used and the ingredients themselves suggested that it was pharmacologically inactive. Tetrodotoxin has no known medical antidote, nor, from what is known of the action of the toxin, would the zombi makers require one. Victims of puffer fish poisoning either live or they die, and those who survive recover on their own, as presumably would the zombis. Still, this information notwithstanding, the persistent reports of an antidote begged further investigation. As colleagues often remind me, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.
Yet in all this obsession with the drug and elusive antidote, I was, in one sense, missing the point entirely. All that the formula of the poison explained was how an individual might be made to appear dead. Clearly the same thing occurred in Japan, however infrequently, but just as clearly those who succumbed to toxic fugu preparations were not zombis; they were merely poison victims. Any psychoactive drug has within it a completely ambivalent potential. Pharmacologically it induces a certain condition, but that condition is mere raw material to be worked by particular cultural or psychological forces and expectations. This is what experts call the “set and setting” of any drug experience. Set in these terms is the individual’s expectations of what the drug will do to him; setting is the environment—both physical and, in this case, social—in which the drug is taken. For example, in the northwest rain forests of Oregon there are a number of native species of hallucinogenic mushrooms. Those who go out into the forest deliberately intending to ingest these mushrooms generally experience a pleasant intoxication. Those who inadvertently consume them while foraging for edible mushrooms invariably end up in the poison unit of the nearest hospital. The mushroom itself has not changed.
This did not suggest that the zombi poison might be only a pleasant hallucinogen. But like the mushroom, its potential was latent. The Japanese victim lying conscious but paralyzed while his family mourned his death might, upon recovery, rationalize his terrifying experience within the expectations of his society. Everyone knows that is what fugu poisoning is like. Without doubt, in the phantasmagoric cultural landscape of Haiti, Clairvius Narcisse had his own expectations that he carried with him literally into and out of the grave. Of what was going on in his mind, I had no idea, and until I did I would know nothing about zombis. But I did have available to me—and the opportunity to explore it before my return to Haiti—a literature that would provide a context for understanding.
8
Voodoo Death
COUNT KARNICE-KARNICKI was a compassionate man, and his invention made him the rage of Europe. The count was a Russian nobleman, the chamberlain to the czar, but his inspiration had come in Belgium while attending the funeral of a young girl. As the first shovefuls of dirt landed on the wooden coffin, a pitiful scream rose from the earth, staggering the officiating priest and causing a number of young women to faint. It was a sound that the count would never forget. He, like so many of his generation in all corners of Victorian Europe, became obsessed by the threat of premature burial.
His invention, introduced just before the turn of the century, was a simple contraption, efficient and inexpensive enough to be well within reach of rich and poor alike. For the truly destitute, the apparatus was available for rent. It consisted of a hermetically sealed box and a long tube that would be fixed into an aperture in the coffin as soon as it was lowered into the ground. On the chest of the dead person was placed a large glass ball attached to a spring linked to the sealed box. With the slightest movement of the glass ball, as would occur if breathing began, the spring would be released, causing the lid of the box to fly open and admit both light and air to the buried coffin. At the same time the spring initiated a mechanical chain reaction worthy of Rube Goldberg. A flag sprang four feet above the box, a bell began to ring and continued for thirty minutes, and an electric lamp ignited. The long tube was envisioned not only to admit oxygen, but also to serve as a megaphone, amplifying the presumably weak voice of the almost dead. Not a hundred years ago, at the turn of this century, this peculiar apparatus was heralded as a technological breakthrough. Many thousands of Frenchmen left specific instructions in their wills to ensure that it would be placed on their tombs. In the United States it was so popular that societies formed to promote its subsidized use.
The citizens who embraced Count Karnice-Karnicki’s invention were responding to an epidemic of premature burials that had colored the popular press and confounded medical authorities. A typical report appeared in the London Echo in March of 1896. Nicephorus Glycas, the Greek Orthodox metropolitan of Lesbos, was pronounced dead in his eightieth year. According to the traditions of his church he was immediately garbed in his episcopal vestments and placed on a throne, where his body was exposed day and night to the faithful, and guarded constantly by priests. On the second night, the old man suddenly awoke and stared with amazement and horror at the parade of mourners at his feet. His priests, according to the report, were no less startled to realize that their leader had not been dead but had merely fallen into a deathlike trance. The Echo correspondent impassionately questioned what might have happened had the metropolitan been a layman, and then concluded that he would have been buried alive.
A second popular account was that of a Reverend Schwartz, an Oriental missionary who was reportedly aroused from apparent death by his favorite hymn. The congregation celebrating his last rites was stunned to hear a voice from the coffin joining in on the refrain.
Though today both of these cases may appear preposterous, at the time they were not only seriously discussed, they were believed, and they helped fuel a hysterical fear of premature burial that swept late Victorian Europe. In 1905 an English physician and member of the Royal College of Surgeons edited a volume in which were
documented 219 narrow escapes from premature burial, as well as 149 cases in which the body was actually interred while still alive. Also noted were ten instances in which autopsies were erroneously performed on the living, and two cases in which consciousness returned to the “corpse” during the process of embalming.
Many people were not about to take any chances. Hans Christian Andersen constantly carried a note in his pocket instructing what should be done with his body in the event of his death. The English novelist Wilkie Collins placed a similar precautionary note by his bedside table each night. So did Dostoyevsky, who urged that his burial be delayed five days lest his apparent death be but a trance. Certain leading members of the British aristocracy took more drastic measures, which incidentally were remarkably similar to certain Haitian practices that their countrymen would no doubt have condemned. The vodounist, fearing that a family member will be raised as a zombi, has been reported to drive a blade through the heart of the dead. Fearing premature burial, the noted British antiquary Francis Douce requested in his will that the surgeon Sir Anthony Carlisle be permitted to sever his head from his body. So did a certain Harriet Martineau. A well-known actress of the era, Ada Cavendish, left instructions in her will that her jugular be sliced. Lady Burton, widow of the famous African explorer and writer Sir Richard Burton, provided that her heart be pierced with a needle. Bishop Berkeley, Daniel O’Connell, and Lord Lytton had similar fears and ordered that their burials be delayed, and that one or more of their veins be opened so that their blood would drain and thus assure that they were truly dead.
By the turn of this century fear of premature burial had grown into an overriding public concern. It was discussed in all the learned medical journals, and in England it generated parliamentary inquiries that led to the Burial Act of 1900, which among its many statutes specified the length of time that had to transpire between the pronouncement of death and actual interment. On the Continent prizes were offered for the discovery of a conclusive sign of death. In France in 1890 a certain Dr. Maze was awarded the prestigious Prix Dusgate and twenty-five hundred francs simply for asserting that the only reliable sign of death was putrefaction. The earnest scientific interest in establishing the difference between real and apparent death is evident in an academic textbook on the subject published in 1890 whose bibliography lists no fewer than 418 citations.
Actually, a satisfactory means of diagnosing death has both obsessed and eluded man since earliest times. Of course the fundamental signs of death have always been known, and they have not changed. They are: cessation of respiration and heartbeat, changes in the eye, insensibility, rigor mortis, pallor and discoloration due to the settling of the blood. The problem, as Kline had expressed so forcefully when we first met, has always been that not one of these is foolproof. And once that is recognized and admitted, a floodgate of possibilities opens.
But there was something else going on in the minds of Victorian society. Just how serious a threat premature burial was in the late nineteenth century is uncertain. Even at the time many insisted that reports were greatly exaggerated. Yet the very fact that the debate flourished in the Houses of Parliament and the halls of the Royal Academy was as significant as its outcome. An already uneasy public undoubtedly took note that the subject was being seriously considered within institutions that were the very pillars of the Victorian world and, by extension, of reason itself. As physicians outlined the difficulties of diagnosing death, politicians debated how long the dead should be kept from the grave, and salesmen pitched Count Karnice-Karnicki’s invention, the public mood was further aroused by certain popular accounts. One of these was the notorious case of a Colonel Townsend. According to a panel of physicians called upon to witness the event, this officer willingly reduced his heart rate and entered a self-induced trance, or, as some described it, a state of suspended animation. Heartbeat ceased, respiration stopped, and the entire body assumed the icy chill and rigidity of death. The color fled from Townsend’s face; his eyes became glazed and fixed. After he had been comatose for thirty minutes, the physicians actually certified him dead and prepared to go home. As they did so, Townsend began to recover slowly, and by the next day he was well enough to repeat his feat. This case was widely quoted not only in the press but in academic textbooks of medical jurisprudence, and it undoubtedly lent credence to contemporary statements such as “the difference between trance and death has never been quite understood by the majority of mankind.”
This statement perfectly encapsulated the Victorians’ dilemma. At the root of the hysterical fear of premature burial was the fact that physicians recognized, and patients suffered, a number of peculiar conditions characterized by immobility and insensibility, and known variously as trance, catalepsy, cataplexy, and suspended animation. As far as the public was concerned, any one of these clinical diagnoses could be the ominous prelude to accidental interment. Victorian physicians noted that catalepsy was marked by the singular absence of will or volition; the body of the patient remained in whatever position it was placed. Trance was said to most nearly resemble the condition of a hibernating animal, with the patient suffering complete mental inertia. Cataplexy was a modification of the same conditions, only the patient simply collapsed limply to the ground with the eyes closed, completely immobile, unable to speak, yet conscious and totally aware of all that was going on around him. Medical writers of the era even discussed a fourth clinical condition, marked by immobility, which they termed ecstasy, but this was not a state that might lead to premature burial. The ecstatic patient was described typically as having a “radiant, visionary expression and a tendency to fix himself in statuesque poses whilst concentrating upon some object of adoration.”
Needless to say, these conditions are no longer recognized by the medical profession. Certain aspects of the cataleptic condition have been subsumed under “catatonic schizophrenia,” but trance has been reduced to a feature of hypnosis research, and ecstasy and cataplexy have disappeared as clinical diagnoses. But for the Victorians these ailments did exist, and they were discussed seriously by the leading medical authorities precisely because people were succumbing to them. Where did they come from? Cataplexy, for example, is described in the old medical textbooks as “being precipitated by strong emotion and persisting until such emotion be controlled,” which sounds not unlike another common feature of Victorian life, also now abandoned—the fainting spell. Recently some have suggested that women of the era simply suffered the physical consequences of wearing impossibly tight corsets, but this interpretation misses the point. Fainting was a socially conditioned response; in certain clearly recognized and predictable situations it was virtually expected. Young women of the elite, in particular, found fainting a convenient means to avoid or modify uncomfortable social predicaments. Some learned to attain their desires simply by cleverly faking, while others actually did pass out, and in some cases it was assumed by physicians that they were dead. In other words, a socially conditioned act became a physiological reality.
Like the fainting spell, catalepsy, cataplexy, trance, and ecstasy were socially conditioned ailments, and their cause lay somewhere deep within the psyche of the age. Their manifestations were concrete and isolated to a particular time. The fear of premature burial undoubtedly was accentuated because people really believed such states of sham death possible. And just because they did exist for the Victorians, some unfortunate souls may well have ended up in the ground wishing that their relatives had rented from Count Karnice-Karnicki.
Part of what was going on in Victorian England was related to a phenomenon that Western anthropologists had noted in “primitive” societies but overlooked in their own culture. For just as an individual’s sickness may have a psychosomatic basis, it is possible for a society to generate physical ailments and conditions that have meaning only in the minds of its people. In Australia, for example, aborigine sorcerers carry bones extracted from the flesh of giant lizards, and when these slivers are pointed at a person while a
death spell is recited, the individual invariably sickens and almost always dies. According to one scientific report the victim
stands aghast, with his eyes staring at the treacherous pointer, and with his hands lifted as though to ward off the lethal medium which he imagines is pouring into his body. His cheeks blanch and his eyes become glassy and the expression on his face becomes horribly distorted … he attempts to shriek but usually the sound chokes in his throat, and all that one might see is froth at his mouth. His body begins to tremble … he sways backwards and falls to the ground … writhing as if in mortal agony. After awhile he becomes very composed and crawls to his [shelter]. From this time onwards he sickens and frets, refusing to eat and keeping aloof from the daily affairs of the tribe.
At this point only the nangarri, or medicine man, may save him by initiating a complex ritual. But should the nangarri refuse to cooperate, the victim will almost certainly die.
What happens to the Australian aborigine is an example of something that occurs in many cultures. It is a phenomenon every bit as real, and every bit as enigmatic, as the ailments generated by the Victorian mind. Its basic pattern is consistent. An individual breaks a social or spiritual code, violates a taboo, or for one reason or another believes himself a victim of putative sorcery. Conditioned since childhood to expect disaster, he then acts out what amounts to a self-fulfilling prophecy. Often the death knell is sounded by a hex or, as in Australia, a simple gesture rife with meaning. Sorcerers may use props as media of transmission: African witch doctors have knucklebones, and European witches carved wooden dolls. Or transmission is direct. Even to day in Greece the harbinger of death need merely squint the evil eye.
