by Bob Curran
The Corpse’s Daughter
Arab Cultures
It has already been noted how voodoo bokors and mambos in West Africa and Haiti were reputedly able to raise the dead for their own end. However, the voodoo practitioners were not the only ones who could allegedly raise cadavers by their magic and for their own ends. The roots of summoning the dead in corporeal form stretch far back into antiquity, and are often seen among the nomadic tribes of the Arabian deserts. Although many of these tribes in such places as southern Jordan are mainly Muslim, evidence of pre-Islamic beliefs still survive. These are maintained by shamans who are called fugara; they have links into the spirit world, and can summon ghosts and demons in whatever form they wish. Sometimes this is done through spirit possession and sometimes it is through a body or physical construct (a doll or image), which will house the entity. The name fugara is a Bedouin word meaning “weak”—simply because the practitioner abstains from large meals and practices abstinence in order to increase his magical powers. This leaves him both skinny and weak. Much of the fugara’s work is concerned with healing and warding off spirits, but occasionally he is called upon to bring back the dead. As in basic voodoo, much of Bedouin belief dictates that events in the world are determined by three types of entities: ancestors, the gods, and the djinn (spirits). Those who could command any of these would have mastery over the world and perhaps even over life and death. The fugara, who could recall the dead—whether corporeally or by spirit possession—was considered to be extremely powerful indeed. The raising of the dead was achieved through calling back, through elaborate ritual, the ancestors of those who had gone before or by calling on the djinn who dwelt in the empty deserts wastes. These spirits might revive the dead and bring them back in the form of guul, which has been Anglicised into the word ghoul. Originally the guul were a form of angel or demon that might possess and animate the bodies of the dead, usually for evil purposes. Indeed the distant star Algol (the demon star) takes its name from the ancient Arabic astronomers who named it Al Guul (or Rhas-al-Guul—the head of the demon), and it was declared to be a force that controlled the dead. The guul were said to inhabit underground dwellings, which were indistinguishable from traditional graves, from which they emerged at night in order to do harm to the living. These were bodies, it was said, that were occupied by dark spirits and were extremely dangerous. Over time, the notion of the ghoul seems to have become more defined, and it emerged as an evil spirit that fed on the corpses of the dead, which it unearthed from their graves. However, these beings might be called from the earth and controlled by a fugara through magical incantations, and might even be used to do mischief in a community.
Similar to the Magyar, the Bedouins believed that there were places in the world where the realm of spirits and ghosts crossed into our own. Such a place was the Rub-al-Khali or the Empty Quarter—a vast desert on the Arabian Gulf. The name Rub-al-Khali means “one with the wind,” and it is one of largest areas of continuous sand in the world. According to the lore of a type of Bedouin shaman known as the muqarribun or Ghost Priests, there is a deeper, hidden significance to the name. This is an entrance to another world from which the djinn and the corporeal dead travel into the world of the living, being given as a “secret door to the Void that lies beyond all things.” From this region, it was believed, the bodies of the dead, driven by an evil intent, wandered out into the wider world. The Ghost Priests, nevertheless, claimed they could control these walking cadavers and protect certain communities from harm.
Another place, sacred to the Bedouins and the muqarribun, lies in the deserts of present-day southern Jordan. This is Wadi Rum, a deep valley cut into the sandstone and granite of the area, which is something of a major tourist attraction today. The word rum is taken to mean “elevated,” and many scientists take the original Arabic pronunciation of the name, which is Raam. Similar to the Rub-al-Kahali, Wadi Rum is another of these crossing places for the djinn and the Arab walking dead. It contains a number of rather spectacular rock formations that were the inspiration for T.E. Lawrence’s book Seven Pillars of Wisdom. The muqarribun claim that some of the rock formations within the wadi are all that remains of an ancient city, built by the djinn and populated by the dead. This legend is thought to have been the inspiration for the American horror writer H.P. Lovercraft’s Irem of the Pillars. In this area, the dead are still supposed to dwell, manifesting themselves at night, their presence only registered by jackal-like calls.
Wadi Rum
Nabatean Civilization
The idea of the returning dead around the mysterious Wadi Rum may arise from the vanished and enigmatic Nabatean civilization, which flourished in the region in Roman times. Perhaps it is because an air of great mystery has attached itself to this ancient people that they have become imbued with mysterious knowledge and powers. Little is known about this early Semitic culture except that they were a trading civilization that benefited extensively from dealing with the Romans, who eventually turned on them and brought their civilization under Roman rule. A tribe of mysterious shamans known as the Al Sulaba who inhabit the Arabian Peninsula, are believed to be perhaps their last descendants. These nomadic tribes are often known as the “Lost Shamans” of the Arabian Desert and are credited with a number of supernatural powers, including bringing back the dead in corporeal form. They are regarded as great healers over whom death has no control. Some anthropologists actually believe them to be of Indian origin, and others believe them to be from a pre-Islamic people who inhabited the area. Because of their extremely fair skin, some have even postulated that they might be of Crusader origin.
Little hard evidence is available concerning the Nabateans apart from the ancient and now abandoned desert capital at Petra in south Jordan, which has become a Jordanian tourist attraction. It is also believed that from Petra they controlled a prosperous trading empire that managed the crossroads between the Arabic and Western civilizations. It is thought that they traded with the Arabs, the Greeks, and the Romans, before the fall of the empire under their last king, Rabbel II, to the might of Rome around AD 106. They were then absorbed into the Pax Romana under the name of Arabia Petrea, and their culture merged with that of their conquerors. However, they were considered by some to be the custodians of arcane wisdom, which has been passed down across the centuries to the Al Sulaba.
The Bedouin muqarribun are very wary of the Al Sulaba, believing them to be in control of the deserts djinn and the dead. They are said to be somehow connected to Wadi Rum and perhaps even to the Rub-al-Khali, and to know the “secrets of the Void” (Afterlife) that are denied to others. Even today, extremely little is actually known about the “Lost Shamans,” and their way of life is still highly secret. Anthropological investigators in the late 19th century, such as Sir Richard Burton and William Belgrave, visited them, but were unable to ascertain their origin—and this still remains the case today. But among Bedouins, the idea that they guard ancient wisdoms concerning the corporeal dead is still very rife. Many of the Bedouin peoples shun them, and no Bedouin man will take a wife from among their kind. Few photographs outside of those taken by 19th-/early-20th century scientists exist, and it’s not really known if they still inhabit the Arabian deserts today as a distinct people. Their tradition of maintaining a “secret knowledge” handed down from the ancient Nabateans, which included the power to call forth the dead, however, has continued and still seems to be evident amongst many Bedouins today.
The lore of the fugara, the muqarribun, and the Al Sulaba have become intertwined throughout the years with notions of Wadi Rum and the Rub-al-Khali—the “secret gateways into the Void”—to create a mythology in the Arab mind in which the dead return at specified “crossings” between their world and ours, and can be summoned by those skilled enough in the arcane arts to do so. And lurking somewhere in the background is the brooding, menacing figure of the guul, the dweller in the graveyard, and perhaps one of the most potent embodiments of the walking dead. As in other civil
izations the Arabian cadavers may not be all that far away in Islamic belief, even in modern times.
The returning dead, therefore, appear in the lore and traditions of many cultures all across the world, from ancient times to the present day. Their presence signals the belief that death is not the ultimate end, and that something lies beyond. They also give an assurance that humans are immortal and that they can, if need be, return to reassure—or perhaps to comfort or advise—those whom they have left behind. They are also the last vestiges of vanished cultures and arcane beliefs, reminding subsequent generations of all that has gone before. And as such, they continue to haunt our minds—whether it be through continuing beliefs, in tales, or in celluloid form—and perhaps will do so for many years to come.
Conclusion:
Figures from Beyond the Grave
There is an old Irish legend concerning the celebrated St. Columcille (with a Scottish variant where it refers to St. Columba, who is, of course, the same man). Although the tale varies, its underlying meaning is the same in both countries.
In the Irish version, the saint’s follower Odhrain died and was buried. (In the Scottish version he gives himself as a sacrifice so that Columba’s abbey on Iona can be built.) Columcille/Columba grieved for his friend and wished him back into the world. Gathering a number of followers at the side of Odhrain’s grave, he prayed that the dead man might be restored, and God granted his wish. The earth parted and Odhrain sat up, blinking in the sunlight. Of course the saint’s other followers gathered around, anxious to know what death was like, and if there was an Afterlife. Odhrain simply shrugged and replied: “Actually death is no great mystery and Hell is not nearly as bad as the Church would have us believe.” Outraged and horrified at this revelation, the saint commanded Odhrain to be dead once more, and he fell back and ordered the others to cover him in clay to prevent him rising again. This gave rise to the old saying among the early Gaelic Christians—“Ur! Ur! air beul Odhrain” (“Earth! Earth! On Odhrain’s mouth”), thus denying any revelation of the Afterlife or any possibility of return from the dead. The tale is taken as an attempt by the early Church to do away with surviving Pagan notions regarding death and resurrection. This wariness and prohibition hints at how deeply ideas of death, what lies beyond, and the possibility of return from the grave, lies within the human psyche.
Odhrain
For many ancient peoples death was the final unknown, just as it is today. Nobody knew what death actually was; was it, for instance, the end of all things and the end of an individual’s involvement in the material world (as we believe it to be today), or was it simply a process by which the individual passed from one reality to the next? Furthermore, nobody actually knew for certain what lay on the other side, and if, as some ancient civilizations believed, it was merely a process of transfer from one sphere of existence to another, might that process be reversed, thus allowing the dead to return to the world of the living, albeit perhaps in a temporary capacity? Other questions abounded, too: Were the dead aware of what was going on in the living world? Could they influence affairs in that world? Were they supportive to their descendants, or jealous and hostile toward those who survived them? If they returned, would they do harm and would they need to be placated?
Phantom
Gradually attempts to answer at least some of these questions began to coalesce into a corpus of belief and lore that surrounded the idea of returning revenants, some of which incorporated elements of some very ancient perceptions. As the civilizations began to come together, many of these beliefs persisted on the fringes of society, taking on definite and distinctive shapes, often of a terrifying or menacing aspect—the draugr, the mummy, or the zombie. Many of the developing belief systems assimilated them, too, usually depicting them as night terrors or dark creatures to be avoided. In the Christian West, the Church found itself in an awkward, not to say difficult, position. Having placed a great deal of emphasis on the Afterlife and the hope of attaining Salvation from Hell, it could hardly deny the ancient notions of returning corpses, which could be taken as proof of at least part of what it taught. So it began to devise ways of explaining the revenant that climbed from its grave in order to wander the countryside, and ideas of the Blessed Dead and the Demonic Dead seemed to explain this. This gave rise to some of the earliest supernatural fables—it might be wrong to strictly call them “ghost stories” because, nowadays, we often have a rather different perception of “ghosts”—which we have in Western Europe. The returning phantoms were not the ethereal figures of much later Victorian melodrama, but rather solid, corporeal entities that could eat, drink, smoke, injure, and enjoy sexual relations. It was assumed that they could also kill.
And of course, the Christian tradition was not the only one to embrace the idea of cadavers returning from the tomb. West African, Egyptian, and Eastern cultures also mentioned such lore and had belief systems that incorporated the idea of walking revenants. And throughout the years, some of these beliefs, and the often, frightening figures that embodied them, found their way into the fringes of mainstream Westernized horror fiction and cinema—the zombie, the mummy, the ghoul, or the zuvembie—to terrify readers and viewers just as old tales concerning the walking dead had done many centuries before.
The idea of returning revenants has also been strengthened in the popular consciousness by medical conditions such as catalepsy, in which the “deceased” have not been dead at all, but in a coma-like condition, reviving after a period of time and resuming normal life. Conditions such as this may well have been more common in former times than we imagine in a period when medicine was slowly developing. And as we have noted, the idea of grave robbers—the bodysnatchers who flourished during the 18th and 19th centuries—also added to the terrifying images of rising cadavers. It was stories of graves being opened and their contents removed that presented a chilling and terrifying spectacle to the society of the time and underscored the idea that corpses might somehow rise and re-enter the world of the living. In an age when science was gaining hold these ideas and beliefs harked back to more primal fears, and to an earlier era when the walking dead might very well stalk the roads as soon as the sun went down.
Something of that same element remains in our society today. Many modern horror stories and “fright films” often include the menacing figures of returning revenants that usually terrify protagonists (and the readers or the audience) with their fearful appearance. The fear of the corpse rising from the grave still lies deep within every one of us, as does the belief that such revenants are agents of evil and will invariably mean us harm. Perhaps it is with this ancient terror nestling somewhere in our minds that many of us can echo the words of the venerable Abbe Serapion in Theophile Gautier’s often neglected classic of Gothic fiction La Morte Amoreuse:
“My son, I must warn you. You are standing on with one foot raised
on the brink of an abyss; take heed that you do not fall therein.
Satan’s claws are long and tombs are not always true to their trust.”
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