The Dead & the Undead (by Papia Ghosh)

Have you ever imagine if one night you are sleeping and suddenly you wake up and see one of your dead relatives is sitting beside you. How would you feel? Happy, frightened or sad? And what if you see neither that person can recognize you nor the same caring person as you know them. What if a person comes back from dead as an undead?

Yes you are right I am talking about the zombies, who are popularly known as undead. What are zombies? There are various opinions about them. Some says it is a creature that is fictional, appeared in books, films, games and other entertainment media where they portrays as a reanimated corpse of human body who is being controlled by someone else by use of some magic.

So typically zombies are human body without any consciousness or sense of real things. A non-conscious system that physically different from but functionally isomorphic to a normal human. For example, a system with silicon chips instead of neurons like a robot. Some researchers use the logical possibility of such a functional zombie to argue against functionalist theories of consciousness, which postulate that consciousness equals functioning. The other related idea, the zombie within, has recently been studied extensively in psychology and neuroscience. A great deal of human activity—perception, memory, learning—can be accomplished unconsciously. Some have argued that there are major neural pathways devoted to unconscious processing of visual inputs, which leads directly to motor action and physical reaction. These postulations have led some philosophers to suggest that each of us contains a "zombie within" that unconsciously produces many of our motor response, without our even knowing it.

According to history zombies are a product of voodoo spiritual belief system originated in West Africa. The foundations of voodoo were established in the seventeenth century by slaves captured primarily from the kingdom of Dahomey, which occupied parts of today's Togo, Benin, and Nigeria in West Africa, it combines features of African religion with the Roman Catholicism of the European cultures. Today over 60 million people practice voodoo worldwide. Religious similar to voodoo can be found in South America where they are called Umbanda, Quimbanda or Candomble. It is widely practiced in Benin, Haiti and other black communities of the large cities in North America. Unfortunately, in popular literature and films voodoo has been demoralized to sorcery, black witchcraft, and even cannibalistic practices, generating many foreigners' prejudices, not only about voodoo but about Haitian culture as well. The voodoo religion involves belief in a supreme god (bon dieu) and a host of spirits called loa which are often identified with Catholic saints. As bon dieu is difficult to reach, Voodoo culture worship loa (lwa in other opinions) who is subordinate to bon dieu. These spirits are closely related to African gods and may represent natural phenomena — such as fire, water, or wind — or dead persons, including eminent ancestors. They consist of two main groups: the rada, often mild and helping, and the petro, which may be dangerous and harmful.

According to the tenets of Voodoo, a dead person can be taken from death by a bokor or sorcerer by some spell or potion. Zombies remain under the control of the bokor since they have no will of their own. "Zombie" is also another name of the Voodoo snake lwa Damballah Wedo, of Niger-Congo origin; it is similar to the Kikongo word nzambi, which means "god". There also exists within the West African Voodoo tradition the zombie astral, which is a part of the human soul that is captured by a bokor and used to enhance the bokor's power. The zombie astral is typically kept inside a bottle which the bokor can sell for luck, as healing substance or business success. It is believed that after a while God will take the soul back and so the zombie is a temporary spiritual entity.  It is also said in voodoo legend that feeding a zombie salt will make it return to the grave. It is said that zombies are incapable of remembering the past, unable to recognize loved ones and doomed to a life of miserable toil under the will of the zombie master.

There are many examples of zombies in modern day Haiti. “Papa Doc Duvallier the dictator of Haiti from 1957 to 1971 had a private army of thugs called tonton macoutes. These people were said to be in trances and they followed every command that Duvallier gave them. Duvallier had also his own voodoo church with many followers and he promised to return after his death to rule again. He did not come back but a guard was placed at his tomb, to insure that he would not try to escape, or that nobody steals the body. There are also many stories of people that die, and then many years later return to the shock and surprise of relatives.” (Source: Monstrous.com)

“A case reported a writer named Stephen Bonsal described a zombie he witnessed in 1912 in this way: a man had at intervals a high fever, he joined a foreign mission church and the head of the mission saw him die. He assisted at the funeral and saw the dead man buried. Some days later the supposedly dead man was found dressed in grave clothes, tied to a tree, moaning. The poor wretch soon recovered his voice but not his mind. He was identified by his wife, by the physician who had pronounced him dead, and by the clergyman. The victim did not recognize anybody, and spent his days moaning inarticulate words.” (Source: Monstrous.com)

Modern zombies, as portrayed in books, films, games, and haunted attractions, are quite different from both voodoo zombies and those of folklore. Modern zombies are typically depicted in popular culture as mindless, unfeeling monsters with a hunger for human flesh especially brain. Zombies became a popular device in modern horror fiction, largely because of the success of George A. Romero's 1968 film Night of the Living Dead.

According to Wikipedia, The zombie apocalypse is a particular scenario of apocalyptic fiction that customarily has a science fiction/horror rationale. In a zombie apocalypse, a widespread (usually global) rise of zombies hostile to human life engages in a general assault on civilization. Due to a large number of thematic films and video games, the idea of a zombie apocalypse has entered the mainstream and there have been efforts by many fans to prepare for the hypothetical future zombie apocalypse. Efforts include creating weapons and selling posters to inform people on how to survive a zombie outbreak.

Modern zombies come in mobs and waves, seeking either flesh to eat or people to kill or infect. They are generally incapable of communication and show no signs of personality or rationality. Their collective and almost absurd presence (since they are dead) is closely tied to the idea of a Zombie Apocalypse the collapse of civilization caused by a vast plague of undead. The ideas are now so strongly linked that zombies are rarely depicted within any other context.