a brief history of the zombie people
TRANSCRIPT
A BRIEF HISTORY OF OUR PEOPLEDr. Bea Dreadful
Oct. 30, 2015St. Petersburg College
OUR ANCESTOR: THE REVENANT
Revenant: A dead body that could reanimate, leave the grave, and harm the living (Geggel)
Earliest known examples of graves containing revenants: 4500 – 3800 BCE, Cyprus; bodies found in graves with millstones across heads/chests to pin them down
What made a revenant? Suicides; murder, drowning, plague victims, improper burial, people who were cursed, foreigners/outsiders, illegitimate/abnormal babies, babies born on inauspicious date
ANCIENT GREECE• Discovered in Kamarina, a Greek
city-state in southeastern Sicily (598 B.C.E. – mid-first century CE). Necropolis: Passo Marinaro (5th to 3rd centuries B.C.)
Two odd burials show how they stopped our ancestors: putting pottery and stones over the body to keep them in the grave.
(Credit: Drawings by D. Weiss from G. Di Stefano's excavation journals.)
MIDDLE AGES• Revenants: Violent or unnatural death,
death in childbirth, lack of confession of sins, possession by evil spirit, rampant sexuality, the non-baptised• Body might not expel all life energy at
death; soul sent out for judgment • Spirits could slip into the corpse and
then run amuck through the world of the living (Caciola 10, Finucane 57)
• To stop them: Confession, holy relics, burial with spikes, beheading, burning the body
MIDDLE AGES• Goal: Get body to decay quickly• England, France, Germany and the Low
Countries: • Body tightly wrapped, sewn into a
shroud. • Acidic graveyard soil desired• If the ground was not suitable, a body
might be boiled or dismembered as “scattering the limbs [would] prevent the possibility of revenants” (Caciola 34).
THE DANCING DEAD (DANSE MACABRE)• Danse Macabre images manifested with the cemetery of the Innocents of Paris;
popularized, living and dead danced together
TODAY: WE STILL DANCE
Michael Jackson, “Thriller”; December 1983https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hG6oy46qKE4 1:43/ 2:31
EVIL: Walt Disney, Skeleton Dance, 1929• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h03QBNVwX8Q
MODERNITY: THE ZOMBIE• Zombie: noun 1. the body of a
dead person given the semblance of life, but mute and will-less, by a supernatural force, usually for some evil purpose. • the supernatural force itself.
(Dictionary.com)• The root of the word comes from the
language of Kikongo from the African Congo.
• First recorded as an English word (zombi) in 1819; History of Brazil by Robert Southey
MODERNITY: ZOMBIES ARISE!
The Walking Dead, 2012
The Dawn of the Dead, 1978
Now they can’t get enough of us!
Early modern: Night of the Living Dead (1968) – radioactive contamination; bites
The Living Dead series (1978-2010) (social commentary, exaggeration)
Shaun of the Dead (2004)(horror/comedy)
Walking Dead, World War Z (TV) (mystery, disease, microbiological)
TODAY: OCT. 30, 2015
WE WANT YOU!
SOURCES• Bynum, Caroline W. “Death and Resurrection in the Middle Ages: Some Modern Implications."
Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society. Vol. 142, 4. Dec. 1998: 589 – 590. JSTOR. Web. 25 Sept. 2014.
• Caciola, Nancy. “Wraiths, Revenants and Ritual in Medieval Culture.” Past and Present Aug. 1996: 3 – 45. JSTOR. Web. 24 Sept. 2013.
• Finucane, R.C. Ghosts: Appearances of the Dead and Cultural Transformation. New York: Prometheus Books, 1996.
• Geggel, Laura. “Ancient Greek burials prepared for zombie uprising”. Livescience.com. June 25, 2015. Web.