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Nowadays when people think of zombies, the image they have is of a shambling, decaying corpse whose only desire is to consume warm human flesh - an image which comes to us from decades of horror movies featuring zombies. It seems that the original concept of the zombie has all but vanished from the public consciousness in favour of this Hollywoodised version.

Zombies feature quite preominently in the Voudon (Voodoo) religion. Its practitioners believe that a 'bokor', or Voodoo sorceror, can reanimate a dead body and turn it into their mindless slave by capturing the victim's soul and holding it, usually in a special bottle or other container. There have been several studies done of this alleged phenomenon, however - in particularly the work of Zora Neale Hurston and Wade Davis - which suggest that zombies do exist, but that their condition is the result of special drugs rather than any specific mystical powers.

Davis in particular claimed to have discovered that a 'zombie' could be created with the use of two special drugs in powder form. The first contained tetrodotoxin - the same toxin found in the Japanese pufferfish - and would leave the victim in a death-like state for several days so that people would believe they had died. The second drug contained hallucinogens which would leave the victim in a trance or zombie-like state with no will of their own for as long as they were needed.

There have also been two cases of 'zombies' being discovered and studied by authorities, and the studies have seemed to lend credence to the theory of the zombie-creating drugs. In the case of Felicia Felix-Mentor, who was apparently found wandering a village some 30 years after she had apparently died, there were rumours of the zombie drugs but Hurston, who was investigating, was unable to substantiate these rumours. Wade Davis also investigated and told the story of one Clairvius Narcisse, who claimed to have been enslaved as a zombie but was released, but there is some skepticism regarding this story.

Unfortunately, due to the secrecy that surrounds many of the practices of the Voodoo religion, the question of whether zombies exist may never be fully answered, but if they do, it is likely that they will be as people drugged to the point of insensibility and made to look as though they are dead rather than the flesh-eating ghouls of Hollywood infamy.

Learn more about this author, Katrin Miller.
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