With films and TV programmes such as WWZ and The Walking Dead zombies seem to be shuffling their way on to screens big and small everywhere at the moment.
Obviously these re-animated corpses don’t really exist, unless, of course, you happen to be a folklore fan.
Stories of zombie like creatures seem to have chilled and thrilled the human imagination for millennia: the goddess Ishtar threatened the hero Gilgamesh with an army of the living dead when he ignored her attempts to seduce him and zombie like creatures protected the grave goods of dead Vikings.
Whilst in England in the Middle Ages corpses were occasionally reckoned to leave their graves and wreak havoc amongst the living.
Of course the best known zombies come from Haiti and West Africa, it is said they are created by a priest called a bocor. The bocor uses his magical talents to bring a corpse back to a kind of half-life; in this state the corpse or zombie obeys the commands of the bocor.
Most cultural anthropologists disbelieve the zombie legends, although some people have claimed that zombies are living humans drugged with puffer fish venom. It seems then that the case for the existence for zombies is well and truly closed but no doubt they’ll still haunt our nightmares for a few years to come.
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