November 15, 2008
The European or Daedalus Zombie
Daedalus was an ingenious inventor and a skilled craftsman who called Athens his homeland. His most enduring and legendary creations were the wooden contraption he devised to enable Queen Pasiphae to have sexual intercourse with the bull that her husband, Cretan King Minos, had received in tribute from Poseidon, the Labyrinth he built in Knossos to house the Minotaur, the half-beast, half-human monster born out of the union of Pasiphae and the beast, the artificial wings he assembled, allowing him and his son Icarus to escape from their imprisonment in the Labyrinth.
A man of considerable breadth and superior intelligence, Daedalus was, nevertheless, inclined to follow his basest instincts. He murdered his own nephew in a jealous rage by tossing him from the Acropolis as the youngster, working under his mentorship, exhibited skills that were far superior to his. Found guilty of homicide by an Athenian court, he was banished from the city, whereupon he fled to Crete.
What does Daedalus, King Minos, Queen Pasiphae, Crete, Athens, the Acropolis - all things Hellenic - have to do with the Haitian zombie which happens to be our main concern?
As it turns out, Daedalus's interest was not limited to the physical world. Among other things, he also dabbed in metaphysics. He experimented with the soul and ended up formulating a method enabling him to transfer the human soul out of the body into a machine, thus making it (the soul, that is) immortal. Unfortunately, nothing is known about his "soul-transfer" methodology, the principal tenets of his cosmology or his theology.
Nonetheless, the ability to cast the human soul out of the body into an external receptacle being, according to the Haitian school of zombiology, the crucial step in the making of a zombie, it is evident that Daedalus had the knowledge and the wherewithal to produce zombies at will. Which is to say that, by design or by sirendipidy, Daedalus ended up making zombies, whether or not he knew that by removing the soul from the body he was essentially creating a zombie. This revelation provides firm evidence that zombification had been performed on the European continent long before it was introduced in Haiti, centuries later. It further suggests that the zombie idea might not even be an original Haitian or African concept. The question then arises as to why has the European or Daedalus zombie never been the object of any scientific iinquiry while the Haitian zombie rcontinues to be the focus of endless investigations by anthropologists, sociologists and ethnologists!
The answer is simple. European fairy tales are taken for what they are, namely, fiction. People recognize that Daedalus and his cast of characters have never existed in reality. They all belong to the world of the imaginary, a world inhabited by phantasms.
Meanwhile, questions regarding the Haitian zombie will continue to haunt and puzzle those among us who believe that the soul of a human being can truly be separated from the body, and that mere mortals have the power to bring the dead back to life.