Terms and Spirit Listing
- Z -

Zen (zain, zin)

(V.ENC) The ritual pots used to cook food for the loa.

Ze rouge

(V.ENC) Literally "with red eyes," this term is used to describe an attribute of some Petro loa, such as Erzulie ze Rouge.

Z'étoile

(V.ENC) The z'étoile decides a person's destiny and resides in the heaves, apart from the body. It is not of great importance to vodou belief.

Zombi astral

(V.ENC) A zombi astral is created when a black magician captures the ti-bon-ange of a person during that period when the soul hovers over the body after death. In contrast to a zombie, which is a body without a soul, a zombi astral is a soul without a body. The zombi astral is confined to a glass jar or bottle and performs deeds at the command of the bokor, never allowed to join the land of the dead or achieve a final rest.

Zombie (zombi, zombi cadavre)

(V.ENC) According to vodou belief, a zombie is a dead body that has no soul, and it is always created by a black magician, a bokor. The bokor perofrms a ritual that causes a person to die. Then, within a short period of time, the bokor calls the person back to life as a soulless body. A significant number of researchers believe that this process of "zombification" is an actual practice, achieved not through magic and ritual, but rather through a combination of powerful drugs and poisons. This potion is so toxic that it merely has to be absorbed through the skin to have an effect. No one knows exactly what the components of the potion are, and the bokors guard the recipe zealously, but it is thought to contain substances from various toxic animals and plants, including the gland secretions of a particular frog, the bouga toad, which are 50-100 times more potent than digitalis and also contain a hallucinogen. Other ingredients supposedly include millipedes and tarantulas, the skins of poisonous tree frogs, seeds and leaves from poisonous plants, human remains (for effect), and four types of puffer fish, which contain tetrodotoxin, one of the most poisonous substances in the world. After administration, the victim becomes completely paralyzed and falls into a coma. To all intents and purposes, he seems to be dead. Sometimes, the victim remains conscious and witnesses his own funeral and burial, but is powerless to stop it. The bokor raises the victim after a day or two and administers a hallucinogenic concoction called the "zombie's cucumber" that revives the victim. When the person is revived, he is so brain-damaged that he cannot remember his name or his family; he has lost the power of speech, and his senses are dull. The human personality is entirely absent. Zombies are thus easy to control and are used by bokors as slaves for farm labor and construction work. Family members can take steps to ensure that the body and soul of the deceased loved one are not misused by a bokor. Often, family members set up a watch in the cemetery for thirty-six hours after the burial, after which time, the deceased can no longer become a zombie of any kind. One way to keep someone from becoming a zombie is to kill the body a second time by stabbing it in the heart or decapitating it. Hoholi, or special sesame seeds placed in the coffin, also prevent the machinations of a bokor. If the hair or fingernails have been after death, however, that is a sure sign that a bokor has tampered with the body. Contrary to what is portrayed in popular movies, the bodies of zombies don't continue to decay, and they don't try to eat human brains. In fact, practitioners of vodou don't fear being harmed by a zombie so much as they are afraid of being made into one. Giving a zombie salt supposedly restores its powers of speech and taste and activates a homing instinct that sends it back to its grave and out of the bokor's influence. But as widespread as stories about zombies are, there are few reliable, documented cases of actual zombies. Unlike in the Night of the Living Dead movies, Haiti is not crawling with reanimated, soulless bodies. The horror and shock value of the zombie story probably chiefly contributed to it being to widely spread, and if bokors ever did once turn people into zombies in Haiti, the practice has probably stopped by now.