How newt turned into a zombie. Stages of turning into a zombie. Sensory organs have fallen into disrepair

First you need to decide what are all such signs of a zombie. Probably the biggest sign, as you know, to be literally dead, has nothing to do with real medical parallels, so we will limit ourselves only to those diseases that make people look like the living dead. These include decay and dead flesh, a trance-like state that deprives a person of any cognitive functions, an inability to communicate in other ways than moans and moans, a slow shuffling gait, and a desire to try human brains or at least bite someone.

Is there one such disease that includes all of these symptoms? No. But there is a whole bunch of diseases that have some of these symptoms and this is scary enough.

Sleeping sickness

The scary thing is that there are still no vaccines or ways to prevent the spread of infection if a person is bitten by a tsetse fly. Even the treatments now available are of little benefit. Melarsoprol is one of the available treatments, but it is over fifty years old and contains enough arsenic to kill one in twenty people to whom it is applied. And even if a person survives after this, there is still a risk that he will catch this disease again.

Around 50,000 to 70,000 people die from sleeping sickness every year, although the figure could be much higher. In Uganda, one in three people is at risk of contracting the disease, so about six million people are at constant risk of infection. So every year we have about 50,000 samples of the living dead, although they do not remain in this state for so long.

Rabies

There is no such disease, mental or physiological, that makes people eat other people, at least the medicine of such diseases is not known. (Cannibalism is not considered a mental illness, but rather part of some kind of mental disorder.) There are certain culturally specific mental conditions, wendigo psychosis, found among the Native Americans. This is one of the best examples of people thinking they are becoming cannibals, that's all.

Although rabies, under certain conditions, can resemble certain states, like zombies, when they feel the desire to eat human brains. The rabies virus causes severe inflammation or brain swelling, which is almost always transmitted by bites from infected animals. About 55 thousand people die annually from rabies, most of these deaths occur in Africa and Asia. Although vaccines rabies exists and must be given before symptoms appear in order for the patient to survive.

Again, the symptoms of rabies are very similar to those of a zombie: complete or partial paralysis, impaired mental activity, confusion and strange behavior, obsession and, ultimately, frenzy. Not all symptoms may appear, but rabies can be easily identified if the patient is unable to think clearly and communicate, has difficulty walking and displays an aggressive obsession that takes the form of attacks on people.

While such a zombie-like patient is medically possible, it is actually not realistic. Human-to-human transmission of rabies is very rare and most often occurs due to insufficient examination before organ transplantation.

Necrosis

Anyone who is familiar with Greek roots already knows what this is about: necrosis is death, namely, of certain groups of cells in the body until the complete death of a person. Technically, this cannot be called a disease, rather, it is a condition caused by many different reasons. Cancer, poisoning, injury and infection can be possible reasons premature cell death.

If we are to literally describe the living dead, then a patient with dead tissue might be the closest equivalent of a zombie. After all, the necrosis patient is technically half dead, although it is still alive in many other important parts of the body (brain, heart, and other vital organs) that we associate with life.

If it is caused by external causes, necrosis causes a series of events that can lead to even greater negative effects beyond the affected area. Dead cells stop sending signals to the nervous system, dead cells can release dangerous chemical substances harmful to neighboring healthy cells. If the lysosome lining inside the cell is damaged, enzymes can be released that also harm the cells around it.

This chain reaction can cause the spread of necrosis (and if it spreads over a fairly large area, then this is already gangrene) and, in the end, the outcome can be fatal. The only way that can help in this situation is to remove the dead body parts. If the dead area is too large, amputation may be necessary.

The positive in this situation is that necrosis is not contagious, that is, it cannot in any way cause an outbreak of a zombie virus .

The Nazi system in 1938-1939 - the time of Bettelheim's stay in Dachau and Buchenwald - was not yet aimed at total extermination, although lives were not considered then either. She was focused on the "education" of slave power: ideal and obedient, not thinking about anything except the mercy from the owner, which is not a pity to waste. Accordingly, it was necessary to make a frightened child out of a resisting adult personality, to infantilize a person by force, to achieve his regression - to a child or even to an animal, a living biomass without personality, will and feelings. Biomass is easy to manage, not sympathetic, easier to despise, and obediently slaughtered. That is, it is convenient for the owners.

Summarizing the main psychological strategies for suppressing and breaking the personality, described in Bettelheim's work, I have identified and formulated a number of key strategies for myself, which, in general, are universal. And in different variations they were repeated and repeated practically at all levels of society: from the family to the state. The Nazis only collected it all into a single concentrate of violence and horror. What are these ways of transforming personality into biomass?

Rule 1. Make the person do meaningless work.
One of the favorite activities of the SS was to make people do completely meaningless work, and the prisoners knew that it did not make sense. Carrying stones from one place to another, digging holes with your bare hands, when the shovels were lying nearby. What for? "Because I said so, a Jew's face!"
(How is this different from "because you have to" or "your business is to do, not think"?)

Rule 2. Introduce mutually exclusive rules, violations of which are inevitable.
This rule created an atmosphere of constant fear of being caught. People were forced to negotiate with the warders or "kapos" (SS assistants from among the prisoners), falling into complete dependence on them. A large field for blackmail was unfolding: warders and capos could pay attention to violations, or they could not - in exchange for certain services.
(The absurdity and inconsistency of parental requirements or state laws is a complete analogue).

Rule 3. Introduce collective responsibility.
Collective responsibility erodes personal responsibility - this is a well-known rule. But in an environment where the cost of error is too high, collective responsibility turns all members of the group into overseers one after another. The collective itself becomes an unwitting ally of the SS and the camp administration.

Often, obeying a momentary whim, the SS man would give another senseless order. The desire for obedience eaten into the psyche so strongly that there were always prisoners who followed this order for a long time (even when the SS man forgot about it after five minutes) and forced others to do it. For example, one day a warden ordered a group of prisoners to wash their shoes outside and inside with soap and water. The boots were as hard as stone, and they rubbed at the feet. The order was never repeated. Nevertheless, many prisoners who had been in the camp for a long time continued to wash their shoes from the inside every day and scolded everyone who did not do this for negligence and dirt.

(The principle of group responsibility ... When “everyone is to blame,” or when a particular person is seen only as a representative of a stereotyped group, and not as an exponent of his own opinion).
These are three " preliminary rules". The following three act as a shock link, crushing an already prepared personality into biomass.

Rule 4. Make people believe that nothing depends on them. To do this: create an unpredictable environment in which it is impossible to plan anything and make people live according to the instructions, suppressing any initiative.
A group of Czech prisoners was destroyed like this. For some time they were singled out as "noble", entitled to certain privileges, allowed to live in relative comfort without work and hardships. Then the Czechs were suddenly thrown into quarry jobs with the worst working conditions and the highest mortality rates, while cutting back on their diet. Then back - to a good home and light work, after a few months - back to the quarry, etc. No one was left alive. Complete lack of control own life, the inability to predict what you are being encouraged or punished for, knocking the ground out from under your feet. The personality simply does not have time to develop adaptation strategies, it is completely disorganized.
“A person's survival depends on his ability to retain some area of free behavior, to maintain control over some important aspects of life, despite conditions that seem intolerable ... Even a small, symbolic opportunity to act or not to act, but of his own free will, allowed him to survive me and people like me. " (in italics in quotation marks - quotes by B. Bettelheim).

The most brutal daily routine constantly spurred people on. If you hesitate one or two minutes to wash, you will be late for the toilet. If you delay cleaning your bed (there were still beds in Dachau then), you will not have breakfast, which is already meager. Haste, fear of being late, thinking for a second and stopping ... Excellent guards constantly urge you on: time and fear. You are not planning the day. You don't choose what to do. And you don't know what will happen to you later. Punishments and rewards went without any system. If at first the prisoners thought that good work would save them from punishment, then later came the understanding that nothing guarantees that they would not be sent to get stones in the quarry (the most deadly occupation). And they were awarded just like that. It's just an SS man's whim.
(This rule is very beneficial for authoritarian parents and organizations because it ensures the lack of activity and initiative on the part of the addressees of messages like “nothing depends on you”, “well, what have you achieved”, “it has been and always will be”).

Rule 5. Make people pretend that they do not see or hear anything.
Bettelheim describes this situation. An SS man beats a man. A column of slaves passes by, which, noticing the beating, together turns their heads to the side and accelerates sharply, showing with all their appearance that they “did not notice” what was happening. The SS man, not looking up from his occupation, shouts "Well done!" Because the prisoners have demonstrated that they have learned the rule of "not knowing and not seeing what is not supposed to." And the prisoners have increased shame, a feeling of powerlessness and, at the same time, they involuntarily become accomplices of the SS man, playing his game.
(In families where violence is rampant, it is not uncommon for a relative to see and understand everything, but pretend not to see or know anything. For example, a mother whose child is sexually abused by a father / stepfather ... totalitarian states, the rule "we know everything, but pretend ..." is the most important condition for their existence)

Rule 6. Make people cross the last inner line.
“In order not to become a walking corpse, but to remain a human, albeit humiliated and degraded, it was necessary all the time to be aware of where that line passes, because of which there is no return, a line beyond which one cannot retreat under any circumstances, even if it threatens life ... To realize that if you survived at the cost of crossing this line, you will continue a life that has lost all meaning. "

Bettelheim gives a very graphic story about “ last line". One day the SS man drew attention to two Jews who were "skimmed". He forced them to lie down in a muddy ditch, called a Pole prisoner from a neighboring brigade and ordered them to bury those who fell out of favor alive. The Pole refused. The SS man began to beat him, but the Pole continued to refuse. Then the warden ordered them to switch places, and the two were ordered to bury the Pole. And they began to bury their companion in misfortune without the slightest hesitation. When the Pole was almost buried, the SS man ordered them to stop, dig him back up, and then lie down again in the ditch themselves. And again he ordered the Pole to bury them. This time he obeyed - either out of a sense of revenge, or thinking that the SS man would spare them too at the last minute. But the warden did not pardon: he stamped the ground over the heads of the victims with his boots. Five minutes later, they - one dead and the other dying - were sent to the crematorium.
The result of the implementation of all the rules:

“The prisoners who assimilated the idea constantly inspired by the SS that they had nothing to hope for, who believed that they could not influence their position in any way - such prisoners became, literally, walking corpses ...”.

The process of turning into such zombies was simple and intuitive. At first, a person stopped acting of his own free will: he did not have an internal source of movement, everything he did was determined by pressure from the guards. They automatically followed orders, without any selectivity. Then they stopped raising their legs when walking, and began to shuffle in a very characteristic manner. Then they began to look only in front of them. And then death came.

People turned into zombies when they abandoned any attempt to comprehend their own behavior and came to a state where they could accept anything, everything that came from the outside. “Those who survived understood what they didn’t realize before: they have the last, but perhaps the most important human freedom - in any circumstances to choose their own attitude to what is happening.” Where there is no relationship of its own, a zombie begins.

Zombies in Haiti

The idea of a significant time during which it is possible to bring a person back to life is suggested by reports of "zombies" in Haiti. This practice was once introduced to the island by voodoo priests and the descendants of black slaves who came from today's Dahomey.

It consists, as it were, of two links: first, murder, and then returning to life. The victim, which they intend to turn into a "zombie", is mixed into the food with poison made from two-toothed fish (dioodon histrix). This fish contains a very strong nerve poison (tet-rhodotoxin), which exceeds the degree of exposure to potassium cyanide by 500 times. The victim immediately stops breathing, the surface of the body turns blue, the eyes turn glass - clinical death occurs.

A few days later, the deceased from the poison is kidnapped from the cemetery in order to allegedly bring him back to life. So he becomes a "zombie". Awareness of his "I" returns to him incompletely or does not return at all. In the accounts of eyewitnesses who met "zombies", they are referred to as people who "look meaninglessly in front of them." (Remember the story about the daughters of the old man shaman, also brought back to life: “only her eyes remained cloudy.”)

True, such a loss of memory and self-awareness is not always irreversible. Several cases related to "zombies" that have become known lately allow one to judge this. A certain Nataghetta Joseph died in 1966, about which her family was issued a certificate from the local police department. She was buried, and six years later, fellow villagers met her wandering around the village where she once lived. In another case, a thirty-year-old woman died, which was also recorded in the magistrate. And three years later, her husband met her in a "zombie" state in a remote area where she worked on a plantation.

The story of Claudius Narcissus

The story with Claudius Narcissus received special publicity, because not only scientists, but also television and newspapers became interested in this case. Narcissus had a long battle with his brothers over land. In the spring of 1962, he suddenly fell ill, was admitted to a hospital in Port-au-Prince, where he died soon after. The death was confirmed by two leading doctors of the hospital, one of whom was an American doctor. Mourned by his family, he was buried. When consciousness returned to him, it turned out that he was on some distant farm. There he worked in the fields from dawn to dusk with a hundred people like him. Apparently, from time to time they had some kind of stupefying drug mixed into their food, fogging their memory. When one day for some reason this was not done, the "zombies" scattered and scattered across the island. Suspecting that the reason for what was done to him was his brother, Narcissus did not return to his village or show up at all. However, someone who knew him identified him as a "zombie" and informed his relatives. The authorities became interested in the case. Narcissus was taken to a family where he had not been since the day of his funeral - eighteen years. Relatives recognized him, but refused to accept him back. While waiting for some kind of shelter to be found for him, Narcissus was admitted to the hospital. The photograph of him sitting on his own tombstone, went around many newspapers around the world.

According to the observations of a researcher who spent several years in Haiti, the physically strongest are selected for the "zombies" in advance, so that later, returning to life, they can be used as slaves on sugarcane plantations. The fear of becoming a "zombie" is so great that a funeral ritual in Haiti includes a series of actions, the purpose of which is to prevent the kidnapping of the deceased in order to bring him back to life. The zombie ritual is strangely echoed with the magical practice that is still prevalent among the aborigines of Australia. According to their stories, recorded by ethnographers, a person who had been pre-designated as a victim is kidnapped by a sorcerer and, placing him on his left side, thrust a sharp bone or a stick into his heart. When the heart stops, it means the soul has left the body. After that, through various manipulations, the sorcerer brings him back to life, ordering him to forget about what happened to him. But at the same time it is suggested to him that in three days he will die. Such a person returns home without really knowing what has been done to him. Outwardly, he is no different from other people, but this is not a person, but only a walking body.

I mentioned that the practice of "zombies" was introduced to Haiti by Negroes from Dahomey. Apparently, some methods of returning to life continue to be practiced in Dahomey to this day. Here is how an American doctor-traveler, who happened to be present at one of these "sessions", tells about it.

How are they turned into zombies?

“The man was lying on the ground, showing no signs of life. I noticed that one ear was half cut off, but it was an old wound; no more traces of violence were visible. Around him stood a group of negroes, some completely naked, others wearing long, unbelted shirts. Among them were several priests, who could be distinguished by the tuft of hair on their shaved head. An even noise of voices was heard: preparations were underway for the ceremony.

An old man in an old, faded army jacket, which hung down to his knees, was in charge of everything. He shouted at the others, waving his arms. He wore an ivory bracelet on his wrist. The old man was obviously the chief priest of the fetish, and he had to cast out evil spirits today. "

The traveler addressed the local companion who brought him there:

I'm a white doctor. I would like to examine the person and make sure that he is really dead. Can you arrange it?

After short negotiations, the agreement was given. The high priest stopped his dance that had begun. “The audience gathered around, watching me with curiosity. On the ground lay a healthy young lad, over six feet tall, with a broad chest and strong arms. I sat down so as to shield him with my body, with a quick movement lifted his eyelids to check the pupillary reaction according to Argyll-Robineon. There was no reaction, there were no signs of a heartbeat ...

... We were surrounded by a group of thirty people. In low voices they sang a rhythmic song. It was a cross between a howl and a growl. They sang faster and louder. It seemed that even the dead would hear these sounds. What was my surprise when exactly this happened?

"Dead" unexpectedly ran his hand over his chest and tried to turn. The screams of the people around him merged into a continuous scream. The drums began to beat even more violently. Finally, the lying person turned, squeezed the yogis under him and slowly got down on all fours, his eyes, which a few minutes ago reacted to her light, were now wide open and looked at us. "

The locals, whom the traveler met in different parts of Dahomey, told him that a person could be brought back to life, if not much time had passed after his death. It also followed from the words of some Europeans living in the country that he was not the only white man who happened to be present at such a ceremony.

Other peoples practicing reviving the dead

Unlike the practice of modern resuscitators, when the possibility of returning to life is measured in minutes, representatives of other, non-European cultures consider this time to be much longer. So, in Haiti, the priests of "voodoo", referring to the practice of "zombies", talk about ten days. Among the peoples of Siberia, in relation to shamans, this period is determined at seven days. These seven days are also mentioned in ancient Sumerian clay tablets. The North American Indians and tribes of New Guinea have six days. It was believed that the Turukhan shamans had a critical period to bring a person back to life, a little more than a day. However, what is important here is not the time difference, which is measured in days, but the very stability of the idea that within a certain time, several days, a return to life is possible.

I have quoted some of the testimonies of such returns. There is every reason to believe, however, that most of these facts are lost and forgotten, as much as much evidence of the past is lost and forgotten.

In preparation for a public lecture on personality psychology, I looked through excerpts from the book of the psychoanalyst Bruno Bettelheim, The Enlightened Heart. In it, he describes his experience as a prisoner of the Dachau and Buchenwald concentration camps, in which he was in 1938-1939, as well as the experience of others who faced the system of destruction of human dignity later, when the Nazis "revealed" to their full potential. I made notes, extracts, and in the end I got this article.

I was interested in the psychological aspect of what was happening in concentration camps. How the Nazi system broke personalities, how individuals resisted the system and the monstrously destructive psychological field, what strategies were used and how they were deformed. In the end, personality is our strategies for adapting to the world around us, and who we are in many ways (but not in all) depends on what this world is like. - Ilya Latypov writes.

So, let's begin…
The Nazi system in 1938-1939 - the time of Bettelheim's stay in Dachau and Buchenwald - was not yet aimed at total extermination, although lives were not considered then either. She was focused on the "education" of slave power: ideal and obedient, not thinking about anything except the mercy from the owner, which is not a pity to waste. Accordingly, it was necessary from the resisting an adult personality to make a frightened child, to infantilize a person by force, to achieve his regression - to a child or even to an animal, a living biomass without personality, will and feelings. Biomass is easy to manage, not sympathetic, easier to despise, and obediently slaughtered. That is, it is convenient for the owners.

(How is this different from "because you have to" or "your business is to do, not think"?)

(Absurdity and inconsistency parental requirements or state laws - a complete analogue).

Rule 3. Introduce collective responsibility.
Collective responsibility erodes personal responsibility - this is a well-known rule. But in conditions where the cost of error is too high; collective responsibility turns all members of the group into overseers one after another. The collective itself becomes an unwitting ally of the SS and the camp administration.

These are three “preliminary rules”. The following three act as a shock link, crushing an already prepared personality into biomass.

A group of Czech prisoners was destroyed like this. For some time they were singled out as "noble", entitled to certain privileges, allowed to live in relative comfort without work and hardships. Then the Czechs were suddenly thrown into quarry jobs with the worst working conditions and the highest mortality rates, while cutting back on their diet. Then back - to a good home and light work, after a few months - back to the quarry, etc. No one was left alive. Complete lack of control over your own life, the inability to predict what you are encouraged or punished for, knocking the ground out from under your feet. The personality simply does not have time to develop adaptation strategies, it is completely disorganized.

“Human survival depends on his ability to retain some area of free behavior, to maintain control over some important aspects of life, despite conditions that seem intolerable ... Even insignificant the symbolic ability to act or not to act, but of my own free will, allowed me and people like me to survive. "
B. Bettelheim

The most brutal daily routine constantly spurred people on. If you hesitate one or two minutes to wash, you will be late for the toilet. If you delay cleaning your bed (there were still beds in Dachau then), you will not have breakfast, which is already meager. Haste, fear of being late, not a second to think and stop ... You are constantly urged on by excellent overseers: time and fear. Not you planning day. You don't choose what to do. And you don't know what will happen to you later. Punishments and rewards went without any system. If at first the prisoners thought that good work would save them from punishment, then later came the understanding that nothing guarantees that they would not be sent to get stones in the quarry (the most deadly occupation). And they were awarded just like that. It's just an SS man's whim.

(This rule is very beneficial for authoritarian parents and organizations because it ensures the lack of activity and initiative on the part of the addressees of messages like “nothing depends on you”, “well, what have you achieved”, “it has been and always will be”).

(In violent families, it is not uncommon for someone to from relatives He sees and understands everything, but pretends that he sees nothing and does not know. For example, a mother whose child is sexually abused by a father / stepfather ... In totalitarian states, the rule "we know everything, but pretend ..." is the most important condition their existence)

Rule 6. Make people cross the last inner line.
“In order not to become a walking corpse, but to remain human, even humiliated and degraded it was necessary all the time to be aware of where the line passes, because of which there is no return, the line beyond which one should not retreat under any circumstances, even if it threatens life. To realize that if you survived at the cost of crossing this line, you will continue a life that has lost all meaning. "
B. Bettelheim

Bettelheim gives a very graphic story about the "last line". One day the SS man drew attention to two Jews who were "skimmed". He forced them to lie down in a muddy ditch, called a Pole prisoner from a neighboring brigade and ordered them to bury those who fell out of favor alive. The Pole refused. The SS man began to beat him, but the Pole continued to refuse. Then the warden ordered them to switch places, and the two were ordered to bury the Pole. And they began to bury their companion in misfortune without the slightest hesitation. When the Pole was almost buried, the SS man ordered them to stop, dig him back up, and then lie down again in the ditch themselves. And again he ordered the Pole to bury them. This time he obeyed - either out of a sense of revenge, or thinking that the SS man would spare them too at the last minute. But the warden did not pardon: he stamped the ground over the heads of the victims with his boots. Five minutes later, they - one dead and the other dying - were sent to the crematorium.

The result of the implementation of all the rules:
“The prisoners who assimilated the idea constantly inspired by the SS that they had nothing to hope for, who believed that they could not influence their position in any way - such prisoners became, literally, walking corpses ...”.
B. Bettelheim

People turned into zombies when they abandoned any attempt to comprehend their own behavior and came to a state where they could accept anything, everything that came from the outside. “Those who survived understood what they didn’t realize before: they have the last, but perhaps the most important human freedom - to choose their own attitude in any circumstances. to what is happening. " Where there is no relationship of its own, a zombie begins.

1982 - Harvard ethnobotanist Wade Davis leads an expedition to Haiti. Found that local sorcerers can prepare a poison that is capable of causing deep. When the powder is rubbed into the skin, it paralyzes nervous system, the breath almost disappears.

With the help of local clerics, Davis was able to meet with sorcerers and obtain samples of the poison for analysis. Its main ingredient turned out to be tetradoxin, one of the world's most powerful nerve poisons, exceeding the effect of potassium cyanide by 500 times. This poison is obtained from a two-toothed fish (dioodon histrix). In Haiti, the recipe for such a poisonous powder was known 400 years ago. So far, there are no convincing versions that could explain how tetradoxin works and why the victim remains fully conscious.

The practice of turning a person into a zombie was once brought to the island by the priests of voodoo and the descendants of black slaves who came from Benin (formerly Dahomey). It consists of two stages: first, the murder, and then the return to life. The victim, which they intended to turn into a zombie, was poured into the food with tetradoxin poison (according to other sources, this poison was rubbed into the skin). The victim immediately stopped breathing, the surface of his body turned blue, his eyes turned glass - he was advancing.

A few days later, the deceased was abducted from the cemetery in order to allegedly bring him back to life. So he became a living corpse. The awareness of his “I” did not return to him completely or did not return at all. Eyewitness accounts of zombies speak of them as people who stare blankly in front of them.

There is a lot of documentary evidence of zombies in real life... Thus, in 1929, the New York Times reporter William Seabrook published the book The Island of Magic, in which he tells about his life in Haiti, in the house of the famous witch Maman Seli.
Here is how he described his meeting with the living dead: “The most terrible thing is the eyes. And this is not my imagination at all. These were in reality the eyes of a dead man, but not blind, but burning, defocused, unseeing. Because the face was terrible. So empty, as if there was nothing behind it. Not just a lack of expression, but a lack of ability to express. By that time, I had already seen so many things in Haiti that were outside of ordinary human experience that for a moment I completely turned off and thought, or rather, felt: "Great God, maybe all this nonsense is true?"

According to the observation of a researcher who spent 3 years in Haiti, physically stronger people were selected in advance for zombies, so that later, returning to life, they would be used as slaves on sugarcane plantations.

As mentioned above, the practice of zombies was brought to Haiti by Negroes - immigrants from Benin. As you can see, some examples of returning to life are practiced in Benin and in our time. This was told by a doctor-traveler from America, who attended one of these sessions.

“On the ground,” he wrote, “there was a man who showed no signs of life. I sat down so as to shield him with my body, with a quick movement lifted his eyelids to check the pupillary reaction. There was no reaction, and there were no signs of a heartbeat. The man was actually dead. Those gathered under the leadership of the priest sang a rhythmic song. It was a cross between a howl and a growl. They sang faster and louder. It seemed that even the dead would hear these sounds. Imagine my surprise when exactly this happened.
The dead man suddenly ran his hand over his chest and tried to turn. The screams of the people around him merged into a continuous howl. The drums beat even more violently. In the end, the living corpse turned, tucked his legs under him and slowly got down on all fours. His eyes, which a few minutes ago had not reacted to the light, were now wide open and looking at us. "

It is possible that an eyewitness described here something similar to the ritual of the Haitian zombies.

Another story told by Z. Hurston heard from the mother of the deceased boy. On the night after the funeral, his sister suddenly heard singing and an incomprehensible noise in the street. She recognized her brother's voice, and her crying awakened the whole house. The family saw from the window an ominous procession of the dead and with them a boy buried the day before.
When he, with an effort shifting his legs, came up to the window, everyone heard his plaintive cry. "But such was the horror inspired by these creatures that even his mother and sister did not dare to go out and try to save him." The procession disappeared from sight. After that, the boy's sister went crazy.

The zombie ritual in a strange way echoes the magical practice, and nowadays prevailing among the aborigines of Australia. According to their stories, recorded by ethnographers, a person who had been pre-designated as a victim is kidnapped by a sorcerer and, laying on his left side, thrust a sharpened bone or a stick into his heart. When the heart stops, it means that the soul has left the body. Then, through various manipulations, the sorcerer brings him back to life, ordering him to forget about what happened to him. But at the same time he is told that after three days he will die. Such a person returns home without really knowing what happened to him. Outwardly, he is no different from other people, but this is not a person, but only a walking body.

In one Tibetan monastery, the writer and historian A. Gorbovsky observed the performance of the rlanga rite, the purpose of which was to help the soul in its posthumous state. With a large crowd of people, the deceased is brought and placed in the monastery courtyard. In front of him in the lotus position is a lama. Everything happens in complete silence. Some time passes, and the deceased slowly rises. His eyes are still closed, his face remains the face of a dead person. Moving like an automaton, he goes around the place where he was lying three times, lies down again and freezes, ready for burial.

Perhaps, the method of short-term revival of corpses in Tibetan monasteries is based on the belief that even in the absence of vital functions of the body, certain levels of consciousness, a certain beginning in a person, continue to perceive the environment.

Research recent years it has been established that death does not occur immediately. This is a gradual long-term evolution of an organism with a certain probability of reversibility - a special kind of existence. A corpse does not have a biofield, but this is also not a sign: so a living person can lose it and live without it for some time.

Resurrection of a living corpse - as explained

Dr economic sciences, a physicist by education Boris Iskakov created a bold hypothesis. Its essence is as follows. V modern science there is more and more evidence of the existence in nature of such a phenomenon as the world lepton gas (MLG), which permeates all the bodies of the Universe. It consists of ultra-light microparticles, which today are scientific literature dozens are described - electrons, positrons, theons, muons ... To put it in an extremely simplified way, leptons are carriers of human thoughts and feelings, information about objects and phenomena of the material world. MGL contains information about everything that was, is and will be in the Universe.

It is precisely the interaction of the world lepton gas with an object physical world and the human brain can explain many phenomena that are considered mysterious to this day. These are telepathy, clairvoyance, etc. On the surface of the human skin there are several hundred biologically active points. Their radiation is created by the total quantum shells of the human body, located one inside the other - according to the principle of a nesting doll. One's own body is not the whole person, but only his visible core, around which his information-energy counterparts are located. The emission of quantum shells may be associated with low-energy "cold beta decay" reactions occurring in nerve cells.

The experiments of some of the researchers have shown that when the "core" is destroyed, quantum shells also begin to dissolve. If they do not receive information and energy replenishment, then their half-life will be approximately 9 days, and their complete decay will be 40 days. This applies to both living beings and inanimate objects.

It is curious that these dates coincide with the time of the commemoration of the dead. The ancient Russians believed that the soul “walks” around its house for six days, and for another three days through the fields and vegetable gardens near its native village. Therefore, they performed such rituals: on the 3rd day - burial, on the 6th - farewell to the house, on the 9th - farewell to the village, on the 40th - farewell to the Earth. Interestingly, Buddhism also features 40 days, during which the soul is looking for a new body for reincarnation. During these 40 days, the lama had to read the instructions to the deceased, moreover loudly, clearly and without errors. During the reading, one could not cry and lament, because it was considered harmful to the deceased.

According to B. Iskakov's theory, it is possible to assume that the sensitives of antiquity could observe the quantum shells of deceased people and see critical moments when these deceased needed to be fed by the thoughts and feelings of relatives and friends.

With the further development of this theory, perhaps it would be possible to find explanations for the mysterious phenomena in Tibetan monasteries.