Zombies - Is there any scientific explanation for the 'walking dead'?

There are many old stories about this intriguing and very interesting topic, myths and legends, as well as recorded movies, series and numerous video games.

Who are the zombies?

The basic definition of zombie is that it is an 'undead' person who comes from the Caribbean and Creole voodoo belief system. These zombies are human bodies revived by voodoo medicine. Other forms of zombies originated from the movies horror genre that promotes them very impressively from the very beginning of the film industry.

According to voodoo lore, a dead body can be enlivened with “bokor” or “mambo”, which are some kinds of priests in voodoo religion. They follow the decision of the person which revived them and do not have their own will.

The word 'zombie' comes from the Congo and represents the name of their snake deity. In the 1937, Zola Neale Hurston, exploring Haitian culture, met with the case of Felicia Felix Mentor, who died in 1907. She was 29 years old. Her fellow villagers felt that she had been walking on the streets 30 years after she was buried. Neale Hurston believed that the witnesses were under the influence of strong drugs every time they saw late Felicia. At the end, she noted that one day, during the scientific dealing with voodoo magic, scientists might encounter numerous completely new ways of treatment.

Some of the explanation for this phenomenon

A couple decades later, Wale Davis published two books about zombies: 'Snake and debt' and 'Ethno-biology of zombies in Haiti'. The first book was published in the 1985, and the second in 1988. In both of them, the author claims that the dead can be revived by two powders. One of them is Coup de poudre (shock powder), which contains TTX (tetrodoxin). Only 1 milligram of this powder can seemingly numb the person for a few days. Another important powder is dissociative hallucinogen of any kind, and it leaves a person without its own will.

Beside these two chemicals associated in the ritual, there is a theory that a person is so convinced of the process 'becoming a zombie', that it becomes a reality as a placebo, since all known cases of real-life zombies come precisely from this system of belief, and never from the Western world .

In addition to this system, there are known various legends about the revived mummies, imprisoned souls, ghosts, artificial Golem, walking skeletons and a whole series of the Living Dead. A little more modern approach to zombie phenomenon would be the one presented in the section of book "1984" by George Orwell, where people have arbitrarily and tacitly become 'walking dead' and minions Big Brother.

This is of course a symbolic representation of what was later realized by Doctor Andrija Puharich during experiments related to certain frequencies and mood of people exposed to them...