Decoding the Cosmic Meaning of the Zombie Motif
Personifications, objectifications, and mystical horror
If you could time travel to the distant past and ask an ancient Greek, Jew, or Sumerian what was his or her favourite myth, would the answer conform to our archeological expectations?
Even the People of the Book, for instance, namely Jews who treasured their scriptures didn’t often believe what the Torah and the prophets said they should. Ancient Jews didn’t have personal, pocket-sized copies of their myths that could keep them all on the same page. The Hebrew scriptures urged Jews to be monotheists even while those same scriptures reveal that average Jews were polytheists who were eventually Hellenized, which made Christianity possible.
The myths that crop up for scholars to pick over aren’t necessarily the stories that used to captivate most folks. The stories we live by could be hiding in plain sight. For instance, Christians today would say they live by the New Testament, even as late-industrial Christians are plainly beholden, rather, to the code of capitalism. And secularists who say they don’t subscribe to anything as archaic as a myth gobble up thousands of stories a day in the forms of advertising, cable news, and streaming entertainment.
One of the most profound but seldom appreciated myths for the late-modern world is that of the zombie apocalypse. In this familiar narrative, the world ends spectacularly, as the dead rise inexplicably from their graves, not to fulfill some biblical prophecy but as a twist of godless, natural law. The walking corpses terrorize and devour most of humanity, leaving a handful of grim scavengers to survive by marshaling their resources, outwitting the zombies, and slowly losing their inner humanity.
If we think this narrative has a deeper meaning, we might assume it’s about consumerism: the zombies are like mindless consumers, and our selfishness is killing the planet.
But there’s a more profound, metaphysical interpretation of zombies.
There are three perspectives we can take on the world, corresponding to the main players in the zombie myth. First, there’s folk psychology, our ordinary way of talking about people’s minds, as we posit our beliefs, desires, and rationality. This intentional stance, as the philosopher Daniel Dennett called it, is the default human worldview, the one that predominates before the apocalypse strikes, in zombie fiction.
Before the zombies arrive, people are going about their business, pondering their mental models of the world, and pursuing their goals. This folk model of the mind also went haywire in the prehistoric period, as it was the basis of animism and thus of the world’s religions. In discovering that people have minds, we thought we could similarly detect minds everywhere in nature’s “animations” or forces, cycles, and systems.
In any case, then the zombie horror dawns. Science is befuddled as corpses rise from the earth. Here are bodies that are only superficially alive, but that lack conscious minds. Zombies are soulless, so folk psychology doesn’t apply to them, just as trying to communicate with an extraterrestrial intelligence might prove fruitless.
Notice that zombies aren’t just human corpses. They’re magically reanimated corpses. The essence of a zombie, therefore, has nothing to do with our species. Indeed, the horror of a zombie, as it’s come to be defined in popular culture, is that the zombie’s animation is inexplicable. The corpse lives on ultimately for no reason — and that’s precisely what scientists find when they posit laws of nature that turn out to be brute, inexplicable facts rather than prescriptions supplied by a divine lawgiver.
Sure, we can explain how a natural effect follows from its cause and we can trace those causes back to the Big Bang. But we can’t explain how a natural order can come from nothing, so naturalness, as such, is zombie-like, meaning it’s ultimately baffling and therefore alienating and horrific to social mammals like us who expect the finality of psychological explanations.
We talk of “laws of nature,” expecting a lawgiver because we prefer to apply the intentional stance to nature, like animists or theists. But science is bound to be objective and logical, which means that stricter thinkers bar themselves from making that life-friendly move. From the cosmic perspective in which naturalness and physicality are mystifying (since causal explanations can’t go on forever and a crude retreat to theism or folk psychology is unscientific), the universe is zombified just to the extent that it’s been objectified.
The zombie motif showcases this second, mystical perspective with the zombie character that magically breaks from the natural order and horrifies the masses. In Buddhist terms, we can think of zombie nature as “suchness,” devoid of conceptualized essence. Likewise, in Kantian terms, there are no trees, rocks, planets, or masses of any kind, nor are there events, dimensions, or processes. These are only phenomena, projected by the mind in its attempt to understand what’s incomprehensible by modeling it, by reducing it to our terms. When we no longer trust such human conceptions, the universe appears “empty” in its monstrous unity. That mystical oneness is as unfathomable as the zombie monster.
The third perspective has been touched on already, and it corresponds to that of the scientist who tries vainly to understand the rise of zombies. Perhaps the dead are rising because of a virus or some natural or extraterrestrial plague? This perspective belongs also to the human survivors who must think in ruthless, instrumental terms to stay ahead of the walking dead.
This last perspective, then, is objectification, which is the province of reason, Machiavellian politics, and science. From this standpoint, we posit causes and other reasons, and we analyze phenomena to understand them, ignore mentality where we find it, and objectify to increase our dominance. The more we understand how something works, the more we can predict its behaviour, which potentially neutralizes its threat to us and enables us, in theory, to domesticate the foreign element, as we tamed wild animals by exploiting and domesticating their instincts.
In summary, then, the pop cultural zombie myth presents us with the following three perspectives:
Folk psychology, our default cognitive mode of humanizing ourselves, each other, and preferably or instinctively all of nature. This perspective prevails in mainstream humanity and most of our history, and in the zombie story it’s the viewpoint that defines people before the apocalypse, that is, before the mystical revelation.
Zombie mysticism or cosmic horror, the intellectually elite mode of cognition in which we see past both our personifications and objectifications to the inhuman origin of the universe’s order. This is the horror that dawns on the zombie’s victims, and it’s symbolized by the magical or the handwaving emptiness of the zombie’s animation.
Objectification, another relatively elite mode of cognition in which we try to understand things to control them with reasoning and experimental testing of hypotheses. The zombie story features this mode in the scientists who attempt to explain and cure the zombie plague, and in the survivors whose long-term confrontation with zombies depletes them of their spirit so they lose faith in folk psychology and resort to more robotic thinking, as soldiers or scavengers.
The German philosopher Philip Mainlander’s dark theology offers, in effect, a literalistic take on this zombie mythos. According to Mainlander, God once existed but he killed himself, and his decaying corpse is the natural universe. Here, too, we see the three perspectives:
folk psychology applies to the deity and his reasons for committing suicide
zombie mysticism applies to the essence of natural reality
objectification pertains to the grim, potentially futile plight of the scavengers who focus on surviving amid the trees, as it were, and lose sight of the undying wood of the forest.
The scientist explains how natural causes relate to their effects, tracking and mapping such probabilities, but in doing so perhaps she’s like the fly that sits contented on excrement.
Yet this theology is likely farfetched. A better use of the zombie motif is to take it as an influential metaphor for nature’s ironic re-enchantment in the face of ruthless scientific objectifications and industrial domestications.
We aim to overpower the wilderness, wrapping Tiamat, the chaos dragon in the bonds of our cognitive inferences. But what fundamentally is nature? Can scientists tell us, or must they stop short and merely presuppose some laws and mathematical patterns that turn out to be absurd in the godless context of methodological naturalism? What is a fullness of forms when its patterns are superficially understandable but ultimately inexplicable?
The late-modern naturalist’s mythic answer might be that nature is a zombie monstrosity.
I am enjoying your writing. This is a really interesting metaphor. Thank you.