The Eucharist: Source of the Zombie Cannibal Mythos

Horror hides in plain sight as a sanitized Christian routine

Photo by Josh Applegate on Unsplash

Is it just a coincidence that Christianity features both the supposed physical resurrection of a dead saviour’s body — and thus the worship of a full-on zombie monster — but also, in the Eucharist, the symbolic eating and drinking of that person’s reborn body?

How is that not an extended depiction of what would later be known as one of the primary horrors in fiction, the mythos of George Romero’s zombie?

Of course, Christianity long predates the zombie subgenre, so Romero’s horror movies could only have been riffing on the Christian symbols or inadvertently bringing to light their inner meaning.

The fact that the Eucharist ritual could have persisted for two thousand years demonstrates that even the most grotesque absurdity can become commonplace with enough social reinforcement. Just teach children to do what’s outlandish, such as revering a convoluted case of ritual cannibalism. Next, surround the practice with shameless rationalizations, prop up the ceremony with distracting pageantry, and you can sustain even that which falls to pieces after ten seconds of critical analysis.

The Eucharist is hardly alone in being a common outrage, something that should be ridiculed but that’s accepted not just as normal but sacred.

In any case, the zombie fiction horrifies, but the “risen Christ” is widely regarded as a blessed deity. When the zombie eats a hapless person’s intestines, that’s an appalling perversity. But when the benighted Christian symbolically eats and drinks his or her saviour’s flesh and blood, that’s interpreted as only a humble memorial, a way of carrying forward Jesus’s sacrifice on the cross.

True, the horror of Jesus’s physical resurrection is muted by the muddled picture you find in the New Testament, which combines the zombie trope with the ghost story. Thus, Jesus’s resurrected body isn’t depicted as dumb and mindless, let alone murderous, contrary to what you’d expect from a Romero zombie, because the resurrected Christ is part zombie, part ghost. It’s a “spiritual body,” as Paul calls it, a chimera that was patched together to satisfy the different ulterior motives of early Christian groups.

Also, Jesus’s dead body was supposed to have been preserved in a private tomb and to have resurrected relatively quickly before it would have decayed beyond all recognition. The resurrected Christ doesn’t linger on Earth to decay, letting the natural effect of his wounds take hold and thus coming to resemble more closely a zombie, because he ascends to Heaven on a cloud.

Still, the magical resurrection of a dead body in a physical form is the essence of the zombie monster.

The Paschal lamb

Obviously, Paul and the Gospel writers weren’t thinking of twentieth-century zombies when they concocted the Christian symbols and rituals.

They were thinking, rather, of the Paschal lamb from the Jewish holy day of Passover. Exodus 12 tells Jews to eat a lamb to commemorate their liberation from slavery in Egypt, when God instructed the captives to slaughter a lamb and rub its blood on their doorframe, so that God would pass over the faithful and slay the firstborn of their Egyptian captors.

“Your lamb shall be without blemish,” says Exodus, “and you shall not break a bone of it…The blood shall be a sign for you, upon the houses where you are; and when I see the blood, I will pass over you, and no plague shall fall upon you to destroy you, when I smite the land of Egypt.”

Christians conceived of Jesus on the cross as a sacrificial lamb, as when John 1:29 calls Jesus “The Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world!” And in 19:33, the author goes out of his way to say the Roman soldiers didn’t break Jesus’s legs, to “fulfill” Jewish scripture about Passover.

Mithraism and the slaughtered bull

In addition to the Passover lamb, the early Christians were likely thinking of Mithraism, which competed with Christianity in the first few centuries CE. In Mithraism, the hero Mithras gains favour with the god Sol (the Sun) by slaying a bull in a sacrifice and sharing the meat in a banquet with that god.

The central event of Mithraism, the slaying of the bull, was a creation myth: “It was believed that from the death of the bull — an animal often seen as a symbol of strength and fertility — sprung new life. Rebirth was an essential idea in the myth of Mithraic Mysteries. The sacrifice of the bull established a new cosmic order…”

According to Britannica, this would have been interpreted Platonically, in which case Mithras represented the demiurge from the Timaeus:

With the bull’s death and the creation of the world, the struggle between good and evil began: thus is the condition of human life…After the sacrifice, Mithra and the sun god banqueted together, ate meat and bread, and drank wine. Then Mithra mounted the chariot of the sun god and drove with him across the ocean, through the air to the end of the world.

We can only speculate about the detailed meaning of Mithraism’s symbols because few primary sources remain, but the themes are clear, as is their overlap with Christianity: a bloody act of sacrificial killing, resurrection or the springing of new life from death, a lesser god’s communion with a greater one, and a ritual meal with a god.

So, that’s likely part of what was on Paul’s mind when he said in 1 Cor. 11:23–26:

For I received from the Lord what I also delivered to you, that the Lord Jesus on the night when he was betrayed took bread, and when he had given thanks, he broke it, and said, “This is my body which is for you. Do this in remembrance of me.” In the same way also the cup, after supper, saying, “This cup is the new covenant in my blood. Do this, as often as you drink it, in remembrance of me.”

Lest anyone thinks Paul treated this ritual as only allegorical, we have his chilling admonishment of the Corinthian Christians for taking the ritual too lightly: “Whoever, therefore, eats the bread or drinks the cup of the Lord in an unworthy manner will be guilty of profaning the body and blood of the Lord. Let a man examine himself, and so eat of the bread and drink of the cup. For any one who eats and drinks without discerning the body eats and drinks judgment upon himself” (11:27–29).

And again in 10:16, “The cup of blessing which we bless, is it not a participation in the blood of Christ? The bread which we break, is it not a participation in the body of Christ?”

“Participation” there means “communion,” as in an act of sharing something to make it common, like in the magical thinking that supported savage acts of cannibalism.

The zombie apocalypse

Ultimately, the horror that’s shared in Passover and Mithraism, the Christian concept of Jesus’s sacrifice, and Romero’s zombie mythos is the wild intuition at the root of all magical thinking. The harm done to one living thing is supposed to help another — and not just instrumentally, as when townspeople kill a local wild animal that’s hunting their children, or when an unscrupulous businessperson pays a hitman to dispatch a troublesome rival. No, the aid in the religious case is supposed to be magical: one living thing’s suffering is another’s gain in that the lifeforce passes “spiritually” from one to the other.

In Judaism, the Passover meal is symbolic since Jews repudiate idols, so the blood on the lintels is only a sign that Jews belong to the in-crowd. In Mithraism, the magic is much more elaborate since the killing of the bull was supposed to have been the supernatural means by which the universe was created, so the bull’s loss was our gain. And in Christianity, Jesus suffered and died for believers who thank him by ritually digesting his flesh and blood. The magical transference of Jesus’ payment for others’ sins is represented by the consumption of the bread and the wine in the Eucharist ceremony.

Yet Romero’s mythos subverts and satirizes this magical thinking since what transfers from the victim to the monster, or from the image of the zombie’s feast on flesh to the viewer or reader, is just the horror of death, not any kind of higher life. As I explained elsewhere, the prospect of eternal life is captured by the zombie abomination: if our inner life is all that matters to dualists, and natural life is an afterthought compared to the spirit’s eternity in Heaven or Hell, the emptiness of that theistic fiction about our immortal spirit shows itself when the flesh is made everlasting in the zombie.

With no guidance from any tangible mind, the latter being housed in the brain that the zombie covets, the zombie shambles aimlessly and amorally, wreaking chaos and destruction, ending the world not just physically but by this cruel revelation that all along the “spirit” has been a mere natural by-product. The lesson of zombie fiction is that endless life in natural reality would be a calamity. The flesh would decay, the mind would rot and corrupt itself, and nature’s aimless physicality would have the last laugh in a zombie apocalypse.

When the zombie slaughters a screaming person on a garbage-strewn street, the government having fallen away to factionalism, the only blood sacrifice there is is to godless nature, to the zombie-like animation of mindless particles in an entropic decay of the cosmos.

But what’s amusing is that the Christian case of magical thinking must persist alongside the satirical force of the zombie mythos. The overlap between these symbols is palpable, largely because the zombie story implicitly parodies the Christian enshrining of physical resurrection. But whereas Christianity speaks to an archaic mind frame that late-modern Christians can only mime like zombie consumers themselves, the zombie narrative itself is much more potent and relevant to the world as we currently find it.

Still, the horror of zombies is implicit in the Eucharist despite the Catholic presentation of this ritual, which naturally sanitizes its meaning in Disneyfied fashion. Again, the essence of the horror isn’t the zombie’s decaying body. Rather, it’s the apocalyptic meeting of supernature and nature, the introduction of magic or a miracle that could resurrect a dead body and arbitrarily atone for sins through a spiritual transfer of moral purity or a life force.

Even in its stylized form, the Eucharist calls to mind the magical thinking that could just as easily terminate our species in a zombie apocalypse, as save us from sin by a sacrificial crucifixion and the ritualistic ingestion of a resurrected corpse.

The core horror of zombies and the Eucharist is the positing of supernatural magic.

Be careful what you wish for, then, if you want to live forever, or if you’re still thinking in premodern terms about resurrections, ascensions, ritual sacrifices, and the magical transfer of spirits. In belabouring the story of Jesus’s death and resurrection, Christians are effectively talking about zombie cannibalism even if their Church trains them to construe the horror as a godsend.

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