Omai, Aladdin and the British encounter with zombies
All things are always changing / But nothing dies", writes Ovid in his poem, Metamorphoses; he develops, over fifteen complex books and through a thousand and one stories of transformation, a vision of the universe in which species melt into others, rocks become flesh, girls turn to water and trees and boys into flowers, animals exchange their nature with stars and plants and stones.
The ancient philosopher Pythagoras acts as Ovid's mouthpiece for this fundamental metamorphic theory of creation and natural growth; at its basis lies the doctrine of the transmigration of souls, that the immortal and individual spirit can move from one vehicle to another. Ovid himself ends the poem with the word, "Vivam" -I shall live. For Ovid, metamorphosis, the principle of organic vitality, is also the pulse in the body of art.
Shape-shifting energies continue to flow through countless classical and other myths, in which sudden transformation can both punish and reward, degrade and enhance, snatching one victim from the grasp of violent death, lifting up another to the skies. Metamorphosis offers almost benign just-so stories for the origin of natural phenomena, but the concept also governs the more malign practice and scope of magic (Circe's powers of transmogrifying men into beasts). Even more fundamentally, it also runs counter to notions of unique, individual integrity of identity in the Judaeo-Christian tradition, and sets up, through myriad narrative devices, a vision of personhood that is borderless, unstable and wandering, apt to take possession of other bodies and to live beyond its physical form.
These two principles, soul migration on the one hand and bodily transformation on the other, the distinctive twin poles of non-Christian thought, also structure some of the novel ideas of the person developed in fantasy literature -tales of horror, dread and the supernatural -growing ever more popular from the seventeenth century until it becomes enshrined in the Gothic; they install, at the heart of popular literature, new models of personhood, including many varieties of spirit possession and soul theft.
Tales of metamorphosis often arise in spaces (temporal, geographical and mental) that are crossroads, cross-cultural zones, points of interchange on the intricate connective tissue of communications between cultures. The encounter with the Americas was one of the most transformative experiences of history, and not only, needless to say, on the original peoples there, whose lives were utterly altered - and in so many ways shattered and destroyed. That side of the story cannot be overlooked or evaded, but it is not the whole story. The historian Peter Lamborn Wilson, in his quirky book, Pirate Utopias (1995), introduces the idea of "positive shadow" in reference to Europeans who "turned Turk", to characterize the ways colonized or repudiated cultures can still exercise fascination, "perfume of seduction", over their new masters, and thereby produce a series of reciprocal transformations. The argument that the contemptuous depiction of savage rites and superstitions gave the oppressor permission to oppress the subaltern as an inferior, a child, a barbarian does not take into account sufficiently the continuing and ever-increasing fascination with stories of metamorphosis and magic in ethnographic and literary texts, where the beliefs of the indigenous peoples of the Americas, and later of Africa and the African slave diaspora, were reported. Like the ancient pagans, they too told stories about wandering souls and changes of shape; among the undone crowd of ghosts and revenants, ghouls, phantoms and spellbound personalities, zombies emerge as the dominant and most fascinating terror in the literature -and psychology -that the African diaspora has influenced.
Stories of metamorphosis tend themselves to be migratory: fairy tales of transmogrification, such as Apuleius' The Golden Ass, were first written down around the edge of the Mediterranean, in Egypt and in the great ports of Venice and Naples, and travelled along trade routes from far and wide, circulating via the bazaars and caravanserai of the Middle East, the diplomatic bags of early empire builders and proselytizers, specimen-hunters and cartographers, often figures who are themselves situated at turning points in culture and moments of clash and conflict between one intellectual hegemony and another. It is a characteristic of metamorphic writing that it appears in transitional places and at the confluence of traditions and civilizations. Such stories can act as powerful "congeners", materials through which one culture interacts with and responds to another, even when unknown to each other; they conduct energies across barriers, though they may themselves dissolve from view in the resulting transformations. (The congener is a concept Peter Hulme uses fruitfully in his book Colonial Encounters, 1986, to add a different nuance to the idea of a source or of an analogue, or, I would like to add, to characterize a way of looking and understanding.) They can often be found in an oddly neglected branch of literature, early ethnography, and its subset of scientific inquiry, into geology, entomology, botany and biology, where many reports of supernatural medicine, possession, ideas of soul and spirit were first made.
Favourite kinds of bodily metamorphosis -shape-shifting -in fairy tales and uncanny stories, breaking the rules of time, place, human reproduction and personal uniqueness, gather in mass and intensity and even velocity of dissemination from the 1760s to the 1840s, in chronological symbiosis, if not in actual intellectual engagement, with the ethnography of new territories and colonies, and within the material conflicts caused by French and English empire-building. Unexpectedly perhaps, it is during this era of Enlightenment confidence and revolutionary upheaval that the vogue for such fantastic fictions begins to run most strongly: captive ghosts, stolen souls and the vampiric supernatural gain a fresh vitality and significance, and the zombie enters English literature.
The dominant settings are not strange in themselves, only estranged by supernatural forces. The reason that the fever of Gothic begins to spike at this time could derive from economic and political energies: the metamorphoses inflicted by occupation, slavery and the getting of wealth abroad incited a literature of metamorphic identity as the apt vehicle of the changing times.
