A BRIEF HISTORY OF OUR PEOPLEDr. Bea Dreadful

Oct. 30, 2015St. Petersburg College

OUR ANCESTOR: THE REVENANT

Revenant: A dead body that could reanimate, leave the grave, and harm the living (Geggel)

Earliest known examples of graves containing revenants: 4500 – 3800 BCE, Cyprus; bodies found in graves with millstones across heads/chests to pin them down

What made a revenant? Suicides; murder, drowning, plague victims, improper burial, people who were cursed, foreigners/outsiders, illegitimate/abnormal babies, babies born on inauspicious date

ANCIENT GREECE• Discovered in Kamarina, a Greek

city-state in southeastern Sicily (598 B.C.E. – mid-first century CE). Necropolis: Passo Marinaro (5th to 3rd centuries B.C.)

Two odd burials show how they stopped our ancestors: putting pottery and stones over the body to keep them in the grave.

(Credit: Drawings by D. Weiss from G. Di Stefano's excavation journals.)

MIDDLE AGES• Revenants: Violent or unnatural death,

death in childbirth, lack of confession of sins, possession by evil spirit, rampant sexuality, the non-baptised• Body might not expel all life energy at

death; soul sent out for judgment • Spirits could slip into the corpse and

then run amuck through the world of the living (Caciola 10, Finucane 57)

• To stop them: Confession, holy relics, burial with spikes, beheading, burning the body

MIDDLE AGES• Goal: Get body to decay quickly• England, France, Germany and the Low

Countries: • Body tightly wrapped, sewn into a

shroud. • Acidic graveyard soil desired• If the ground was not suitable, a body

might be boiled or dismembered as “scattering the limbs [would] prevent the possibility of revenants” (Caciola 34).

THE DANCING DEAD (DANSE MACABRE)• Danse Macabre images manifested with the cemetery of the Innocents of Paris;

popularized, living and dead danced together

TODAY: WE STILL DANCE

Michael Jackson, “Thriller”; December 1983https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hG6oy46qKE4 1:43/ 2:31

EVIL: Walt Disney, Skeleton Dance, 1929• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h03QBNVwX8Q

MODERNITY: THE ZOMBIE• Zombie: noun 1. the body of a

dead person given the semblance of life, but mute and will-less, by a supernatural force, usually for some evil purpose. • the supernatural force itself.

(Dictionary.com)• The root of the word comes from the

language of Kikongo from the African Congo.

• First recorded as an English word (zombi) in 1819; History of Brazil by Robert Southey

MODERNITY: ZOMBIES ARISE!

The Walking Dead, 2012

The Dawn of the Dead, 1978

Now they can’t get enough of us!

Early modern: Night of the Living Dead (1968) – radioactive contamination; bites

The Living Dead series (1978-2010) (social commentary, exaggeration)

Shaun of the Dead (2004)(horror/comedy)

Walking Dead, World War Z (TV) (mystery, disease, microbiological)

TODAY: OCT. 30, 2015

WE WANT YOU!

SOURCES• Bynum, Caroline W. “Death and Resurrection in the Middle Ages: Some Modern Implications."

Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society. Vol. 142, 4. Dec. 1998: 589 – 590. JSTOR. Web. 25 Sept. 2014.

• Caciola, Nancy. “Wraiths, Revenants and Ritual in Medieval Culture.” Past and Present Aug. 1996: 3 – 45. JSTOR. Web. 24 Sept. 2013.

• Finucane, R.C. Ghosts: Appearances of the Dead and Cultural Transformation. New York: Prometheus Books, 1996.

• Geggel, Laura. “Ancient Greek burials prepared for zombie uprising”. Livescience.com. June 25, 2015. Web.