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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.
