How would I go about putting a curse on someone? With voodoo, preferably? Is there someone I would have to contact, or could I do it all at home? Thanks in advance. –A quiet loner in northern California
Our source here is ethnobotanist Wade Davis. In 1982 he visited Haiti to see if he could learn the secret of the “zombie powder” that local sorcerers, known as bokors, allegedly used to reanimate the dead. As told in his 1985 book, The Serpent and the Rainbow (a scholarly version, Passage of Darkness: The Ethnobiology of the Haitian Zombie, appeared later), Davis had little to go on but some tantalizing stories and a few contacts. Nonetheless, during his first week in Haiti he managed to meet two alleged zombies who’d been patients at a local psychiatric institute. (One would become the subject of a BBC documentary.) What’s more, with the aid of a wad of greenbacks he was able to witness the manufacture of a batch of zombie powder. In a chilling passage he tells of a midnight trip to a graveyard where he watched a bokor and his assistants dig up the corpse of a recently deceased infant, portions of which–Davis is a bit vague on the details–were added to a witches’ brew of plants, sea worm, toad, lizard, and fish.
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It ain’t necessarily so. Davis’s hypothesis has been bitterly disputed by other scientists. Two experts on tetrodotoxin, C.Y. Kao and Takeshi Yasumoto, tested two of his samples and found they contained only a minute amount of it, too little to have any pharmacological effect. They also condemned Davis for his involvement in grave robbing. According to an account of the controversy in the journal Science, Davis himself fed zombie powder to rats without result, a fact not cited in his books. Leon Roizin never repeated his experiments, published his results, or determined what was in the samples he was given. In the Science article he was quoted as saying he was “embarrassed.”
