Vampires, werewolves, and zombies have us in their grips. The reason for their resonance and power is spiritual, and the reasons are different for each mythical being. With World War Z premiering, we have a new spiritual meaning for zombies.
A teenaged friend of ours was dating a person in her class whose father firmly believes in a Zombie Apocalypse. World War Z is about the zombie apocalypse, a different matter than belief in zombies within a religious system like voodoo, or even unhinged from that system and relating to the fears and personal quest of an individual.
A zombie apocalypse envelopes the world. Belief in any apocalypse relates to communal fears, an awareness shared by many, but not brought to the level of consciousness. Thus, the mythic archetype of an apocalypse arises in the culture and speaks from within us saying, “Wake up!” We might even say, with Jung, that the arising of an archetype on a wide scale is an attempt by Nature to heal herself, by seeking to heal the locus of illness: the human species.
So, this is true of apocalypse in general, but what of a zombie apocalypse? This is our attempt, and the Earth’s attempt to bring to consciousness the reality of global climate change. The zombies are ourselves, but so changed that they cannot be reasoned with; no relationship is possible. They are everywhere. Vast hordes threaten the whole world. It is like looking in a world mirror and recognizing the effects of our actions — the zombies are our monstrous children, but they only recognize us as prey.
The fictive origin of the zombie virus being unleashed on humanity, as told in the novel, World War Z, is highly instructive in understanding the underlying, urgent message of the zombie apocalypse. A ritual center — a sacred village in China — has been inundated by a river-damning project. A boy and his father dive into the drowned village, which has been cursed, to recover treasure. A hand grips him, he is bitten, he never sees his father again. Could it be clearer? The apocalypse is the feedback loop, the karmic result of our unsustainable lives on the Earth.
It is interesting that in World War Z that the best way to kill a zombie is to remove its head. The heart is no longer functioning, and it is only by removing that which has been over-identified as the center of human being, the head, the brain container, that the zombie can be stopped. Message to ourselves: drop consciousness from intellect into heart today.
Here is where the true response to the true message of the zombie apocalypse swerves from the overall response given in World War Z: heroic, resourceful humans cannot think and invent and brave our ways out of the real apocalypse to which this mythic message points. Instead we must get a new mind, one centered in the heart, not the head, one centered in God, not ourselves.
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