Parting the Mists

Thank you for being patient with my inconsistent posting this week. Monday featured a biopsy early in the morning, and yesterday I unexpectedly helped a family member with some paperwork. Life does happen, and I was glad both things went smoothly!

Now, on to the card. There must be something about the cooler temps and rain that made me reach for the Halloween Oracle. Even though it’s a seasonal theme, it can be a great deck any time of year.

Being used by someone else – losing control of either your own soul or body – is the key to what the zombie represents traditionally (though some modern interpretations of the zombie as a symbol of our mindlessness and compliance to consumerism and other forms of societal Novocain is a valid reinterpretation). Honestly both interpretations speak to loss of control – or of someone being controlling when they shouldn’t be. Perhaps now is time to look at this issue in your life.

Zombie – Control

The dead arise
voices a-mumbling
after our brains
our screams they are tumbling

Zombies have become quite the fashion recently, much like vampires. Turn on the television and you can’t escape the moaning and groaning of these, the living dead. (And yes, they do seem to be after your brain!) There are even public zombie walks – where people dress us as zombies and appear en mass on roads and in cities.

But zombies are not merely a fun icon of popular culture. Traditionally, they are mainly associated with the African and Haitian Vodou religion. Zombies are said to be dead bodies reanimated by incantations chanted by a learned practitioner (called a “bokor”) and they are usually enlivened for a purpose.

The practitioner is said to capture part of a living soul to animate the body and that is always a temporary action as the soul cannot be contained in that decomposing body for long or God will take the soul back.

One of the most frightening aspects of zombiism is the idea of our souls and consciousness being trapped inside a body that does not do our bidding but someone else’s. Another is the idea of being buried alive – the fate of some, it is said, who get trapped in already dead bodies.

Should the zombie step unsteadily into your life, it’s time to look at the concept of control. Do you want to control everything, leaving little to free expression? Do you choose partners who are not your equal so that they are more easily manipulated and changed to your liking? Or do you allow that to happen to you? If you are not living your most authentic life, it’s time to look at why and how to change that.

The Halloween Oracle by author Staci Demarco and artist Jimmy Manton