Blogger Don Juan made an interesting post a few weeks ago about
what it means to be living according to the seven characteristics of life
identified by scientists, and if zombies possess or are capable of such traits.
What is not quite included in these characteristics but important
nonetheless is spritus and anima.
Apparently these Latin words were once part of the medical
community and vocabulary. They were meant to name notions regarding one of the
many differences between a corpse and the living body, but more specifically
pertaining to how the corpse does not possess something the body of the person
once did: movement, a beating heart, or the intake of breath that carries the
belly, chest, or shoulders with it. Essentially, signs of life- but more. They
were meant to describe signs of an individual; the display of a lifetime of
experiences that condition and reflect a personality, mannerisms, expressions,
attitudes, sentiments, and all kinds of physical abilities and emotional
capacities that reveals themselves in every moment of being alive.
Right
now I’m reading “God’s Hotel” by Victoria Sweet, which is an autobiographical
account of her experience as a physician. In it, she describes the experience
of performing her first autopsy on Mr. Baker, someone she knew well, and how
“strangely disappointing” it was in that it was exactly like any other autopsy
she had performed. She thought it would be different because she knew him, and
that there was something to find in the autopsy that would be unique to him that
would verify that it was undeniably Mr. Baker she was looking at as opposed to
another textbook corpse. But there was not. Though he had a human body typical
of the average person, there was something missing that made his body and being
unique to him that was there when he was alive. She writes,
“Much later I learned that medicine had once had
a name for this, this something present in the living body but missing from the
corpse. Two names, actually. There was spiritus…the
breath, the regular, rhythmic breathing of the live body that is so shockingly
absent from the dead. Spiritus is what is exhaled in the last breath. And there
was anima. Usually translated as soul…anima is the invisible force that
animates the body, moves it, not only willfully but also unconsciously—all
those little movements that the living body makes all the time” (3).
She
goes on to discuss the terms absence in her career. “Anima, ancient medicine had observed, is just as absent from the
dead body as spritus. By the time
medicine got to me, however, words like spiritus
and anima had been banished from the
medical vocabulary” (3).
If
these terms were still relative to the medical and scientific community, how
would they fit into the seven characteristics of life? With their addition, how
would zombies fit into this criteria of what it means to be living? It depends
on the kind of zombies we’re talking about, but all of them exhibit movement,
or signs of anima. Zombies are commonly understood to be dead, as a corpse is,
yet a corpse lacks spiritus and anima, unlike zombies. What does the presence
of anima indicate about possible signs of spiritus? Something equivalent to our
need to breathe? What does it indicate about being dead or alive? How much and
what kind of anima are signs of being alive?
If
Mr. Baker had gone all zombie on Victoria Sweet during the autopsy, I think it
would have provided an interesting plot development in her book. Maybe they
would have performed an exorcism on him, and I’d know more Latin terms to pretentiously
sprinkle throughout this blog post as a result. But if Mr. Baker had exhibited
zombie-like anima, he would not have been identified as a corpse....where am I going with all of this? Something along the lines of the long debated, what does it mean to be alive or dead, and which are ZOMBIES?!?!?!?!?!
*Also I went ahead and decided that even though "zombies" were not known to Latins, if they were, they'd be called "zombus", eh? right?
Yahoo answers actually says that as "zombies" often translate to "living dead" the latin for it would just be "mortuus vivens." I'm gonna trust yahoo answers on this one, but keep my oh so witty and wild post title...
*Also I went ahead and decided that even though "zombies" were not known to Latins, if they were, they'd be called "zombus", eh? right?
Yahoo answers actually says that as "zombies" often translate to "living dead" the latin for it would just be "mortuus vivens." I'm gonna trust yahoo answers on this one, but keep my oh so witty and wild post title...