Anima& Spiritus in Zombus.

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...