Tradition

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

Reanimated Dead gathers three corpses that get up and act, from Chinese, Old Norse and medieval Latin tradition, treated in every case as a physical problem requiring a physical remedy.

The jiangshi is a reanimated corpse of Chinese folklore, stiff with rigor and moving in hops because its joints will not bend, connected in the older reports to the practice of returning a body over long distances for burial in its home ground and to the belief that a corpse left unburied or wrongly handled may be reoccupied by the coarser part of the soul; the Qing dynasty robes and paper talisman familiar from Hong Kong cinema belong to the twentieth century rather than the older accounts. The draugr of Old Norse literature is a dead man who stays in his burial mound and comes out of it keeping his body, strength and ill temper, treated by the sagas as a problem solved physically, by wrestling, beheading and burning, not a vapor exorcised, with greed for grave goods and resentment of the living the usual motives and sickness among the livestock the usual sign of one left undealt with. A revenant is a corpse that returns from the grave, reported in Latin chronicles of twelfth century England and northern Europe as local fact rather than romance; William of Newburgh records several such accounts and the standard remedy, exhumation and burning, distinct from the later literary vampire which takes its shape from eighteenth century central European reports.

All three are handled the same way: not appeased, negotiated with or exorcised, but physically destroyed, usually by burning, a solution the grouping's own members apply independently of one another.