by chaoticprime » May 30th, 2013, 12:11 pm
Lovecraft's Ghouls came from the novel Vathek, along with a good deal more inspiration for his ideas. Its an 18th century Gothic horror novel based in Arabic mythology. It was written a few years after the first English language versions of 1,001 Arabian Nights. At least, that's what it says in the jacket cover of my own copy. They were described as grave-robbing spirits (specifically named for seizing corpses; ghul, originally). The words spirit and ghost are now associated with what we'd call incorporeal undead, but for a good long while they both basically common parlance for anything supernatural that was frightening. Though the etymology of neither word means anything at all similar. Blame Chaucer.
Zombies, as stated above, are servants of Bokor (they can serve good or bad Loa, even Rada Loa). The actual word, like much of voodoo, has African roots. Originally, it was a Kimbundu-language word, "nzambi," that basically meant the same thing as "god." Keep in mind that a god, outside of Old English circles, is actually anything invoked--as in an invocation. The first effort to write down that language was made by Portuguese Jesuits. In fact, the only form the language exists in today, is in the songs written in it that are still being sung. Any way you put it, they're remote-controlled slaves, that may or may not be "all-the-way" dead, but usually it is suggested that they are. Voodoo has a couple extra stages of death in its cycle.
The strictest requirement for something being undead, is that it had to have sometime been dead, but no longer is, and therefore is defined by what it is not--living or dead.
Also, on the subject of Jinn, did you know that it is because of the French translation of 1,001 Arabian Nights that the common spelling for jinni, the singular form of the plural collective jinn, was changed to "genie?" That was because it sounded identical to the French word for genius, also "genie." (Also from my book). Ultimately, though, jinn also means the same thing as spirit and ghost do. They're all regional descriptions for the same idea.
Similarly, undead and revenant basically mean the same thing, with the only distinction between them logically, being how they have been used in fantasy--the same goes for the above jinn, ghosts, spirits, and so on. The unifying theme for revenants was always revenge/willed back to kick ass.
