Again, I can't quote on my phone: Yes I am aware that what I'm talking about is the "Christian version" and I actually have spent a lot of time doing research , even though my access to sources is limited since I'm from France and in the libraries there was not much about that topic and when I did find info, the myths were slightly modified in french translations. And I never said I wanted to be accurate, I wrote urban fantasy, not an anthropological essay. I took pieces that I wanted to fit into my novel, I never said what's in it was true, which is not what fiction is for anyway
Undead makes me picture a walking, pitiful skeleton. Altogether the word is pitiful to me. It raises a lingual contradiction - 'dead' is a word associated with both inevitability and irreversibiltiy. Once a form of life is dead, it stays dead, more than that it shall never be again. The social and literal connotation of this word amplifies the sad irony felt at the word 'undead'. In itself it's a joke - it axes inevitabiltiy, it reverses for an eternity that which is ireversible. While the dead, depiste whatever pleasure they may or may not take in being undead (evil vampire, for example) there is humanly an empathetic, instinctive understanding that somewhere inside they only desire respite. As Edgar Allen Poe wrote - surcease of sorrow. A skeleton specifically would be the most pathetic to me. Unable to utilize muscle to express emotion for all the yearning of the soul to do so. Undead to me is cruel irony.
