Garlic and Vampires Again

 Last year I harvested a bumper crop of garlic and sold some from a roadside stand. I composted most of the grade B, C garlic... but it doesn't compost. It just grows and grows like a weed. Almost every garlic plant I composted grew, so I had to pull them all and leave them in the sun. The surefire way to kill them would be to burn them, I guess.

The association between garlic and vampires in the vampire mythos is pretty interesting.

The vampire is a rehashed greek mythology character: Hades or Pluto, the king of the dead. Pluto is the god of wealth and the underworld/world of death and the dead, aka winter. In older movie depictions of vampires, count dracula is after the blood of young virgin women just as Pluto/Hades abducts Persephone, the goddess of spring (really young spring plants), who is the daughter of Demeter, goddess of the harvest.

Why garlic? The kernel of the vampire story seems to be a folk interpretation of the disease porphyria, aka "the vampire disease". People who suffer from that genetic malady have an aversion to any food that contains sulfur--garlic does.

I think garlic obtained its place in the vampire myth, though, because it grows through the winter and is basically indestructible, like the vampire character. Since the vampire is a rehashed underworld/Pluto character, who embodies the dead world of winter, a plant that grows through the winter would be a good totem against such a character.

Anyway, the thing that's interesting about these legends and myths is how the core ideas mutate, split, merge and grow over time. Also novel story elements that don't really work, or fit with the overall scheme are discarded and forgotten. For example, in some versions of the vampire lore, silver is effective against vampires, but that really doesn't fit in with the overall schema of the vampire story, so it is eventually deleted.