Watching a horror movie about a vampire with cold, winding thrashing against your windows and the table lamp flickering slightly around you? The bass music scape of the movie and the prolonged shocking silences fill the air. On screen is a deadly vampire, fangs ready to pounce on its victim on a deserted road.
The victim, a vegetable seller, scared out of his wits, hangs dearly onto a bunch of garlic, counting his last few minutes. And just then the vampire spots the garlic, becomes terrified and flees like there’s no tomorrow. Isn’t this a common sight that you may have seen or read about vampires - that they are scared of garlic? But have you ever wondered why that may be so? Let’s take a deep dive.
A major contribution to this belief of hanging on to garlic or hanging garlic garlands outside the house to ward off vampires and evil spirits comes from folklore. Garlic is known to be the protector against evil spirits, demons and witches. Since vampire is loosely considered as evil, garlic was used for protection against them too.
One of the main reasons is the pungent nature of garlic. Their smell is very overwhelming, and it is this smell that is said to keep evil at bay. Moreover, its anti-bacterial, anti-fungal and anti-parasitic properties helped keep diseases away from those protected by it. Vampires are often used as mythological or folk beings or metaphorical symbols of diseases. Since diseases were often cured by garlic, this became a saviour towards anything evil.
Following up on vampires being metaphorical, let’s look at the symptoms of being one. Pale skin, coughing blood, persistent weakness and fatigue were common symptoms. It may also have been that since daylight was less and inaccessible, most decided to take rest in daylight and probably tried their recovery-luck after sunset.
This may have given rise to the understanding that vampires walk at night and sleep during the day. But take a close look; don’t these symptoms look similar to diseases like rabies, tuberculosis or plague? In the absence of modern medicine and presence of hearsay talks, this fear of disease or metaphorical vampires was shooed off by the medicinal properties of garlic.
If you study the social beliefs of the 17th and 18th century East Europe, you would read about sporadic vampire panic that spread across villages. Anyone who seemed to be different from what the society considered to be normal was named vampires or witches. While witch hunting is a completely, different topic, protecting oneself from vampires by wearing garlic garlands, hanging them outside homes or rubbing them vigorously on doors and windows were common practices in the villages of Serbia or Bulgaria.
And from all these beliefs and folk tales, writers, poets and later cartoonists and filmmakers started taking up their tools and including this as a prominent fact in pop culture. Right from Bram Stoker’s Dracula to slash horror movies, if you face a vampire, keep garlic handy!
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