What Do Plants and Vampires Have in Common?
At their root, a common origin story
If you cruise the internet for memes — and I pray for your undead soul that you do not— you may have come across one of these:
Intriguing, huh? Kind of an “aha” type meme, right?
Except: Huh?
Except: It doesn’t really answer any questions.
In fact, it creates more questions. Including but not limited to: Why, exactly, are vampires OCD about counting? What good would it do them? Aside from counting the hours until sunrise, what do they need math for?
Would you believe there’s an explanation? And the meme-length version is this:
Vampires aren’t obsessed with counting.
It was never about the counting.
It was always about the seeds!
If you like memes, ie if you like your information short and without context, please skip to the end with claps or likes or subscribes or however you choose to validate my fragile hanging-by-a-vine existence. But if you’re going “hey Corpsebreath, I’m gonna need a blog on why sexy-ass vampires — who often can’t procreate — care so much about seeds”, then plant yourself in that chair for a few more minutes and let’s grow together.
A flowering pun
Many classic bloodsuckers (what we often call Byronic vampires) have this religious baggage. And you know what I’m talking about: “Eek, a cross!” or, more recently, “Eyeroll, crosses don’t work on me.”
But not all vampires are cast onto this tabletop game of God vs Satan. If you reach way back, and I’m talking waaaay back into the folklore, you see that there’s deities of another kind represented in the mythology of vampires, mythology that was around before Judeo-Christian-Islam got a lock on Europe. And occasionally those primeval beliefs seep into the fiction of keen authors.
For example, in Anne Rice’s The Vampire Lestat, there is the tale of Teshkamen, an ancient vampire who is held captive by druids inside a hollowed tree. Called “The God of the Grove”, he is both worshiped and a prisoner; unable to end his own torment until the druids dig up a replacement for him.
I’d love to bushwhack about an electoral system for gods and straw polls for the supernatural; but what we really have to reap from this is the connection of the mythological vampire with vegetation. And we can do that because Anne Rice didn’t just come up with this stuff off the top of her head, she did some light reading first.
See, vampires didn’t just appear out of the ether, fully formed with all the powers and qualities we now associate with them. Before fiction writers got a hold of vampires in the 1800s, they were more mutable and malleable, depending on what Eastern European countryside you visited. But they evolved out of older beliefs, slowly and unevenly. And while a lot of that evolution has to be left up to speculation — this stuff wasn’t exactly written down in academic journals — we have some clues.
Vampires are the original Easter Bunnies
This much is clear: ancient pagan cultures in Eastern Europe worshiped gods that specialized in rebirth, renewal, and a reawakening of what was dead — ie plant life. It’s those things all around us that seem to be dead, suddenly returning to life.
James G. Frazer, in 1890’s The Golden Bough, notes:
Deities of vegetation, who are supposed to pass a certain portion of each year underground, naturally come to be regarded as gods of the lower world OR OF THE DEAD” (emphasis mine)
So it’s no surprise that ancient peoples — in order to protect themselves, their livestock, their diversified investment portfolio, and their crops — would annually take part in a ritual “Driving Out Of Death.” And Frazer notes that such ceremonies didn’t end with ancient times but were still common, up until the time of his writing.
In fact, they still happen in some form today.
But Frazer later notes that it’s not quite as simple as “kill Death we’re good here go home crack a brew.” Rather, as Mary Hallab says in Vampire God:
The ritual “killing” of Death in various guises also acts positively to promote good crops and even general good fortune. Such rituals may be followed by ceremonies of bringing in the spring, or sometimes by the resurrection of Death itself. In these cases, the figure of Death is clearly the personification of vegetation and its yearly cycle of growth and decay.
If you witness trees, flowers, and grass die year after year, only to magically return to life in the spring like some kind of chlorophyl-infused Russian Doll; you might start to wonder if a similar life-after-death can happen for people.
Add to that, if part of your family reunion itinerary is an afternoon of “Killing Death”, and you did this every single year, you might also get accustomed to the idea of having to kill what is already dead.
And! And! And! once these to practices are familiar — as routine as Easter and Arbor Day which oh gee whiz just so happen to occur at the same time of year these pagan ceremonies took place — taking the next step toward believing that something malevolent is coming back from the dead, and must be killed again, maybe isn’t such a big leap?
Yes, I’m talking about killing vampires in their grave.
I am not off the farm here
Bram Stoker couldn’t have been completely unaware of this connection between the seasonal mythology and vampire lore. He named the Russian ship that transported Dracula to England The Demeter. In mythology, Demeter is — don’t you just know it — the Greek god of agriculture and the harvest BUT LOOK HERE SHE ALSO HAD A PRESENCE IN THE REALM OF THE DEAD.
The branch doesn’t fall far from the maplesuckin’ tree.
Reapers gonna reap
Stay with me for a couple more paragraphs, because I’m gonna bring this around like a circle of plant life —
Paul Barber, who scattered like Okies from the Dust Bowl after writing this one very important book, noted that in some places a body is buried with a scythe to prevent it returning as a vampire. At first blush, giving a vampire an edged weapon seems dumber than another Underworld sequel. But a scythe, though sharp, isn’t a weapon: its a tool of the farm. Why bury a vampire with a tool of the farm? Because, silly: the vegetation god needs to get busy in the afterlife; not by biting necks but by bringing in the crops.
Ian Miller, author of The Scything Handbook, the #1 ranked book on scything (I checked: these things really are ranked) personally assured me that — while peasant farmers may have had to resort to a scythe in a fight out of necessity — it was by far not a preferred weapon. It lacks versatility and is too awkward and relies on your enemy standing still. Always go with a sword over a scythe, he told me. Go with almost anything over a scythe when you have the option.
Please remember that for three more sentences because —
We are harvesting Rice
As we bring this haunted hayride back to Anne Rice: in Interview With The Vampire, Louis uses a scythe to kill the vampires of Théâtre des Vampires. Thematically, he is reaping what they have sewn, aka he’s getting some sweet ass revenge for the murder of his gal pals earlier; and also who among us hasn’t wanted to cut an actor in half with a farm implement?
But on a much bigger field, by forcing Louis to use a scythe instead of an axe or sword or spear or an actually useful weapon, Rice is fulfilling the idea suggested by James Frazer and Paul Barber and Mary Hallab: that vampires are the legacy of ancient vegetation gods. Vampires inhabit the same mythological family tree as the gods of the harvest.
Did you know that Brad Pitt’s gardener has a twitter page? Someone give me a research grant and I’ll keep bringing you top toothpickings like that!
So here we conclude in full bloom: why would we scatter seeds in hopes of making a vampire stop to count them instead of bite us? It’s not that the vampire is obsessed with counting things; it’s that the vampire, the legacy of the pagan vegetation gods, needs to inspect the seeds — that’s his job!
So the next time someone tells you that vampires have arithmomania, pull this blog up on your bookmarks and read it out loud straight through. It serves your friend right for spreading false memes.
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Image Sources: Bob Canada’s Blogworld, Shutterstock, 123rtf, China Daily, Michel Wolgemut’s Image of Death (Imago Mortis), Warner Bros.
