Apotropaic objects

Seeds

Many substances can be strewn along a vampire’s grave and the path to the graveyard to hinder it should it attempt to rise; these substances include millet, sea sand, mustard seeds, oats, linen seeds, carrot seeds, and poppy seeds.

But here the vampire is not repelled or pierced by the objects. Rather he is compelled to either eat them or to count them one at a time.

Poppy seeds are especially useful because their inherent narcotic nature causes a vampire to wish to rest in its grave instead of walk. Accounts exist of supposed vampires having their caskets filled with poppy seeds to keep them in their graves.

In Eastern and Central Europe following a burial of a person who might become undead, seeds and organic grains were sometimes placed in the coffin, in the grave, over the grave, on the paths from the cemetery to the homes of the living, and on the thresholds and roofs of the homes.

In his book Mythologie du Vampire en Roumanie (1981), Adriene Cremene gives an anecdote from Romania where the relatives of a dead person would leave the cemetery after his burial, throwing grains of millet in the path and saying

“Let the strigoi eat each year one grain of millet and not eat the hearts of his family.”

In Macedonian Folklore by G. F. Abbot (1903), there is a case described where a vampire hunter lured a vampire (vrykolakis) into a barn where there was a heap of millet grains. The vampire became so pre-occupied with counting these grains that the vampire hunter was able to nail him to a wall without any resistance on the part of the vampire. Abbot also wrote that some Macedonians protected themselves from a possible vampire following a burial by placing mustard seeds on the roof and thorny plants outside the doors.

Chinese narratives about vampires also state that if a vampire comes across a sack of rice it  will have to count all of the grains. There are similar myths recorded on the Indian Subcontinent and even in South America.

Origin

This belief seems to predate the apparition of vampires and was a folk remedy against another monstrous creature, the witch that was later applied to vampires. 

It was believed that, if you where being chased by a witch and you scattered rice on the ground, she or he would be compelled to stop and pick up every grain because the rice was a grain nourished by God (as in Sunlight) and as such the witch must pick up every grain to be sure of not stepping on any and thus being destroyed.

A similar practice to deter witches was to lay a dead dog or cat on one’s doorstep, the witch or vampire will have to stop and count every hair on the animal, but will have to flee before dawn, or get caught by the sun and die.

An interesting variation of the belief occurs in the country of Surinam. Here, the asema is a blood sucking sorcerer or witch who leave his or her skin at night and flies off in the form that appears to be a ball of light. One way to prevent the night-flying asema from entering a home is to place a sesame seeds or rice grains mixed with the nails of a ground owl before the entrances. The asema is compelled to count the seeds or grains, but each time it inadvertently picks up an owl’s nail it lets go off all the seeds or grains it had counted and is forced to start over again.

The werewolves, often in pair with witches and vampires, are sometimes deterred using the same method. In  the Cajun lore of Louisiana, the loup- garou is a blood drinking werewolf that can be compelled to count all the holes in a sifter placed near a home.