I’m very fond of garlic and planted about five hardneck varieties last fall in my neighbor’s plot (the variety New York White performed best, which I guess is to be expected in NY, lol!). This summer, I harvested them. I chose the largest 24 heads of garlic to try a pickle recipe on. I decided to work that recipe on Saturday, Saturn’s day, since I read that garlic is a favorite of Hekate, whom I have always considered a Saturnian entity. I should say that garlic is often considered a Mars plant, because it’s hot, but I’m guessing that the connection to Hekate is because it grows in the ground, because of its strong smell, and because of its ability to counteract poison (i.e., it’s antibiotic properties). I know that garlic was one of the items presented in ancient times for Hekate suppers. According to Frederick Simoons in his wonderful Plants Of Life, Plants Of Death, it was woven into a wreath left at a crossroads with the other foods in the supper.
I started out by using the side of a knife to crack the garlic peel and so make it easier to strip off, my usual way of peeling garlic, but after about 30 cloves, my fingertips were starting to burn. So I decided to actually try the tip on p. 313 of Ball Complete Book of Home Preserving for getting the peels off–dunk them in plenty of boiling water, bring the water back to a boil for 30 seconds, then douse in cold water. The skins slide off with ease. What a relief! I modified the recipe on that page a little, using wine vinegar instead of white vinegar (which is only good for cleaning, IMO), slivers of dehydrated Aleppo pepper I grew last year instead of whole dried red chilies, and fresh golden oregano harvested from my garden instead of dried oregano. I also used the French bailed canning jars by Le Parfait that I bought on ebay (where they can be found for a slightly more reasonable price than elsewhere, at least, so far). This was my first time canning with bailed jars, which the USDA considers evil. I found that these jars seal like a champ. In fact, it is difficult to open them. After pulling them out of the kettle, you let them cool with the bails on overnight. The next day, unbail and test the seals by lifting the jar by its lid. I had no seal failures in 12 jars. Leave the bails off and store. These jars are built like tanks. I look forward to using them for many years. I should wait a week or two before tasting the garlic so all the flavors have a chance to meld, but I couldn’t resist and am having some right now, along with dilly beans I made last week, kalamata olives, and carrot and celery sticks. Delicious!
I was looking for info on Hekate suppers and was interested to find in The Routledge Handbook of Greek Mythology the following: “She would send spooks up into the world at night, or would appear in her own right, especially at crossroads under the dim light of the moon, to roam the pathways at the head of a crew of ghosts. Her retinue, the host of Hekate, was made up of the shades of the restless dead who had died prematurely or violently, or who had received no proper burial. Since she would also be accompanied by loud-barking daimonic dogs, her passage bears a resemblence to the ‘Wild Hunt’ of Western European folklore” (p. 194, emphasis mine). I’ll say it bears a resemblence. Since Hekate is a very old deity, I wonder who the Good Lady of the Hunt really was. I’ve seen her identified with Diana, but perhaps Diana is here a simple euphemism for Hekate. They are both associated with the night and both are childless. It might have been considered perhaps foolish but harmless to follow Diana, but to follow Hekate would not be dismissed as mere silliness, since she has been identified with witchcraft and sorcery since ancient times. That’s a rationale for morphing Hekate into Diana. Also, the image of the restless shades of the dead in her retinue clicks for me with the guiding of the dead that Carlo Ginzburg describes in Ecstasies: Deciphering the Witches’ Sabbath
When I planted this garlic, I was not intending to honor Hekate but only, outside of ending up with a lot of good organic garlic, honoring Saturn. This summer has turned out, though, to be one where I become more and more turned towards the Dark Spirit of Crossroads, whoever that might be.
Lovely stuff! I could see using these special garlic cloves as garnish for offerings you leave at the crossroads. I’m seeing an almond flour and poppy seed flat bread, with egg and garlic pickle, for example.
As to why garlic, I would agree. That saying in Yiddish, ‘You should grow like an onion, with your head in the ground’, comes to mind because garlic grows the same way. I’ve heard it ‘you should grow like an onion, with your head in the ground pointing to hell‘, also. Alliums are liminal plants. They inhabit the above, and the below simultaneously. In fact, I never quite know if I should plant my cloves during a full moon, or the dark moon, since both parts grow in that fashion. So I tend to plant it at last quarter. Liminal deity, liminal plants. And because Hekate is arguably the mother of witchcraft which implies the first herbalist and healer and simpler and wort cunner, et al, garlic is going to be part of her green pharmacopoeia.
The Wild Hunt has me puzzling. I would imagine the Good Lady of the Wild Hunt is basically just The Other, but with gender assigned since we apes tend to define our world into divisions of male and female – just language dictates this and colors it all. Whether the Wild Hunt is analogous to guiding the dead, that would make sense. The phenomenon is of a being not of this world quite, leading a noisy troop through places where we will see them, or hear them, or do a double-take that maybe we glimpsed something in the distance, or peripherally. Which to me begs the question, “Why?” The Diana connection I could not guess at. She’s a huntress. And she was associated with Hekate in some imagery and myths, ostensibly because of the virgin goddess thing, but I actually don’t think Hekate was a virgin goddess. Opinions differ widely on that. There are some myths and images that confound Hekate and Hermes together into a single hermaphroditic deity, as well. She seems to have been pigeonholed into many places.
That bread sounds like a really great idea for an offering.
Your comment about a noisy group of followers reminded me of something Ginzburg describes in Ecstasies. Men who guided the dead reported carousing with them–they would break into taverns and into stillrooms and drink up the stuff there on the way to the Underworld. They didn’t physically do this. They did this in the form of their spirits while their body lay in bed. This carousing was puzzling to me when I read about it, but it actually fits in well with what the women were experiencing when they following the Good Lady of the Hunt and her retinue. So it’s another link between those two. Ginzburg sees these things are strictly a division of labor by gender, two halves of the same experience.
And in turn, one can equate Hekate with Nicenevin in the whole “dark sorcery” bit.
I love garlic. There’s no such thing as too much of it, only too little. I’ll eat whole, vaguely par-boiled, cloves like candy. I eat hummus like most people eat ketchup.
Garlic is very martian, very saturnine, but also very lunar. It resembles the moon, slowly waxing and waning by slivers and slices.
The more I travel along, the more I see these various gods as not distinct but as manifestations in time and place for something we cannot apprehend easily. In a way, this is a real comfort to me. For me, Hermes and the Dark Spirit of the Crossroads and Hekate present themselves as separate from each other, but it seems they are also all manifestations of something deeper. I have never even heard of Nicenevin, but she fits right in with them.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicnevin Is a good place to start. I see it as Nicnevin and Nicenevin alternately. It’s interesting that the Queen of Fairies is referred to as the “Daughter” of someone else. A trend we see elsewhere in Aradia.
Hi Harold — I decided to visit your blog after reading Jack Faust’s just now. I dig it (hehe, the blog I mean), plan to visit often, much more up my alley than Jack’s (tho’ I enjoy his immensely). I’m so not a city guy.
Hekate has famous associations with Scotland, stomping ground of Nicnevin. I haven’t been able to find any documentary source re how she got there. Of course the Romans never made it into Scotland, but that doesn’t mean the Scots were isolated or ignorant. And I wonder about that weirdness in Clapham Wood, south on the island’s opposite coast… This is important to me as I have lots of Scots in me. And since I first learned of Her and sought Her out I’ve kept turning to Hekate. A non-usual (or maybe humdrum, I don’t know) choice (ha!) of Lady to, well, basically, fall in love with, but there you have it. And I always make it a part of the Deipnon Hekates.
I often carry a clove of garlic in my pocket and also put 5 in a room as an apotropaic: one in each corner and one in the middle. Generally you do that with other ingredients in Hoodoo but I figured why not. After a while I throw them away at a crossroads. Northern Traditionalists, I don’t know with what authority or UPG, say garlic’s sacred to Odin as well, tho’ maybe not as good as the leek.
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Hieronimo