The Mysterious Mandrake
In its prime, this ancient plant was powerful and fearsome, giving rise to awesome superstitions
By David Bare
Winston-Salem Journal
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Some plants have the uncanny ability to work their way into our mythology and stay there. They evolve through history, their uses and appearance morphing to fit the order of the day. The mandrake is one such plant. Surrounded by legend, its life in our collective psyche goes back as far as the Old Testament. Recently, author J.K. Rowling brought the plant back into popular culture. The stewed root of the mandrake is used to cure petrification in Harry Potter and Chamber of Secrets.
The mandrake, Mandragora officinarum, is native to Northern Italy and the West Balkans, according to the Royal Horticultural Society Dictionary of Gardening. The dictionary describes the seed vessel as a "tomato like fruit."
The mandrake's mystical properties spring from the supposed resemblance of its roots to the human body. It is among the herbs represented in the oldest surviving illustrated-botanical work, De Materia Medica, written by Dioscorides in the first century.
The mandrake is portrayed as half-vegetable and half-man. Beneath a crown of leaves and berries spread out like an American Indian headdress, the brown man-root is depicted as having legs, arms, knees, and breasts, a face and long brown hair. The toes and fingers of the figure are long, fibrous and rootlike. People believed that there were male and female mandrakes. The males were depicted with long beards and the females with flowing hair.
The mandrake's herbal history preceded Dioscorides' anthropomorphism, though.
Mandrake fruits, along with lotus, olive and willow, were among the funerary wreaths placed in the tomb of Egyptian King Tutankhamen 3,000 years ago.
The mandrake is also found in Genesis 30: 14-16 where it is used as an antidote for sterility. The fruit is used here, giving rise to the name "love apples."
Highly esteemed
Its many properties and the lore of its supernatural powers made the plant very valuable. The mandrake was a powerful and highly esteemed root. It was valued as an aphrodisiac. It restored fertility. It was a sedative, a bringer of good fortune, an expeller of demons, and at one time, the most widely used anesthetic.
Mandrake appears in a list of useful plants in Arabic documents from the sixth and seventh century. Italian illustrations from the 14th century portray the mandrake as a man popping out of the ground wearing on his head a garland of leaves and fruits.
The root's humanlike form in these illustrations gave rise to the most fantastic superstitions surrounding the mandrake. The mandrake was believed to have the power to give a terrible shriek when pulled. Hearing that shriek would cause madness or sudden death.
The legend of the shrieking mandrake has grown wildly over time.
In Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, Juliet opines, "And shrieks like Mandrakes torn out of the earth, That living mortals, hearing them, run mad."
In Rowling's world, boy wizard Harry Potter and his friends wear earmuffs while transplanting mandrake sprouts in their herbology class. In answering a question about mandrakes, Hermione, one of Harry's best friends, says, "The cry of the mandrake is fatal to anyone who hears it."
Over the centuries, elaborate rituals grew around the harvesting of the long, brittle root. To harvest the mandrake root, the superstitious believed, one had to protect oneself from its horrible shrieking. In the simplest procedures, the harvester revealed the crown of the root and then tied a cord from the root to the neck of a dog. A piece of meat was placed before the dog and when the dog went after the meat, it pulled up the root.
Other rituals were more involved, including the instructions to draw "circles round mandrake with a sword and cut it with one's face toward the west; and at the cutting of the second piece, one should dance around the plant and say as many things as possible about the mysteries of love."
Despite having the power to shriek a root gatherer to madness or death and its use by witches in love potions and flying ointments, the mandrake root was believed to ensure a sort of blessing on households.
The roots were sold as amulets that could bring good fortune to a household and protect the bearer. The root was placed in water four times a year and the water sprinkled about the household to imbue it with good fortune. Between these bathing times, the root was wrapped in silk and kept among the most treasured household possessions.
This tradition became so popular that a market in fake mandrake roots sprang up. By crafting the root of the bryony plant - and, in some cases, growing it in compost to assume a more humanlike form - homeowners were deceived into believing that they were purchasing mandrake. Grass seed was even planted on top of the root to resemble hair.
"The rootes which are conterfited and made like little puppettes and mammettes, which come to be sold in England in boxes with heir, and such forme as a man hath, are nothing elles but folishe feined trifles, and not naturall. For they are so trymmed of crafty theves to mocke the poor people with all, and to rob them both of theyr wit and theyr money," the herbalist William Turner wrote in 1568.
A legend wanes
By the time Nicholas Culpeper came on the scene in the mid-1600s, the mandrake seems to have been stripped of its supernatural abilities.
"The root formerly was supposed to have the human form, but it really resembles a carrot or parsnip," Culpeper wrote.
Still, old legends die hard.
Ethnobotanists Marcel De Cleene and Claire Lejeune report in their book Compendium of Symbolic and Ritual Plants in Europe that the mandrake root, which was in the Middle Ages believed to make soldiers invisible, was being worn by German soldiers in World War II.
So beware that tap-rooted dandelion that you're about to pull up from the lawn. It may instead be a madness-inducing, household-protecting, spell-breaking, fertility-restoring, shrieking-aphrodisiac mandrake.
It's the time of year for such things.