Record #99
Mandrake
A semi-human plant whose deadly cry accompanies its uprooting from the earth.
Original Text
Like the barometz, the plant known as the Mandrake borders on the animal kingdom, since it gives a cry when it is torn up; this cry can drive those who hear it mad. We read in Shakespeare (Romeo andJuliet, IV, iii):
And shrieks like mandrakes torn out of the earth, That living mortals, hearing them, run mad . . .
Pythagoras called the plant anthropomorphic; the Roman agronomist Lucius Columella called it semi-human; and Albertus Magnus wrote that the Mandrake is like man himself, down to the distinction between the sexes. Earlier, Pliny had said that the white Mandrake is the male and the black the female. Also, that those who root it out first trace three circles on the ground with a sword and look westward; the smell of its leaves is so strong that ordinarily it can deprive men of the power of speech. To uproot it was to run the risk of terrible calamities. In the last book of his Historyofthe Jewish Wars, Flavius Josephus advises us to employ a trained dog; the plant dug up, the dog dies, but the leaves are useful as a narcotic, a laxative, and for the purposes of magic.
The Mandrake’s supposed human form has suggested the superstition that it grows at the foot of the gallows. Sir Thomas Browne (Pseudodoxia Epidemica, I646) speaks of the grease of hanged men; the once popular German writer Hanns Heinz Ewers wrote a novel (Alraune, I9I3) around the idea of the hanged man’s seed being injected into a harlot and producing a beautiful witch. In German, ‘mandrake’ is Alraune; earlier it was Alruna, a word that comes originally from ‘rune’, which stood for ‘whisper’ or ‘buzz’ . Hence (according to Skeat) it meant ‘a mystery . . . a writing, because written characters were regarded as a mystery known to the few’ . Perhaps, more simply, the idea of a visible mark standing for a sound baffled the Nordic mind, and thereinlay the mystery.
Genesis (XXX: I4-I7) has this strange account of the reproductive powers of the Mandrake:
And Reuben went in the days of wheat harvest, and found mandrakes in the field, and brought them unto his mother Leah. Then Rachel said to Leah, Give me, I pray thee, of thyson’smandrakes.
And she said unto her, Isit a small matter that thou hast taken my husband? and wouldest thou take away my son’s mandrakes also? And Rachel said, Therefore he shall lie with thee tonight for thyson’smandrakes.
And Jacob came out of the field in the evening, and Leah went out to meet him, and said, Thou must come in unto me; for surely I have hired thee with my son’s mandrakes. And he lay with her that night.
And God hearkened unto Leah, and she conceived, and bare Jacob the fifth son.
In the twelfth century, a German-Jewish commentator on the Talmud wrote this paragraph:
A kind of cord comes out of a root in the ground and tied to the cord by its navel, like a squash or melon, is the animal known as theyadu’a, but theyadu’a is in all respects like a man: face, body, hands, and feet. It uproots and destroys all things around it as far as the cord reaches. The cord should be cut by an arrow, and the animal dies.
The physician Dioscorides (second century a.d.) identified the Mandrake with the circea, or herb of Circe, of which we read in the tenth book of the Odyssey:
At the root it was black, but its flower was like milk. Moly the gods call it, and it is hard for mortal man to dig; but the gods are all-powerful.
And shrieks like mandrakes torn out of the earth, That living mortals, hearing them, run mad . . .
Pythagoras called the plant anthropomorphic; the Roman agronomist Lucius Columella called it semi-human; and Albertus Magnus wrote that the Mandrake is like man himself, down to the distinction between the sexes. Earlier, Pliny had said that the white Mandrake is the male and the black the female. Also, that those who root it out first trace three circles on the ground with a sword and look westward; the smell of its leaves is so strong that ordinarily it can deprive men of the power of speech. To uproot it was to run the risk of terrible calamities. In the last book of his Historyofthe Jewish Wars, Flavius Josephus advises us to employ a trained dog; the plant dug up, the dog dies, but the leaves are useful as a narcotic, a laxative, and for the purposes of magic.
The Mandrake’s supposed human form has suggested the superstition that it grows at the foot of the gallows. Sir Thomas Browne (Pseudodoxia Epidemica, I646) speaks of the grease of hanged men; the once popular German writer Hanns Heinz Ewers wrote a novel (Alraune, I9I3) around the idea of the hanged man’s seed being injected into a harlot and producing a beautiful witch. In German, ‘mandrake’ is Alraune; earlier it was Alruna, a word that comes originally from ‘rune’, which stood for ‘whisper’ or ‘buzz’ . Hence (according to Skeat) it meant ‘a mystery . . . a writing, because written characters were regarded as a mystery known to the few’ . Perhaps, more simply, the idea of a visible mark standing for a sound baffled the Nordic mind, and thereinlay the mystery.
Genesis (XXX: I4-I7) has this strange account of the reproductive powers of the Mandrake:
And Reuben went in the days of wheat harvest, and found mandrakes in the field, and brought them unto his mother Leah. Then Rachel said to Leah, Give me, I pray thee, of thyson’smandrakes.
And she said unto her, Isit a small matter that thou hast taken my husband? and wouldest thou take away my son’s mandrakes also? And Rachel said, Therefore he shall lie with thee tonight for thyson’smandrakes.
And Jacob came out of the field in the evening, and Leah went out to meet him, and said, Thou must come in unto me; for surely I have hired thee with my son’s mandrakes. And he lay with her that night.
And God hearkened unto Leah, and she conceived, and bare Jacob the fifth son.
In the twelfth century, a German-Jewish commentator on the Talmud wrote this paragraph:
A kind of cord comes out of a root in the ground and tied to the cord by its navel, like a squash or melon, is the animal known as theyadu’a, but theyadu’a is in all respects like a man: face, body, hands, and feet. It uproots and destroys all things around it as far as the cord reaches. The cord should be cut by an arrow, and the animal dies.
The physician Dioscorides (second century a.d.) identified the Mandrake with the circea, or herb of Circe, of which we read in the tenth book of the Odyssey:
At the root it was black, but its flower was like milk. Moly the gods call it, and it is hard for mortal man to dig; but the gods are all-powerful.