J R Soc Med. 2003 Mar; 96(3): 144–147.
PMCID: PMC539425
Myths and mandrakes
This article has been cited by other articles in PMC.
J K Rowling's Harry Potter and the Chamber of
Secrets1
includes a scene in which the hero and his friends are in a greenhouse, taking
instruction from Professor Sprout on the re-potting of mandrakes. To protect
their hearing, the class is equipped with earmuffs.
In an age ever more preoccupied with medicinal herbs, mandrake is the herb
that time has forgotten, the word more readily associated today with a column
in the Sunday Telegraph or the American strip cartoon Mandrake
the Magician. Mandrake the Magician (1934) was the first super-powered
costumed crime fighter, the forerunner of Superman, Batman and, most recently
Spiderman, but even this icon of the 20th century had his origin in antiquity,
for the unlikely source of his creator Lee Falk's inspiration was a poem by
the 17th century English poet John
Donne2. Donne's
subject was fertility:
‘Goe, and catche a falling starre,Get with child a mandrake roote’.
And the origin of the mandrake's association with fertility is truly
ancient, surfacing first in chapter 30 of the Book of Genesis, where
the childless Rachael asks her sister Leah for the loan of the mandrakes which
her son had brought in from the fields. Much later, this fertility myth
received support from the medieval doctrine of signatures, which suggested
that God had provided all plants with a sign indicating their value. Mandrake
has a long and frequently bifid taproot whose shape sometimes resembles the
body of a man (Figure 1).
Believing this to indicate reproductive power, our ancestors took to sleeping
with them under their pillows at night.
Mandrake (Mandragora officinarum). Sibthorpe: Flora
Graeca (1808)
Others, however, began to wonder whether the possession of roots might not
bring them success in other areas as well—wealth, popularity, or the
power to control their own and other people's destinies, and took to wearing
them as good luck charms. Not surprisingly, the Church frowned upon this
practice and when, during her trial in 1431, Joan of Arc was accused of having
a mandrake about her person, the suggestion helped send her to the
stake3.
Mandrake was, of course, far from being the only plant with an
anthropomorphic root. The herb had another property, however, for the root
contains hyoscine a powerful alkaloid with the ability to cause
hallucinations, delirium and, in larger doses, coma. Mandrake's use as a
surgical anaesthetic was first described by the Greek physician Dioscorides
around AD 60, and its use as a tincture known as mandragora, or in combination
with other herbs such as opium, hemlock and henbane is described in documents
from pre-Roman times
onwards4. It was the
presence of this alkaloid, as well as the shape of the root, that led to the
mandrake's association with magic, witchcraft and the supernatural.
Mandrake roots became highly sought after in their native Mediterranean
habitat, and attempts to protect them from theft are thought to have been the
source of the second mandrake myth, which stated that a demon inhabited the
root and would kill anyone who attempted to uproot it. Over the centuries,
elaborate rituals developed to avoid what became known as the mandrake's
curse, the most famous of these requiring the assistance of a dog
(Figure 2). Later elaboration
of this legend attributed the herb's lethal power to a shriek or a groan
emitted by the mandrake as it was uprooted, and suggested that death could be
avoided either by a loud blast on a horn at the critical moment or by sealing
one's ears with wax. In Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, the
earmuff is more in keeping with current health and safety regulations.
The mandrake's curse. After being shown a tasty morsel (far right),
a hungry dog is tied to the root of the mandrake. From a safe distance, the
hunter throws the food in front of the dog, which lunges forward, uprooting
the herb. The dog dies at sunrise ...
THE ENGLISH MANDRAKE
Although mandrake found its way into Britain around the 11th century, the
herb does not grow naturally here, and anyone wishing to avail himself of its
powers, real, or imaginary, was therefore obliged to seek an alternative.
Those in search of its medicinal effects turned to henbane, Hyoscyamus
niger, a closely related herb with a similar pharmacological profile to
mandrake but a more northerly distribution. Henbane was a potent ingredient in
the various midnight brews and flying ointments beloved of witches and is
thought to have been the ‘cursed hebenon’ poured into the ear of
Hamlet's father.
Those seeking to profit from the demand for mandrake charms would have
found henbane a disappointment, for it possessed only a small fibrous root.
For this purpose they turned instead to the white bryony, Bryonia
dioica, a hedgerow plant of south-east England with a large multilobed
taproot5
(Figure 3). Competitions were
held to find the most realistic (and suggestive)
examples6 and, in
his New Herball of 1568, Dr William Turner, the clerical-medical Dean
of Wells Cathedral and father of English botany, described how specimens were
further embellished with a knife and by the superficial insertion of millet
seeds to create, after germination, a ‘beard’:
The white bryony (Bryonia dioica). Alyon: La
Botanique (1785)
‘The rootes which are counterfited and made like little pupettes or mammettes which come to be sold in England in boxes with heir and such forme as a man hath are nothyng elles but foolishe trifles and not naturall. For they are so trymmed of crafty theves to mocke the poore people with all and to rob them both of theyr wit and theyr money’7.
POETIC LICENCE
Genuine mandrake roots, presumably imported, and preparations made from
them, were also available at this time and Turner gives fascinating
instructions for their use as anaesthetics while at the same time describing
the unpredictability that was responsible for the rapid decline in their use
everywhere. The popularity of the myths, however, remained undimmed.
The works of William Shakespeare contain many references to the mandrake
and its myths (Box 1) and are remarkable both for the depth of knowledge they
reveal and for their accuracy. Other writers, however, used considerable
artistic licence and no more ingenious example of this exists than the comedy
The Mandrake Root by the Florentine writer Niccolò Machiavelli
(1469-1527), which unites the mandrake's fertility myth with its
curse10. The story
concerns a rake, Callimoco, who concocts a plan to help satisfy his lust for
the young wife of a local lawyer. Aware of the couple's desire to start a
family, Callimoco offers the wife a potion made from the mandrake root, but
persuades her husband that the first man to sleep with her afterwards will
die. The gullible lawyer agrees to the use of a local tramp as a
‘stand-in’ for the first night, and Callimoco dons his tramp's
disguise to await the summons.
THE LITTLE GALLOWS MAN
Around this time, an apparently new myth began to circulate, to the effect
that a mandrake would spring up from ground contaminated by human blood or
semen, such as at the foot of a gallows. Once again, Dr Turner, who had spent
some years in Europe, was quick to condemn those responsible:
‘But it groweth not under gallosses as a certain dotyng doctor of Colon in hys physick lecture dyd tych hys auditores; nether doth it ryse of the sede of man that falleth from hym that is hanged; Neither is it called Mandragora because it came of man's sede, as ye forsayd doctor dremed’.
Playwrights, nonetheless, wasted little time in taking this new myth to
their hearts and, in his corspe-strewn tragedy The White Devil John
Webster (1578—c. 1630) (erroneously) unites the mistletoe and mandrake,
good and evil, with the tree which, with its horizontal lower branches, had
long made a convenient impromptu gallows:
‘But as we seldom find the mistletoeSacred to physic on the builder oak,Without a mandrake by it, so in our quest of gain’.
In the film Shakespeare in Love, Webster is portrayed as a mousy
adolescent who condescendingly informs the Bard ‘plenty of blood, that's
the only writing’, and this new myth was right up his street. In Act
III, scene iii of the play, Lodoveco gives orders for his sister's murder:
‘Wilt sell me forty ounces of her bloodTo water a mandrake’.
Whilst, finally, in Act V, scene vi, Webster raises the mandrake's curse to
even greater heights of the macabre:
‘Millions are now in graves, which at last dayLike mandrakes shall rise shrieking’.
In more recent centuries, mandrake myths have continued to provide writers
with inspiration, and not only those writing for the theatre, as, for example,
in Act I, scene ii of Verdi's opera Un Ballo in Maschera (1857) when
Amelia, the governor's wife, seeks a cure for a guilty passion from the gypsy
woman Ulrica. Ulrica tells her:
‘Oblivion I can give you. Mystic drops of a magic herb I know that renews the heart. But whoever wants it must gather it with his own hand at the dead of night—the graveyard is the place. To the west of the city, there, where on the gloomy field the pallid moon shines down on abhorrent land the herb has its roots by those ill-famed stones where all sins are atoned for with the last living breath!’
Later, Amelia approaches the fateful spot: ‘Here is the horrible
field where death is the atonement for crime. There are the pillars the plants
at their feet.’
ENVOI
Folklore based upon the mandrake myths survived well into the 20th
century:
‘In December 1908, a man employed in digging a neglected garden half a mile from Stratford upon Avon, cut a large root of white bryony through with his spade. He called it mandrake, and ceased to work at once, saying it was ‘awful bad luck’. Before the week was out, he fell down some steps and broke his neck’6.
References
1. Rowling JK. Harry Potter and the Chamber of
Secrets. London: Bloomsbury, 1998:
72
2. Father of the Phantom. Cartoonist Profiles
1975;27:
20-4
3. Thompson CJS. The Mystic Mandrake. London:
Rider, 1934: 146
4. Carter AJ. Narcosis and nightshade. BMJ
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1630-2 [PMC free article] [PubMed]
5. Reader's Digest. Field Guide to the Wild Flowers of
Britain. London: Reader's Digest Association, 1981:
157
6. Vicary R. Oxford Dictionary of Plant-lore.
Oxford: University Press, 1995:
393-4
7. Chapman GTL, McCombie F, Wesencraft A, eds. William
Turner: A New Herball, Vol. 2. Cambridge:
University Press, 1996: 437
8. Huson P. Mastering Witchcraft. London:
Rupert Hart-Davis, 1970: 146
9. Carter AJ. Dwale: an anaesthetic from old England.
BMJ
1999;319:
1623-6 [PMC free article] [PubMed]
10. Bondanella P, Musa M, eds. The Portable
Machiavelli. London: Penguin, 1979:
430
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