Mandrake

The mandrake is Mandragora officinarum, a Mediterranean plant of the nightshade family whose thick, often forked taproot can resemble a human figure, the fact from which almost all its lore grows. The Hebrew Bible treats it as an aphrodisiac and fertility charm: in Genesis 30 Reuben finds mandrakes in the field, and Rachel bargains with Leah for them in the hope of conceiving, and the Song of Songs names their fragrance among the pleasures of love. Its anthropomorphic root made it the plant most heavily loaded with magical meaning in the European tradition, a living thing read as a little human because it happened to look like one.

The English herbalist John Gerard, in his Herball of 1597, was already sceptical of the plant's reputation in his own time, dismissing the tales of shrieking roots and dog-assisted harvesting as, in his own words, ridiculous fables, and noting the strikingly human-shaped mandrake roots sold by itinerant dealers were commonly carved and manipulated by hand from ordinary bryony or other roots to enhance the resemblance, a documented case of the folklore being actively manufactured for the market rather than simply arising from the plant's natural shape. The name mandrake was also given, by resemblance alone, to an unrelated North American plant: the may apple, Podophyllum peltatum, sometimes called American mandrake, which shares none of the Mediterranean plant's forked, human-shaped root or its history of magical lore.

The famous legend that the mandrake shrieks when uprooted and kills whoever hears it, so that a dog was tied to the root to pull it up and die in the gatherer's place, is elaborated in classical and medieval sources from Theophrastus and Pliny onward, a story grown around a plant already thought half-human. Behind the magic is a real pharmacology: mandrake contains tropane alkaloids and was genuinely used in antiquity as a soporific and anaesthetic, Dioscorides describing its use to dull the pain of surgery. That same chemistry makes it dangerous. Mandrake is toxic, and its historical medicinal use is recorded here as history, not as advice; the plant can cause serious poisoning and is not safe to use.

The plant's association with a shriek that can kill outlived its medieval context by centuries, most recently supplying the basis for the screaming mandrake of the Harry Potter novels and films, a twenty-first-century popular retelling of a motif that Theophrastus and Pliny had already been recording as old lore some two thousand years earlier, a rare case of a piece of classical plant-lore passing essentially unbroken into mainstream modern fiction. The same class of tropane alkaloids found in mandrake, scopolamine among them, was extracted and used in early twentieth-century obstetrics for twilight sleep, a combination of scopolamine and morphine meant to dull the memory of childbirth pain, a documented and now abandoned medical practice descended from the same plant chemistry Dioscorides used as a surgical anaesthetic in antiquity.