What exactly is a Mandrake?

5 Comments

1. Reis M says:

   12. February 2010 at 19:25

   The only mandrake i know of, is in Harry Potter. It’s a creature attatched to the root of a plant, which can ‘petrify’ you , (make ya’ faint).
2. spiderman says:

   12. February 2010 at 19:25

   The Mandrake, Mandragora officinarum, is a moderately common plant in the Mediterranean region. It frequently has a forked root, which may occasionally look like a pair of arms and legs. An ancient belief was that it would scream as it was pulled from the ground.

   It is a member of the Solanaceae (Potato) Family and in common with other members of the family it is poisonous, with a dangerous alkaloid, hyoscyamine, present in its tissues. Extracts from the plant also have hallucinogenic properties, adding to its mystique.
3. elpizothegreat says:

   12. February 2010 at 19:25

   Here is an extensive article on mandrakes:
   http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?artid=539425
4. lilith663 says:

   12. February 2010 at 19:25

   Mandrake is the common name for members of the plant genus Mandragora belonging to the nightshades family (Solanaceae). Because mandrake contains deliriant hallucinogenic tropane alkaloids such as hyoscyamine and the roots sometimes contain bifurcations causing them to resemble human figures, their roots have long been used in magic rituals, today also in neopagan religions such as Wicca and Germanic revivalism religions such as Odinism. (It is alleged[who?] that magicians would form this root into a crude resemblance to the human figure, by pinching a constriction a little below the top, so as to make a kind of head and neck, and twisting off the upper branches except two, which they leave as arms, and the lower, except two, which they leave as legs.)

   The mandrake, Mandragora officinarum, is a plant called by the Arabs luffâh, or beid el-jinn ("djinn’s eggs"). The parsley-shaped root is often branched. This root gives off at the surface of the ground a rosette of ovate-oblong to ovate, wrinkled, crisp, sinuate-dentate to entire leaves, 6 to 16 inches long, somewhat resembling those of the tobacco-plant. A number of one-flowered nodding peduncles spring from the neck bearing whitish-green flowers, nearly 2 inches broad, which produce globular, succulent, orange to red berries, resembling small tomatoes, which ripen in late spring. All parts of the mandrake plant are poisonous. The plant grows natively in southern and central Europe and in lands around the Mediterranean Sea, as well as on Corsica.

   Contents [hide]
   1 Hebrew Bible
   2 Magic, spells, and witchcraft
   3 In literature
   4 In film
   5 In video games
   6 References
   7 External links

   [edit] Hebrew Bible
   In Genesis 30, Reuben, the eldest son of Jacob and Leah finds mandrakes in a field. Rachel, Jacob’s infertile second wife and Leah’s sister, is desirous of the mandrakes and barters with Leah for them. The trade offered by Rachel is for Leah to spend the next night in Jacob’s bed in exchange of Leah’s mandrakes. Leah gives away the plant to her barren sister, but soon after this (Genesis 30:14-22), Leah, who had previously had four sons but had been infertile for a long while, became pregnant once more and in time gave birth to two more sons, Issachar and Zebulun, and a daughter, Dinah. Only years after this episode of her asking for the mandrakes did Rachel manage to get pregnant. There are classical Jewish commentaries which suggest that mandrakes help barren women to conceive a child though.[citation needed]

   Mandrake in Hebrew is דודאים (dûdã’im), meaning “love plant”. Among certain Asian cultures, it is believed to ensure conception.[citation needed] Most interpreters hold Mandragora officinarum to be the plant intended in Genesis 30:14 ("love plant") and Song of Songs 7:13 ("the mandrakes send out their fragrance"). A number of other plants have been suggested such as blackberries, Zizyphus Lotus, the sidr of the Arabs, the banana, lily, citron, and fig.

   [edit] Magic, spells, and witchcraft

   Mandragora, from Tacuinum Sanitatis (1474).According to the legend, when the root is dug up it screams and kills all who hear it. Literature includes complex directions for harvesting a mandrake root in relative safety. For example Josephus (c. 37 AD Jerusalem – c. 100) gives the following directions for pulling it up:

   A furrow must be dug around the root until its lower part is exposed, then a dog is tied to it, after which the person tying the dog must get away. The dog then endeavours to follow him, and so easily pulls up the root, but dies suddenly instead of his master. After this the root can be handled without fear.

   Extract from Chapter XVI, Witchcraft and Spells: Transcendental Magic its Doctrine and Ritual by Eliphas Levi. A Complete Translation of Dogme et Rituel de la Haute Magie by Arthur Edward Waite. 1896

   … we will add a few words about mandragores (mandrakes) and androids, which several writers on magic confound with the waxen image; serving the purposes of bewitchment. The natural mandragore is a filamentous root which, more or less, presents as a whole either the figure of a man, or that of the virile members. It is slightly narcotic, and an aphrodisiacal virtue was ascribed to it by the ancients, who represented it as being sought by Thessalian sorcerers for the composition of philtres. Is this root the umbilical vestige of our terrestrial origin ? We dare not seriously affirm it, but all the same it is certain that man came out of the slime of the earth, and his first appearance must have been in the form of a rough sketch. The analogies of nature make this notion necessarily admissible, at least as a possibility. The first men were, in this case, a family of gigantic, sensitive mandragores, animated by the sun, who rooted themselves up from the earth ; this assumption not only does not exclude, but, on the contrary, positively supposes, creative will and the providential co-operation of a first cause