Time.news – Its anthropomorphic roots and its toxicity have always placed it at the center of legends and noir tales. And in some medieval alchemy texts it is reproduced with the likeness of a man or a child: the mandrake or mandrake was the main ingredient of magical potions and protagonist of great literary works, also for its hallucinogenic effects.
The name, probably of Persian derivation (mehregiah), was assigned to this perennial herbaceous plant by the Greek Hippocrates, the father of medicine. And since ancient times she was credited with aphrodisiac virtues and the ability to cure sterility. But also the faculty of inducing madness or paralysis, if collected in the spring, as soon as it was born, or death, if taken from the fields when it had matured.
According to popular beliefs, mandrakes were born from the sperm and urine of hanged men, emitted at the point of death. Already the ancient Romans believed that inside the root there was a hidden demon, which, if urged, would kill those who had collected the plant.
To uproot it from the ground, it was necessary to draw 3 circles around the root with a willow branch, and after making a virgin girl urinate on the ground, allow her to pick it up, looking west; or, according to Theophrastus of Lesbos and Pliny the Elder, after having poured menstrual blood or the urine of a girl on the ground, with the ears covered so as not to hear, a rope could be tied to the foot of the root, on the other end clasped around the neck of a black dog that, running, would have unearthed it. If purified in a red wine bath, preserved and fed with blood and sperm, with a gold coin beside it it would have increased the wealth of its owner.
To propagate the myth of the mandrake able to make people conceive is the Bible, in Genesis, when Leah, thanks to this infusion, manages to conceive Issachar. And it is the Florentine Niccolò Machiavelli, in the homonymous comedy, at the beginning of the 16th century, who relaunched this alleged property of the root.
The servant Callimachus, wanting to spend a night of passion with his beloved lady Lucrezia, who had not been able to have children from her husband, tells the latter, Messer Nicia, that there is a miraculous infusion, but that whoever lies first with the woman who drank it is destined to die; Thus disguised as a beggar, he will be able to have Lucrezia, convinced by her mother and a friar to sacrifice her purity in the name of a good cause, managing to reveal her love for her and giving her a son. In 1615, in some treatises on lycanthropy, a magical ointment based on mandrake was considered capable of causing transformation into animals.
The mandrake also appears among the magical plants of the fantasy novel ‘Harry Potter and the chamber of secrets’ and of the homonymous film based on that volume of the wizard saga that has bewitched the world. At the Herbology lesson in greenhouse number 3, Professor Pomona Sprout, who grows it, makes her pupils study it, and in this case the root is also used to heal petrifications. The plant also appears in the name of two characters from the anime and manga ‘The Knights of the Zodiac’.
Then there is the 1965 film ‘La Mandragola’, directed by Alberto Lattuada, with Totò and Rosanna Schiaffino, a film version of Machiavelli’s comedy. Guillermo del Toro in the 2006 ‘Labyrinth of the Faun’ proposes the mandrake as a valid aid in difficult pregnancies. Little Ophelia puts a plant nourished with milk and her blood under the bed of her mother, who has difficulty in gestation.