Herb or the week: Mandrake

 Then cries of the Mandrake 

In the shadowed cradle of the world, where the first gods still walked with muddy feet and the earth herself was learning to scream, there grew a root unlike any other. Men would later call it Mandragora, the sleepy apple, the devil’s candle, the hanged-man’s supper; but in the elder tongue it bore no name at all, for to name it was to invite its notice, and its notice was rarely kind.

Long before the cities of men rose like rash upon the skin of the land, the mandrake slept beneath the gallows. Where murderers swung and traitors danced their last jig upon the air, their final seed fell not as children but as roots. From the black droppings of the hanged, from the froth upon their broken lips, from the terror that soaked the soil when the neck snapped, the mandrake drank. It grew forked like a man’s legs spread in agony, and its thick taproot took the shape of one who had been stretched upon the rope. Tiny arms, a bulbous head crowned with leaves like wild hair, and always, always, the faint suggestion of a face twisted mid-shriek.

The old ones knew better than to pull it carelessly. When the moon was dark and the dogs refused to bark, the seeker came with a horn of ram and a black hound on an iron chain. Three circles were drawn about the plant with a sword that had never tasted blood, and an offering of bread, wine, and honey poured upon the ground so the earth might be sweetened against what was to come. Then the rope was tied fast around the mandrake’s neck of root, the other end knotted to the hound, and the seeker fled with fingers stuffed in ears.

For when the root was torn from its bed, the mandrake screamed.

Not the thin cry of a child nor the howl of a beast, but something older: the sound the world made when it first learned death was possible. That scream could blast the wits from a man’s skull, curdle milk in the udder, wither fruit upon the bough, and strike the puller dead where he stood. Only the dog paid the price, maddened and torn apart by unseen claws, while the root (now safely cradled in cloth of red wool) was carried home by one who had never heard its voice.

Bathed in wine and milk beneath a waxing moon, the mandrake grew tame, or as tame as such a thing can ever be. Kept in a box of cedar or wrapped in silk stolen from a corpse’s shroud, it granted its keeper strange boons. Gold came unasked. Lovers forgot their vows to others. Enemies sickened and died with no mark upon their bodies. Yet the root demanded feeding: a drop of blood on Fridays, a thimble of semen or maiden’s milk beneath the new moon, and always the murmur of secrets, for the mandrake listens better than it speaks.

Some said the little man-shaped thing was a familiar sent by the Queen of Elphame, others that it was a lost soul caught halfway between grave and hell. Witches cradled them like babes. Alchemists powdered them for the Work of the Sun. Kings kept them locked in ivory caskets and consulted them before battle, trembling at the answers whispered through clenched leaves.

But every mandrake remembers the rope.

Let a keeper grow careless, let the offerings cease or the red cloth fray, and the root begins to twist in its box. It swells, it groans, it dreams of the gallows tree. One night the lid is found flung wide, the silk shredded, and in the morning the master lies cold with eyes burst and tongue blackened, while outside the window a fresh plant has already taken root beneath the scaffold, waiting for the next traitor, the next thief, the next fool who believes he can own what was never meant to be owned.

Thus has it ever been, and thus shall it be, while men hang men and the earth stays hungry. In the deep places beneath the hill where no dog dares follow, the true mandrakes grow wild and tall as a man, crowned with purple bells and leaves like poisoned laurel. There they dance when no eye watches, slow and terrible, rehearsing the scream that will greet the final neck that snaps at the end of time.

Heed the old warning, wanderer. Should you spy a forked root sleeping beneath dark leaves, pass by. Plug your ears with wax and your heart with fear. Some doors were never meant to open, and some roots were nourished on screams long before you learned to speak.

Uses of Mandrake

It is a highly toxic plant, it can cause death if it is ingested directly, and it has activity through the skin, so it is unwise to handle its leaves, fruits and, above all, its roots.

The ancient inhabitants of Africa believed that it had healing properties and therefore they used it to wash their hands and feet. 

The fame of mandrake is also linked to the Hebrew tradition, where the root of this plant was used as a powerful fertilizer. It is mentioned in the Old Testament, in the story of Rachel, the wife of Jacob, in which she was sterile and became pregnant after taking an infusion of mandrake.

One of the best known cases that encouraged the relationship between witchcraft and mandrake occurred during the trial of Joan of Arc. The judges accused her of wearing a mandrake root hidden in her clothes, which they believed gave her powers of divination. According to the legends, the mandrake root was used for invoking demons and performing divinations.

The Witch’s Flying Ointment

The mandrake root has a long history in witchcraft. Not only did the common people and royalty use it, but so did accused witches during the Dark Ages. While the mandrake grew naturally in the Mediterranean region, distribution spread through the Northern, Eastern, and Western European countries over time. The mandrake became an essential ingredient in the witch’s flying ointment, according to grimoires from that time. It was a powerful hallucinogen and aphrodisiac. If used with other toxic herbs and rubbed externally on the witch’s skin, it made the witch feel as if she is “flying”…or to put it simply got her high or sent her on a “trip”.

The Mandrake as the Folk Remember It: A Garland of Night-Whispers and Grave-Dirt

Across every land where men learned to hang their own kind, the same terror took root and flowered into a thousand different nightmares. The plant has worn more masks than the moon has phases, yet every mask hides the same screaming face.

Britain and the Germanic North: The Thief Beneath the Gallows

In England they called it mandrake or womandrake, but the country people spoke only of “the Little Gallows Man.” Every crossroads gibbet had one growing beneath it, fattened on the “poor sinner’s fat” (the dripping that fell when the corpse was cut down). To harvest it you needed a dog with a white star on its breast, bread baked on Good Friday, and a length of rope spun from a hanged man’s hair. When the root came free, the shriek was said to kill eleven living things within earshot: the dog first, then the youngest child in the nearest cottage, then the puller himself if he had looked back.

Once safely gathered, the root was carved into a doll with a face like a wizened baby. Fed milk and blood on moonless nights, it grew restless and began to walk the house after midnight, rattling doors and pinching sleepers black and blue. If you asked it where treasure lay, it would point with a tiny arm toward the churchyard or the miser’s hearth. But woe to the house that forgot to dress it in new clothes every Yuletide: the doll would swell until it burst its coffin and the owner would be found hanged from his own bedpost, feet dancing above a fresh young mandrake already sprouting between the floorboards.

In Germany the same root was Alraune or Galgenmännlein (“little gallows mannikin”). A proper Alraune must be dug on a Friday in the hour of Venus, with the left hand only, while reciting the Creed backward. Kept in a bottle of brandy, it granted its master luck at dice and made women fall in love against their will. But every seventh year it demanded a new dog be killed in its name, or it strangled the gambler in his sleep and rolled the dice with his finger-bones.

The Slavic Lands: The Night-Crying Flower

Among the Ruthenians and Poles it was “rusałka’s candle” or “the crying Adam.” They said Adam himself, when driven from Eden, wept such bitter tears that one fell upon the grave of Abel and became the first mandrake. Its root is shaped like Adam’s body before Eve was taken from his side (whole, sexless, and howling). To pull it, a naked man must stand within a circle of burning hemp and play a fiddle carved from coffin-wood. The root will dance to the tune and follow the music out of the earth, still screaming. If the fiddler stops before sunrise, the mandrake drags him down and takes his place above the ground, wearing his skin like a coat.

In Serbia they buried a mandrake beneath the threshold so that no witch could cross. In Bulgaria they planted it upside-down in a murderer’s grave so that his soul could never leave the body and walk as a vampir. Everywhere the same bargain: keep it fed and it keeps you rich; starve it and it eats you instead.

Mediterranean and Arabic Lore: The Demon’s Lantern

The Greeks knew it as the plant of Circe and Hecate both. Sailors swore that on moonless nights they saw purple fires flickering on deserted islands (mandrakes burning like lanterns to lure men to their doom). Arab physicians called it yabruh or luffah al-jinn (“the jinn’s apple”) and claimed the only safe way to gather it was to shoot three arrows over it while reciting the Throne Verse. The third arrow would sever the root without waking the scream.

In Jewish legend it is yabruch or sefer ha-yashar, the plant Moses used to point out Joseph’s bones in Egypt. But another, darker tale says Cain planted the first mandrake in Abel’s blood, and its fruit are the golden apples that still tempt men into murder.

The Romany and the Roadside Root

Gypsy caravans would never camp near a gallows for fear of the baxt mandragora (“luck-root”). Yet some old women carried tiny shrivelled ones wrapped in red silk, claiming they were born from the seed of a man hanged while still virgin. Such a root could make a horse run a hundred miles without tiring, or cause an enemy’s wagon to lose a wheel at the worst possible ford. When the owner died, the root was buried with her left hand so that in the next world she would never be poor.

The Universal Terror

Everywhere the same laws are whispered:

•  Never buy a mandrake with ordinary money; it must be paid for with a coin bitten by a corpse.

•  Never let it see its own reflection; it will remember it is a prisoner and strangle you with your own hair.

•  Never speak its true name aloud after sunset; the name is the noose, and the noose remembers.

And everywhere the same ending: the root always returns to the gallows. Rich men, wise women, cunning thieves (all wake one morning to find their treasure gone, their door open, and a hangman’s silhouette swinging gently above a patch of disturbed earth where something small and man-shaped has just gone back to sleep, waiting for the next neck, the next scream, the next harvest.

For the mandrake is not a plant that grows.

It is a debt that ripens.

And every land that learned the rope still owes it interest, paid in the oldest currency of all: a human life, screaming as it is torn from the world.

The mandrake waits. It always waits.

Psst: it’s a hoax! The plant does not cry or make any sound when it is touched or pulled from the ground!