(Photo: Wellcome Library, Londonn/CC BY 4.0) (As long as they don’t care too much about their dead dog).Īn unusual illustration of a female mandrake being uprooted, with the dog attached to the feet of the plant, and a kneeling male figure with his hands to his ears. The mandrake-hunter can then unplug their ears and continue the hunt in peace. The mandrake root will be uprooted by the dog’s sudden leap, and its shrieks will kill the hungry dog. Back away from the root and throw the dog a treat, and the dog will lunge for it. According to the stories, the only way to uproot the mandrake safely is to plug one’s ears with wax, and tie a rope between a mandrake root and a dog’s tail. The ages-old legend of the shrieking mandrake, as portrayed in the world of Harry Potter, holds that a mandrake will emit an ear-piercing scream if uprooted, killing the person who digs it up. Across Europe, men and women desperately sought out mandrake root to resolve their woes, and fraudsters counterfeited them out of carved bryony root to satisfy the growing demand.Ī medieval depiction of a “female” mandrake. A mandrake root, shaped like a baby and slipped underneath one’s pillow every night, could help a woman conceive or, shaped like a woman and carried in one’s pocket, could help a man secure his desired lover. As a plant with the shape of a human body, the mandrake was believed to exercise control over the body: it could induce love or conception, or bring good fortune, wealth and power. Over the centuries, legends surrounding the mandrake’s different sexes and human shape grew stronger, reinforced by the medieval doctrine of signatures, which claimed that plants that resembled certain body parts could be used to treat ailments of those body parts. He describes a “male” and “female” mandrake, though we know today that he was describing two different species, Mandragora officinalis and Mandragora autumnalis.įrom a seventh-century manuscript of Dioscurides’ De Materia Medica. (Photo: Public Domain/WikiCommons) But be careful, he warns-take too much, and one might end up dead.ĭioscurides is one of the first and most important references on the mandrake plant, documenting its appearance along with its medicinal uses. Dioscurides, a first-century Greek physician, tells us that a “winecupful” of mandrake root (that is, mandrake root boiled in wine) was used as an anesthetic in ancient Rome. But its powers are not only mythical: a member of the nightshade plant family, mandrake contains hallucinogenic and narcotic alkaloids. In the Bible’s Book of Genesis, mandrake root helps Rachel conceive Jacob, and in Greek mythology, Circe and Aphrodite are thought to use it as an aphrodisiac.

Baby mandrake