Also called Mandragora officinarum, dudaim, love apple, Alraune, mandragora
The mandrake is a poisonous Mediterranean nightshade whose forked, human-looking root grew a huge body of legend, from the love plants of Genesis to the shrieking root pulled up by a dog. This entry covers the history and gives a safe symbolic working that uses a drawn or carved stand-in, never the real plant.
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Take care: Mandrake is poisonous in every part: its tropane alkaloids cause racing heart, blurred vision, confusion and hallucinations, and it is unsafe to eat, drink, smoke or use on skin. If you own a root, keep it away from children and pets, handle it with gloves and never burn it; bryony and American mayapple, both sold as mandrake, are poisonous too.
Reuben finds dudaim in the field during wheat harvest and brings them to his mother Leah. Rachel, who has no children, trades a night with Jacob for them. The Hebrew word is usually read as love plants and most interpreters take it to mean mandrake, which gave the plant a lasting reputation as an aid to fertility.
Uses: mandrake fruits (dudaim)
Josephus describes a glowing root called baaras that killed whoever touched it, so a trench was dug around it and a dog tied on to pull it out, the dog dying in the harvester's place. He does not call it mandrake, but medieval writers moved the story onto mandrake. The Vienna Dioscorides, copied around 512 in Constantinople, already pictures an uprooted mandrake with a dying dog.
Uses: dog, cord, wax for the ears in later versions
Latin herbals spread the belief that the uprooted root screamed and that hearing it brought madness or death, so gatherers stopped their ears. Later German and English lore said mandrakes sprang up beneath gallows. Root figures sold as Alraune or mandrakes were often carved from bryony, itself a poisonous plant.
Uses: carved root figure, cloth wrapping
Mandragora officinarum is a low Mediterranean member of the nightshade family with a rosette of leaves, bell flowers and yellow-orange berries. Its thick root often forks, which is the seed of nearly all its legends. The plant contains tropane alkaloids, including atropine, scopolamine and hyoscyamine, and the first-century physician Dioscorides described mandrake wine as a sleep-bringer used before surgery. Genesis 30 gives the oldest story, in which Rachel trades with Leah for dudaim, usually translated as mandrakes.
Josephus told of a deadly root that had to be pulled by a dog, and by about 512 the Vienna Dioscorides showed a mandrake with a dying dog at its feet. Medieval herbals added the killing shriek and the gallows birth, and the root became a staple of flying-ointment and love-potion lore. Machiavelli's comedy La Mandragola (c. 1518) turned the fertility legend into satire. Carved mandrake charms sold at fairs were often bryony, and both plants are poisonous.
A dried acorn, or an acorn-shaped pull on a window blind, kept to guard a house from lightning and to bring steady luck and long life. It draws on the old tie between the oak and the thunder god.
Customs people have used to ask for a child, from Rome's Lupercalia and the Sheela-na-gig carvings of Irish churches to Japan's Kanamara Matsuri, with a gentle egg-and-candle blessing for the home. It is folk tradition, not fertility treatment.
A small figure made to stand for a person, so that what is done to it is done to them. Ancient and early modern poppets were mostly harmful; this entry gives the history and a safe self-focused version for holding yourself steady through a hard season.
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