As a child, no villain was to me more savage than the zucchini. My mother grew the scoundrels in the backyard, and whether she was deliberately scheming to improve her yields, or the climate just happened to have been ideal those years, season after season they got bigger and bigger. They grew so large and numerous that I eventually had to leave home—mostly because I went to college, but the zucchini certainly didn’t help.

I realize now that I had been quite lucky in my tanglings with zucchini, for in the Mediterranean there grows a far more murderous plant called the mandrake. Its roots can look bizarrely like a human body, and legend holds that it can even come in male and female form. It’s said to spring from the dripping fat and blood and semen of a hanged man. Dare pull it the from the earth and it lets out a monstrous scream, bestowing agony and death to all those within earshot.

Yet there is a way to safely uproot a mandrake—safely, that is, if you aren’t a dog with a bastard of an owner. If you really, really want one, the myths say to tie a hungry hound’s leash or even its tail to the plant. Back away, plug your ears with wax (a folkloric echo, by the way, of Odysseus ordering his crew to do the same as they passed the devious Sirens), and reveal a treat. The overzealous dog will sprint and consequently uproot the mandrake, but will immediately keel over in searing pain as its quarry lies there screaming.

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How did it come to this? When did we start sacrificing our pets to shouting plants? How could our legendary fear and hatred of the mandrake surpass even my legendary fear and hatred of zucchini?

In reality, mandrakes aren’t what you would call "super great" for human consumption, at least in large quantities. It’s a member of the famously deadly nightshade family, plants that contain, among other toxins, the highly poisonous compound solanine, which naturally wards off insects. (Tomatoes and potatoes, by the way, also belong to this family and do indeed contain solanine, though the bulk of the compound is isolated to the leaves instead of the edible bits.)

These solanum alkaloids also are present in the mandrake, but their side effects of delirium and gastrointestinal distress and even shock didn’t bother the ancient Greeks nohow. They valued the mandrake for the number of other compounds that give it soporific properties, that is, the root can make you really sleepy. Indeed, the Greeks used it as an anesthetic for surgery, a practice that continued into the Middle Ages. The Greeks also used it as an aphrodisiac, steeping the root in wine or vinegar—mandrake is known as the “love-apple of the ancients,” and is associated with the Greek goddess of love, Aphrodite.

Similarly, the ancient Hebrews believed the mandrake could be used to induce conception. This appears in Genesis, where Rachel, supposedly barren, ate mandrake and was able to conceive Joseph. In the Middle Ages, the fertility powers of mandrake gained new credence under the so-called doctrine of signatures, which held that plants bearing resemblances to body parts could be used to treat their associated limbs and organs. Mandrakes can look rather like babies, so those having trouble conceiving would sleep with them under their pillows. The mandrake roots, not actual babies.

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And it wasn’t just about mandrakes getting people horny and fertile. According to Anthony John Carter, writing in the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine in 2003, medieval folks carried mandrake roots around as good luck charms, hoping the plant would grant them not only wealth and the power to control their destiny, but the ability to control the destinies of others as well. The Catholic Church wasn’t so hot on this, as you can imagine. And unfortunately for Joan of Arc, at her trial in 1431 she was accused of habitually carrying one. She denied this, though it didn’t really matter. Her accusers seemed more concerned that she dressed like a dude and stuff rather than what kind of vegetation she had in her pockets.

Still, the mandrake was widely held to work miracles. But miracles don’t come cheap: The belief in its curative effects led to runaway demand. “Mandrake roots became highly sought after in their native Mediterranean habitat,” Carter writes, “and attempts to protect them from theft are thought to have been the source of” the myth of the ferocious plant.

And high demand for a valuable commodity will also, of course, lead to the proliferation of knockoffs. Mandrakes were the veritable luxury purses of the 16th century, and fraudsters went to great lengths to counterfeit the anthropomorphic root. Typically they used bryony, a kind of climbing plant and member of the gourd family, carving it into a human form and, for added realism and perversion, adding wheat or grass for pubic hair.

The great botanist William Turner scolded such hucksters in 1568, sometimes using Y’s instead of I’s presumably for dramatic effect: “The rootes which are counterfited and made like little pupettes or mammettes which come to be sold in England in boxes with heir and such forme as a man hath are nothyng elles but foolishe trifles and not naturall. For they are so trymmed of crafty theves to mocke the poore people with all and to rob them both of theyr wit and theyr money.”

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It was a far better fate, Turner would have had to admit, than you or your dog dropping dead after getting an earful from a mandrake root. Turner himself described how to prepare mandrake root for anesthesia, making sure to note that it is a rather unpredictable medicine, what with the, you know, putting people into comas. Accordingly, around this time, notes Carter, the use of mandrake roots in medicine rapidly declined. “The popularity of the myths, however, remained undimmed,” he writes.

The mythologizing of the mandrake—all the screaming and growing out of the blood of hanged men and such—shows up in the works of Shakespeare and the dramatist John Webster. They helped seal the villainization of the mandrake, even for several hundred more years. At the turn of the 20th century, for instance, a British bloke digging a garden cut through some of bryony roots. He mistook it for a mandrake, “and ceased to work at once, saying it was ‘awful bad luck.’ Before the week was out, he fell down some steps and broke his neck.”

Whether the man’s dog was also injured in the fall, however, remains unclear. The potential irony therefore is sadly lost to history.

References:

Leach, M. and Fried, J. (1949) Standard Dictionary of Folklore, Mythology, and Legend. Harper and Row

Carter, A. (2003) Myths and Mandrakes. Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine. 96(3): 144–147