Mandrake — between medieval pharmacopoeia and modern folklore

Les plantes qu'on a brûlées avec les femmes. On ne les vend pas. On les nomme.

tagline · chemin

Les plantes qu'on a brûlées avec les femmes. On ne les vend pas. On les nomme.

— Les plantes qu'on a brûlées avec les femmes. On ne les vend pas. On les nomme.

Why we refuse — TL;DR

INFUSE will not sell Mandragora officinarum. Three reasons.

1. Major nightshade toxicity: like her sisters belladonna and datura, mandrake concentrates atropine, hyoscyamine, scopolamine. The same toxicological risks, the same narrow margin between an effective dose and a lethal one.
2. Folklore-marketing capture: Harry Potter turned mandrake into a novelist's prop. That transformation released a commercial demand for a deadly plant. To sell mandrake today by riding that wave is to exploit a childhood confusion in contempt of the real danger.
3. A sacred memory to honour: mandrake is one of the most anciently attested plants of the Western pharmacopoeia (the Bible, Theophrastus, Dioscorides, Hildegard). That antiquity binds us. She cannot become a piece of merchandise.

The history — who really knew this plant

Mandrake appears in Genesis, chapter 30, verse 14: Reuben, son of Leah, finds mandrakes (dudaim in Hebrew) in the fields and brings them to his mother. Rachel, the infertile wife of Jacob, asks for some, and bargains with Leah for a night with their shared husband in exchange. A few verses later, Rachel conceives Joseph. The biblical text thus explicitly links mandrake to fertility — that is her first documented signature.

The Song of Songs (ch. 7, v. 14) returns to the dudaim — "the mandrakes give forth their fragrance, and at our gates are all manner of choice fruits, new and old, which I have laid up for you, my beloved." The context is erotic. Mandrake is the plant of lovers, of wombs, of ripening fruit.

Theophrastus, in the 4th century BCE, in his Enquiry into Plants, already describes the rituals of harvest. You must trace three circles around the plant, face west, dance while singing. Without these gestures, the root will take its revenge. This description, which one might take for folklore, is in fact a pedagogical staging: Theophrastus protects the plant from casual gathering by surrounding her with a demanding protocol. It is a sourced ethic at the very beginning of Western science.

Dioscorides, the Greek physician in the service of the Roman armies (1st century CE), enters mandrake into his Materia Medica with two principal uses: surgical analgesic (mandrake wine put the patient to sleep during operations) and general anaesthetic. The Roman pharmacopoeia took up this practice. Pliny the Elder and Galen confirm it. For 1,500 years, mandrake remained the reference anaesthetic of Western surgery.

Hildegard of Bingen, in the 12th century, in her Physica, warns against misuse but does not disown the use. Mandrake stays in the monastic pharmacopoeias. In the 13th century, the physician Theodoric of Lucca writes a recipe for spongia somnifera (the sleeping sponge), mixing mandrake, opium, henbane and hemlock — applied to the patient's face before the operation. Medieval surgical analgesia owes much to mandrake.

In parallel, Germanic folklore develops the figure of the Alraune — a mandrake root in human shape, kept as a domestic fetish, said to bring wealth, fertility, protection. You must feed the Alraune (with bread, wine, blood), clothe it, put it to bed with care. Alraunes were sold for fortunes at medieval fairs. Many were forgeries (carved bryony roots). Demand outstripped supply.

The European Renaissance (Paracelsus, Cardano) keeps mandrake as a medical and magical plant. In the 17th century, the introduction of ether and later chloroform rendered surgical anaesthesia by mandrake obsolete. The plant gradually leaves the official pharmacopoeias. By the 20th century, she survives only as a botanical curiosity and a novelist's prop — the Harry Potter turn (1998) propels her into the children's imagination worldwide.

What this history carries

• A major pharmacopoeial plant, attested across 2,500 years, removed from medical use less than two centuries ago
• A plant linked to fertility in the Bible — ancient gynaecological knowledge?
• A reference anaesthetic plant, which accompanied millions of surgeries before ether
• A folkloric plant (the Alraune) already sold fraudulently in the Middle Ages — speculation is nothing new
• A plant of modern children's fiction — a capture that erases the history

The pharmacology — ancient surgical anaesthesia, contemporary danger

Mandrake shares with belladonna and datura the anticholinergic profile. Her principal alkaloids: hyoscyamine, scopolamine, atropine, mandragorine. The concentration varies according to species (M. officinarum, M. autumnalis), the part of the plant (the root the most loaded), the season of harvest.

Mechanism: muscarinic antagonism of acetylcholine. At a moderate dose, a sedative and general anaesthetic effect — hence the medieval use in surgery. At a high dose, anticholinergic delirium, convulsions, coma. Death possible. A narrow therapeutic margin.

Why did modern medicine abandon mandrake? Two reasons: (1) ether and chloroform, from the 1840s on, offer a more predictable and safer anaesthesia; (2) the isolation of pure atropine and scopolamine makes it possible, when a precise anticholinergic effect is sought, to use the isolated molecule without the other alkaloids. The whole plant, as with belladonna, no longer has a recognised therapeutic indication in contemporary Western medicine.

Why the current market is troubling

Mandrake is present on the market today in four troubling forms.

First form: living plants sold by specialist nurseries or online, for ornamental and collector purposes. The medieval Alraune market replays itself, in a more sanitised form. The buyers are often young, drawn by the folklore and the rarity. The plant is legal in France as a botanical curiosity.

Second form: whole dried roots, sold as ritual objects by certain esoteric networks. There, the toxicological risk appears the moment a buyer attempts an infusion or decoction "to experiment." Such attempts are documented by the Poison Control Centres — rarer than for Datura, but they exist.

Third form: various preparations (tinctures, powders, balms) circulating in marginal networks. Toxicological risks equivalent to belladonna.

Fourth form — and symbolically the most worrying: the Harry Potter merchandising that exploits the mandrake imaginary (plush toys, "decorative" plants for children, educational accessories). This childhood trivialising of a deadly plant prepares a generation to confuse folklore with real danger. INFUSE refuses to take part in that continuum, even at its margins.

INFUSE's ethical reasons for not selling

First reason — nightshade toxicity

Mandrake = belladonna = datura on the basic pharmacological level. The toxicological arguments developed in our earlier articles apply in full. A narrow margin between effect and death. No stable commercial calibration is possible with the whole plant.

Second reason — the historical debt

Mandrake carried Western surgical anaesthesia for fifteen centuries. Without her, millions of ancestors would have died on the operating table. That historical debt binds us. To sell mandrake today as an ornamental curiosity or an esoteric accessory is to fail what this plant did for us. Respect is measured by the distance one knows how to keep.

Third reason — the folklore that erases

Harry Potter turned mandrake into an amusing prop in a children's novel. That worldwide commercial success released a demand that did not exist before. Many buyers today are fans who know nothing of the real toxicity. To sell in that context is to exploit a confusion. INFUSE will not do it.

Fourth reason — respect for the biblical and ancient lineages

Mandrake is in the biblical canon. She is in Theophrastus, Dioscorides, Galen, Hildegard. That density of attestation, across 2,500 years, makes her a monument-plant. Monument-plants are not products. They are inheritances — to be carried on through writing, teaching, memory; not through sale.

For those who still wish to come close: the legitimate paths

1. Read the Bible (Genesis 30, Song of Songs 7), Theophrastus (Enquiry into Plants IX), Dioscorides (Materia Medica IV), Hildegard (Physica). These readings restore the plant's depth better than any consumption ever could.
2. Study the history of medieval surgical anaesthesia. The spongia somnifera, the recipes of Theodoric of Lucca, the 19th-century transition to ether. It is a fascinating and little-taught chapter in the history of medicine.
3. Visit, if the chance arises, a Mediterranean botanical garden where mandrake still grows. To see her alive, in season, is an experience nothing replaces. A few plants survive in physic gardens (Pisa, Padua, certain monasteries).
4. For the old uses (sleep, gentle anaesthesia, accompanying long-standing aches), consider the safe alternatives: valerian, hops, passionflower, meadowsweet, lemon balm. None of them carries the folklore. All of them do the work.

Nuggets & legends

• The Greek word mandragoras is attested in Hippocrates (5th c. BCE). The etymology remains debated: perhaps from mandros (cell, stable) + agreuō (to hunt) — "that which drives out of the cell," that is, that which carries you outside yourself. A speculative etymology, but a beautiful one.
• In Greek mythology, Circe — the sorceress of the Odyssey — used mandrake to turn Odysseus's companions into pigs. The plant has been linked to women-sorcerers since antiquity.
• In the 13th century, the Arab herbalist Ibn al-Baytar describes mandrake in his great pharmacopoeial treatise (Kitāb al-jāmiʿ) with remarkable botanical precision. Medieval Arab science carried much of the knowledge of this plant on to Europe.
• Leonardo da Vinci, in his notebooks, draws mandrake several times, intrigued by the anthropomorphic shape of the root. His drawings are among the most precise of the Renaissance period.
• In the 17th century, the Alraune market in Germany was so lucrative that forgers carved bryony roots (Bryonia dioica), which were more common, into human shapes to sell them as mandrakes. Pope Leo X explicitly banned the trade in false Alraunes — to little effect.
• In 1543, Andreas Vesalius, the father of modern anatomy, denounces in his De Humani Corporis Fabrica the myth that mandrake grew beneath gallows, fertilised by the semen of the hanged. Science was already fighting the folklore.
• Shakespeare mentions mandrake in Romeo and Juliet (Act IV, scene 3): "shrieks like mandrakes torn out of the earth." The legend of the deadly scream thus circulated well before Harry Potter — Rowling inherited it from a European tradition four thousand years old.