![]() ![]() The natural mandragore is a filamentous root which, more or less, presents as a whole either the figure of a man, or that of the virile members. we will add a few words about mandragores (mandrakes) and androids, which several writers on magic confound with the waxen image serving the purposes of bewitchment. A Complete Translation of Dogme et Rituel de la Haute Magie by Arthur Edward Waite. After this the root can be handled without fear.Įxtract from Chapter XVI, Witchcraft and Spells: Transcendental Magic its Doctrine and Ritual by Eliphas Levi. The dog then endeavours to follow him, and so easily pulls up the root, but dies suddenly instead of his master. 100) gives the following directions for pulling it up:Ī furrow must be dug around the root until its lower part is exposed, then a dog is tied to it, after which the person tying the dog must get away. Literature includes complex directions for harvesting a mandrake root in relative safety. Mandragora, from Tacuinum Sanitatis (1474).Īccording to the legend, when the root is dug up it screams and kills all who hear it. Template:POV-statement Magic, spells and witchcraft None of these renderings are supported by satisfactory evidence. Numbers of other plants have been suggested, as bramble-berries, Zizyphus Lotus, the sidr of the Arabs, the banana, the lily, the citron, and the fig. Most interpreters hold Mandragora officinarum to be the plant intended in Genesis 30:14 ("love plant") and Song of Songs 7:13 ("the mandrakes send out their fragrance"). Among certain Asian cultures, it is believed to ensure conception. Mandrake in Hebrew is דודאים (dûwôdãym), meaning “love plant”. There are classical Jewish commentaries which suggest that mandrakes help barren women to conceive a child. Soon after this Leah, who previously had had four sons but had ceased to become pregnant for a long while then became pregnant once more and gave birth to a son. The trade offered by Rachel is for Leah to spend the next night in Jacob's bed. Rachel, Jacob's second wife, the sister of Leah, is desirous of the mandrakes and she barters with her sister for them. In Genesis 30, Reuben, the eldest son of Jacob and Leah finds mandrakes in the field. The plant grows natively in southern and central Europe and in lands around the Mediterranean Sea, as well as on Corsica. All parts of the mandrake plant are poisonous. There spring from the neck a number of one-flowered nodding peduncles, bearing whitish-green flowers, nearly 2 inches broad, which produce globular, succulent, orange to red berries, resembling small tomatoes, which ripen in late spring. This root gives off at the surface of the ground a rosette of ovate-oblong to ovate, wrinkled, crisp, sinuate-dentate to entire leaves, 6 to 16 inches long, somewhat resembling those of the tobacco-plant. The parsley-shaped root is often branched. The mandrake, Mandragora officinarum, is a plant called by the Arabs luffâh, or beid el-jinn (" djinn's eggs"). (It is alleged that magicians would form this root into a crude resemblance to the human figure, by pinching a constriction a little below the top, so as to make a kind of head and neck, and twisting off the upper branches except two, which they leave as arms, and the lower, except two, which they leave as legs.) Because their curious bifurcations cause them to have a semblance to the human figure (male and female), their roots have long been used in magic rituals, today also in neopagan religions such as Wicca and Germanic revivalism religions such as Odinism. Mandrake is the common name for members of the plant genus Mandragora belonging to the nightshades family (Solanaceae). ![]()
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