mandragon, n. The mandrake (q.v.) plant.
HECATE: Dear and sweet boy! What herbs hast thou?
FIRESTONE: I have some mar-martin and mandragon.
HECATE: Marmaritin and mandragora, thou wouldst say.
Thomas Middleton, The Witch (1604)
mandragora, mandragore, n. [< LL mandragora < L mandragoras < Gr
mandragóras] The mandrake (q.v.) plant. Also, a familiar spirit in the
form of a beardless manikin, frequently one given by the Devil to a
sorcerer or witch and consulted as a means of divination.
Char. Madam.
Cleo. Ha, ha, giue me to drinke Mandragora.
Char. Why Madam?
Cleo. That I might sleepe out this great gap of time:
My Anthony is away.
William Shakespeare, Antony and Cleopatra (160-)
Looke where he comes: Not Poppy, nor Mandragora,
Nor all the drowsie Syrrups of the world
Shall euer medicine thee to that sweete sleepe
Which thou owd'st yesterday.
William Shakespeare, The Tragœdy of Othello, the Moor of Venice (160-)
Come, violent death,
Serve for Mandragora to make me sleep.
John Webster, The Duchess of Malfi (1614)
For a strong preparation of Mandragora is good for the gout.
Christopher Smart, Jubilate Agno (1759-63)
In what revels are ye sunken
In old Æthiopia?
Have the Pygmies made you drunken,
Bathing in mandragora
Your divine pale lips that shiver
Like the lotus in the river?
Pan, Pan is dead.
Elizabeth Barrett Browning, "The Dead Pan" (1844)
In the Secret Catechism of the Druses of Syria -- a legend which is
repeated word for word by the oldest tribes about and around the
Euphrates -- men were created by the "Sons of God" descending on Earth,
where, after culling seven Mandragoras, they animated these roots, which
became forthwith men.
H.P. Blavatsky, The Secret Doctrine: The Synthesis of Science, Religion,
and Philosophy (1888)
Sing to me of the Labyrinth in which the two-formed bull was stalled!
Sing to me of the night you crawled across the temple's granite plinth,
When through the purple corridors the screaming scarlet Ibis flew
In terror, and a horrid dew dripped from the moaning Mandragores,
And the great torpid crocodile within the tank shed slimy tears,
And tare the jewels from his ears and staggered back into the Nile,
And the priests cursed you with shrill psalms as in your claws you
seized the snake,
And crept away with it to slake your passion by the shuddering palms.
Oscar Wilde, "The Sphinx" (1894)
"That's a pity," I answered smoothly. "I confess I can't distinguish
sweet basil from devil's bit, or turk's nose from mandragora."
Robert Graves, Seven Days in New Crete (1949; aka Watch the North Wind
Rise)
"It will be your turn next, Messire," he cried. "These vampires mean to
hold us here amid their unhallowed necromancies till they have drained
us of our last drop of blood. Their spells are like mandragora or the
sleepy sirups of Cathay; and no man can keep awake in their despite."
Clark Ashton Smith, "A Rendezvous in Averoigne" (1930)
"Abortion fathered by a sloth!" he cried. "Suckling of a sow that has
eaten mandragora! Would you slumber till doomsday?"
Clark Ashton Smith, "The Master of the Crabs" (1947)
Be clement still, and steep
Thy breasts in mandragore,
And let thy hands a poppied vintage pour
Whenas we turn, idolatrous,
Fain of thy yielded bliss and given sleep
In nights calamitous.
Clark Ashton Smith, "Supplication"
All day I follow still,
On western wold or hill,
The dream redreamed, the enchantment wrought once more:
Tomorrow brings at last
All blisses of the past
For him that drinks of autumn's mandragore.
Clark Ashton Smith, "Anodyne of Autumn"
And I see
Where some wild shadow shakes, though the pale wind
Of midnight stirs far off . . . and hear
Curst mandragores that gibber to the moon,
Though no man treads anigh. . . .
Clark Ashton Smith, "The Witch in the Graveyard" (ellipses in original)
Thy soul is like a secret garden-close,
Where roots of cleft mandragoras enwreathe;
Where bergamot and fumitory breathe,
And ivy winds its flower with the rose.
Clark Ashton Smith, "Duality" (1923)
Mandragora, within the graveyard grown,
Hath given thee its carnal root to eat,
And vipers, born and nurstled in a tomb,
From fawning mouths drip venom at they feet;
Yet from thy lethal lips and thine alone,
Love would I drink, as dew from poison-bloom.
Clark Ashton Smith, "Love Malevolent"
[nurstle: to nursle, to nuzzle.]
"These men knew of animals and jewels such as margarites and
chrysoberyls, and of all plants such as dittany which cures wounds, and
mandragora which compelleth sleep (though why men should want to sleep,
when there is so much to read and profit by the reading, I do not know)."
David H. Keller, "The Thirty and One"
"Mandrake, or Mandragora, is a powerful restorative," said Hermione,
sounding as usual as though she had swallowed the textbook. "It is used
to return people who have been transfigured or cursed to their original
form."
J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (1998)
mandrake, n. [< mandragora, influenced by drake, a dragon] A southern
European and North African plant, Mandragora officinarum, which has a
fleshy, forked root traditionally considered to resemble a human figure
and bears the poisonous and deliriant alkaloid hyoscamine. According to
tradition, the mandrake grows from the semen ejaculated by a hanged man
at the moment of death, and emits a deadly scream at the moment it is
uprooted.
Titles: Clark Ashton Smith, "The Mandrakes"
I drank of poppy and cold mandrake juice,
And being asleep, belike they thought me dead
And threw me o'er the walls.
Christopher Marlowe, The Famous Tragedy of the Rich Jew of Malta (1590)
Thou horson Mandrake, thou art fitter to be worne in my cap, then to
wait at my heeles.
William Shakespeare, King Henry IV, Part 2 (159-)
A plague vpon them: wherefore should I cursse them?
Would curses kill, as doth the Mandrakes grone,
I would inuent as bitter searching termes,
As curst, as harsh, and horrible to heare,
Deliuer'd strongly through my fixed teeth,
With full as many signes of deadly hate,
As leane-fac'd enuy in her loathsome caue.
My tongue should stumble in mine earnest words,
Mine eyes should sparkle like the beaten Flint,
Mine haire be fixt an end, as one distract:
I, euery ioynt should seeme to curse and ban,
And euen now my burthen'd heart would breake
Should I not curse them. Poyson be their drinke.
Gall, worse then Gall, the daintiest that they taste:
Their sweetest shade, a groue of Cypresse Trees:
Their cheefest Prospect, murd'ring Basiliskes:
Their softest Touch, as smart as Lyzards stings:
Their Musicke, frightfull as the Serpents hisse,
And boading Screech-Owles, make the Consort full.
William Shakespeare, King Henry VI, Part 2 (159-)
How, if when I am laid into the Tombe,
I wake before the time that Romeo
Come to redeeme me? There's a fearefull point:
Shall I not then be stifled in the Vault?
To whose foule mouth no healthsome ayre breaths in,
And there die strangled ere my Romeo comes.
Or if I liue, is it not very like,
The horrible conceit of death and night,
Together with the terror of the place,
As in a Vaulte, an ancient receptacle,
Where for these many hundred yeeres the bones
Of all my buried Auncestors are packt,
Where bloody Tybalt, yet but greene in earth,
Lies festring in his shrow'd, where as they say,
At some houres in the night, Spirits resort:
Alacke, alacke, is it not like that I
So early waking, what with loathsome smels,
And shrikes like Mandrakes torne out of the earth,
That liuing mortalls hearing them, run mad.
William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet (159-)
I Last Night, lay all alone
O'the Ground, to hear the Mandrake grone;
And pluckt him up, though he grew full low;
And, as I had done, the Cock did crow.
Ben Jonson, The Masque of Queens (1609)
Pliny writing of the Mandrake, Nat. Hist. 1. 25. c. 13. and of the
digging it up, hath this Ceremony, Cavent effossuri contrarium ventum, &
tribus circulis antè gladio circumscribunt, postea fodiunt ad Occasum
spectantes. But we have later tradition, that the forcing of it up is so
fatally dangerous, as the grone kills, and therefore they do it with
Dogs, which I think but borrowed from Josephus his Report of the Root
Baæras, lib. 7. de Bel. Judaic. Howsoever, it being so principal an
ingredient in their Magick, it was fit she should boast to be the
Plucker up of it her self. And, that the Cock did crow, alludes to prime
circumstance in their work: For they all confess, that nothing is so
cross, or balefull to them, in their Nights, as that the Cock should
crow before they have done.
Ben Jonson, note to The Masque of Queens (1609)
But as we seldom find the mistletoe,
Sacred to physic, on the builder oak,
Without a mandrake by it; so in our quest of gain,
Alas, the poorest of their forced dislikes
At a limb proffers, but at heart it strikes:
This is lamented doctrine.
John Webster, The White Divel; or, The Tragedy of Paulo Giordano Ursini,
Duke of Brachiano, with The Life and Death of Vittoria Corombona the
Famous Venetian Courtizan (1612)
By the Mandrakes dreadfull groanes;
By the Lubricans sad moanes;
By the noyse of dead mens bones,
In the Charnell houses ratling:
By the hissing of the Snake,
The rustling of the fire-Drake,
I charge thee thou this place forsake,
Nor of Queene Mab be pratling.
Michael Drayton, Nimphidia, the Court of Fayrie
Go and catche a falling star,
Get with child a mandrake roote,
Tell me, where all past yeares are,
Or who cleft the Divels foot,
Teach me to heare Mermaides singing,
Or to keep off envies stinging,
And find
What winde
Serves to advance an honest minde.
John Donne, "Song"
'Twere wholsomer for mee, that winter did
Benight the glory of this place,
And that a grave frost did forbid
These trees to laugh, and mocke mee to my face;
But that I may not this disgrace
Indure, nor yet leave loving, Love let mee
Some senslesse peece of this place bee;
Make me a mandrake, so I may groane here,
Or a stone fountaine weeping out my yeare.
John Donne, "Twicknam Garden"
Many Mola's and false conceptions there are of Mandrakes, the first from
great Antiquity, conceiveth the Root thereof resembleth the shape of
Man; which is a conceit not to be made out by ordinary inspection, or
any other eyes, than such as regarding the Clouds, behold them in shapes
conformable to pre-apprehensions.
Sir Thomas Browne, Pseudodoxia Epidemica; or, Enquiries into Very Many
Received Tenents and Commonly Presumed Truths (1646)
Inwardly taken, are simples, or compounds; simples, as poppy, nymphæa,
violets, roses, lettuce, mandrake, henbane, nightshade or solanum,
saffron, hemp-seed, nutmegs, willows with their seeds, juice,
decoctions, distilled waters, etc. Compounds are syrups, or opiates,
syrup of poppy, violets, verbasco, which are commonly taken with
distilled waters.
Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy: What It Is, With All the
Kinds, Causes, Symptomes, Prognostickes & Severall Cures of It (1621)
A friend's counsel is a charm, like mandrake wine, curas sopit [it
assuages care]; and as a bull that is tied to a fig-tree becomes gentle
on a sudden (which some, saith Plutarch, interpret of good words), so is
a savage, obdurate heart mollified by fair speeches.
Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy: What It Is, With All the
Kinds, Causes, Symptomes, Prognostickes & Severall Cures of It (1621)
"Lady," answered Sandrico, "you are false and disloyal; you are like the
mandrake apple, comely in show but baneful in taste, and for your
ingratitude you are worse than the serpent, who hath venom to annoy
others, but not himself."
Alexander Hart, The Tragi-Comical History of Alexto and Angelica; or,
Love's Metaphor (1640)
Imprimis, as to her Descent, some Heralds derive her Pedigree from that
of the Scotch Barnacles, and say, that she dropt from some teeming
Gallows, or sprung up like Mandrakes from the S—— of some gibbitid
Raggamuffian.
Duke of Buckingham, A Character of an Ugly Woman; or, A Hue and Cry
after Beauty (1678)
There, by a most incestuous birth,
Strange woods spring from the teeming earth;
For they relate how heretofore,
When ancient Pict began to whore,
Deluded of his assignation
(Jilting, it seems, was then in fashion),
Poor pensive lover, in this place
Would frig upon his mother's face;
Whence rows of mandrakes tall did rise
Whose lewd tops fucked the very skies.
John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, "A Ramble in St. James's Park"
He comes—the rock resounds his tread --
How shall she dare to lift her head,
Or meet those eyes, whose scorching glare
Not YEMEN'S boldest sons can bear?
In whose red beam, the Moslem tells,
Such rank and deadly lustre dwells,
As in those hellish fires that light
The mandrake's charnel leaves at night?
Thomas Moore, "The Fire-Worshippers" in Lalla Rookh (1817)
The Arabians call the mandrake "the devil's candle," on account of its
shining appearance in the night.--Richardson.
Thomas Moore, note to "The Fire-Worshippers" in Lalla Rookh (1817)
The phantom shapes -- oh touch not them --
That appal the murd'rer's sight,
Lurk in the fleshly mandrake's stem,
That shrieks, when pluck'd at night!
Thomas Moore, "The Fire-Worshippers" in Lalla Rookh (1817)
When winter had gone and spring came back
The Sensitive-plant was a leafless wreck;
But the mandrakes and toadstools and docks and darnels
Rose like the dead from their ruined charnels.
Percy Bysshe Shelley, The Sensitive-Plant (1820)
"Oh! what a happy thing it is to be young and full of choler and folly!
Not but that I have done the same myself," chuckled the old man; "for
thou knowest mandrake must be gathered only at the full moon, and
hemlock roots are digged in the dark -- many a twilight such as this I
spent groping in the murky woods, picking those things that witches love
-- and not gone home with full wallet until the owls were homing and the
pale white stars were waxing sickly in the morning light."
Edwin Lester Arnold, The Wonderful Adventures of Phra the Phœnician (1890)
So they jested heavily over their celestial banquet, becoming more and
yet more befuddled as the Stewards swilled down the dark beer of Sekmet,
until they had all reached a state of dignified and complete
incoherence. This beer, to Smirt's personal taste, was unattractively
seasoned, with mandrakes and with human blood, so that Smirt did not
partake of it, nor did he eat any of the banquet.
Branch Cabell, Smirt: An Urbane Nightmare (1933)
"At the lifting of my finger I am able to metamorphose thee to a
mandrake. If indeed thou beest else already."
E.R. Eddison, The Worm Ouroboros (1922)
My own verses were of this gnomic character. I had dreamed that I was
taking a cruise along the west coast of Italy. The principal stops were
Cologne, Brescia, Rome and Santiago. We were playing a game like bouts
rimés with very peculiar conditions, of which one was that the words
"the mandrake shrieks" were to appear in every poem. With enormous
labor, but, as it seemed to me, great brilliance, I produced the
following stanza; then decided to leave the ship and go back to Paris,
because I was afraid I should fall down in the contest by not having
time enough to supply another stanza equally remarkable:
The human heart is full of leaks;
The human head is full of vapors.
The crows disband; the mandrake shrieks;
The scandal was in all the papers.
Some crows were actually making a racket and had evidently penetrated my
dream without being able to wake me.
Edmund Wilson, "Dream Poetry" (1937) in The Shores of Light: A Literary
Chronicle of the Twenties and Thirties
Where mandrakes, crying from the moonless fen,
Told how a witch, with eyes of owl or bat,
Found, and each root maleficently fat
Pulled for her waiting cauldron, on my ken
Upstole, escaping to the world of men,
A vapor as of some infernal vat;
Across the stars it clomb, and caught thereat
As if their bright regard to veil again.
Clark Ashton Smith, "Averted Malefice"
We have seen the crystal
Of dead Medusa's tears.
We have seen the undines
That wane in stagnant weirs,
And mandrakes madly dancing
By black, blood-swollen meres.
Clark Ashton Smith, "Nyctalops"
The worshipper of vegetables, standing beneath his holy marrow nailed in
four places to the wall, heard the cry come down from the heights. A
mandrake cried on Cader.
Dylan Thomas, "The School for Witches" (1936)
ESTRAGON: What about hanging ourselves?
VLADIMIR: Hmm. It'd give us an erection.
ESTRAGON: (highly excited). An erection!
VLADIMIR: With all that follows. Where it falls mandrakes grow. That's
why they shriek when you pull them up. Did you not know that?
ESTRAGON: Let's hang ourselves immediately!
Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot: A Tragicomedy in 2 Acts (1948)
Deep in thought, Mazirian the Magician walked his garden. Trees fruited
with many intoxications overhung his path, and flowers bowed
obsequiously as he passed. An inch above the ground, dull as agates, the
eyes of mandrakes followed the tread of his black-slippered feet.
Jack Vance, "Mazirian the Magician" in The Dying Earth (1950)
Black Yen ejaculates over the salt marshes where nothing grows not even
a mandrake. . . .
William S. Burroughs, Naked Lunch (1955-59; ellipsis in original)
This book spill off the page in all directions, kaleidoscope of vistas,
medley of tunes and street noises, farts and riot yipes and the slamming
steel shutters of commerce, screams of pain and pathos and screams plain
pathic, copulating cats and outraged squawk of the displaced bull head,
prophetic mutterings of brujo in nutmeg trances, snapping necks and
screaming mandrakes, sigh of orgasm, heroin silent as dawn in the
thirsty cells, Radio Cairo screaming like a berserk tobacco auction, and
flutes of Ramadan fanning the sick junky like a gentle lush worker in
the grey subway dawn feeling with delicate fingers for the green folding
crackle. . . .
William S. Burroughs, Naked Lunch (1955-59; ellipsis in original)
"Shit -- Uranian shit -- That's what my human dogs eat -- And I like to
rub their nose in it -- Beauty -- Poetry -- Space -- What good is all
that to me? If I don't get the image fix I'm in the ovens—You
understand? -- All the pain and hate images come loose -- You understand
that you dumb hick? I'm finished but your eyes still pop out -- Naked
candy of adolescent image Panama -- Who look out different? -- Cook you
all down to decorticated mandrake --"
William S. Burroughs, Nova Express (1961-63)
Chris has set up a stone altar in the old gymnasium with candles and
incense burners, a crystal skull, a phallic doll carved from a mandrake
root, and a shrunken head from Ecuador.
William S. Burroughs, The Place of Dead Roads (1977-83)
Kim feels something stir and stretch in his head as horns sprout. . . .
He writhes in agony, in bone-wrenching spasms, as a blaze of silver
light flares out from his eyes in a flash that blows out the candles on
the altar. The crystal skull lights up with lambent blue fire, the
shrunken head gasps out a putrid spicy breath, the mandrake screams:
IA KINGU IA LELAL IA AXAAAAAAAAA
William S. Burroughs, The Place of Dead Roads (1977-83; ellipsis in
original)
At last, lying one afternoon spread-eagled at his ease in the sun, at
the edge of one of the ancient Plague towns he becomes a cross himself,
a crossroads, a living intersection where the judges have come to set up
a gibbet for a common criminal who is to be hanged at noon. Black hounds
and fanged little hunters slick as weasels, dogs whose breeds have been
lost for 700 years, chase a female in heat as the spectators gather,
it's the fourth hanging this spring and not much spectacle here except
that this one, dreaming at the last instant of who can say what lifted
smock, what fat-haunched gnädige Frau Death may have come sashaying in
as, gets an erection, a tremendous darkpurple swelling, and just as his
neck breaks, he actually comes in his ragged loin-wrapping creamy as the
skin of a saint under the purple cloak of Lent, and one drop of sperm
succeeds in rolling, dripping hair to hair down the dead leg, all the
way down, off the edge of the crusted bare foot, drips to earth at the
exact center of the crossroad where, in the workings of the night, it
changes into a mandrake root. Next Friday, at dawn, the Magician, his
own moving Heiligenschein rippling infrared to ultraviolet in spectral
rings around his shadow over the dewy grass, comes with his dog, a
coal-black dog who hasn't been fed for a few days. The Magician digs
carefully all around the precious root till it's held only by the finest
root-hairs -- ties it to the tail of his black dog, stops his own ears
with wax then comes out with a piece of bread to lure the unfed dog
rrrowf! dog lunges for bread, root is torn up and lets loose its
piercing and fatal scream. The dog drops dead before he's halfway to
breakfast, his holylight freezes and fades in the million dewdrops.
Magician takes the root tenderly home, dresses it in a little white
outfit and leaves money with it overnight: in the morning the cash has
multiplied tenfold.
Thomas Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow (1973)
After her work was done, Himlat gave Elizabeth a mandrake root that
looked like a little man. On the neck of the mandrake man she had
embedded two small datura flowers good for telling the future. Himlat
told Elizabeth to keep her mandrake safe until the time her first
woman's blood came. Then she should soak the root in her first blood
until the root was sated with it. After that, she should let him dry
under the full moon. The power of that doll would be so awesome that a
few simple words of Elizabeth's would cause the doll to bring her
whatever she wished.
Andrei Codrescu, The Blood Countess (1995)
I had a big black dog. You pull the mandrake from the ground -- the
scream of the root kills the hound. You can tell the potency of the root
by the volume of the scream. The dog's body I sell to a taco place -- no
questions asked.
Don Webb, "Metamorphosis No. 40" in Uncle Ovid's Exercise Book (1988)
"As our Mandrakes are only seedlings, their cries won't kill yet," she
said calmly as though she'd just done nothing more exciting than water a
begonia. "However, they will knock you out for several hours, and as I'm
sure none of you want to miss your first day back, make sure your
earmuffs are securely in place while you work. I will attract your
attention when it is time to pack up."
J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (1998)
--
Dan Clore
My collected fiction, _The Unspeakable and Others_:
http://tinyurl.com/2gcoqt
Lord Weÿrdgliffe & Necronomicon Page:
http://tinyurl.com/292yz9
News & Views for Anarchists & Activists:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/smygo
"Tho-ag in Zhi-gyu slept seven Khorlo. Zodmanas
zhiba. All Nyug bosom. Konch-hog not; Thyan-Kam
not; Lha-Chohan not; Tenbrel Chugnyi not;
Dharmakaya ceased; Tgenchang not become; Barnang
and Ssa in Ngovonyidj; alone Tho-og Yinsin in
night of Sun-chan and Yong-grub (Parinishpanna),
&c., &c.,"
-- The Book of Dzyan.
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