The gate of the year

Illustration from a manuscript of the VII century of the work De Materia Medica, by the Greek physician Dioscorides (I century A.D.), actually in the National Library of Naples (Cod. Gr. 1). The mandrake plant (genus Mandragora) is represented in this picture, to which aphrodisiac qualities have been attribute since Antiquity and which was employed also against sterility. A reference to the plant (called in Hebrew duda’im, “love plant”) can be found in the Old Testament (Genesis, 30, 14-16). According to a widespread belief, the plant, when uprooted, gave a terrible shriek, which could kill the person who had gathered it (a mention of this belief is in Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, act IV, scene III). The particular shape of the root suggests an anthropomorphic feature, an homunculus. Since Antiquity the pharmacological and anesthetic proprieties of the plant were well known, and it was employed in surgery since the IX century. A medieval tradition associated the utilization of an ointment extracted from the mandrake root with the belief in the witches’ flight to the Sabbath. According to the Spanish humanist of the XVI century Andrés Laguna, le hallucinogenic properties of the plant produced, in the subjects that employed it, the delusion of being able to travel in flight and to see marvelous things, explaining in this way the phenomena associated with the Sabbath of the witches. The same theory has been recently reformulated by anthropologist Michael J. Harner, who maintains that most of the phenomena, described in the documents about medieval and modern witchcraft, relative to magical flights and animal transformations, were attributable to the utilization of plants belonging to the family Solanaceae, including mandrake, belladonna and henbane, which contain substances having powerful hallucinogenic effects (Harner 1973).

[Image: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:NaplesDioscuridesMandrake.jpg]




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Illustration from a manuscript of the VII century of the work De Materia Medica, by the Greek physician Dioscorides (I century A.D.), actually in the National Library of Naples (Cod. Gr. 1). The mandrake plant (genus Mandragora) is represented in this picture, to which aphrodisiac qualities have been attribute since Antiquity and which was employed also against sterility. A reference to the plant (called in Hebrew duda’im, “love plant”) can be found in the Old Testament (Genesis, 30, 14-16). According to a widespread belief, the plant, when uprooted, gave a terrible shriek, which could kill the person who had gathered it (a mention of this belief is in Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, act IV, scene III). The particular shape of the root suggests an anthropomorphic feature, an homunculus. Since Antiquity the pharmacological and anesthetic proprieties of the plant were well known, and it was employed in surgery since the IX century. A medieval tradition associated the utilization of an ointment extracted from the mandrake root with the belief in the witches’ flight to the Sabbath. According to the Spanish humanist of the XVI century Andrés Laguna, le hallucinogenic properties of the plant produced, in the subjects that employed it, the delusion of being able to travel in flight and to see marvelous things, explaining in this way the phenomena associated with the Sabbath of the witches. The same theory has been recently reformulated by anthropologist Michael J. Harner, who maintains that most of the phenomena, described in the documents about medieval and modern witchcraft, relative to magical flights and animal transformations, were attributable to the utilization of plants belonging to the family Solanaceae, including mandrake, belladonna and henbane, which contain substances having powerful hallucinogenic effects (Harner 1973). [Image: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:NaplesDioscuridesMandrake.jpg]