The Greek physician Dioscorides, who served as a surgeon in the army of the Roman Emperor Nero, mentions, in his Materia Medica, mandrake as being anciently considered efficacious in love philtres. He also alludes to the practice in his own days, when a concoction of the root of mandrake steeped in wine was judged to be a favorable love-potion.
In the furious and unceasing search for some product of the earth, some fabricated distillation, some suddenly and miraculously discovered triumphant panacea that would efficaciously induce virile activity, the ancients grasped at any object that, by its mere outward and physical conformation, might conceivably have some cryptic, symbolic association with genital resemblances, and hence with amatory functions.
Such a resemblance was readily and gratefully found in the mandrake. The mandrake, even in Biblical times, was credited with unique properties, not least, with amatory stimulation.
Mandrake, or mandragore, which is botanically mandragora, mandragora officinarum, is a tuber with purple flowers, dark-leaved. It is native to Palestine, and hence has a Hebrew name, mentioned in Biblical literature. It is called there dudaim, an expression associated etymologically with love.
The peculiarity of mandrake is that it often assumes a human shape, the limbs in particular being formed like human extremities.
From the earliest literary eras mandrake was a customary ingredient in love-potions. Circe, the sorceress who appears in Homer’s Odyssey, was traditionally an adept in concocting brews with mandrake infusions. So intimately was her name linked with this man-shaped plant, that it became known as Circe’s plant.
As later Biblical confirmation of the significance of mandrake, the strange and moving episode of Jacob and Rachel and the employment of the very effective mandrake may be mentioned.
There is a further suggestion of its use in the Song of Songs.
The Greeks and the Romans likewise were acquainted with mandrake and its virtues. The Greeks considered the root an amatory excitant, and, by association, called Aphrodite, who presided over amatory functions, Mandragoritis, She of the Mandrake. Plutarch, the Greek philosopher and biographer, alludes to the plant and its resemblance to human genitalia. In his monumental encyclopedia, the Natural History, the Roman Pliny the Elder similarly dwells on this likeness, and adds that when a mandrake root that has grown into male genital form is found, it will unquestionably secure feminine love.