Without interruption the tradition of the mandrake lingered through the centuries. Old chroniclers allude to it. Woodcuts and illustrations in medieval vellum-bound folios present readers with the horrifyingly semi-human form of the plant. Sinister and abhorrent legends have grown up around the plant, many of them associated with death, gibbets, hangings, thieves.
Medieval folklore trusted to the consumption of the root as a reliable help in conception. This belief is also confirmed by a seventeenth century traveler. Sorcerers and alchemists and other occult practitioners concocted their elixirs with the aid of mandrake.
The seventeenth century English herbalist, John Gerarde, refers to mandrake in his Herball or General Historie of Plantes, and to its use in conception, particularly in the case of barrenness. He merely touches on its employment in amatory practices, but he is repulsed by the prurient and salacious nature of these devices.
In these days, too, mandrake evidently has not been neglected as a possible invigorating agent. In Greece and in Italy, folk beliefs in the plant still survive, and are put into active practice.
Sexual and procreative capacity was such a primal, essential factor in the old religious cults that, in classical mythology, Greek and Roman, and in Egyptian and Asian cults as well, the bull, the most potent among animals, was the ceremonial and pictorial symbol of this cosmic power. The bull, in fact, was equated with divinity. The processional sacrifice among the Romans, the taurobolium, highlighted the preeminence and the reverence due to the bull. In Egypt, he appears as Apis, the bull-god. He is also present in the Mithraic cult, and Mithra himself is sculpturally represented as holding a bull and cutting its throat. The bull was an expiatory sacrifice among the Germanic tribes, and also among the Northmen. In the Orient, too, the bull is sacred among the Japanese. Cows, also, have been no less venerated among the Greeks, the Hebrews, and the Hindus.
An ancient Egyptian record, the Doulaq Papyrus, reveals, in the translation by the famous Egyptologist Sir William Flinders Petrie, how even in antiquity sexual passion was channeled, promoted, and controlled: and how the cult of money and the phallic cult often went hand in hand and were intimately linked together. So that religious prostitution, the sacred erotic rites of pagan worship, transcended the common activities of the public prostitute and assumed a hieratic, reverential status.
This status is stressed and confirmed in the story of the sacred prostitute or hierodule Thubui, who was approached by Setna-Khamois, son of the Egyptian Pharaoh Usimares. In the papyrus the lavish richness of the hierodule’s apartment is described, and the bloody conditions she exacts from her passionate prospective lover.