The Museum of Witchcraft

Mandrakes

The museum shows a collection of carved mandrake roots on loan from the family of the late Bob Richel of Amsterdam.

The mandrake, from ancient times, has been closely associated with magic and has been valued as an aphrodisiac, fertility drug and as a powerful anaesthetic. In the Bible, Rachel used its fruit to help her to conceive Joseph. This display has been added to the Museum after frequent requests from our visitors.

Mandrake should be treated with the greatest reverence. Theophrastus of Lesbos, in the 4th century BC, says that anyone digging up the plant should draw three circles round it with a sword, face west, and dance around it chanting about love.

The historian Josephus warned that it would kill anyone who uprooted it. One way round this problem was to tie a dog to the plant and use him to pull it up. Medieval manuscripts depict the mandrake root as being human in shape, and tell how the terrible scream of mandrake when uprooted would strike the hearer dead.

In the Middle Ages it was used by medieval magicians as an incense for summoning demons. Mandrake contains chemicals - tropane alkaloids - that are known to have hallucinogenic effects.

It was thought that mandrakes sprang up beneath gallows, with the root taking on the shape of the person who'd been hanged.

Bob Richel's mandrakes also exude a humorous energy as well as being a symbol of occult male sexual energy. Their beautifully made coffins add a darker and more mysterious quality, and presumably relate to ideas of spiritual transformation and rebirth.

The 17th century philosopher Rist describes a mandrake root kept in a coffin, but in the case of Rist's example it is linked to the idea that the mandrake took its life force from a hanged criminal.