Nuevos datos para una historia de la mandrágora (Mandragora spp.) en la tradición mágica árabo-islámica (ss. X-XVII)

Indalecio Lozano-Cámara

doi:10.3989/alqantara.2025.863

Authors

Indalecio Lozano-Cámara Universidad de Granada https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5745-5626

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.3989/alqantara.2025.863

Keywords:

Mandrake, Mandragora spp., sīmiyāʾ, Arab-Islamicate magic, white magic, aphrodisiacs, female fertility, generation of animal and plant life, hallucinogens

Abstract

The general aim of this article is to provide new data for the knowledge of the history of the mandrake (Mandragora spp.) in the Arab-Islamicate magical tradition between the 10th and 17th centuries. More specifically, it investigates some of the myths and magical beliefs about the plant that were in circulation in classical Arab-Islamicate civilization as well as its uses in white or natural magic (al-sīmiyāʾ) operations connected to these beliefs. Specifically, it discusses mandrake’s connections with eroticism and female fertility, its supposed magical power to artificially generate animal and plant life, and its use to provoke illusions and hallucinations. There are also magical beliefs about the mandrake’s supposed ability to glow in the dark at night and that it only grows in solitary places away from people. As with other magical beliefs about the plant in the Arab-Islamicate tradition, the superstitions and myths studied here have their roots in pre-Islamic Greco-Latin and Chaldean-Babylonian magical traditions. On the other hand, they show close parallels with magical beliefs about mandrakes in other civilizations and cultural traditions. The results of this research have been obtained by consulting a significant number of Arabic sources, both Eastern and Maghrebi and Andalusian, of different types (botanical, agronomic, medical-pharmacological, magical), although there are many others (travel literature, legal treatises, literature and poetry, geography, other works of magic not consulted) that possibly contain very relevant information for our knowledge of the history of the mandrake in the Arabic-Islamic magical tradition. Consequently, the results presented here should be considered as tentative, and this article itself as an ongoing and therefore open and unfinished research.

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