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I mean, the magicians want somebody whom they can't just call back direct translation of the body usually messes up the brain patterns enough to make the thinkers hard to use, especially with the sky falling. So they get his name and some hold on his soul and then rebuild his body around a mandrake root. They bind his soul into that, and in some ways he's almost human.
Of further plants related to his Satanic majesty is the clematis, termed "devil's thread," the toad-flax is his ribbon, the indigo his dye, while the scandix forms his darning-needles. The tritoma, with its brilliant red blossom, is familiar in most localities as the "devil's poker," and the ground ivy has been nicknamed the "devil's candlestick," the mandrake supplying his candle.
I agreed to find ways to return you to your own world intact, and you shall be returned." For a moment, the thickness seemed to relax, and Hanson choked a few words out through it. "What's the world of a mandrake-man, Sather Karf? A mandrake swamp?" "For a mandrake-man, yes. But not for you." There was something like amusement in the old man's voice. "I never said you were a mandrake-man.
He could not tear himself away from his house, it was like tearing up the shrieking mandrake by the root, almost death itself. Now we walk in and out of our brick boxes unconcerned whether we live in this villa or that, here or yonder. Dark beams inlaid in the walls support the gables; heavier timber, placed horizontally, forms, as it were, the foundation of the first floor.
He passed ropes around the corners until the mandrake turned and rigidly marched away, the blows of his whip falling metronome-like on the slaves he passed. "Thanks," Hanson said "I wonder what it's like, being a true mandrake?" "Depends," the slave said easily. He was obviously more intelligent than most, and better at conserving himself. "Some mandrake-men are real.
"I last night lay all alone On the ground, to hear the mandrake groan; And plucked him up, though he grew full low, And, as I had done, the cock did crow." We have already incidentally spoken of the vervain, St. John's wort, elder, and rue as antagonistic to witchcraft, but to these may be added many other well-known plants, such as the juniper, mistletoe, and blackthorn.
The Good Samaritan, by the same artist, is a large engraving on stone: an incongruous medley of palms, sorbs and oaks grown together, heedless of seasons and climates, peopled with monkeys and owls, covered with old stumps as misshapen as the roots of the mandrake; then a magical forest, cut in the center near a glade through which a stream can be seen far away, behind a camel and the Samaritan group; then an elfin town appearing on the horizon of an exotic sky dotted with birds and covered with masses of fleecy clouds.
I can hear the cry as I sit here writing; my memory rehearses it; it was one of the most frightful, blood-curdling, hellish sounds I ever endured; and the scene was on the Wicklow hills in Ireland. The narcotic plant, the mandrake, is also credited with groaning, though I cannot say I have ever heard it.
There is no one but Dickens who has a style that can drag these things into light. His style shrieks sometimes like a ghoul tugging at the roots of a mandrake. At other times it wails like a lost soul. At other times it mutters, and whimpers, and pipes in its throat, like an old man blinking at the moon. At other times it roars and thunders like ten thousand drunken devils.
Anthony came to him one morning, thinking to please him, and brought him a root that he had bought from a travelling pedlar just outside the gateway. "This is a mandrake root, your Grace; I heard you speak of it the other day." The Archbishop took it, smiling, felt it carefully, peered at it a minute or two. "No, my son," he said, "I fear you have met a knave.
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