Thus Suffolk alleging the futility of bad language in apology for the backwardness in its use with which he has just been reproached by the ungentle queen of Henry VI., exclaims,
Would curses kill, as doth the mandrake’s groan, I would invent as bitter-searching terms, As curst, as harsh, and horrible to hear, Deliver’d strongly through my fixed teeth, With full as many signs of deadly hate, As lean-fac’d Envy in her loathsome cave.
And poor Juliet enumerates among the horrors of the charnel-house,
Shrieks like mandrakes’ torn out of the earth, That living mortals hearing them, run mad.
The persuasion was, moreover, included amongst the Vulgar Errors gravely combated by Sir Thomas Browne.
Mandragora, then, is the most ancient and the most widely famous of all magic herbs; and the old conjecture is at least a plausible one that from its exclusive possession were derived the evil powers employed to the detriment of her wind-borne guests by the inhospitable daughter of Perse.
Moly, on the other hand, must be sought for amongst the herbaceous antidotes of fable. Perhaps the best known of these is the plant repugnant to the fine senses of Horace, and equally abominable to the nostrils of Elizabethan gallants. The name of garlic in Sanskrit signifies ‘slayer of monsters.’ Juvenal ridiculed the Egyptians for paying it reverence as a divinity.
Porrum et cepe nefas violare ac frangere morsu. O sanctas gentes, quibus hæc nascuntur in hortis Numina!
The Eddic valkyr, Sigurdrifa, sang of its unassailable virtue. As a sure preservative from witchcraft it was, by mediæval Teutons, infused in the drink of cattle and horses, hung up in lonely shepherds’ huts, and buried under thresholds. It was laid on beds against nightmare: planted on cottage roofs to keep off lightning: it cured the poisoned bites of reptiles: it was eaten to avert the evil effects of digging hellebore; while, in Cuba, immunity from jaundice was secured by wearing, during thirteen days, a collar consisting of thirteen cloves of garlic, and throwing it away at a cross-road, without looking behind, at midnight on the expiration of that term. The occult properties of this savoury root originated, no doubt, as M. Hehn conceives,[308] in its pungent taste and smell. Substances strongly impressive to the senses are apt to acquire the reputation of being distasteful to ‘spirits of vile sort.’ Witness sulphur, employed from of old, in ceremonial purification. But this may have been owing to its association, through the ‘sulphurous’ smell of ozone, with the sacred thunder-bolt.