#mandragora

An unusual sample of Mandragora officinarum. I found it uprooted on the forest floor, roots wriggling like as if they were appendages. Even odder perhaps, is it's single unblinking eye. I didn't even know these plants grew in this part of the world.

I recently got back into FFXI so of course... I had to draw lil guys 🙂‍↕️ (these will be made into stickers and will be up in my store Soon™️)

This medieval manuscript illumination shows a pair of mandrake roots depicted as humanoid figures with leaves sprouting from their heads - because when your taproot naturally forks into something vaguely person-shaped, medieval people assumed you were basically a tiny earth demon. According to folklore, pulling up a mandrake root would cause it to scream and kill anyone who heard it, so people tied the roots to dogs and made the animals pull them from the soil, sacrificing the dog to harvest the plant. This is either brilliant problem-solving or proof that medieval humans had a deeply twisted relationship with both botany and pets. The first-century Greek physician Dioscorides was among the first to document mandrake as an anesthetic for surgery, and it remained Europe's primary anesthetic until ether was discovered in the 19th century. The plant contains hallucinogenic tropane alkaloids that make it genuinely medicinal in small doses and genuinely deadly in large ones, which means medieval physicians had to know the exact threshold between "you're asleep for surgery" and "you're just asleep forever." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mandrake

i kinda think if she was actually bi this wouldnt be considered as impressive a power to ancient dudes

Thank you!!! ❤️❤️