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MANDRAKE
Narcotic; sedative; analgesic; core energy; plant person; hidden root.
Pain and suffering occurs when we identify with the physical body. Mandrake takes awareness elsewhere in the self (though the body is as much the self as the non-physical self).
Dive beneath the surface experience, the real substance is below, out of sight.
External forms come and go, reflecting aspects of the constant, underlying awareness. Plant, tree, animal, human: moving from one to another is like looking from different windows in the same house.
Do not identify too closely with who and what you believe you are. Experiences modify, negate, reinforce our position.
Everyone is capable of anything, given the right circumstances.
Everyone is capable of being anything, given the right circumstances.
Potential, hidden resources, versatility.
Do not mistake ‘personality’ as ‘soul’.
Skill: Melting
Failing: Certainty
Lesson: Adaptability
Laugh,
Walk away.
The tyranny of certitude
Will always fail.
The root withers in light.
The leaf withers in darkness.
Achieve the right place,
Satisfied.
Mandrake (Mandragora officinarum), is the most renowned of the European magical plants. It grows across the warmer parts of Southern Europe, Western Asia and the Himalayas. A stemless plant putting out a dome of large, wrinkled leaves in the centre of which green, blue or purplish bell-flowers appear in early spring. In May these ripen to form succulent yellow berries. It is the long anthropomorphic root that is symbolically and magically most active, containing hyocyamine, scopolamine as well as atropine and other related groups. Like all Solanaceae, mandrake is a powerful plant where the dosage is crucial. Traditionally used as an analgesic and anaesthetic, a birthing herb, sleep-inducing, visionary and fatal in large doses.