Iago: Look where he comes. Not poppy nor mandragora
Nor all the drowsy syrups of the world
Shall ever medicine thee to that sweet sleep
Which thou owedst yesterday.
Othello, III.3.379-382
I.
The more I read and write about Pokémon, the more I’m convinced that one of its great strengths comes from the limited space — often a literally small space, in the case of Game Boy screens and trading cards — given to designers, artists and writers, which forced a virtuous clarification. As I wrote in a previous post on the development of the original games, the Game Boy’s technical limitations led to Pokémon designs with the immediacy and legibility of hieroglyphics. Something similar occurred with the Pokédex entries and trading card flavor texts, whose authors had to create a vivid, evocative and even mythical image in one or two sentences.
The Base Set Oddish trading card, as seen above, includes the following flavor text, taken from the Red and Blue Pokédex entry: “During the day, it keeps its face buried in the ground. At night, it wanders around sowing its seeds.” These two sentences, along with Keiji Kinebuchi’s computer graphics illustration, provided enough fuel for my young mind to imagine a moonlit garden springing to life, row by row. A more detailed description would not have left as much room for the imagination.
Pokédex entries on Oddish focus on two aspects: its ability to walk and its scream when pulled out of the ground. (Entries on its evolved forms Gloom and Vileplume reflect those creatures’ real-world inspiration, the notoriously foul-smelling Rafflesia flower, and thus focus on secretions, odors and toxic pollen.)
The former is nothing unique in the world of Pokémon. The original 151 include a number of walking plants or hybrid plant-animals, including the Bulbasaur family, Exeggcutor and Tangela, which inexplicably wears red shoes. Its scream, on the other hand, points back to a plant, both real and mythical, which was planted in the human imagination many centuries ago and has never been fully uprooted.
And with it to a sister genre of the bestiary which, like the bestiary itself, has refused to fully die.
II.
The bestiary was not the only medieval and Renaissance European book that combined classical learning, religious symbolism, folklore and early science into an imaginative, lavishly illustrated catalogue of the nonhuman world. The medieval herbal, omnipresent in both the European and Arab worlds, drew its text from the first century Greek doctor Pedanios Dioscorides’ De Materia Medica with additional influences from Pliny the Elder’s Naturalis Historia and the fourth century Pseudo-Apuleius Herbarius (once erroneously attributed to the author of The Golden Ass.)
“A typical chapter from a herbal treatise,” Minta Collins writes in Medieval Herbals: The Illustrative Tradition,
names the plant, gives a list of synonyms, describes its characteristics, its distribution and its habitat, reports what earlier authors have said about it, its medical properties, how it should be gathered and prepared, lists recipes for medicines made from it, or lists the cures it is used for, and gives any contra-indications.
These descriptions, like those of the bestiary, left more room for imagination and superstition than modern science. For instance, a British herbal — which I read in Ann van Arsdall’s modern translation — includes herbal remedies for ailments such as the evil eye, various enchantments, and demonic possession. Like the bestiary, the medieval and early modern herbal existed at the intersection of what we would now consider very separate disciplines, in this case medicine, magic, botany, religious worship and gardening advice.
As mentioned much earlier in this series, we continue to use bestiary phrases such as ‘lick into shape’ in our modern English. The herbal has also exerted a cultural influence over the centuries. For example, John Lelamour’s 1373 English-language herbal includes the first recorded use of many now-everyday words, including ‘airy,’ ‘cake,’ ‘cold’ (in the sense of the common cold), ‘female,’ ‘knob,’ ‘migraine,’ ‘purge’ and ‘receive.’
In his 2019 PhD dissertation Shakespeare and the Botanic Revolution, Harry Ford argues that the Bard himself drew on Renaissance herbals for plant imagery in his plays and poems, citing specific titles — with their wonderfully early modern English spelling — such as Henrie Lyte’s The Niewe Herball, or Historie of Plantes (1578) and John Gerard’s Herball, or Generall Historie of Plantes (1598).
In a sense, the herbal as a genre has never quite disappeared. At the time of this writing, for example, I can go out to my local library and check out The Healing Garden: Cultivating & Handcrafting Herbal Remedies (2022) by Juliet Blankespoor, The Herbal Apothecary: 100 Medicinal Herbs and How to Use Them (2016) by J.J. Pursell or the Encyclopedia of Herbal Medicine (2023) by Andrew Chevallier. As multiple sources I’ve read argue, these books represent only some of the most recent works in an unbroken, millennia-long tradition of cataloguing the medicinal uses of plants.
The rest of this post will focus on Oddish’s ancestor, perhaps the strangest denizen of the medieval herbal. Oddish is just one of many descendants of the mythical mandrake or mandragora and has relatives in Harry Potter, World of Warcraft, the Forgotten Realms setting of Dungeons & Dragons and Final Fantasy XV. We will start with the original.
III.
Like the salamander, which exists in quite different forms in the scientific and mythical worlds, the mandrake is first and foremost a real-world organism, or in this case a handful of related species in the genus Mandragora, part of the Solanaceae (nightshade) family.
Two aspects of these plants serve as magnets for the many, many supernatural aspects attributed to them by the human imagination over multiple millennia. First, like many of its relatives in the nightshade family, mandrakes contain potent alkaloid toxins which cause a variety of symptoms in humans, including dry mouth, tachycardia, nausea, vertigo and hallucinations.
Second, as seen in the illustration above, mandrake roots bear a striking resemblance to the human body, especially to its lower half. This resemblance, fueling the sympathetic magical thinking of ‘like produces like,’ probably led to the mandrake’s identification as an aphrodisiac and fertility drug. It was far from alone in this ‘Doctrine of signatures;’ walnuts’ resemblance to the brain meant that they were said to heal the brain, as liverworts were said to heal the liver.
Thus the mandrake’s very first literary appearance comes in Genesis chapter 30, in which the childless Rachel wishes to use mandrakes (דודאים, dudaim, literally “love plants”) as a fertility drug. The mandrake has consistently kept this association with fertility at least into the second half of the 20th century. Deep Purple’s 1968 debut album, for instance, includes the song “Mandrake Root,” with the following (rather inelegant) lyrics about the plant’s aphrodisiac effects:
I've got a mandrake root
It's some thunder in my brain
I feed it to my babe
She thunders just the same
Food of love sets her flame.
Falstaff refers to the mandrake-as-aphrodisiac twice in Henry IV, Part 2. In (III.2), for instance, he recalls the seemingly upstanding Justice Shallow’s licentious youth, when he was “lecherous as a monkey/and the whores called him ‘mandrake.’” Shakespeare’s contemporary John Donne twists the concept of mandrake as fertility drug in one of his most famous poems, “Song: Go and Catch a Falling Star,” placing “get with child a mandrake root” alongside other impossible tasks like catching falling stars and finding “where all past years are.”
Of course, herbal aphrodisiacs are not a great fit for a children’s Nintendo game, so this aspect of the mandrake was dropped. As we’ve seen in multiple previous posts, the process of Pokémonization, like that of Disneyfication, includes the sanding off of rough edges.
Oddish drops another key aspect of medieval and early modern mandrake folklore, due in this case to its grisliness rather than its suggestivity. Due perhaps to a confusion between mandragora and the French phrase main de gloire, ‘hand of glory,’ English and German folklore identified the mandrake as having a particular affinity for the soil under the gallows. According to some sources, mandrakes grow not from seeds but from the dripping blood — or other bodily fluids — of hanged men.
(The hand of glory, the preserved hand of a hanged man said to possess strange powers, has generated a wealth of superstition and cultural reference simply too rich and vast for me to survey here. Perhaps I’ll get around to it if Game Freak ever designs a severed hand Pokémon.)
On the other hand, Oddish does retain much of its ancestor’s oddness: its ability to walk around, to poison, to alter consciousness and, of course, to scream.
IV.
If you’re around my age, your initial encounter with the mandrake probably came in chapter six of Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, where Harry and his herbology classmates pull mandrakes out of the ground while wearing earmuffs to protect themselves from their cries.
The mythical mandrake’s shriek — variously said to cause either instant death or insanity — had become one of its most familiar aspects by the early modern period and continues to inform its representations in modern fantasy media. Perhaps the second most familiar example comes in Romeo and Juliet (IV.3), during Juliet’s soliloquy on her mounting dread of taking Friar Laurence’s sleeping potion and playing dead in her family’s ancestral tomb. She imagines herself alone in the tomb and subject to a variety of terrors, including “shrieks like mandrakes’ torn out of earth/that living mortals, hearing them, run mad.” (Another Shakespeare character, Suffolk in Henry VI, Part 2, wishes that his own harsh words could have a mandrake-like effect on his enemies (III.2).)
Strangely enough, Game Freak has never given Oddish an attack corresponding to its mandrake’s shriek, which is a missed opportunity. Even in the original games, other Pokémon use their various voices for a handful of sonic attacks: Clefairy, Jigglypuff et al send their opponents to sleep with Sing; Vulpix, Growlithe, their evolutions and Aerodactyl can scare wild Pokémon away with Roar; dozens of creatures can use Growl to lower their opponents’ attack. 28 Pokémon can learn the defense-lowering attack Screetch, the closest in-game analogue to Oddish’s shriek, but neither Oddish nor either of its evolved forms are one of them.
Instead, Oddish has a fairly basic arsenal in the original games: three damage-dealing Grass-type attacks, the Poison-type Acid attack and three incapacitating/status-changing moves, PoisonPowder, Stun Spore and Sleep Powder. While none of the last three attacks are unique to Oddish (Bellsprout and its evolved forms can learn all of them), Oddish can be said to have truly inherited them from its particular mythical ancestor. In medieval and early modern folklore, the mandrake was both medicine and poison, a natural and supernatural mind-altering substance.
V.
I began this post with a quote from Othello, with Iago’s gloating that even the sleep-inducing mandrake is insufficient against the worries — the products of his own scheming — that will keep Othello up at night. This is not the only use of mandrake as a sleeping aid in the Shakespearean canon, as Cleopatra asks her servant Charmian for mandragora “That I might sleep away this great gap of time/My Antony is away” (I.5). Shakespeare’s reference to the mandrake as a sleeping aid were undoubtedly drawn from then-contemporary medicine.
In his Niewe Herball, published two years before Shakespeare’s birth, William Turner identifies the mandrake as a powerful soporific while also warning the reader that “thys herbe diverse wayes taken is very jepardus for a man and may kill hym if he eat or drynk it out of measure and have no remedy from it” (quoted in Grieve’s A Modern Herbal). In the same passage Turner describes a mandrake overdose resulting in what we would now call a coma.
The mandrake root was much more than the early modern equivalent of Ambien or Lunesta. Anne Van Arsdall’s herbal translation (Medieval Herbal Remedies: The Old English Herbarium and Anglo-Saxon Medicine) credits the mandrake as a potent cure for insomnia, earache, gout and nervous spasms, as well as for two more supernatural ailments:
For insanity, that is, for possession by devils, take three pennies’ weight from the body of the mandrake plant and give it to drink as easily as the person is able in warm water. He will be quickly cured… If anyone perceives any grievous evil in the home, take the mandrake plant to the center of the house — as much as one has of it — and it will expel all the evil.
No wonder that, as Grieve writes in A Modern Herbal, the early modern England demand for mandrakes greatly exceeded the supply, encouraging enterprising herbalist to carve counterfeit mandrake roots out of bryony roots. (These pseudo-mandrakes were embellished to look even more humanlike than the genuine article.)
Mandrakes were associated with witchcraft as well as with medicine. In one of his court masques, The Masque of Queens, Shakespeare’s contemporary and eulogizer Ben Jonson has a witch sing “I lay last night all alone/O’the ground, to heare the mandrake grone.” According to no less than Francis Bacon, witches make their broomsticks fly by smearing them with an ointment made of mandrakes, other nightshades, and fat from the corpses of children.
Oddish’s original Japanese name, Nazonokusa, then, is à propos here — the mandrake is an enigmatic herb, both medicine and poison, both natural and supernatural, straddling the worlds of herbal remedies and witchcraft with its strangely humanlike legs.
As I write this most I find myself wondering again and again how the mandrake root — even if it is a potent hallucinogen — attracted so many supernatural aspects, how it became not just a miracle cure, not just a witch’s ingredient, not just a protection against evil, not just a fertility drug but all of the above and also a little walking human-shaped creature that will scream its head off and possibly kill you or take your sanity if you pull it out of the ground.
One thought occurs to me.
As a child, you were probably warned against touching or tasting random wild mushrooms because poisonous mushrooms are very real and very toxic. You were likely warned about poison ivy while hiking. In a world much closer to the forest and its poisons than our own, did the instantly memorable shrieking mandrake become a symbol or synecdoche for the dangers of touching or tasting unfamiliar plants the way that the ghost or monster under the bed came to embody the dangers of the night and the Little Red Riding Hood wolf came to embody the dangers of venturing into the forest alone?
VI.
In the Pokémon world, Oddish is the first stage of a three-stage evolutionary cycle and will evolve into Gloom and then into Vileplume. Looking at the real world, Oddish could be said to be the final stage of another three-stage evolution, from the mandrake of botany to the mandrake of folklore to this kitsch reinterpretation.
This evolutionary journey is not unique to Oddish. Many — if not most — of the mythical creatures that eventually inspired Pokémon originated as exaggerated, embellished observations of real living things. Bestiary translator T.H. White, whose work I’ve drawn on throughout this series, described the bestiary as a “compassionate book” with “a reverence for the wonders of life.” In its own way, Pokémon has some small piece of that reverence.
Bibliography:
Aronson, Jeffrey K. “When I use a word… The Lelamour Herbal.” BMJ 2023; 380: p225.
Borges, Jorge Luis. The Book of Imaginary Beings. Translated by Norman Thomas di Giovanni. 1974. Vintage, 2002.
Burridge, Claire. “Healing Body and Soul in Early Medieval Europe: Medical Remedies with Christian Elements.” Studies in Church History 58 (2022), 46–67.
Carter, Anthony John. “Myths and Mandrakes.” Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine (Volume 96, March 2003).
Collins, Minta. Medieval Herbals: The Illustrative Tradition. British Library/University of Toronto Press, 2000.
Donne, John. John Donne: The Major Works. Edited by John Carey. Oxford University Press, 2000.
Eco, Umberto. The Name of the Rose. Translated by William Weaver. Mariner Books, 2014.
Ford, Harry. Shakespeare and the Botanic Revolution. 2019. University of Exeter, PhD dissertation.
Grieve, M. A Modern Herbal. 1931. Dorset Press, 1994.
Morton, Ian. “In the Dead of the Nightshade.” Country Life, 7 September 2022.
Ono, Toshiro. Pokémon Graphic Novel, Volume 3: Electric Pikachu Boogaloo. VIZ Media, 2000.
Rowling, J.K. Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets. Bloomsbury, 1998.
Simpson, Jacqueline, and Steve Roud. A Dictionary of English Folklore. Oxford University Press, 2000.
Van Arsdall, Ann. Medieval Herbal Remedies: The Old English Herbarium and Anglo-Saxon Medicine. Routledge, 2002.
Author’s Note: First and foremost, a big thanks to all my subscribers for their patience over the past month. It’s great to be back on Substack with a new post. I’m also happy to note that we’re up to 225 subscribers in more than thirty different countries.
Writing this particular post led me to an insight not directly related to this Pokémon or to Pokémon in general.
Shakespeare’s art is, as his Scottish usurper memorably describes the ocean, multitudinous, and writing this series on the legacy of the bestiary (and of the herbal) has taught me that among that multitude is Shakespeare’s inheritance and recontextualization of medieval and early modern folk belief. In contrast to the classical learning of his contemporaries Jonson and Marlowe and the deep biblical knowledge of Francis Bacon, Shakespeare’s plays abound in much more local, much closer to the ground folklore and superstition about plants and animals. From this treasury he selected and shaped the perfect images to illustrate his characters’ thoughts and build his atmospheres.
Best wishes to all readers new and old.
The Pokémon Chronicles. This is book material, Robert. Superb writing.
I don’t know much about Pokemon, and I still appreciate the amount of research and dedication that went into this post.
And you're right, I did first encounter the mandrake in Chamber of Secrets 😆. Super interesting to see how this creature is represented across different mediums of storytelling.