From the Narrow Desert: Mandrakes

Showing posts with label Mandrakes. Show all posts

Friday, December 2, 2022

Nutmeg is a drug

I guess I've known that in theory since I read The Swiss Family Robinson as a child (on which more below), but I'd always assumed it was only psychoactive in very large doses. When I was a teenager, one of my favorite beverages was buttermilk with a pinch or two of nutmeg, and I never noticed any psychotropic effects. About a week ago I decided to try that drink again after decades of not drinking it, and I guess this time I put in a little more nutmeg than was good for me. It wasn't much -- two cups, each with a bit more than half a teaspoon, I would guess -- but it was enough!

No, I didn't see a styracosaurus or anything, but I was in a trance state for the better part of two and a half days. It was a fairly light trance, and I was able to function more-or-less normally. In many ways it was comparable to the light trances I sometimes used to put myself in when reading or preaching, the chief perceptual symptom of which was what I used (incorrectly) to call "tunnel vision." Tunnel vision properly refers to the loss of peripheral vision, but in my childhood I used it as a name for the feeling (in certain trance states) that everything around me was immensely distant, as if it were at the other end of a long tunnel I was looking through. (This was usually induced by intense concentration, so I suppose it did have some connection to "tunnel vision" in the colloquial sense.) Another way to express it would be that it feels as if you are looking through binoculars at everything -- everything is as large and clear as it would be if it were close to you, but you know that it is not in fact close to you.

Aside from this, there was a strange idea -- an idea more than a sensation -- that there was something unusual about the surface of my body, that I was "prickly" or "covered with moss" or "bristling with triangles" (some of the phrases that came to mind at the time). I experienced no hallucinations in the strict sense, but I did have unusually vivid mental imagery, somewhat reminiscent of the abstract art of Stanslaw Kors. I was quite sleepy throughout the trance period, and when I slept I had "deep" dreams -- that kind where you wake up feeling as if you've been underwater -- of which I remember very little. I remember that the dreams were entirely in Latin, often with a disembodied "running commentary" in that language, and that at one point I had a conversation with a mantis shrimp, which also spoke Latin. (I had never dreamed in Latin before, nor have I since.)

After the effects of the nutmeg had worn off, I tried to find out more about it. Apparently nutmeg is classified as a "deliriant," alongside such drugs as datura, hensbane, deadly nightshade, and -- quelle coïncidence! -- mandrake.

My experience was not at all pleasant or mind-expanding, and I do not recommend it to anyone.

⁂

I remember that as a child I read a lot of different books -- all oldish, 19th century or so -- about people surviving on desert islands. I understand that many such books were written after Robinson Crusoe -- a whole genre called the robinsonade -- but I can't name any of them. There was Robinson Crusoe itself, The Swiss Family Robinson, and -- what else? I remember I read a lot of them. Searching the Internet for lists of robinsonades, I only turn up such works as Treasure Island and Lord of the Flies, which are not at all the sort of thing I have in mind. Anyway, in one of those books I read, the protagonists encountered a bird behaving strangely, as if intoxicated, and then discovered that it had been eating nutmegs. This was my first exposure to the idea that nutmeg could be intoxicating. Before reading that book, I had read something -- it may have been Tau Zero by Poul Anderson -- that mentioned people getting drunk on eggnog, and I had inferred from that that some forms of eggnog were alcoholic. (As a Mormon, I knew only the non-alcoholic version.) After reading the robinsonade, though, I decided it must have been the nutmeg that made them drunk. Only much later, I think not until my early teens, did I learn that I had been right the first time and that eggnog is typically an alcoholic drink.

After my own experience of nutmeg intoxication, I wanted to track down the robinsonade episode, so I tried to remember as many other details about the book as possible. All I could get was that there were agoutis and bustards, and that the plural forms nutmegs and lichens -- slightly odd in modern English -- were used. Searching for agouti bustard nutmegs island turned up only one book: The Swiss Family Robinson. This surprised me a bit -- I had remembered that it was not Swiss Family but one of the other nameless similar books. Searching the Gutenberg version for nutmegs, I found this:

In a short time nest-building commenced, and among the materials collected by the birds, I observed a long gray moss or lichen, and thought it might very possibly be the same which, in the West Indies, is gathered from the bark of old trees, where it grows, and hangs in great tuft-like beards, to be used instead of horse-hair for stuffing mattresses.
My wife no sooner heard of it than her active brain devised fifty plans for making it of use. Would we but collect enough, she would clean and sort it, and there would be no end to the bolsters, pillows, saddles, and cushions she would stuff with it.
For the discovery of nutmegs we had also to thank the pigeons, and they were carefully planted in our orchard.

In a way, this is obviously my source -- nutmegs, plural, are discovered via birds, and lichen is nearby -- but lichen is singular, and there is no indication that the birds were intoxicated by the nutmegs. But it seems highly unlikely that any other novel would borrow the very specific plot point of birds helping the protagonists discover "nutmegs," and I don't see how I could have misremembered it. The idea that nutmeg could be intoxicating was a new idea for me, learned from the book, not something I could have read into a book that does not mention it.

(Incidentally, was my nutmeg-induced idea that I was "covered with moss" somehow influenced by this passage as well?)

According to Wikipedia, "Over the years, there have been many versions of the story with episodes added, changed, or deleted," to the extent that "Wyss's original narrative has long since been obscured" -- so were all those books I read just different versions of The Swiss Family Robinson? And was the version on Gutenberg bowdlerized so as not to suggest to impressionable young readers the idea of trying to get high on household spices? Now I'm going to have to spend some time trying to track down the version I read as a child, the one with the nutmeg-intoxicated bird.

Tuesday, November 15, 2022

Joan of Arc accused of carrying a mandrake

From J. G. Frazer's Jacob an the Mandrakes:

One of the articles of accusation against Joan of Arc was that 'the said Joanna was once wont to carry a mandrake in her bosom, hoping by means of it to enjoy prosperity in riches and temporal things, alleging that the said mandrake had such a power and effect'. This accusation the Maid utterly denied. Being asked what she did with her mandrake, she replied that she never had one, but she had heard say there was one near her town, though she had never seen it. Moreover, she had heard that a mandrake is a dangerous thing and difficult to keep; she did not know what it was used for. Questioned further about the particular mandrake which she admitted to have heard about, she answered that she had been told it was in the ground under a hazel-tree, but the exact spot she did not know. Interrogated as to the use to which a mandrake is put, she replied that she had heard that it causes money to come, but she did not believe it, and the voices that spoke to her had never said anything to her on the subject.

Mandrakes, treasure-hunting, syzygy

A day or two ago I ran into a thread on /x/ which I can't seem to find in the archives. The OP asked if spending a lot of time thinking about the paranormal would cause paranormal events to occur in one's life. One of the replies said something like, "No, but learning a new word will cause people around you to start using it more often." Then there was another cryptic reply, where the anon listed three words -- I can't remember the first, but the second and third were syzygy and perplexed -- and said he was just putting them out in the ether for his own purposes, and that just by reading them, even without understanding them, we would be helping him out.

⁂

The persistence of mandrakes in the sync stream led me to do some reading. I found this in J. G. Frazer's Jacob and the Mandrakes (1917):

To this day there are 'artists' in the East who make a business of carving genuine roots of mandrakes in human form and putting them on the market, where they are purchased for the sake of the marvellous properties which popular superstition attributes to them. . . . The virtues ascribed to these figures are not always the same. Some act as infallible love-charms, others make the wearer invulnerable or invisible ; but almost all have this in common that they reveal treasures hidden under the earth, and that they can relieve their owner of chronic illness by absorbing it into themselves.

This made me think of Joseph Smith, of course, and I poked around online trying to find if he had ever used mandrakes in his treasure-hunting days. I didn't find anything, but in the process of searching I ran across a reference to "The Beast and the Prophet: Aleister Crowley's Fascination with Joseph Smith," a chapter by Massimo Introvigne in the Oxford University Press book Aleister Crowley and Western Esotericism, edited by Henrik Bogdan and Martin P. Starr.

The chapter wasn't available to read on the OUP website, so I searched for it elsewhere online. That's when I found that, before it became a book chapter, it had been published as an article in a journal called SYZYGY.

⁂

Earlier today I had been thinking about a technique I had read about some time ago in an old David St. Clair book for recalling forgotten facts. I was just thinking today that I wanted to try it but couldn't think of any specific facts that I had forgotten. Everything that came to mind as something I might want to recall, I could already recall perfectly. Well, now I have something to try it on: the first of the three words. Right now all I can come up with is bellicose, but I also have the sense that this is a confabulated memory and that the actual word was something else.

⁂

Update: Never mind, I found the thread. The forgotten word -- actually the second on the list, not the first -- was neoteny. (Odd I would have forgotten that word just months after reading a book on the subject! And where did bellicose come from?)

Man, these drakes!

In my November 4 post "Kanye and El Kanah," I connected the word mandrake with "a man called Drake," meaning that one Canadian rapper. On November 13, Poppop left a comment (discussed here) connecting mandrake with "an anthropomorphic duck superhero, Man-Drake." Today (early November 15 here in Taiwan, still the 14th in Mexico), Dan Piraro posted this on his blog:

Monday, November 14, 2022

Quel canard! Quelle oie!

Referencing the mandrakes that have been showing up in the syn stream recently, Poppop left this comment on my last post.

Glad you saw the etymonline mandrakery -- I saw it too last week and almost dropped you a line. I had probably gone 30 years without encountering the word and then boom it was there online twice.

Perhaps in an alternate universe, there is an anthropomorphic duck superhero, Man-Drake, who fights crime since witnessing his parents' murder at the hands of mean hunters? Quel canard.

I read this comment on the afternoon of November 13 (Taiwan time). On the morning of the same day, approximately six hours before reading the comment, I had been cleaning out some cabinets in my study when I found a folder containing some very old papers, going all the way back to my toddler days. A lot of them, I have no idea why I kept them, but now that I have kept them all these years, just throwing them away would be unthinkable. Among the papers filed there were four pages of cartoons drawn by my brother Luther on the backs of documents dated 1991 and 1992, when he would have been 10 or 11.

Welcome to your alternate universe, Poppop.

Now I happen to remember that this is not actually an anthropomorphic duck but rather an anthropomorphic goose named Gilbert, and that his hunter nemesis is called Milton. There's no real backstory beyond that -- nothing but this handful of drawings -- but he's obviously an anthropomorphic waterfowl with a grudge against hunters, and he certainly seems to have super powers. I mean, in the first strip he is apparently strong enough to break a rifle barrel with his bare hands and fast enough to do so, pound the broken piece into the ground, and tie Milton's shoelaces to it all before the latter has time to react. Then he apparently takes the gun, repairs the broken barrel with some super-strong material, and later deflects bullets by holding his gun in just the right position so they hit the reinforced barrel and bounce off! That's some next level kung fu there.

Poppop ended his comment with Quel canard, "What a duck!" Later that day, some random link-following led me to the Jewish Telegraph Agency's take on Dave Chappelle's recent monologue. It's no surprise that the word canard was used a few times -- antisemitic and canard go together like kippers and marmalade -- but one instance nevertheless stood out.

That joked [sic] echoed a familiar line of Jewish defense groups, who are often at pains to point out that a disproportionate Jewish presence in an industry is not an indication of a conspiracy -- an age-old canard.

Taken literally, isn't that saying that the idea that disproportionate Jewish presence is not an indication of conspiracy is a canard?

One more coincidence to note: Before suggesting that "Man-Drake" might be an anthropomorphic duck superhero, Poppop said that the last time he had encountered the word mandrake was probably 30 years ago. Thirty years ago would be 1992 -- which, judging by the dates on the backs of the pages, is probably the very year that my brother's athropomorphic goose superhero comics were drawn.

Saturday, November 12, 2022

Synchronicity: Mandrakes, Herschel Walker, and the Narmer Palette

In my recent post "Election prediction assessment," I discussed links between the Fool card of the Rider-Waite Tarot and the Georgian football player turned politician Herschel Walker. The Fool card depicts a man walking and is thus linked to the name Walker. It also happens to be traditionally associated with the planet Uranus, which was discovered by William Herschel -- who had originally wanted to call the new planet "the Georgian Star" after his patron, King George III. Back in the 1980s, Herschel Walker was actually promoted as "the Georgian Star," with explicit reference to the astronomer Herschel (erroneously called "William Herschel Walker"!) and his discovery of Uranus. From an old New York Times article:

Four Atlanta businessmen have come up with a plan to make money off the fame of Herschel Walker, the University of Georgia football star, but it may not be within National Collegiate Athletic Association rules. The group has printed and plans to place on sale posters featuring a black football player in a Georgia uniform with the words ''The Georgian Star.''
To avoid violating N.C.A.A. rules, the group, Accolade Inc., has blurred out Walker's features and number. N.C.A.A. rules forbid an individual player's name, picture or number to be used in a commercial venture. The poster sells for $6 and, according to Avery McLean, the school's marketing director, the plan calls for the university to receive 6 percent of the revenue from every poster sold. But it appears that the N.C.A.A. will not permit Georgia to be involved in the promotion. ''We have not approved the poster in question,'' said Dave Berst, the N.C.A.A.'s director of enforcement. ''It appears that the poster is contrary to N.C.A.A. regulations.'' The poster tells the story of Sir William Herschel Walker, the Briton who discovered the planet Uranus in 1781. Wanting to honor his king, George III, Sir William named his discovery ''The Georgian Star.'' In time, scientists changed the name to Uranus.

So that's a pretty direct link between the Fool card and the names Herschel, Walker, and Georgia. Furthermore, the Fool's white rose resembles the white Cherokee rose which is Georgia's state flower, and the white dog calls to mind the white bulldog that is the mascot of the University of Georgia football team.

In a comment on my own post, I added:

The Phantom, the comic strip character and proto-superhero created by Lee Falk, often goes by "Mr. Walker" (always with a footnote explaining that this is "for 'The Ghost Who Walks'"). Like the Fool, the Phantom is always accompanied by his faithful dog. I thought of the Phantom recently when mandrakes came up in the sync stream, since Lee Falk was also the creator of Mandrake the Magician.
https://narrowdesert.blogspot.com/2022/10/synchronicity-mandrakes-and-el-kanah.html
That post linked mandrakes to El Kanah. A later post linked El Kanah to a black celebrity and a Georgia football team. (See the comments for the football reference.)
https://narrowdesert.blogspot.com/2022/11/kanye-and-el-kanah.html

Today, preparing to write a follow-up post on the Fool's links to both George Walker Bush and Herschel Walker, and the implications for 2024, I decided to look up fool in the Online Etymology Dictionary, even though I basically already knew the etymology. Now what I normally do is type et, let autocomplete give me etymonline.com/, type w and get etymonline.com/word/, and then manually type in the word I'm looking up. I do this all in the address bar, without ever visiting the OED home page. This time, though, for whatever reason, I did go to the homepage -- and right there under "Latest Stories" was an article with the title "MANDRAKE ROOTS." Of course I clicked on it.

I have no idea how it got that title, since it makes no reference to mandrakes at all -- but guess who it does make reference to!

How did the moons of the planets get classical names? It can't have been a relic of classical times, because the satellites weren't known before telescope technology, in the 17th century. Their discoverers tended to name them after patrons, real or hoped-for, which led to an embarrassing lot of petty European tyrants honored with celestial bodies. . . . William Herschel proposed giving the multiplying moons suitable proper names out of mythology, a proposal readily accepted by the other astronomers and in use by 1848.

Not only a reference to Herschel, but to astronomers' naming new heavenly bodies after their patrons -- just as Herschel himself had originally wanted to name Uranus after George III.

The comment quoted above mentions "El Kanah" in connection with mandrakes. This name entered the sync stream via Joseph Smith's Book of Abraham, which lists "Elkenah" among the gods worshiped by the pagan Egyptians -- or that's what I had originally written. Rereading the Book of Abraham, I find that Elkenah and the other Egyptian-looking gods, including "the god of Pharaoh, king of Egypt," are actually said to have been worshiped by the pagan Mesopotamians! This extremely bizarre idea led me to the Wikipedia article on "Egypt–Mesopotamia relations." As I skimmed it, I noticed that a particular illustration kept being repeated.

The Narmer Palette didn't mean anything in particular to me at the time, but the repetition, together with the distinctive iconography, made it memorable.

Today I checked the Junior Ganymede blog, where the most recent post was titled "Today" and had no text, just a photo of some flowers. There was a single comment, implying that Kent Budge had died and leaving a link.

I clicked the link, and it was indeed an announcement of the death of Kent Budge -- but it began with this image:

Sunday, October 30, 2022

Synchronicity: Mandrakes and El Kanah

On October 1, I started reading the Old Testament a chapter a day; thus today, October 30, at around two or three in the afternoon, I read Genesis 30. This includes the "mandrake episode":

And Reuben went in the days of wheat harvest, and found mandrakes in the field, and brought them unto his mother Leah.

Then Rachel said to Leah, "Give me, I pray thee, of thy son's mandrakes."

And she said unto her, "Is it a small matter that thou hast taken my husband? and wouldest thou take away my son's mandrakes also?"

And Rachel said, "Therefore he shall lie with thee to night for thy son's mandrakes."

And Jacob came out of the field in the evening, and Leah went out to meet him, and said, "Thou must come in unto me; for surely I have hired thee with my son's mandrakes."

And he lay with her that night (vv. 14-16).

At around 9:00 p.m. the same day, I checked /x/ and found this:

So that's unusual. I'm posting this now, about an hour later, so I went back to /x/ to see if the post was still there (yes), and if anyone had said anything interesting (no). To find it, I did a Ctrl-F for mand, and the first hit was this:

Like most "Bible Mandela effect" claims, this is BS. I've been reading the Bible since forever, and it's always said that (minus the word very in the KJV). On a whim, I decided to look up other translations of the verse in question (Ex. 34:14) on BibleGateway. In the list of 50-some translations that came up, only one used boldface and italics, and it therefore jumped out at me.

One of the other versions, a half-translation with many untranslated Hebrew words, had a spelling that was even more of a sync.

El Kanah -- just one letter different from Elkenah, a supposed Egyptian god mentioned in Joseph Smith's Book of Abraham, which I had recently posted about in "Maha-makara whiteboard telepathy." I even referenced Kevin Barney's theory that the name means "El of Canaan." It's quite ironic that the name might actually mean "Jealous God" -- not tolerating rivals -- since Elkenah is depicted as being worshiped alongside four other gods.

It is appropriate that El Kanah, the Jealous God, would be synchronistically associated with the mandrake story in Genesis 30, since that story has to do with jealousy and sexual rivalry.