They are in the nightshades family along with Datura or Jimson weed, eggplant, mandrake, deadly nightshade or belladonna, capsicum (paprika, chile pepper), potato, tobacco, tomato, and petunia. Featured in Pan's Labyrinth, they were also important in the following Biblical story: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mandrake_%28plant%29#Hebrew_Bible as well they have a long history of mystical associations. It was believed that when picked they would scream and anyone who heard this would die. Here is how you could pick one:
A furrow must be dug around the root until its lower part is exposed, then a dog is tied to it, after which the person tying the dog must get away. The dog then endeavours to follow him, and so easily pulls up the root, but dies suddenly instead of his master. After this the root can be handled without fear.
And then:
Is this root the umbilical vestige of our terrestrial origin ? We dare not seriously affirm it, but all the same it is certain that man came out of the slime of the earth, and his first appearance must have been in the form of a rough sketch. The analogies of nature make this notion necessarily admissible, at least as a possibility. The first men were, in this case, a family of gigantic, sensitive mandragores, animated by the sun, who rooted themselves up from the earth...
from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mandrake_%28plant%29
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2.) He rejected the idea of "music of the spheres" as ridiculous: movement of astronomical bodies, he supposed, is incapable of generating sound.
Albertus Magnus, a Dominican friar and preeminent scholar of Aristotle, under whom Thomas Aquinas studied, had tried to reconcile religion and science.
His ideas influenced the design of this, the Strasbourg Cathedral:
Click on either or both of the below photos:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albertus_Magnus#Music
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3.) The mandrake next led me to Franz Mesmer, from whom we have words such as "mesmerize", who in the 18th century, believed he had found something called "animal magnetism", however in 1784 the king and his commissioners found that there was no actual scientific fluid called "animal magnetism". Here, briefly, is the procedure as done for an individual (there's a separate one for groups):
With individuals he would sit in front of his patient with his knees touching the patient's knees, pressing the patient's thumbs in his hands, looking fixedly into the patient's eyes. Mesmer made "passes", moving his hands from patients' shoulders down along their arms. He then pressed his fingers on the patient's hypochondrium region (the area below the diaphragm), sometimes holding his hands there for hours. Many patients felt peculiar sensations or had convulsions that were regarded as crises and supposed to bring about the cure. Mesmer would often conclude his treatments by playing some music on a glass armonica.
It wasn't questioned as to whether or not his cures worked, it was questioned that there was any physical scientific proof of "animal magnetism". The commission concluded that there was no evidence for such a fluid. Whatever benefit the treatment produced was attributed to "imagination."
Apparently, Reiki and Qi Gong have some similarities to "animal (from Latin animus = "breath") magnetism".
from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franz_Mesmer
and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animal_magnetism
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4.) Back to the mandrake:
Some alchemists, impressed by this idea [see #1 above: second quoted paragraph], speculated on the culture of the mandragore, and experimented in the artificial reproduction of a soil sufficiently fruitful and a sun sufficiently active to humanise the said root, and thus create men without the concurrence of the female.
also:
VLADIMIR: What do we do now?
ESTRAGON: Wait.
VLADIMIR: Yes, but while waiting.
ESTRAGON: What about hanging ourselves?
VLADIMIR: Hmm. It'd give us an erection.
ESTRAGON: (highly excited). An erection!
VLADIMIR: With all that follows. Where it falls mandrakes grow. That's why they shriek when you pull them up. Did you not know that?
It was a common belief in some countries that a mandrake would grow where the semen of a hanged man dripped on to the earth; this would appear to be the reason for the methods employed by the alchemists who "projected human seed into animal earth".
Would you like to make a Mandragora, as powerful as the homunculus (little man in a bottle) so praised by Paracelsus? Then find a root of the plant called bryony. Take it out of the ground on a Monday (the day of the moon), a little time after the vernal equinox. Cut off the ends of the root and bury it at night in some country churchyard in a dead man's grave. For thirty days water it with cow's milk in which three bats have been drowned. When the thirty-first day arrives, take out the root in the middle of the night and dry it in an oven heated with branches of verbena; then wrap it up in a piece of a dead man's winding-sheet and carry it with you everywhere.
again from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mandrake_%28plant%29
and from Waiting for Godot by Beckett
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6.) Nightshades:
One of the most important groups of these compounds is called the tropane alkaloids. The term "tropane" comes from a genus in which they are found, Atropa (the belladonna genus). The belladonna genus is so named after the Greek Fate, Atropos, who cut the thread of life.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nightshade#Alkaloids
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7.) The "hotness" of capsaicin products and foods is expressed in Scoville units. A scoville unit is the factor by which the capsaicin-containing substance must be diluted to render the resulting solution imperceptible to a tester (for example, a teaspoon of a 5,000 Scoville unit hot sauce would have to be diluted with 4,999 teaspoons of a sugar water solution to negate its potential to cause a sensation on the palate).
from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nightshade#Alkaloids
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