CLXXXI.— ENCHANTER’S NIGHTSHADE. 
Circcea lutetiana Linne. 
J UST as a building constructed with purely utilitarian plans may become mellowed 
by age to much beauty and surrounded with any number of interesting historical 
associations, so the names of plants originally most prosaically matter-of-fact may in 
course of time acquire much poetical suggestiveness. Thus when we see the tiny 
dead-white blossoms of Circ<ea lutetiana Linne showing conspicuously against the 
dense shadow of some wooded glen we can imagine its generic name and the English 
Enchanter s Nightshade to be fully justified by the weirdly gloomy surroundings amidst 
which it grows, though it would seem, as a matter of fact, that these names represent 
a long series of blunders, mistaken identifications, superstitions, and impostures. 
The name Circcea, or rather its Greek equivalent Kcpua la, Kirkaia, was used 
by Dioscorides 
“because Circe, an Enchantress expert in herbs, used it as a Tempting-powder in amorous concerns.” 
It was said to be the plant with which she bewitched the companions of Ulysses 
and to be used, with that precedent, in the compounding of love-philtres. Gerard, 
however, writes of it : — 
“There is no use of this herbe either in phisicke or chirurgerie that I can read of, which hath happened by the corruption 
of time, and the errour of some who have taken Mandragoras for Circea, in which errour they have still persisted unto this 
daie, attributing unto Circea the vertues of Mandragoras.” 
These “vertues of Mandragoras,” real and imaginary, carry us back to the very 
dawn of medicine. Mandragora , a near ally of Atropa Belladonna , is poisonous, 
emetic, purgative, and narcotic, but was much used in ancient times as a sedative, as 
appears from Shakespeare’s classing it with “the drowsy syrups of the world” in 
“ Othello.” Its tap-root, however, is often forked, so as to present a faint resem- 
blance to the legs of a human being ; and it is an evidence of the great antiquity of 
the doctrine of signatures that the use of the plant as a love-philtre, suggested by 
this resemblance, appears in the Book of Genesis, Leah’s dudaim being undoubtedly 
the Mandrake. Pythagoras called the plant “ Anthropomorphos,” “the form of a 
man,” and Columella spoke of it as semi-homo , half-human. Josephus gives the entire 
fable that he who uproots the plant dies incontinently, and that, therefore, a dog was 
tied to it to pull it out of the ground ; and in the beautiful fifth-century manuscript 
of Dioscorides at Vienna, Euresia, Goddess of Discovery, is depicted presenting the 
very human-looking root to Dioscorides, while the dog is dying beside her. Many 
early herbals denounced these “ ridiculous tales . . . whether of old wives or 
some runagate surgeons or physicke-mongers,” as Gerard calls them, as also the 
addition that 
“it is never or very seldome to be found growing naturally but under a gallowes, where the matter that has fallen from a dead 
body hath given it the shape of a man.” 
