Cold grain
and shower of sleet
and sickness of serpents.

Hail is the whitest of grain;
it is whirled from the vault of heaven
and is tossed about by gusts of wind
and then it melts into water.

Magic, spells and witchcraft

Extract from Chapter XVI, Witchcraft and Spells: Transcendental Magic
its Doctrine and Ritual by Eliphas Levi. A Complete Translation of
Dogme et Rituel de la Haute Magie by Arthur Edward Waite. 1896

“… we will add a few words about mandragores (mandrakes) and
androids, which several writers on magic confound with the waxen
image; serving the purposes of bewitchment. The natural mandragore is
a filamentous root which, more or less, presents as a whole either the
figure of a man, or that of the virile members. It is slightly
narcotic, and an aphrodisiacal virtue was ascribed to it by the
ancients, who represented it as being sought by Thessalian sorcerers
for the composition of philtres. 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 ; this assumption not only does not
exclude, but, on the contrary, positively supposes, creative will and
the providential co-operation of a first cause, which we have reason
to call God.

Some alchemists, impressed by this idea, 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. Others, who regarded humanity as the synthesis of animals,
despaired about vitalising the mandragore, but they crossed monstrous
pairs and projected human seed into animal earth, only for the
production of shameful crimes and barren deformities. The third method
of making the android was by galvanic machinery. One of these almost
intelligent automata was attributed to Albertus Magnus, and it is said
that St Thomas (Thomas Aquinas) destroyed it with one blow from a
stick because he was perplexed by its answers. This story is an
allegory; the android was primitive scholasticism, which was broken by
the Summa of St Thomas, the daring innovator who first substituted the
absolute law of reason for arbitrary divinity, by formulating that
axiom which we cannot repeat too often, since it comes from such a
master:

” A thing is not just because God wills it, but God wills it because
it is just.”

The real and serious android of the ancients was a secret which they
kept hidden from all eyes, and Mesmer was the first who dared to
divulge it; it was the extension of the will of the magus into another
body, organised and served by an elementary spirit; in more modern and
intelligible terms, it was a magnetic subject.”

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”. In Germany, the plant is
known as the Alraune: the novel (later adapted as a film) Alraune by
Hanns Heinz Ewers is based around a soulless woman conceived from a
hanged man’s semen, the title referring to this myth of the Mandrake’s
origins.

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