At least by the sixteenth century, herbals began to debunk such myths. In early texts, the mandrake, which came in male and female varieties, supposedly had a human form, grew from the matter of dead bodies under gallows, and screamed when pulled from the ground. In herbals, the mysterious mandrake accumulated all types of miraculous properties and stories. Leah’s son, Reuben, goes to a field where he finds a bunch of mandrakes. As a result, Leah is apparently on the outs with her husband, as Jacob, presumably, is too busy getting it on with Rachel’s maid to pay her any mind, but here is where the marital relations take an even more bizarre turn. Out of frustration, Rachel offers Jacob one of her maids as a surrogate, and the maid gives Jacob children. As a result, Rachel envies her sister’s fruitfulness and the relationship with her husband the ability to produce children entails. Jacob, married to two sisters (who, incidentally, are his cousins), Leah and Rachel, can conceive children with the elder, Leah, but not with the younger, Rachel.
MANDRAKE BIBLE FULL
While I knew the Bible was full of polygamy and weird sexual relationships, and, while I remembered pausing when combing through medieval and early modern herbals to laugh at the woodcuts and engravings of mandrakes, I wasn’t quite prepared for the weird-ass way they converge in Genesis 30.
While Jacob’s system of makeshift genetic engineering has some interesting consequences for my study of the Phantasy, I became even more intrigued by what I found in the first half of this chapter with its unconventional marriages and the mention of Reuben’s mandrakes. As I discussed in my last post, this supposedly occurred because an image set before a human or animal affected its imagination, stamping the influence of the perceived object upon the fetus in the womb. Jacob takes the striped cattle and sheep as his own to separate his flock from Laban’s and increases and strengthens his flock by creating white streaked rods which he sets before the stronger cattle and sheep. The references in Paré and Montaigne pointed me to the second half of Genesis 30 where Jacob uses a little pre-modern genetic engineering to both separate his own flock from Laban’s and increase his stock. Reading Genesis 30 provides me with a new response tothe religious right’s objections to gay marriage in service of “defending traditional marriage.” This time through, however, I decided to turn to the Bible to decipher the references, and, in doing so, exposed myself to the fascinating madness of that chapter. In previously thinking about representations of the imagination, I never really considered their dual references to Genesis 30. Having researched and written before on the passages from Paré and Montaigne I discussed there, I somehow overlooked the bizarre Biblical reference that appeared in each.
While writing my last post on Ambroise Paré’s monstrous Phantasy, I came across a reference to Genesis 30 that captured my own imagination.
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