The mandrake is Mandragora officinarum, a Mediterranean plant of the nightshade family whose thick, often forked taproot can resemble a human figure, the fact from which almost all its lore grows. The Hebrew Bible treats it as an aphrodisiac and fertility charm: in Genesis 30 Reuben finds mandrakes in the field, and Rachel bargains with Leah for them in the hope of conceiving, and the Song of Songs names their fragrance among the pleasures of love. Its anthropomorphic root made it the plant most heavily loaded with magical meaning in the European tradition, a living thing read as a little human because it happened to look like one.
The English herbalist John Gerard, in his Herball of 1597, was already sceptical of the plant's reputation in his own time, dismissing the tales of shrieking roots and dog-assisted harvesting as, in his own words, ridiculous fables, and noting the strikingly human-shaped mandrake roots sold by itinerant dealers were commonly carved and manipulated by hand from ordinary bryony or other roots to enhance the resemblance, a documented case of the folklore being actively manufactured for the market rather than simply arising from the plant's natural shape. The name mandrake was also given, by resemblance alone, to an unrelated North American plant: the may apple, Podophyllum peltatum, sometimes called American mandrake, which shares none of the Mediterranean plant's forked, human-shaped root or its history of magical lore.