The Mandrakes

Brought to you by Altrusian Grace Media (altrusiangrace.com) and human-narrated by Matthew Schmitz.


In “The Mandrakes,” Clark Ashton Smith tells a grim Averoigne tale about Gilles Grenier, a sorcerer who murders his wife Sabine and buries her beneath a patch of mandrakes near his hut; when he later harvests the plants for use in his famous love-philtres, he discovers that the roots have grown into uncanny female-shaped likenesses of Sabine herself, quivering, crying out when cut, and bleeding as though alive. Rather than recoiling, Gilles exploits them for profit, brewing even more potent enchantments, but the potions inspire not love but hatred, madness, and violence in those who drink them. His crime is finally exposed when a mandrake-root, speaking in Sabine’s own voice, directs the authorities to her grave, leading to Gilles’s conviction for both sorcery and murder and ending the story as a macabre moral fable about greed, desecration, and the corrupting consequences of tampering with death.