(urth) Pike's Ghost

[Jerry Friedman]

> From: Lee Berman severiansola at hotmail.com
...

> Leaving the question of Typhon's alien nature aside for now, the Mandragora 
> seems 
> almost indisputable proof of Typhon's potential to be cloned or downloaded 
> into a
> new body in some manner. There is nothing dragon-like about the fetus in the 
> bottle.
> What possible reason is there for Wolfe to call it "Mandragora" if not 
> to refer to 
> Typhon, the only other reference to a man-dragon there is.
...

Oddly enough, a possible answer is at Wikipedia.

"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."  A Wikipedia editor has added, "(See: Homunculus)."

From /Transcendental Magic: Its Doctrine and Ritual/ by Éliphas Lévi, translated by Arthur Edward Waite.  The book is at
http://books.google.com/books?id=e0GcOrh-xNAC&pg=PA323

There's a little more on plant-animal hybridization in the full passage, and perhaps people will find other points of interest.

So this may be saying that someone has taken a mandrake root and humanized it, creating a homunculus.

No doubt there's much more to say about this, but this margin is too small.

Jerry Friedman