Along with their medicinal uses, mandrakes had magical powers. In the fourth century, Pseudo-Apuleius described how mandrake could remove the effects of demonic possession: “For witlessness, that is devil sickness or demoniacal possession, take from the body of this said wort mandrake by the weight of three pennies, administer to drink in warm water as he may find most convenient - soon he will be healed”. Mandrake amulets or figures, known as puppettes or mammettes, were used from the medieval period to bring good fortune and happiness, even to cure sterility. See for example the mandrake charms in Bernard Picart’s engraving from eighteenth-century France. Mandrakes were also thought to grow under the bodies of hanged men and became associated with incontinence and rigor erectus; one eighteenth-century writer described how: “At the foot of the gallows on which a man has been hanged and where urine has been voided at the time of death, there springs up a plant with broad leaves and a yellow flower. The root of the plant exactly represents the human form, from the hair of his head to the sexual organs”. Mandrakes were thus often seen as tools of witches, used in their hallucinogenic flying ointment and in various brews and spells, including love potions.