Board Thread:Other games/@comment-200.166.78.99-20130128185536/@comment-4533950-20140105065513

Masami Kurumada's Saint Seiya, does bear an attack similar to that of an Alura Une (also called Venus Weed in some versions)As stated here on the wiki: http://castlevania.wikia.com/wiki/Alura_Une, its name probably comes from "Alraune," the German word for Mandrake.

Further, "Mandrake" is the common name for members of the plant genus Mandragora, particularly the species Mandragora officinarum, belonging to the nightshades family (Solanaceae).

Because mandrake contains deliriant hallucinogenic tropane alkaloids such as atropine, scopolamine, apoatropine, and hyoscyamine, and the roots sometimes contain bifurcations causing them to resemble human figures, their roots have long been used in magic rituals, today also in contemporary pagan traditions such as Wicca and Odinism.

To further explain the history of the Mandrake, take a look at the following:

Machiavelli wrote in 1518 a play Mandragola (The Mandrake) in which the plot revolves around the use of a mandrake potion as a ploy to bed a woman.

(Possibly where the Alura une gets it's feminine humanistic design from in the series.) This is reinforced by the very wording of the creature's name. "Alura" is a perversion of the word "Allure" or "Alluring" (In which case, this plant does possess some traits that will "lure" in men) while serving as a portmanteau of Alluring and Une (which is another mythical plant, which the developers depict evolving into an Alura Une, Corpseweed, or other plant genus.)

As for it's ties to blood, Shakespeare refers four times to mandrake and twice under the name of mandragora.

"...Not poppy, nor mandragora, Nor all the drowsy syrups of the world, Shall ever medicine thee to that sweet sleep Which thou owedst yesterday." Shakespeare: Othello III.

"Give me to drink mandragora... That I might sleep out this great gap of time My Antony is away." Shakespeare: Antony and Cleopatra I.

"Shrieks like mandrakes' torn out of the earth." Shakespeare: Romeo and Juliet IV.

"Would curses kill, as doth the mandrake's groan" King Henry VI part II III.ii

Further still...

Cited from Chapter XVI, Witchcraft and Spells: Transcendental Magic its Doctrine and Ritual by nineteenth-century occultist and ceremonial magician Eliphas Levi. A Complete Translation of Dogme et Rituel de la Haute Magie by Arthur Edward Waite:

"Is this root the umbilical vestige of our terrestrial origin ? We dare not seriously affirm it, but all the same it is certain that man came out of the slime of the earth, and his first appearance must have been in the form of a rough sketch. The analogies of nature make this notion necessarily admissible, at least as a possibility. The first men were, in this case, a family of gigantic, sensitive mandragores, animated by the sun, who rooted themselves up from the earth ; this assumption not only does not exclude, but, on the contrary, positively supposes, creative will and the providential co-operation of a first cause, which we have reason to call God. 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 humanize the said root, and thus create men without the concurrence of the female."

This excerpt hypothesizes that a mandrake is a form of Homunculus.

In fact, it was a common folklore in some countries that mandrake would only grow where the semen of a hanged man had dripped on to the ground; this would appear to be the reason for the methods employed by the alchemists who "projected human seed into animal earth". In Germany, the plant is known as the Alraune: the novel (later adapted as a film) Alraune by Hanns Heinz Ewers is based on a soul-less woman conceived from a hanged man's semen, the title referring to this myth of the mandrake's origins. (and it's origin in game as far as design goes.)

As you can see, the plant has a history of being associated as a toxin which brings severe bodily harm or even death in some cases, or it can be called a manmade form of life brought about by alchemists playing at divine acts.

Aside from that, there is not mythological tie to blood, or... for that matter any sense of Greek/Roman mythology that I can discover to link it to Saint Seiya's mythos.

Interesting observation, though!