Strange Science in The Odyssey by Ellie Sheeran

            Greek mythology is spilling over the brim with fantastical sorcery, cursed objects, unlucky mortals, and gods insulted by insolent man; take, for example, The Odyssey, a Greek poem by Homer famous for its magical and impossible elements. While some facets of the poem may be based on real events, the horrifying encounters with giants, unearthly monsters and powerful sorcerers are widely considered as nothing but fiction. However, whoever the "they" are in "that's what they say" deem that all legends find their birthplace in some semblance of truth, and the same goes for The Odyssey. But first, some background!
            In the midst of their voyage, Odysseus, the namesake of Homer's epic poem, takes his crew through the water and lands on a mysterious landmass called Aeaea. There, Odysseus sends out a party of men to explore; and, exhausted, they in their shambling stumble upon the palatial residence of a woman. She invites them warmly inside to eat, but upon one bite of food entering their mouths, turns them into animals: therefore revealing herself as the powerful sorceress Circe. One man escapes and informs Odysseus frantically of this distasteful turn of events, and he departs to rescue his fellow men. However, before he confronts Circe, the messenger god Hermes stops him. Hermes tells Odysseus to ingest a special plant called moly so that he may resist the magical entrapment of Circe's trickery; he ends up defeating her and reclaiming his crew, successfully resisting her sorcery.
             Naturally, tales of magic and animal transformations have been long since been dismissed. However, the many references to herbs and drugs have piqued the attention of scientists: and not in vain. The earliest versions of Homer's poem detail Circe's mixing of herbs into a potion that would make sailors utterly forget their native land. As it happens, a native Mediterranean plant is called jimson weed. That sounds perfectly innocuous, but don't catch your breath, because jimson weed is full of compounds that inhibit the neurotransmitter acetylcholine. Disruption of acetylcholine causes vivid hallucinations, difficulty differentiating imagination from reality, and bizarre behavior: just the kind of thing that would make people sure they've been turned into animals.
               However, jimson weed is only scratching the surface. The way Homer describes the moly plant Hermes gives to Odysseus is unusually specific: he describes it as "black at the root with a flower white as milk". Like the rest of the Circe story, moly was dismissed as mere fantasy. But in 1951, Russian pharmacologist Mikhail Mashkovsky uncovered that villagers in the Ural mountains used a plant with a milk-white flower and a black root to keep paralysis at bay and treat people with polio. The plant, called the snowdrop, contained a compound called called galantamine that prevented the disruption of the neurotransmitter -you guessed it- acetylcholine, making snowdrops also feasible treatments for Alzheimer's disease: maybe even hallucinations caused by jimson weed. Maybe. Perhaps. Possibly.
                Now I am not presuming that Circe, Odysseus, and his crew experienced events that are all true and can be proved so; merely that ancient stories have elements of truth in them that we previously dismissed as fantasy. As we learn more about the world around us, the line between magic and science may blur even further. What do you consider to be magic?

Image: Snowdrop flower
Image: Jimson weed