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Reappraising the Homeric Moly: Mediterranean Geophytes as Antidotes to Antimuscarinic Intoxication in the Odyssey

Publicado
Servidor
Preprints.org
DOI
10.20944/preprints202607.2229.v1

Background: In 1983 Plaitakis and Duvoisin identified Homeric moly with Galanthus nivalis L., and read the Circe episode as the earliest recorded use of an anticholinesterase against antimuscarinic poisoning. The identification held for four decades. Recent multidisciplinary criticism has now put its philological and biogeographical foundations in doubt. Objective: To ask what survives of the pharmacological thesis once those foundations are removed — by reconstructing the clinical phenotype the poem describes, extracting the constraints the texts actually impose, and testing five candidate taxa against them. Methods: Critical review, integrating the Homeric and classical sources (Theophrastus, Dioscorides) with Amaryllidaceae phytochemistry and with the clinical toxicology of antimuscarinic delirium. Results: The phenotype as narrated, delirium with inner awareness preserved (noos empedos), corresponds closely to central antimuscarinic toxicity. Five constraints emerge from the texts: a dark-tunicated bulb, a white flower, arduous extraction, an inland habitat, and the pharmacodynamic capacity to reverse the syndrome. Against these, Galanthus nivalis performs well on morphology and pharmacology and badly on biogeography, being effectively absent from the Aegean lowlands. Peganum harmala does possess anticholinesterase activity, contrary to a claim often made in this debate, but its habit is wrong and so is its ecology. Allium nigrum belongs to the moly of the later botanists and offers no centrally acting mechanism; Mandragora belongs to the kykeon, not to the cure. Only Pancratium spp. satisfy all five, and they do so for a reason no other candidate can supply: contractile roots that bury the bulb, accounting for precisely the difficulty of extraction that Theophrastus singled out as diagnostic. Conclusions: The pharmacological reading of the episode stands. The single-species identification does not, and should give way to a clade-level hypothesis centred on the Mediterranean Amaryllidoideae, with Pancratium as the likeliest archetype — that is, to an ancient ethnobotanical complex in which empirical antidotal knowledge was carried by a group of plants rather than by one.

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