Dear Gwyneth Paltrow, I have great news.
I’ve found your next big product idea for Goop.
It solves everything.
And I do mean everything.
It’s both an aphrodisiac and a contraceptive and it stops STDs.
It lowers your blood pressure, stops nausea, and if you put it on yourself like a paste,
it can even heal open wounds.
And the best part of all?
It probably doesn’t even work.
On a small island off the coast of Gozo, there grows a parasite that was once so valuable
that the rulers of this land would have put you to death for picking it.
In fact, it's so valuable that even stepping foot on the island where it grew was enough
to get you three years as a galley slave.
Because to the Maltese people, this was the universal cure all.
This was the most important medicine on the island, if not the world.
They tried it in every single way they could.
They ground it into pastes and powders.
They turned into liquid and ate it whole.
Because to them, it could solve anything.
They called it a fungus, specifically the Maltese Fungus, but it’s actually a parasite.
Its scientific name is cynomorium, and at one point in history
it was the most heavily guarded treasure in this entire country.
It’s a tiny plant with an incredibly deep history here, yet if your average local found it today,
it would probably go completely unnoticed.
I should mention that I don’t have any actual footage of the fungus.
I feel I need to state that up front.
After all, they're not going to let me out on the rock, so how I'm supposed to get it.
But that said, if we were in almost any other Mediterranean country, both North Africa and Europe,
I might actually have that footage.
Because despite how valuable of a plant it is here, in every other country
it grows and dies relatively untouched.
Which is kind of the point of this video.
Why did it become such a wonder drug here?
And to answer that, I do kind of need to show you what it looks like.
So if you could please bear with me while I use a still image I found on the internet.
We'll pull of the bandage and be back to the nice moving footage soon.
Ok, there it is.
Cynomorium.
Exciting stuff.
Get a feel for it because I’m probably not going to show it to you again.
Now, when you saw that photo, your first thought probably wasn't ‘wow, that looks really phallic’.
Personally, to me, it kind of looks like an old-timey microphone.
I don’t know about you, but my penis doesn’t start really thin and then bulb out like a corndog.
Maybe I’m weird.
But to the Maltese, who had never seen an old-timey microphone, and probably had never eaten a corndog,
this was a particularly phallic plant.
And we know that because their doctors kept prescribing it for problems of the penis.
Which I feel needs a bit of explanation.
There was once a man named Jakob Bohme.
He theorized that God really, really cared about us.
He cared about us so much, according to Bohme, that he’d kind of arranged all the plants
to look a little bit like body parts so that our doctors would know which to use for which.
Got a heart problem?
Eat something that looks like a heart.
Makes sense. Sort of.
Bohme was certainly not alone in thinking this.
He just happens to be the one who most affected Maltese opinion.
It’s actually a fairly natural theory, and we see similar ideas cropping up
in traditional medicines of the Middle East, China, and elsewhere around the world.
After all, it certainly sounds plausible, at least by old-timey medical standards.
If you genuinely believed that God made you in his image was it really that big a leap
to imagine that he made the plants that way, too?
When the Knights of St. John were granted Malta as their personal fief, it was the sinew
that connected both sides of the Mediterranean.
A European colony imprinted on a North African landscape.
A cultural, architectural and biological mix of African and European history.
It has intensely devoted Catholics speaking a language just barely removed from Arabic.
These lands have been ruled by the Lebanese and Tunisians, Romans and Greeks.
They’ve been ruled by the Normans and Aragonese.
By Arabs and the Pope.
This is a true crossroads of history.
To the knights of St. John, arriving here from their castles on the European mainland,
these islands would have held the allure of the orient.
The plants and landscape resembled that of Jerusalem, and the language and history and culture of the people
were all just somewhat Eastern, holier.
In the same way that the Beatles would later go on to imitate Indian spirituality,
so too did the knights see something better in their Maghrebi stronghold.
One of the most important things they found was the cynomorium.
It fit all their needs.
The local people spoke about it with reverence, and the Muslim slaves they captured
told about how they’d long since used it as a medicine.
So, confirmation from the Orient was enough for the Europeans.
They had read Bohme, and they knew what that phallic plant was for.
Before long, it was sort of a catch all for all the problems of the penis.
The knights may have been religious, but they certainly weren’t chaste.
This was a sailor’s haven after all.
Got the clap? Pop some fungus.
Can’t get it up? Pop some fungus.
Don’t want a bastard? Pop some fungus.
It didn’t really matter what your problem was.
This was like the perfect medieval party pill: if you were ever worried about your penis,
for whatever reason, just take some of this.
And as if that wasn’t enough, the more they came to rely on it, the more it was used for other things.
It wasn’t just phallic, the plant was also red.
So clearly this meant that it could be used to solve issues of the blood, as well.
They ground it down into a powder, and turned it into liquids and pastes.
For internal issues, it was drunk from a vial and for external wounds, it was plastered on like a cast.
The more they relied on it, the more it was claimed to be able to cure.
Everyone had a story where they’d been saved by cynomorium.
Even the most important hero of all Maltese history survived a grenade blast due to the fungus.
Or at least, that’s how they remember it.
I have no idea if it works, by the way.
Nobody does.
There are tests that have sort of made it seem like that it might lower blood pressure,
but for all its historic value, this is not a well studied plant.
And on top of that, placebo effect can pretty much summarize all of the historical anecdote
if we want to look at it that way.
It’s entirely possible that this plant did everything that they claimed it did.
But it's far more likely that it didn’t.
Once people here started believing that it was a wonder drug, it took on a life of its own.
I mean, if you genuinely believed that a rare fungus could cure venereal disease
and stop you from getting pregnant, you’d go through some pretty great lengths to get some.
This little penis enhancing fungus was soon a treasured gift of kings, popes,
and the world’s most powerful people.
It was such a rare and valuable product that they even shaved down the sides of the rock it grows on
and put up a guard tower on the land, just so nobody would go and steal any.
With the advent of modern medicine the fungus is no longer given nearly as much love.
And even if it was, the reality is that there are cynomorium plants all over this region.
They grow on both sides of the Mediterranean and variants of the plant exist as far away as China.
It's not nearly as rare as Maltese had once believed.
For hundreds of years this island contained Malta's most important resource.
It wasn't important to them how rare it was across the whole Earth,
what mattered was this crop's connectivity to this local land.
There would likely never be another society that treats it as important as those ancient Maltese.
Because they saw it in a new light.
An incorrect light, granted, but a new light, nevertheless.
And to me, it shows that it isn't really so important whether or not it worked.
What truly mattered was that they believed it did.
This is Rare Earth.