SYMPATHETIC magic in runic amulet texts was not confined to rhetorical ‘just as…, so too…’ inscriptions or even to metaphors (or metonyms) like the charm word ‘hail’, but also extended to more nuanced and complex symbolic expressions. A common place where sympathetic magic was used in Germanic tradition was in customary medicines which often feature certain types of vegetables, animal stuffs, flowers or herbs chosen because of the beneficial attributes associated with them. Leeks, for instance, were widely used in medieval medicine in order to revive and heal, and they are recorded both in curative recipes preserved in Old Norse literature as well as in Anglo-Saxon medical works. But this property connected with the leek clearly developed out of its association with male sexuality – the leek was the phallic herb in old Germanic tradition. This is not always made clear in medieval descriptions of the leek, however, because describing explicitly this aspect of its nature appears to have been regarded as slightly too embarrassing for many Christian authors. Thankfully, though, not all medieval writers proved so bashful. The most direct description of the phallic nature of the leek derives from a late medieval German source. In the middle of the fourteenth century, Konrad von Megenberg recorded the following about the leek in his Book of Nature: