Ages ago, mineralogical pseudo-sorcerers worked to exact divine control over human mortality using a strange hybrid of magic, meditation and metallurgy. In the 1600s, scientists hunched over simple microscopes scrabbled to understand the then-mysterious miracle of human reproduction. Modern day philosophers use advanced rhetoric to dispute classical notions of free will and the human soul. The common thread that connects all three? A teeny little naked guy called a homunculus (Latin for “little human”).

Small, brawny Homunculi run riot through the history of academic thought, offering scientists bizarre answers to life’s mysteries, all the while stealing polished buttons off formal wear and ripping pictures of boobs out of library books in order to construct their nests. It all started with the alchemists. While these rock-boiling polimaths are primarily remembered as the misguided dreamers who sought to transform common substances into gold, they were into plenty of other ambitious nuttiness, including the development of an eternal life elixir and the search for the so-called universal solvent – a theoretical chemical that could dissolve absolutely anything (much of their philosophical energies were ultimately exhausted in squabbling over the design of an insoluble container to store the solvent.) Homunculi entered the fray sometime during the 3rd century, after the Gnostic mystic Zosimos wrote about how he liked to mentally anthropomorphize various metals so that they took the form of tiny men who would writhed before him, enduring ungodly bodily tortures as a means of attaining alchemical transfiguration. And with that one nugget of wild insanity, Homunculi were born. Alchemists took the notion of these minuscule man-servants quite literary and began attempting to create them by combining various natural ingredients. (If you don’t like to picture old, bearded men jizzing all over everything, you should probably stop reading now.)

There are a variety of recipes for growing a homunculus, who will then serve its creator as a protector and willing gofer/lab assistant. The easiest method: allow a hearty load of human semen to putrefy in a sealed container until the goo resembles a transparent man, at which point all you have to do is feed the man fresh blood and he will grow into an itty bitty personal assistant. Another method involves poking a hole in an egg, filling the hole with human semen and then burying the egg and waiting for a homunculus to emerge from the ground. And on and on. Like every other aspect of alchemy, the homunculus-generation process underscores the belief that a communion of intellect and spiritual openness can reveal divinity through science and imbue scholars with the power of God.

Even the more traditional science of the 1600s relied on creationist notions, and would also come to briefly rely on the diminutive homunculi.

Wednesday: Homunculi and Spontaneous Generation

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