The Homunculus: From Science Fact to Gothic Fiction

Dark Histories

Ben Cutmore

History

4.8 • 2.2K Ratings

🗓️ 31 January 2021

⏱️ 50 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

With a long and winding path through history from ancient times, to the renaissance and beyond, Alchemy was a vast subject with a multitude of practitioners, from the legendary and mythical to established medical gentry and scholarly clergy. In fact and fiction, they were men and women obsessed by the magical bending of the laws of nature to their will, creating gold, the elixir of life, stones that shone like the sun or offered immortality. Another sect of the sprawling tradition, however, found its interest in a far stranger creation, that of the homunculus, or “the little man”. Their writings can today be seen as some of the strangest works to exist in the history of scientific advancement and have far more in line with the publications of Gothic Horror that would eventually follow, centuries later. ------ SOURCES Maxwell-Stuart, P.G (2012) The Chemical Choir: A History of Alchemy. Continuum International Publishing, London, UK. Lindsay, Jack (1970) The origins of alchemy in Graeco-Roman Egypt. Barnes & Noble, NY, USA. Saif, Liana (2016) The Cows and the Bees: Arabic Sources and Parallels for Pseudo-Plato's Liber Vaccae (Kitab al-Nawamis). Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 2016, pp. 1-47(47). Warburg Institute, University of London, UK. Van Der Lugt, Maaike (2009) Abominable Mixtures: The Liber Vaccae in the Medieval West, or the Dangers and Attractions of Natural Magic. Traditio: Studies in Ancient and Medieval History, Thought, and Religion, Vol. 64 (2009), pp. 229-277. Cambridge University Press, UK Newman, William R. (2005) Promethean Ambitions: Alchemy and the Quest to Perfect Nature. University of Chicago Press, USA. Grafton, Anthony. Siraisi, Nancy (1999) Natural particulars: nature and the disciplines in Renaissance Europe. MIT Press, USA. Besetzny, Emil (1873) Die Sphinx Freimaurerisches Taschenbuch. L. Rosner, Vienna. ---------- For extended show notes, including maps, links and scripts, head over to darkhistories.com Support the show by using our link when you sign up to Audible: http://audibletrial.com/darkhistories or visit our Patreon for bonus episodes and Early Access: https://www.patreon.com/darkhistories Connect with us on Facebook: http://facebook.com/darkhistoriespodcast Or find us on Twitter: http://twitter.com/darkhistories & Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/dark_histories/ Or you can contact us directly via email at [email protected] or via voicemail on: (415) 286-5072 or join our Discord community: https://discord.gg/cmGcBFf The Dark Histories Butterfly was drawn by Courtney, who you can find on Instagram @bewildereye Music was recorded by me © Ben Cutmore 2017 Other Outro music was Paul Whiteman & his orchestra with Mildred Bailey - All of me (1931). It's out of copyright now, but if you're interested, that was that.

Transcript

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0:00.0	With a long and winding path through history from ancient times to the Renaissance and beyond,
0:07.1	alchemy is a vast subject with a multitude of practitioners from the legendary and mythical to established medical gentry and
0:14.8	scholarly clergy. In fact and in fiction they were men and women obsessed by the
0:21.0	magical bending of the laws of nature to their will,
0:24.0	creating gold, the elixir of life, stones that shone like the sun or offered immortality.
0:30.0	Another sect of the sprawling tradition, however, found its interest in a far stranger
0:36.6	creation, that of the homunculus or the little man. Their writings can today be seen as some of the strangest
0:45.4	works to exist in the history of scientific advancement and are far more in line
0:50.1	with the publications of Gothic horror that would eventually follow centuries later.
0:56.6	This is the Dark Histories where the facts are worse than fiction. Hello, welcome to Dark History, season 5, episode 2. I hope this finds you very well and you're all healthy.
1:11.0	Today's episode is one of those sort of episodes I like to kind of slip into every
1:16.1	now again and do like sort of a bit more generalized history rather than like focusing in on a particular story I guess.
1:25.0	I've done it a few times in the past with like the vampires and the zombies and
1:28.7	the zombies and things like that.
1:30.5	But I hadn't done one for a while so I thought, you know, let's crack on with something like that, you know, break it up a little bit.
1:37.0	What I will say, and I've said it before, I'm sure that I don't tend to sort of read out warnings or anything like that before we do
1:45.4	episodes you're listening to a podcast called Dark Histories. I think you know
1:49.8	we're all adults you and I both know what's coming. But with this one in particular I will just
1:55.2	say this is not one to listen to whilst you're eating your dinner. I think I'll just
2:01.0	leave it at that. So yeah fair warning if you're eating your
2:03.9	dinner you might want to turn this off till a bit later you know finish what
2:07.3	you're eating first with that said let's crack on this is season 5 episode 2 the
	...

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