In researching "How Frankenstein's Monster Works" (and the podcast episode), I did quite a bit of reading about the homunculus. If you're not hip to this terminology, all you need to know is that a homunculus is an artificial humanoid created through alchemy. While not quite a human, this creature is a "rational animal" and another fictional page in humanity's dream of mastering life and death.
The medieval text known as the "Liber Vaccae" or "Book of the Cow" lays out some rather grotesque and confusing instructions in the art of DIY homunculi brewing -- and Maaike Van der Lugt's "Abominable Mixtures: The Liber vaccae in the Medieval West, or The Dangers and Attractions of Natural Magic" really lays out some excellent commentary on what it all means.
Allow me to break it all down into some quick bullet points. Be warned that this is all rather grotesque. Also, please do me a favor and don't actually attempt this at home.
Yield: 1 blasphemy
- magician semen
- sun stone (a mystical phosphorescent elixir)
- animal blood
- a cow or ewe
- green tutia (a sulphate of iron)
- a large glass or lead vessel
- Mix the semen and sun stone and inseminate the cow or ewe.
- Carefully plug the animal's vagina with the sun stone.
- Smear the animal's genitals with the blood of another animal.
- Place the artificially inseminated animal inside a dark house where the sun never shines.
- Feed the cow or ewe exclusively on the blood of another animal.
- Prepare a powder of ground sun stone, sulfur, magnet, and green tutia.
- Stir with the sap of a white willow.
At this point, the text indicates that the cow or ewe should give birth and the resulting "unformed substance" should be placed in the powder you just prepared -- which will cause the amorphous blob to grow a human skin.
Next, keep the newborn homunculus in a large glass or lead container for three days. The creature will become crazy hungry in this time, so you'll then feed it the blood of its decapitated mother for seven days. In this time, it should develop into a full-grown tiny, grotesque humanoid with some fragment of a human soul.
Now what, right? Well, as it turns out, the homunculus has many uses for a practicing medieval sorcerer:
Oh, and then there's this perplexing bit about turning a decapitated cow into a swarm of bees:
I trust you're properly grossed out by this point, so I'll skip to the part where I frame all of this in some sort of scientific reasoning.
As alarming and grotesque as these ideas are, they underline the mindset of the alchemist, who wandered a meandering path of chemistry, philosophy and superstitious occultism on the quest for knowledge. At the time, it was widely believed that humans could mimic and manipulate natural reproductive processes -- especially when it came to simpler organisms such as bees. And it was still an age in which spontaneous generation seemed a sensible explanation for maggots in your meat.
As crazy as these ideas seem, they underline what our ancestors thought was possible. And as we continue to venture into an age of genetic manipulation and human cloning, who's to say they were wrong?
But again, don't try this at home.