Homunculus
The term lends its name to the cortical homunculus, an image of a person with the size of the body parts distorted to represent how much area of the cerebral cortex of the brain is devoted to it.
Although the actual word "homunculus" was never used, Carl Jung believed that the concept first appeared in the Visions of Zosimos, written in the third century AD.
[5]: 102 In Islamic alchemy, takwin (Arabic: تكوين) was a goal of certain Muslim alchemists, and is frequently found in writings of the Jabirian corpus.
In the alchemical context, takwin refers to the artificial creation of life, spanning the full range of the chain of being, from minerals to prophets, imitating the function of the demiurge.
Dr. Emil Besetzny's Masonic handbook, Die Sphinx, devoted an entire chapter to the wahrsagenden Geister (scrying ghosts).
[7][8]: 306 References to the homunculus do not appear prior to sixteenth-century alchemical writings[citation needed] but alchemists may have been influenced by earlier folk traditions.
When the 31st day arrives, take out the root in the middle of the night and dry it in an oven heated with branches of verbena; then wrap it up in a piece of a dead man's winding-sheet and carry it with you everywhere.
Though the specifics outlining the creation of the golem and homunculus are very different, the concepts both metaphorically relate man to the divine, in his construction of life in his own image.
This was the beginning of spermists' theory, which held that the sperm was in fact a "little man" that was placed inside a woman for growth into a child, an effective explanation for many of the mysteries of conception.
One of the very earliest literary references occurs in Thomas Browne's Religio Medici (1643), in which the author states: I am not of Paracelsus minde that boldly delivers a receipt to make a man without conjunction, ...[16]The fable of the alchemically-created homunculus may have been central in Mary Shelley's novel Frankenstein (1818).
The alchemical idea that the soul is not imprisoned in the body, but instead may find its brightest state as it passes through the material plane, is central to the character.
David H. Keller's short story "A Twentieth-Century Homunculus" (1930) describes the creation of homunculi on an industrial scale by a pair of misogynists.
Likewise, Sven Delblanc's The Homunculus: A Magic Tale (1965) addresses alleged misogyny and the Cold War industrial-military complexes of the Soviet Union and NATO.
In German children's author Cornelia Funke's book, Dragon Rider, the protagonists meet and are aided by a homunculus created by an alchemist.
Examples can be found in numerous media, such as the podcast Hello From The Magic Tavern, the films Homunculus (1916), Bride of Frankenstein (1935), The Golden Voyage of Sinbad (1973), Dr. Who episode The Talons of Weng-Chiang (1977), the made-for-television movie Don't Be Afraid of the Dark (1973) and its theatrical remake (2011), Being John Malkovich (1999), Guillermo del Toro's The Devil's Backbone (2001), Shane Acker's 9 (2009), Philipp Humm's The Last Faust (2019), Yorgos Lanthimos' Poor Things (film) (2023), television shows (such as Bloodfeast, American Dad, Rick and Morty (season 2, episode 1) (2015), Smiling Friends (season 1, episode 5) (season 2, episode 5), and The Big Bang Theory (season 3, episode 3), played by Johnny Galecki), fantasy role-playing games (such as Dungeons & Dragons), video games (such as Ragnarok Online, Valkyrie Profile, Shadow of Memories, The Legend of Heroes series, Cabals: Magic & Battle Cards, Genshin Impact, Bayonetta 3, and Master Detective Archives: Rain Code), books (such as The Secret Series and Sword of Destiny or Seventy-Two Letters by Ted Chiang), graphic novels (such as Bureau for Paranormal Research and Defense) and manga (such as Akihabara Dennō Gumi, Homunculus, Stone Ocean, Fullmetal Alchemist, Sorcerous Stabber Orphen,[21] Fate/Zero, and Gosick).
