There are several recipes for the Homunculus, a golem-like minature of the human being, who, when generated in the right way, is supposed to become a willing servant of the alchemist. For Paracelsus, who claimed to have made one, not more than a foot in height, though his little servant quickly turned on him and escaped, you have to take sperm, a bag of bones and fragments of hair and skin, and lay it in the ground encased in horse manure for forty days.
Later alchemists claimed the sperm must come from the final ejaculations of a hanged man; where it falls to the ground, a mandrake will grow, which must be picked at dawn on a Friday morning by a black dog. Pour it with milk and honey and the mandrake will become the little human being it resembles.
David Christianus, in the eighteenth century, instructs us to take an egg laid by a black hen, and, after making a hole in its shell substitute a part of its white for human sperm. Seal the egg with virgin parchment and in thirty days, a homunculus is born, which you must tend with earthworms and lavender seeds. (Note that the alchemist Konrad Dippel, who lived in Castle Frankenstein, and may have been an inspiration for Mary Shelley’s book, was a student of Christianus at the University of Geissen.)
My impression is the homunculus is a more capricious creature than the golem, catlike rather than doglike, with sharp little teeth and wild eyes and no desire for death. But the word the homunculus is also used in contemporary theories of consciousness to designate that part of brain function that unifies experience. Then the homunculus is a principle of self-identity and preventing any infinite regress when reflecting on the ultimate locus of experience.
But this means the homunculus provides the condition of thought, the possibility of reflexivity, but cannot be reached through introspection. Other theorists suppose there is not one homunculus, but many – a thousand little witnesses who are born and die at each moment. But I like the idea that the homunculus is the blind spot of consciousness, which sees without being able to see itself. Unless one can imagine a thousand blindspots flashing open and disappearing like light-flecks on the water.
Obscure double, witness that cannot speak of itself: I think of those ancient Indian theories of the witness self, still alive, still there in the deepest sleep. Dreaming, I imagine – but of what? Of lifting itself from the Stygian depths, of showing itself to the one to whom it grants the unity of a self. Homunculus is a word too small for this most frightening of doubles, whose face is like my own but full of darkness.
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