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The Mandrake, or  Alraun, -root of German folk legends was the probable the source for an  idea even the founder of Scientology attempted to manifest (and his fellow Aleister Crowley student) , that of creating  a ‘Homunculus’  or ‘moon child’.( Paracelsus, De natura rerum, in Sudhoff, 11:348-349. See p. 349: "ein ding sein form und gestalt ganz und gar sol verlieren und zu nicht werden und aus nichts widerumb etwas, das hernach vil edler in seiner kraft und rugent dan es erstlich gewesen ist.")
 
The Mandrake/Alraun root  was visualized  to look like a little human, and was often kept in a bottle or flask at the time, and is strikingly reminiscent of the homunculus found in the pseudo-Paracelsian De natura rerum. Also in medieval times there where already speculations on incubi and succubi to produce an image of the artificial man excelling over normal humans in intelligence, strength. The author of the De natura rerum however  inserted the alchemical  paragon of human art into this preexisting framework by now claiming that by incubating a flask at moderate heat, one can isolate the male seed from the female and so produce a transparent, almost bodiless homunculus. See, Joachim Telle, "Kurfürst Ottheinrich, Hans Kilian und Paracelsus: Zum pfälzischen Paracelsismus im 16. Jahrhundert," in Von Paracelsus zu Goethe und Wilhelm von Humboldt, Salzburger Beiträge zur Paracelsusforschung 22 (Vienna: Verband der Wissenschaftlichen Gesellschaften Osterreichs, 1981),130-146; R.J. W Evans, Rudolph II and His World (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973);Jost Weyer, GrafWolfgangll von Hohenlohe und die Alchemie(Sigmaringen:J. Thorbecke, 1992); Bruce Moran, The Alchemical World of the German Court (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 1991).
 
Or as William R. Newman recently concluded;  Paracelsus argues that the mandrake incorrectly described by necromancers and philosophers is really a homunculus, which they have misidentified. Paracelsus is probably thinking here of the old German folk legend that the Alraun (alreona) grew primarily beneath gallows, where it was generated from the sperm or urine of hanged criminals: in honor of its provenance, the Alraun was also called Galgenmann or Galgenmännlein ("gallows man"). This belief has been traced back to Avicenna and is mentioned by early modern German authors such as Brunfels. In the seventeenth century it was still believed in some quarters that such a gallows man could also be produced by burying the sperm of a young man underground and periodically feeding the developing embryo with more of the same." In order to understand Paracelsus's reasoning in the above passage, one must realize that he customarily employs the expression venter equinus, a technical term in alchemy for decaying dung used as a heat source, to mean any source of low, incubating heat. Thus it was easy for him to interpret the mandrake legend as a garbled recipe for the homunculus, where the earth beneath the gallows acted as a venter equinus or incubator( Newman, Promethean Ambitions, 2004, p. 215).
 
The homunculus, moreover, was closely tied to the issue of palingenesis, the artificial rebirth of living things by chymical means, which enjoyed a widespread religious significance in the seventeenth century. As we noted before, the De natura rerum of pseudo-Paracelsus refers to the "clarification" of a bird by combustion to ash which is in turn allowed to ferment into a "mucilaginous phlegm." The rebirth of the clarified bird from this phlegm is evidently a naturalistic explanation of the ancient Phoenix myth. The De natura rerum links this process explicitly to the making of the homunculus. Directly after the recipe for the clarified bird, the text says the following: "One must also know that people may be born thus without natural father and mother." The homunculus recipe too involves the use of a mucilaginous phlegm, although in its case this substance is provided by a living human donor rather than being produced from ash. Both in the case of the artificial bird and in that of the artificial human, the phlegm is allowed to putrefy in an alchemical flask, which must be tended by a spagyrist (chymist).

Latest revision as of 08:49, 23 October 2014

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