Homunculus , homunculus ( lat. Homunculus - man) - in the view of medieval alchemists , a creature similar to man, which can be obtained artificially.
For a long time, the creation of the first homunculus was attributed to Arnaldus de Villanova , who lived in the 13th century . One of the most famous “recipes” for obtaining a homunculus was proposed in the 16th century by Paracelsus [1] . The alchemist believed that the human sperm enclosed in a special vessel during heating and some other manipulations (digging into horse dung , “magnetization”, the essence of which is not completely clear) becomes a homunculus. The "homunculus" was fed by adding a small amount of human blood to the flask. The ripening time of the homunculus, according to Paracelsus , is forty days, the growth of the homunculus is 11-12 inches .
According to the ideas of the XVII - XVIII centuries , the homunculus is contained in the sperm , and when it enters the mother's body, it is transformed into a person; sometimes the sperm itself was identified with the homunculus. Such views are called animalcalculism ; one of the adherents of animal-formalism was Levenguk , the discoverer of sperm. The idea of a homunculus was reflected in many medieval drawings, usually depicting a homunculus - a little man who enters the mother’s body and increases significantly in size. In the XVIII century, academic science in the person of one of the founders of epigenesis, K.F. Wolf, sharply opposed such preformist ideas.
Notes
- ↑ Homunculus // Small Encyclopedic Dictionary of Brockhaus and Efron : in 4 volumes - St. Petersburg. 1907-1909.