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Astonishing Legends Network.

Disclaimer, this episode includes the usual amount of adult language and graphic discussions you've come to expect around here. But in the event it becomes an unusual amount, expect another call from me.

All right, welcome back to Scared All The Time. I'm Chris Cullari.

And I'm Ed Voccola.

And this week, we're gonna take a break from looking at fears about all the fun and exciting ways we can die, to look at a very specific fear about creating a very specific form of life, the homunculus. Now, I don't know if you've noticed the way Ed and I have, but our culture seems to be going through a cycle of interest in creating fake people. There's Poor Things, Lisa Frankenstein, there's Reboots of Frankenstein and Bride of Frankenstein in the works. And that's not even touching on the way that AI has reignited conversations about what it means to be alive and conscious. This interest isn't new, really. Most of us know about Mary Shelley's very productive staycation with her friends that produced the original Frankenstein manuscript. But long before that, as early as the 16th century, philosophers, scientists and alchemists were exploring the idea of creating people. And they called these creations homunculi, or literally little people in Latin. And not little in the sense of less than human or something. Little as in fully formed, miniature human beings. So join Ed and I this week as we get degrees from Mad Scientist University and explore the history and lore of homunculi. Where did the idea come from? Who wanted to make them? Why? And most importantly, were they ever successful? Warning, the answers may scare you.

What are we scared? When are we all the time?

Now it is time for, time for Scared All The Time. All right, welcome back. First, Ed and I just wanted to say thank you so much. You guys killed it last week when we said, tell people to join the Facebook page or whatever. We're closing in on 600 members in the Facebook group now, which is up almost 100 from last week. So the show is growing. It's all thanks to you guys. Thank you so much for listening. It's still the kind of thing, tell your friends, tell everybody. We saw our buddy Germ posted that he's been listening to Scared All The Time a lot on Instagram. So thank you for that.

And he has his own podcast that just came out, which I don't have the name of in front of me at the moment, but he's pretty active on all of our socials. I'm sure you guys can find him. It's pretty unique name. So congrats Germ on starting a new journey and for listening to the show all the time, being a very supportive and active member of our community.

Yeah. Thank you so much everybody. We've been trying to keep up with the messages and the Facebook and like, it's just so cool. Some of you guys have such great theories. Someone on the Facebook page shared a theory that the reason people don't move when they die from spontaneous human combustion is because the fire starts so intensely and so suddenly, and with such heat that it like burns all the nerves instantaneously. So they don't feel anything when they're burning from the inside because it like combusts and singes all their nerves. And so they don't move because they don't feel anything, which I think is a great idea. We also had somebody who reached out on the Facebook page and said that they had read or had access to in college, the original Phlogiston texts. Like the original writings on Phlogiston, which is so cool. And like that's part of the fun for Ed and I doing this show is building this community of people who have all this strange information and wild ideas. And it's fantastic. So thank you so much. We're gonna keep growing. We're just gonna keep making it the best we can be. So Ed, do you have any updates on the Patreon stuff that we've been promising the people?

Yeah, it's always in flux. So most recent update on that is we've been approached by Supercast, which is another Patreon style. I guess there's like a bunch of ways now that people can support the show and get unique content. And we're just looking into that. I really liked what we saw from those guys over there. And it's something I think where we're gonna internally test out and see if we like it. And if we do, that might be the thing we do over Patreon. We don't know yet, but there will be a thing very soon. We're just wanting to find something that we think is cool and will be the best end user experience for whoever jumps on board.

Yeah, I don't know if any of you guys are supporters of My Favorite Murder, but they are using Supercast. I think they're the highest profile Supercast podcast. So if you support My Favorite Murder, let us know how you like that interface because we're still exploring and figuring it out.

Yeah, that would be great. That would be a huge help to us. If anybody follows any shows that are using Supercast, let us know. We'd love to know your feedback on that. And on a personal note before we head into the episode, huge loss this week, massive RIP and God bless to Akira Toriyama, one of the all-time greats and just a huge part of my childhood and to some extent my adulthood. So again, massive, massive loss.

Yes. All right, so we're about to get into the episode. Just one last thing. Like we set up top this week's episode is a little bit of change of pace, a little bit lighter than some of the very dark topics we've been covering. It's more creepy than actually scary, but fuck you, it's our show. So whether it's scary or not, we'll do whatever we want. We welcome all kinds of fears here at Scared All The Time. So without further ado, let's dive into the small world of the homunculus.

No pun intended. Or maybe pun was intended, I don't know.

The small world, pun definitely intended. So I have to give Ed credit for suggesting this topic. He's actually been pushing to do an episode on homunculi since we started the podcast. And I'm not entirely sure why he's so obsessed with them other than maybe he secretly wants to create an entire society of homunculi to worship and fear him. So Ed, the floor is yours. How afraid of these little creatures are you and how did you find out about them even?

I'm not afraid of them in the sense of like, oh no, there's a homunculus in the corner, but maybe that would be the case soon. I think I just was reading something one time and they had come up or the process of making them had come up and it was like super gross and disgusting. And then I think it just came up because of kind of what your opening was talking about, which was just talking about this fascination right now with making people. And I think there was that company in Europe somewhere, CRISPR or whatever, who's I guess doing genome shit, which I feel like in the 70s, people were talking about, hey, let's all get together and just not do that. Let's just not make people. And then they cloned Dolly when we were kids.

Well, yeah, in the 90s, they banned it.

Yeah, it felt like we just never heard about that again. You know?

Well, right.

And then the argument people make for like, oh, AI is dangerous and AI is scary and AI needs to be regulated. And I think all of those things are true, but there are examples in the past of new burgeoning technology, which is being like, maybe we shouldn't. And that was, I believe, like human genome stuff, like right, like the 70s. A consortium of sciences came together and be like, hey, let's just fucking not do this. Let's just all agree to not do this. And I think that maybe has culminated in what you were saying, if cloning was in fact banned after Dolly. I don't know. I mean, how are we making impossible meat? I have no idea.

Yeah, I don't think that's a clone.

Fuck it. Just throw in impossible meat in Beyond Burgers. Like that's another good example of like, what the fuck are we doing? Like, what is that? Beet juice? What is it when it bleeds? Like, I have no idea.

I don't know if it's impossible meat. I've read about one of the meat companies and they're essentially just growing like protein chains. There's no like, I don't think impossible meat is ever in danger of like 15, 20 years from now, someone being a whistleblower, like the beet was alive.

I don't know. All it takes is fake meat people, getting in touch to the 23andMe people and being like, I got a lot of DNA samples. What do you got? And it was like, we got a hamburger that we're trying to put teeth in.

Right. So what you're really afraid of here is eating a homunculi hamburger.

Again, it's not a thing where I'm like, homunculi are scary, but I just feel like a lot of the thought behind wanting to make it and striving to make little people or just little anythings or big things or Frankensteins or things in our own image that isn't just shacking up and making a kid. Like I find that insane and kind of scary. I'm scared of the people who are interested in that.

It's the playing God aspect to you that is the scariest part.

I guess so.

Cause well, I mean, it's funny. I think my first encounter with Homunculi, I think was that Treehouse of Horror episode where Lisa creates like a whole society in her desk drawer. Do you remember that?

Yeah. I mean, like it's a real Simpsons did it first situation.

I think I'm pretty sure they call them Homunculi at one point, or maybe it's somewhere along the way. Maybe I just made the connection, but that was the first place that I encountered them. And then actually the second place that I encountered Homunculi is in the original Bride of Frankenstein, because the first third of that movie is about a guy, Dr. Pretorius. I think his name is Dr. Septimus Pretorius, which is an all time great name. And he's trying to create Homunculi, and he has them in these little jars in his lab. And I think maybe one of them escapes at some point, and they get up to a bunch of hijinks. But then Dr. Pretorius convinces Dr. Frankenstein to resume his experiments, and it all spins out from there. But it's interesting that I assume somebody in the writing of Bride of Frankenstein probably had made the connection between the idea of Homunculi kind of being a predecessor to Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. And to be honest, I've never even, I don't think I've ever read an original translation of Frankenstein. So there may be mention of Homunculi in that book.

And I'm sure The Simpsons probably, I haven't seen that episode in a thousand years, but I'm saying they probably mention Homunculi. They're all Harvard writers doing that when it was good. So they know words.

Yeah, that's a good transition, a good segue, because we're gonna define some words here up top.

But can we pronounce them?

No, there's like 15 different words and names in this episode that I probably am gonna fuck up. So a couple of things we should define up top, some terms and words. So first, we're gonna try to keep the discussion focused on pure Homunculi. So no elves, no leprechauns, no fairies. If you want a podcast about being afraid of leprechauns, there are plenty of podcasts for babies out there. We also aren't gonna be talking about a fear of shrinking or being shrunk. That's a very valid fear that I think about all the time and how I would fight a spider with like a sewing needle, but Homunculi are created small. So if anything, we should be more afraid of them growing very big. And finally, I just wanna define, when we say small, like when we're talking about little people in this episode, we mean very small, like a few inches tall, just to help give you a mental image.

Like, do you know how tall a Smurf is? Is at least as tall as a Smurf?

Yes, well, actually that's the other thing. We were just texting the other night, Cat Williams talks about Homunculi on a clip from Joe Rogan's podcast.

Yeah, where he's talking about how they are Homunculi.

Yeah.

That Gargamel made them.

Cat Williams has a theory that the Smurfs are Homunculi and it's an evil show and it shouldn't be watched because Gargamel made them.

I don't know if his theory is that it's evil. I think he was just saying that some people consider it evil because it's, for whatever religious reasons, I guess you shouldn't make Smurf fat.

If you want to have a lot of fun with this episode, just imagine that we're talking about Smurfs the entire time and it'll get exponentially funnier, so.

Yeah, but also like the reason I brought up Smurfs, even besides the things that we were texting with each other before recording, is that, and maybe I've mentioned this on the show before, I don't know, but I love the measurement of Smurfs. Like Smurfs are three apples tall. That's their measurement. They're three apples tall. I mean, obviously somebody's always gonna be like, oh, what kind of apples? Fucking Granny Smith, like fuck off, who cares? It's just three apples tall. So I guess Hermonculi by Cat Williams' definition are three apples tall.

I also, speaking of demonic things about Smurfs.

No one was doing that.

Yeah, well Cat Williams was.

Yes, but I love Smurfs. I also love the Snorks. So I have no problem with this stuff.

I'm on Cat Williams' side, that the Smurfs are demonic, because the last time one of the Smurf movies came out, I walked past one of the big posters that they put up on construction walls and stuff, like those big-

Oh, you're talking about the Smurfs live action movies, and I actually worked on one of those. But yeah, I'm sorry. You're talking about the Smurfs.

I'm talking about the Smurfs live action movie because I had never noticed until I walked by this massive, high-definition render of a Smurf and looked at their skin that I realized a Smurf must feel like a fucking dolphin or something. It was like this waxy blue skin.

A snork, a snork definitely would.

And I think I always thought in my mind that they were like cuddly or like soft or puffy or something. And then when I walked past that and saw what Smurf skin would actually look like, it's disgusting. I don't want anything to do with them.

I feel like I'd be friends with Smurfs. They seem like they have it. They're a lot of fun.

Yeah, until you touch one and chuck it across the room.

I don't need to touch them. I have dozens of friends I've never touched. So it's fine. That's not a prerequisite of being my friend. So yeah, I'd hang out. We'd talk about Smurf stuff. I'd give them the news of like stuff they can't see over, like, oh, over there, past the mushrooms. Actually, they're putting in a buffalo wild wings, pretty cool stuff. So yeah, they are wacky and they're weird. And I guess they're potentially demonic. I have no problem with Smurfs. The Snorks, I have a little bit more of a problem with because, you know, they're aquatic, but don't do what Gargamel does.

Don't do what Gargamel does. So to understand where the idea of the homunculi came from, we first have to understand a little bit about the ancient practice of alchemy. Now, this episode is gonna be for the history heads because there's a lot of information here about alchemy and it's all relevant, but it's also just very interesting. I don't know a ton about alchemy. So this research I found really interesting for a lot of different reasons that we'll get to. But basically this is where I was starting from. I always thought alchemy was basically just the attempt to turn common metals into gold, but it turns out there is a lot more to it. An outline of an alchemy course offered at the University of Hawaii defines the ancient practice as a cosmic art by which parts of that cosmos, the mineral and animal parts, can be liberated from their temporal existence and attain states of perfection, gold in the case of minerals, and for humans, longevity, immortality and redemption. Such transformations can be brought about on one hand by the use of a material substance such as the, quote, philosopher's stone or elixir, or on the other hand by revelatory knowledge or psychological enlightenment. So right off the bat, we're getting a lot deeper into the alchemical weeds than I even knew existed. Like I'd heard philosopher's stone, I guess somewhere in the back of my head, I knew that alchemists also searched for immortality, but I didn't really know how it all connected.

Well, I have a question.

Yes, Ed in the back, you're raising your hand. Thank you.

Thank you. So alchemists, you're like, oh, alchemists were searching for philosopher's stone. They want to make gold. They wanted longevity. They wanted what have you. But I also feel like alchemists was like a position, like a cabinet position, at least in like fantasy novels. It's never just like a rogue alchemist. It's always like, oh, this is the king's alchemist. And so the king, the rich, they want long life. They want more gold. They want shit. So it does feel like a job that's gotta be like, how's it coming with the gold? And you have to just lie all the time and be like, oh, it's still, I don't know, lead. And it's like, we're drinking lots of mercury and we're not getting any longer lives. So it's gotta be a scary role to have where, you know, you probably are pretty high society. You got a lab. They're probably throwing you some coin to do the job, but you gotta be on the chopping block every couple of weeks.

Yeah. Well, there's definitely throughout this, a lot of royal alchemists and higher society people. I think something that's really interesting that we'll get into in a bit though, is that alchemy, it was the birth of a lot of science. Like a lot of modern science got its roots in alchemy because basically alchemy was really the study of the natural world before the natural world and the supernatural were-

Very separate.

Separate from each other. So the roots of alchemy can be traced all the way back to Aristotle in the mid 300s BC. And Aristotle had what we'd consider a rational, though not technically scientific understanding of the world around him. So in other words, Aristotle, undeniably brilliant guy, who made a lot of observations and hypotheses grounded in his observations, but he never put his theories to empirical testing. So I don't remember high school science all that well, but I'm pretty sure the scientific method is big on testing and measuring conclusions and adjusting your thinking based on those results. I wish it stopped at have an idea because I think I probably would have done a lot better in science if all you had to do was think and observe and be like, what about this? And had Aristotle tested things, he might've changed his mind about some of his theories. One of his big ones that was a whiff was the theory that women have fewer teeth than men, which I feel like is a pretty easy one to check. I mean, I know they didn't have dentists probably back then or at least dentists as we understand them. But like, I mean, it wasn't too hard to like count teeth, I don't think, but that was one of his things. So anyway, Aristotle was also thinking about the natural world. And one theory that he came up with, I think probably made a lot of sense at the time. He believed that all matter was made up of four elements, earth, air, fire and water.

God, he sounds like a proto avatar, but also he sounds like he could probably end up rings have a little Captain Planet situation.

Well, that's what I was going to say, except I think Captain Planet added a fifth element that was like love or being handicapped or something.

It was heart.

So in Aristotle's belief, these four elements each had their own unique properties and characteristics, and all physical objects were made up of varying combinations of these four elements. This was all sort of a refined version of his mentor Plato's belief that the physical world was a manifestation of an underlying world of forms or ideas, and that all objects in the physical world were made up of a combination of these forms, which I feel like if you were a peasant who caught wind of that idea, it would be like going to see The Matrix on opening weekend and then going back into town and being like, you guys aren't gonna believe this shit. You gotta hear this.

It is nuts that you mentioned The Matrix opening weekend because I saw The Matrix opening weekend with my dad because I believe there was a re-release in theaters because it's pre-streaming, people. There was a re-release in theaters of Empire Strikes Back or something. And we wanted to go see it. You had to go to the fucking movie theater and it was sold out. So I was like, shit. And I had seen a trailer. I was heard about The Matrix coming out and I was like, oh, this movie might be cool. And we went to see it. And when I left the theater, it was exactly what you just said. I was like, you people won't believe what the fuck I just saw. And my dad, I think he, I don't know what his reaction really was, but for me, I was floored by that fucking movie, dude.

Yeah, yeah. Well, I think that's exactly if you had gone to hear Plato speak in 400 BC or whatever. And he was like, hey, simulation theory. The world, there's just an underlying world of capital F forms and capital I ideas. And it all manifests from that.

Don't listen to Smashing Pumpkins. It's not just a vampire. That's a joke for no one.

I actually found a translated section of Aristotle's writings on this subject of the four elements and linked to it in the show notes. It's all gobbledygook and gibberish. Like I couldn't.

Well, you shouldn't have had it translated into Wingdings.

Well, it's, you need, I feel like you need a scholar to help make sense of it. I mean, it's in English, but it's very dense and kind of hard to follow. But I do think it's worth taking a look at and reading and being struck by the realization that this was something that was thought about and written down over 2000 years ago. And it feels so modern reading it, even though it's hard to understand. It feels like a conversation you'd have with like a stoned guy in college or something.

Also his undeniable riz comes through. It's why it feels so modern.

Whoo, yeah, man. Aristotle, it's like, I read a couple of pages of this thing and I think I'm in love? I don't know, he's pulling me in. But basically the four elements he theorized all had different properties that would combine to form the different objects in the world around us. So earth was considered to be the heaviest and most dense of the elements and was associated with qualities such as solidity, stability and dryness. Air was considered to be lighter than earth and was associated with qualities such as movement, lightness and wetness, no surprise. Fire was considered to be the lightest and most active of the elements and was associated with qualities such as heat, brightness and dryness. And water was considered to be an intermediate between earth and air and was associated with qualities such as, you'll never guess, fluidity, coldness and also wetness.

It'd be weird if it was dryness. We already got two drynesses, only one wetness. We got two wetnesses and two drynesses.

We got two wetnesses. Well, and I think that's part of the idea that like these are all sort of-

Yeah, yin and yang here.

Yeah, they're intermediaries between each other. So, you know, none of, they're all individual elements, but they share these crossover things between them. And this school of thought persisted into the Middle Ages. There's a passage from a book called The Skeptical Chemist, spelled hilariously, like spelled old Middle Ages style, published in 1661 that illustrates sort of a rough proof of Aristotle's ideas by observing a burning log. So Ed hit me with the Yule log sound effect here.

I don't know how they sound.

Like a crackling log.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, I'll put it in. I'll put it in, I'll put it in.

If you but consider a piece of green wood burning in a chimney, you will readily discern in the disbanded parts of it, the four elements of which we teach it and other mixed bodies to be composed. The fire discovers itself in the flame. The smoke by ascending to the top of the chimney and there readily vanishing into air, manifests to what element it belongs and gladly returns. The water boiling and hissing at the ends of the burning wood betrays itself. And the ashes by their weight, their fireiness and their dryness, put it past doubt that they belong to the element of earth. And this is where early alchemical thought came from. Essentially, if the only difference between lead and gold was the ratio of these four elements, then by changing the proportions of elements, lead could be transformed into gold. So what Aristotle invented, I think, is video game crafting. Aristotle invented the idea of the RPG. That's all that it is. You just add fire points to lead and then you get gold.

Well, yeah, I think what he invented was a recipe book for the dogs. You know what I mean? For his boys, because that's what it is, right? It's literally just like add a little more lead to this, add a little bit more fucking wood to this. At a certain point, you let that brew for 16 days and at the end of it, you get a bar of gold. What are you doing out there all night in your fucking man shed?

Turning lead into gold, leave me alone.

It's also amazing that you can go back to the beginning of fucking known time and there's somebody selling the idea that you can get money from nothing. Like it doesn't matter what the situation. It's like, you fucking tired of listening to your boss all day, when you can day trade from your basement or whatever and be fucking rich. Or it's like, oh no, at the end of the day, almost always you have to put in a hard day's work to fucking get paid. But even then that was like, I think we can figure this recipe out. We're gonna be stacking bags doing pretty much nothing.

When we get into some of these recipes, there is a hard day's work involved in some of these.

I just met like planting the idea of money from nothing.

Yes, well, it was also about, in some minds especially, and I forget if I have this a little bit, I do have this a little bit later, but it was about, yes, the pursuit of wealth, but it was also about the pursuit of perfection. It was about trying to, they considered gold to be a perfect element. They considered immortality to be a perfect human. So they were searching for both the wealth and the underlying perfection of the universe. They wanted to kind of crack that code, but they also only figured out how to crack any of it by just like throwing shit together in a pot. So what happened sometime around the ninth century in what is now the area of Iraq and Iran, a guy named Chabir Ibn Hayyan took the ideas that Aristotle came up with and finally added an experimental methodology to them. Now, as an aside, it's not entirely clear that Chabir ever existed or at least existed as one man.

He's like Zoro, whoever's under the mask, every generation might be a new person, but the idea of him-

Kind of, I mean, as early as the 10th century, so really just like a hundred years after his books were written, scholars were already debating if he was actually a guy or a school of alchemists using the name as a pseudonym. But for our purposes for this episode, it doesn't really matter. It's just kind of interesting. What matters is that the writer, whoever it was, of this collection of works built upon the previously developed Aristotelian theory of elements, and Hayan suggested the existence of different categories of matter, including spirits, which vaporize upon heating, metals and stones, which can be converted into powder, which is important when we get to the philosopher's stone stuff. And Habir's work laid the foundation for, I mean, not over-exaggerating, like all of modern chemistry, basically, like at least the structured classification of chemical substances. Like his practice and encouragement of scientific experimentation is what really started to transform alchemy from purely a superstitious practice to a proper scientific discipline. Hayan and his alchemical practices are credited with the invention of all kinds of stuff used in modern chemistry, including quote, the crystallization, calcination, sublimation and evaporation, the synthesis of acids, hydrochloric, nitric, citric, ascetic and tartaric acids and distillation. Hayan used his knowledge to improve manufacturing processes, which allowed advancements in major industries, both in his day and today, including glass making, the development of steel, the dying of cloth and the prevention of rust. So this is where what I was saying earlier, essentially alchemy was science before the natural and supernatural worlds were fully disentangled. Like honestly, someday I could see, if we ever finally disentangle some of our more borderline theoretical or supernatural physics theories, like if we someday understand a more scientific, I don't know what I'm trying to say here.

I don't know what you're saying either. But speaking of more or mores in this case, I do always find it like interesting or fun or whatever in Robin Hood, Prince of Thieves, when Morgan Freeman's character has like a telescope essentially and it scares Robin Hood. He thinks all of a sudden like the men on horses are way too fucking close to them. So I only bring that up because it's like, he's from that part of the world, right? I think he's supposed to be from like the Middle East essentially, whoever they're fighting in the Crusades. It's just like, oh yeah, the guy who created chemistry and weird science shit came out of this part of the world.

Yeah, well, I guess part of what's so interesting about this evolution of scientific theory is like, I wonder 500 years or a thousand years from now, what they'll look back on as stuff that we didn't quite fully understand and go, oh yeah, you know, they eventually had to separate the study of whatever fucking gluons from everything else because they thought that was the same thing back then. That's so crazy, you know, and we don't even know what those revelations will be.

We're not gonna get them in our lifetimes.

No, no, we won't, but that's what's crazy about it.

Feels like we're gonna be sitting right here with AI for a bit. That'll be the big revelation.

Well, as the Greek and Middle Eastern School of Alchemy took off in Europe through translations of ancient texts, a completely independent school of alchemical thought started to take off in China. And Chinese alchemy was a little less focused on material sciences. It was more medicinal in nature, partially because it was heavily influenced by traditional Chinese medicine. But that said, I just thought an interesting fact. Some people might already know this. I feel like this is sort of a bar trivia fact, but one of the most lasting discoveries of Chinese alchemy is gunpowder. And it was accidentally invented by Chinese alchemists who were mixing powders to try to uncover an elixir for eternal life, which is hilarious because gunpowder is most certainly not used to extend anyone's life.

No.

It's very good at doing the opposite.

Well, you know, one of my top five favorite movies of all time is October Sky. And he has to go to the nerd's table at the cafeteria. He wants to learn about rocketry. And he's like, I want to know about rockets. And the kid's like, what do you want to know about rockets? And he's like, I want to know everything. And then he did the first thing he says, he's like, well, they say that rocketry is potentially invented by the Chinese as early as 3000 BC. And he was talking about fireworks and stuff or whatever. You telling me that just made me think of that moment in one of my favorite movies.

Yeah, it's just an odd, or not odd, almost an ironic thing that these people were obsessed with trying to find the elixir of life and ended up inventing gunpowder. Oops.

I mean, whatever, what do they say? What's his name? Fucking Nobel invented dynamite, which I knew before Oppenheimer, but now he's named for a peace prize, you know?

Yeah. So that idea of mixing powders to create elixirs brings us to another important element of alchemy that we should touch on, which is the idea of the Philosopher's Stone. Now I felt so stupid researching this part because I guess I always thought a Philosopher's Stone was almost like something Indiana Jones could find, like a relic or like a...

Yeah, it is poorly named. You don't think of an equation or anything when you hear it.

Yeah. And so, well, Greek, Arab, Hindu, Buddhist and European alchemists all refer to some version of this stone. But as with everything alchemical, it seems like the power of the stone and the definition of the stone was a little different depending on who you're reading or who you're asking. Essentially, it's a mythic substance capable of turning base metals such as mercury into gold or silver. And it's also an elixir of life, able to heal whatever illness you may have, prolonging life for anyone who consumes a small piece of it. Some people say you have to dilute it in wine first and then drink it.

Hell yeah.

I'm sure there are lots of ways you can get a philosopher's stone infusion. And really the point is at the end of the day for centuries, harnessing the power of the philosopher's stone was like the most sought after goal in alchemy. The philosopher's stone symbolized perfection in its finest, divine illumination and heavenly bliss. So maybe what they were searching for was drugs, actually.

I mean, I'm sure they discovered a lot of drugs through this process that were definitely drugs that like destroyed you.

Yeah.

It was like, yo, you're gonna get so high. And it was like, you're all your teeth are gonna fall out. All your fucking, your hair is gonna fall out. They're not gonna know why drinking mercury to get stoned is not a good idea. I bet you they definitely were finding all sorts of wacky shit. The problem was replicating, it was probably difficult. And also, again, I can't imagine the people who put you in charge of this are decent people. Like they're probably just super rich assholes who are like, I wanna live forever. Bring me the bones of as many poor people as you can. Not the women though, because we need a lot of teeth for this. So we're actually gonna be losing money on this endeavor if we get lady mouths. So bring me as many fucking teeth to make this stone as we can.

To be honest, I had kind of a hard time wrapping my head around what the stone is exactly and how it's supposed to function. I think because in some cases, it is what I was saying. It's like a stone that can be found in nature and then ground down and mixed with other elements. But to other philosophers and alchemists, the stone is more of an idea, sometimes referenced as an aether or some sort of base reality, which this I find really kooky and interesting. The idea that the philosopher's stone represents a base reality that we are trying to conjure things from. According to Plato, the four elements, earth, air, fire and water, are derived from a common source associated with chaos. And he referred to this source as prima materia, which is also the name alchemists assigned to the starting ingredient for the creation of the philosopher's stone. So essentially, there are these two schools of thought, the idea that it's a stone that can be found on ground, and then this other school of thought that is much more esoteric, that there is this prima materia, this common source, and that you need to somehow capture that and use it to create a philosopher's stone. In the 17th century, Thomas Vaughan writes, The first matter of the stone is the very same with the first matter of all things. I find this line really interesting. I find this whole school of thought really interesting because it kind of reminds me of string theory, that there's some deep hidden base from which all things manifest. And that's obviously super oversimplifying. And I don't want to be one of those, yeah, I'm into quantum physics guys who like doesn't actually understand anything.

Is that a type of guy? Do you run into those people at parties?

You run into those people at parties, on the internet, like people who are like, yeah, I've been doing a little reading on quantum physics, quantum mechanics, because most of those guys and women, there's plenty of women too, they don't actually understand anything about math or physics. They just watch a lot of new age YouTube videos.

Sure.

You know, like those people. And I don't want to be one of those guys. I don't really understand. I only make that connection roughly. I just think it's interesting that there's still a school of thought that is studied in modern life that roughly is the idea that there is this base below all things and that we still haven't quite been able to find it. Like humans seem to have always had this sense that there is something else just beyond the reach of our human reality. And if we could just find it and understand it and define it, we could achieve riches beyond belief. You know? Mm-hmm, mm-hmm, mm-hmm. Sorry, am I just describing religion at this point?

That's fine, I was thinking that too. I guess in some way you're describing religion. And hey, look at some of those fucking mega churches, mansions, I think they found it, so I don't know.

I don't know if that's interesting. Maybe that's not interesting at all.

Well, I provide chapters, so if people are like, these are just two blowhards who don't know anything, seeming like they read a book for the first time in their lives, and now we're all supposed to be impressed, they can just skip right by this. We're gonna be getting to talking about fucking tiny people soon, so.

We are. Before we get to the good stuff and talk about how to make homunculi at home, there's one last archaic theory you should understand. Pre-formationism. And we won't go too deep on this, but I mention it because I think it's an interesting example of how scientific thought evolved and shaped some of these ideas. So credit first goes to the master of triangles, Pythagoras, for coming up with a not-triangle-related idea called spermism, or the idea that fathers contribute the essential characteristics of their offspring, while mothers contribute only a material substrate, as he called it.

What the fuck is a material substrate?

The place in which you can plant the seed.

Oh, okay. Literally a bun in the oven. It's the bun in the oven theory.

Literally a bun in the oven. So women had less teeth than men, and they basically were just ovens for tiny people.

I think all ovens need to exhaust in some way. So if you have too many teeth, that's, you know what I mean? You need a mouth that has vents.

So yeah, so Pythagoras came up with spermism. Aristotle accepted spermism and elaborated on it a little bit. And his writings are what keyed Europeans into the idea centuries later. Spermism kind of folded into this other debate that was going on about spontaneous generation. And people believed at various points that frogs, flies and other little creatures could generate almost spontaneously from warm places, usually giant piles of horse crap. And so these two ideas kind of blended together into this theory of pre-formation. The idea that all creatures already exist at a microscopic size and just need the right environment to grow to full size. That's what they thought. And there were all kinds of wild ideas about how exactly humans were conceived and developed.

Are you familiar with the bottle city of Kandor from Superman?

No.

It's just like they wanted to save a city from Krypton or whatever. So I believe they shrunk the entire city and its inhabitants down into a bottle that Superman, I'm pretty sure, has to keep at his fortress of solitude, being like, still working on getting you guys big again.

Yeah, well, I mean-

That's a real thing, a whole city.

That actually, we'll get to it in a little bit, but that also feels homunculus inspired because a lot of homunculi were grown in jars. But we'll get to that in a minute. There were all these wild ideas about how exactly humans were conceived and developed, but pre-formationism kind of caught on in 1694 when a Dutch telescopist and microscopist named Nicolas Hartziker published a sketch that I'm not going to be able to pronounce, Essai de Dioptrique. And this sketch portrayed a homunculus, a tiny little person in a sperm cell. I think I found a, I'll link to an image of it in the show notes, but that image really caught on with people. And they were like, oh, I get it. I see where the little man comes from.

That is the worst image. That's doing no one any favors in like furthering actual knowledge. I mean, I guess it helps.

Oh, but it's so important in the next steps of how to create homunculi.

You couldn't pronounce that thing, but I wonder if in English it translates to, you won't believe what I'm seeing in here.

You won't believe what's in your balls. A tiny little city. I will say before we move on, people at this point in the pre 1700s, were developing different theories about consumption and human development. There was a lot of debate about pre-formationism. It wasn't readily accepted. There were other scientists and stuff who like made fun of it. So it was at the time, it was even sort of a, I don't know if it was out there as much as like flat earth would be now, but it was not necessarily the going.

The dominant thought on the subject.

In general, pre-formationism was a little bit hard to research because it had so many permutations and whatever, but it's important because so many of the homunculi recipes rely on a tiny little man living in your sperm. So that's why I touch on it, because we are about to get to what you all are here for, homunculus recipes that you can try at home.

Oh, I think we know who that is. It's gotta be Mr. Disclaimer at the door. One second.

They should absolutely not try them at home, and they're disgusting. So to recap, don't try this at home, and don't listen if you're screaming about bodily fluids.

Okay, well, see you later. Thanks for stopping by. Chris, you wanna hit us with some recipes that people definitely should not try at home or really take that seriously?

So recipe number one, the first known account of the production of the homunculus is said to be found in an undated Arabic work called, The Book of the Cow. The materials required for the creation of this homunculus include human semen, a cow or ewe, and animal blood. The process involved artificially inseminating the cow or ewe and then smearing the inseminated animals genitals with the blood of another animal, as well as feeding the inseminated animal exclusively on the blood of another animal. You got that, Ed?

Okay, I mean, I'm trying to. I think from what I can understand is, you can artificially inseminate it, and then you gotta just feed one of these animals a bunch of blood, and then when that blood animal's, when he's filled with blood, then you take their blood and you fucking wipe it all over the other one's junk?

Kind of, well, you gotta rub the animals genitals with, yeah, all right, let me actually, this is a little confusing.

But what is it in quarts, in tablespoons? I don't understand.

So the materials required for the creation of this homunculus include human semen, a cow or a ewe, and animal blood from an entirely different animal, an unspecified third animal.

Let's just say lizard.

Let's say lizard. The process involves artificially inseminating the cow or ewe, and then smearing the inseminated animal's genitals with the blood of another animal, the lizard, as well as then feeding that cow or ewe exclusively on the blood of that lizard.

So whatever blood you have left over that you haven't rubbed on the cow's junk, now it's on a diet of that blood.

Yes, and so you would need more than a lizard. You'd probably need, I would imagine, like a goat. You need something bigger. It's gotta have, if you're exclusively feeding a cow the blood of another animal, and it has to be one animal.

It can't just be like, bring me 22 lizards. It has to be from one lizard.

Yeah, no.

Or one animal.

Yes, so now the pregnant animal will eventually give birth to an unformed substance, which would then be placed into a powder made of ground sunstone, which in this case is a mystical phosphorescent elixir, basically the philosopher's stone element of this recipe. Sulfur, magnet, green tutia, which is a sulfate of iron, and the sap of a white willow. When the blob starts growing human skin, the alchemist, let me just say that phrase again. When the blob starts growing human skin, You're halfway there. the alchemist would place it in a large glass or lead container for three days. After that, you decapitate its mother and then you feed the blob with human skin, the blood of the decapitated mother for seven days and it will become a fully formed homunculus.

That's amazing. That is so fucking crazy.

Yeah. And that's just one.

But also, yeah, I also love that like in the modern era of recipes online, like every recipe I've ever looked up, it's always like, oh, well, I actually did, I left it in for a day and a half and I replaced the blood of a lizard with just a bunch of oregano. Like people always immediately change every aspect of a recipe when I'm looking online. So I do wonder how that would work out in today's world, but holy shit.

I want one of those like long winded mommy blog recipes that's like more about.

Oh, it's that shit you skip in the beginning.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. But for each of these.

Yeah, I don't care about this at all. Just tell me fucking how to make this. I don't care about how like your grandma made it and she met a homunculi in the war and they dated. Like, I don't need to know any of that. Just tell me how to fucking make a homunculi.

There's another experiment in the book of the cow that isn't homunculi related, but I do think it's really interesting. It describes how to create a hybrid animal that has the body of a cow, the face of a man and the talons of a bird and wings.

Wait, that's the fucking dumbest. Like a Captain Crunch, oops, all berries. Where you're like, okay, this exists in the world of Captain Crunch canon as like, we accidentally just made it with all berries. Cause no one's on the outset being like, listen, Jen, here's what I'm making. It's the body of a cow, the head of a man. No, this is someone who was like, whatever the fuck we just did is now this. So let's just tell them that it's a recipe for that.

Kill it.

Like we have.

Kill it, kill it, kill it.

Also burn it with fire. But it is like, who the fuck's making that? Like I get a tiny man. That's cool. But like a fucking cow with the head of a man and the wings of a fucking Griffin or some shit. Like that to me sounds like a freakazoid experiment.

It is. So I couldn't find, it wasn't elaborated on what the process for making this thing was. So I am sure it is even stranger than the homunculus recipe. But the other thing that is very funny to me is that the reason that you create this animal isn't to like have this cool animal or like train it like a homunculus or get it to do anything. The idea is that you create this animal and then you burn it alive because if you suffumigate yourself, which in this case is to burn the creature and inhale the fumes of the creature, the magical practitioner will become invisible.

I'm sorry, I cut you off before I found out that they were just making an ingredient?

Yes, the creature is an ingredient and then you become invisible. And then the book tells you being invisible, cool. You could probably come up with all kinds of ideas for what you could do if you're invisible.

That's never great.

The book says that the alchemist is then told to enter the houses of men to watch them eating and drinking and listen to their secret conversations. You then commit those secret conversations to memory so that when you reveal what the men ate and said, they attribute extraordinary powers to you. And the author of the experiment tells the magician that if he is thought to have the gift of prophecy because of his extraordinary revelations, he should say, my creator sent me with angelic spiritualities. But if he is thought to have mastery over the spirit world, he is to say, a demon told me this.

This is the most fucking insane, like, okay. So alchemists in my mind right now already could just be con men in the sense that like, yeah, the gold's coming, give me another 20 million rubies and I'll keep working on this. But then now they really feel con many because it's like, I can make you spies. That's so crazy.

What's hilarious is that it's such an overly complicated set of instructions. Not only are you creating an entirely mythical being just to set it on fire and breathe in the fumes so that you could become invisible, the goal isn't to spy on them. The goal is to spy on them, to notice things you shouldn't know so that you can later humble brag about your cool powers.

Well, that's what I'm saying is like the knock on effects of spying on them is being able to, I guess, subjugate power over them in some way by being like, I know more than you do, so you need to listen to me. Which again, all comes back to like, put a little money in this basket. It's just so nuts. But like also, what do you think that conversation for that crazy winged cow is? Do you think they live just long enough to be like, what the fuck am I? And then they just light it on fire?

I just, the whole time I was reading this, I was imagining like a Tim Robinson sketch where like a bunch of medieval guys are sitting around a table and one of them is like, keeps smirking and trying to sneak in little facts or whatever that he shouldn't know about what they ate for dinner.

I know what you had for breakfast.

And the other guys are just ignoring him. But he keeps trying to drop hints. He's like desperate for them to notice.

They're ignoring him because he's forgotten he's invisible. And so they just can't even fucking see him.

That's good.

But to go full con man of it all, if you make everything so incredibly complicated, no one can do it. And if no one can do it, they still have to rely on you in some way.

Yes.

So if it is like, well, why isn't this happening? Why is it, why don't I have the thing you promised? Oh, did the person tell you something that wasn't a secret? You got to start all over again, because he might have just been telling you something that's already known. Or, oh, did you go at night? Actually, you were supposed to go during the day. There was a mistranslation here. Like, if you keep it so insanely complicated, you can always keep people not being able to call you a fucking liar.

Yeah. Well, there's some complications in this next one.

Oh, good. We've already lost the audience, so let's just, this is for us. We love this. Keep going.

Recipe number two. Probably the most famous homunculus recipe, I think because of how disgusting it is.

This would be on the side of like the homunculus Betty Crocker box. Like it's the one everyone knows.

This is the one everyone seems to reference. It was written by a scholar named Paracelsus in his book De Natura Rerum, published in 1537. In this work, often cited as the first to use the term homunculus, Paracelsus describes his process for creating homunculi as follows. Quote, that the sperm of a man be putrefied by itself in a sealed cucurbit, which apparently is some sort of a glass container, for 40 days with the highest degree of putrefaction in venter equinus. Pause. What you may ask is venter equinus?

Yeah, what is that?

Warm horse shit.

Oh no. Oh, equinus, cause like equine, I guess that would be horses, right?

Yeah. Yeah, so you put sperm in a glass container and let it soak in warm horse shit for 40 days or back to Paracelsus here, or so long until it begin to be alive, move and stir, which may easily be seen.

I do love, that's very recipe of them. And it's like, look, you put it in for 25 minutes or until the internal temperature is 165.

Yeah.

You know, it's like mileage may vary with whatever glass box you're using.

Yeah. After this time, it will be something like a man, yet transparent and without a body. Now after this, if it be every day warily and prudently nourished and fed with the arcanum of man's blood, and be for the space of 40 weeks, kept in constant equal heat of horse dung, it will become a true and living infant, having all the members of an infant, which is born of a woman, but it will be far less. This we call homunculus, or artificial man. And this is afterwards to be brought up with as great care and diligence as any other infant, until it come to riper years of understanding. Now, this is one of the greatest secrets that God ever made known to mortal, sinful man. For this is a miracle, and one of the great wonders of God, and secret above all secrets, which I guess I don't know why he's writing about it then, and deservedly it ought to be kept amongst the secrets until the last times when nothing shall be hid, but all things made manifest. So you may notice, Ed, like you said previously, some of these instructions are very complicated. And in the last one, you had to use that mysterious glowing ingredient that was sort of akin to Philosopher's Stone.

Yeah, I have a suspicion that each one of these recipes are going to have what I'm calling a good luck ingredient.

Yes.

Where it's like, ah, good luck getting that Nern root, good luck getting a fucking piece of moon rock.

Yeah.

Well, it's always one thing to keep it from, you know, calling them out on bullshit.

The first time I read through this, I thought like, wow, the combination of shit and blood and cum is so powerful that you don't even need to use a Philosopher's Stone. But then I read it again.

Just for enjoyment the second time, yeah.

There's this ingredient he mentions called feeding it an arcanum of man's blood. And so that's not just like regular man's blood.

An arcanum is not a measurement. It's not like an arcanum is not like 13 eye droppers drops.

No. The translation would either mean the mysteries of human blood or mysterious human blood. Essentially the arcanum of men's blood, the mysterious elixir here is the Philosopher's Stone piece of this recipe.

That's the good luck ingredient.

Yeah. So no matter how much cum and shit you save up until you can crack the secret of the arcanum of man's blood, you shit out of luck.

Maybe wait to buy that ingredient before you start any of the other steps.

Yes. A less mysterious ingredient that pops up a lot in homunculus lore is mandrake root. And that takes us to recipe number three. You've probably seen a mandrake root before. They're vaguely human looking. They sort of have like a thick middle root that kind of looks like a potato or a carrot.

Yeah. They're in Harry Potter.

They're probably in Harry Potter. And then they have like little other roots that protrude out like limbs. And in medieval times, it was thought that these mandrake roots could be used to produce homunculi. These experiments with homunculi are theoretically a little easier to try because they don't require any mysterious ingredients, but this first one does require hanging somebody. So don't try this one at home.

Don't try this one at all.

So this one's also gross if you haven't enjoyed the amount of body juices involved in this. So some of you probably know that when people die, their bowels are evacuated. They piss and shit everywhere.

Yeah, we understand what you meant.

Apparently when men were hung, they would sometimes bust during their last convulsive spasms.

Gross.

So it was said that wherever the hanged man's semen fell to the ground, a mandrake would grow.

Fell to the ground? What are they wearing, kilts?

Or they just cum so much it leaks out of their pants.

Gross.

If the anthropomorphic root was then pulled out before dawn on a Friday morning by a black dog. Then washed and nurtured with milk, honey and sometimes human blood, the root would subsequently develop into a homunculus, which would guard and protect its owner.

Wait, did it say sometimes? Like for real, it said sometimes? Like hedging their bets?

So it did say sometimes. I don't know if this bit that I found is the actual translation of a work or if it's somebody like summarizing the work.

Sure, sure, sure, sure. Yeah, but it does seem to be a through line though, that it is like they always throw in something where it's like, yeah, you know?

Yeah, and honestly, in this one, the human blood is the easy part. First, you gotta hang someone who busts into the ground and then make sure that a black dog pulls it out before dawn on a Friday morning.

And not just eating it.

Yeah, so good luck with that.

And now you're just like two idiots trying to get the keys from that dog in Pirates of the Caribbean, where you're just like, come on, come on, come on, Fido, just give me that fucking mandrake root like before it eats it.

It's like trying to train a pig to find truffles.

Truffles, oh my God.

Except you have to train a dog to find a-

Fucking cum dirt.

Some guy's spooge underground.

And here's the thing is, you're getting a lot of non-hanged guys cum at that point. You're just, the dog's just bringing you cum. That is just like, I have one job at things.

How much is just on the ground? I guess it's medieval times. So maybe there was a lot of it out there.

This episode is gonna be just everyone's least favorite episode, but it's also gonna be someone's favorite episode though. It's gonna be good, I'm hedging my bet on that.

Which one of you freaks is loving this?

Yeah, we're gonna get the most letters asking us to stop the show on this episode, but we also might get the most like emphatic, this episode is their philosopher's stone.

Yeah.

But anyway, we got a lot more shit coming up, I'm sure. So please don't let me stop you.

Okay, so to recap, if this anthropomorphic root was then pulled out before dawn on a Friday morning by a black dog, then washed and nurtured with milk, honey, and sometimes human blood, the root would subsequently develop into a homunculus, which would guard and protect its owner. These little creatures were also called mandragora. There was, I guess, a whole kind of like category of these creatures in different cultures.

This is the flavor of homunculi you can get is the mandragoria. Like this is, it's like you would see this homunculus and go, oh, you made them with mandrake. Yes. Like I can tell right away, that's that flavor of homunculi.

Yes. And French author Jean-Baptiste Pitois compares the creation of a mandragora to that of a homunculus. He actually figured out a way to create one of these without hanging someone and tickling their taint at the same time. He wrote, would you like to make a mandragora as powerful as the homunculus so praised by Paracelsus? Then find a root of the plant called briany, take it out of the ground on a Monday, in parentheses the day of the moon, a little time after the vernal equinox, cut off the ends of the root and bury it at night in some country churchyard in a dead man's grave. For 30 days, water it with cow's milk in which three bats have been drowned. When the 31st day arrives, take out the root in the middle of the night and dry it in an oven heated with the branches of verbena. Then wrap it in a piece of a dead man's winding sheet, which is like a burial shroud, and carry it with you everywhere. So for my money, that's the easiest one.

That might be the easiest one, yeah.

You don't have to kill anybody. You have to drown three bats in cow's milk, which sounds pretty awful. But compared to, there's no human blood involved. You have to bury it in a dead man's grave. But Ed, you're right. The con is strong with this one because there's a lot of hedging.

This one, it's very snake oil salesman. It's very like he's gonna sell you on like a monorail or, you know, it's very music manny.

Yeah, well, it's a little time after the Vernal Equinox in some country churchyards. So it's very like, yeah, there's lots of little ways out of like, oh, you waited too long or you picked the wrong churchyard.

Yeah, and I will say that this guy, his version is very similar to like every Google search I do for something I'm interested in or want, like to physically own. I always start with like the best gaming computer, the best whatever, and then immediately discover that it's all out of my price range. And my next Google search is always like the budget version of that. And so this does feel like the budget Hermonculi, where he was like, you can't get Nernru, don't know anyone with blood, come on down to my fucking place. It'll cut the cans.

He also, at least in this quote, never promises that this thing will actually come to life. He starts by asking, would you like to make a Mandragora? And ends with, wrap it in the dead man's burial shroud and carry it with you everywhere.

And walk around for a while. And yeah, there is no clear like, what the fuck, right? Like, are you missing another page to this newspaper ad?

Yeah, but he maybe just got a bunch of people to walk around with their Mandrake roots out as little pals, walking around town with them and never coming to life.

Did you ever have to do that in school? Did you ever have to like take an egg home or like take a baby doll home?

No, I don't think my school had that program, but I know, yes, I know a lot of people have had to do that.

Yeah, I had to do shit like that, yeah.

They should make it Mandrake. They should make Mandragora. You have to take a Mandragora home.

I would be amazing if I like went to school tomorrow. I highly doubt my, I went to like Catholic school and shit. I highly doubt they would have anything like this, but it would be amazing if I went back to school and it was like, oh, you guys still carrying baby dolls around? It was like, no, no, we're strictly on a Mandragoria curriculum now. Like we don't, yeah, yeah, yeah. We don't take any consideration traditional human birth here at, you know, this magnet school or whatever.

Yeah, there's no sex ed here. This is a homunculi only school.

Yeah, made for and by homunculi.

Homunculi first.

Also the school is very small.

Another almost doable recipe, again, I stress almost, was invented during the 1700s by no less a figure of learning than Dr. David Christianus from Germany's Gießen University. And according to his claim, an egg should be taken from a black hen and a tiny hole should be poked through its shell.

Doable.

So far so good. A bean sized portion of the albumin, which I think is just a fancy term for egg white, then needs to be removed and replaced by human semen.

Sure.

After which the eggs opening should be sealed, no problem, with the hymen from a virgin maiden.

Nope. Right there it got more difficult.

Right there it got more difficult. That's a difficult ingredient. If you have one of those laying around, you're already a criminal.

Yeah.

Like I have so many questions.

And if you haven't already ground it down for another ridiculous ingredient, then I don't know. Like why are you keeping an intact hymen when everyone knows they should be dried in the sun for 31 days and then ground down and add to a cracked egg.

Throw it into a well, pulled back up, mixed with celery.

And what comes out of that well is a Galookagoo, the subject of the Hulu documentary, Galookagoo on Hulu, for our longtime listeners.

Anyway, once you had your egg wrapped in a virgin's hymen, it must be buried in dung during the first day of the March lunar cycle. After 30 days, a homunculus should emerge from the egg. And as long as its owner provides it with a regular diet of earthworms and lavender seeds, it will protect the owner and assist him in all of his endeavors. So again, almost so close to being a homunculus experiment, you could try it at home.

Geez Louise.

But you cannot. So those five experiments lead us into what is the use of a homunculus?

Well, that last one had a use. It was like that one's going to take care of you, it said.

Yeah, it's going to be your little instead of going to an old folks home, you just have an eternal homunculi take care of you in your old age.

I highly doubt you'd have to have them stand on each other's shoulders. They're very small.

Yeah.

Or speaking of shoulders and small people, maybe homunculi are the little angel and devil on your shoulder.

Give them little costumes. Oh, there are costume homunculi coming up. I'm very excited.

OK, good.

So let's say you've gathered your horse shit and cow corpses and buckets of sperm or whatever else you need. You've filled them to the brim with seeds. And the next thing you know, you're the proud parent of a tiny little man or woman. What the fuck is this thing even good for? Well, if you're me, nothing. You probably just kill it immediately. I don't want that in my life. I don't need a four inch tall little demon person running around.

That's the kind of language that we, homunculi advocates, have been fighting against for years. They are not all demons. They probably have tiny souls.

Assuming you're not me and you are, in fact, charmed by this monstrosity upon God, there are actually a lot of uses for a homunculi. No one really quite agreed on what they were good for, so you're going to get different answers. In general, the homunculus was seen as a powerful, but somewhat limited creation, because according to a lot of homunculi lore, they could only thrive within the glass vessel in which they were grown, and they needed to be fed a specific type of blood that only alchemists could obtain. I assume that Arcanum of Man that we were talking about earlier was kind of the special blood food. And if removed from their glass vessel, the homunculus would only live for a short period of time. So since they couldn't really go anywhere, they were commonly thought of as tiny slaves, basically, to assist the alchemists in their experiments and then straight back to the jar.

Straight back to the jar, because we've built in a terrible shelf life for you of like 22 minutes. So hand me that eraser and then get back in there, you little tiny person, you.

Yes. According to dailygrail.com, which I'm sure is a super reliable website, the 16th century English mathematician, astronomer, astrologer, occult philosopher, and alchemist, Dr. John Dee, tried to get in a little bored identity action with his homunculi. It was claimed that he used his little people as spies, sending out a private army of little humanoids out into the shadows of London.

Who all died before they got to their mark.

Yes. Well, so he wanted them to eavesdrop on suspected enemies of Queen Elizabeth I and report back to him. Now, as you just mentioned, this would contradict the widely held belief that homunculi cannot survive for very long outside of their jar or vessel. So this story, warning, might be bullshit. Or John Dee created a race of uber homunculi, in which case we're very lucky that his instructions seem to be lost to time.

Or he just decided at a certain point, tractors are more my vibe, created the very successful John Deere industry that we know and love.

No, no, Ed, this is John Dee, not John Deere.

Well, I thought he was trying to be, he wanted to maybe keep his last name until he had a really great creation.

There you go.

So he's like calling the homunculi by John Dee. Then when he writes the great American novel that is the John Deere, then he throws his whole name on there.

Okay, I could see it. I could see it. Other homunculi had magical powers. This is where things start to get really interesting and or stupid, depending on your perspective on some of these magical abilities. One of the magical abilities sometimes attributed to homunculi included something like being able to control the moon. It was said that these moon-controlling homunculi can make a full moon appear on the last day of the month, which I guess before TV was a pretty cool thing to do. It seems like a really boring and pointless power to have, but I don't know, you're a comics guy.

I don't know what that would do other than I've built homunculi, but I also have a pretty decent army of werewolves. I need to do shit at the end of the month to collect rent, I guess, like werewolves who work for landlords to muscle people into paying their rent. I guess that's a use, but it also feels a little bit like just another skill that is helpful for someone who's saying I'm a prophet. Where if it's like, hey, if I can get this guy to make the full moon outside of its lunar cycle, then I can say, I bet you a million dollars that there will be a full moon at the end of the month. And then everyone's like, that's not possible. You're a lunatic. And then when it happens, it's like, oh my God, no, you're Notre Dame.

No, you're a lunar tick.

Oh shit. Pretty good. Pretty good.

And we're done. Sorry. Some of the other magical abilities that Homunculi had, they could allow a person to walk on water or shape shift into creatures like a cow, sheep or a large ape. The Homunculus could also grant its creator the ability to know things that are occurring far away. So I guess like psychic powers, they could also see and communicate with spirits and demons. Some could summon rain during non-rainy seasons and others could produce extremely poisonous snakes. A fully grown Homunculus, which would be the size of a very, very tiny adult human, was also rumored to be a skillful artist who is able to create dwarves, giants and quote, other marvels.

So basically that's the original like artificial general intelligence or whatever the hell the one that we're all afraid of is. The AI makes its own AI.

Yes.

So if I got a Homunculi, you can churn out more Homunculi. That's kind of best case scenario.

Yeah. I mean, really it seems like Homunculi just kind of have this very bizarre smattering of wild powers. And I almost wonder if some of this was like almost reverse engineered where someone would claim to have some kind of power. And then when someone questioned them about how they would have that power, they were just like, oh, the Homunculi gave it to me.

Sure.

You know, because none of these are connected.

Yeah. And no one questions it. Everyone just leaves being like, could you believe Dave is a Homunculi? You fucking asshole.

I know.

Like, I've been trying to get Homunculi for years. I'm fucking bone dry. I can't come enough.

I have fucked every cow in this town.

And all I've gotten is a bad reputation and not one Homunculi.

I've been arrested 40 times. So the big outstanding question here, of course, is whether or not anyone ever managed on record to successfully cultivate a Homunculi. And the answer is not really. I looked far and wide. I did find one Russian YouTube channel. I will link in the show notes of a guy who has done at this point now like 16 or 17 different Homunculi experiments. And the first one's pretty weird and bizarre, but the more of them you watch, the more it's clear that it's fake. Like they start to look really bad, the more complex they get. But I looked far and wide, not a lot of proof. There are a few mentions throughout history. There was supposedly an extraordinary specimen exhibited in the court of France's King Louis XIV, XIV.

So King Louis XIV.

Yeah, King Louis XIV, his royal physician, Dr. Borel, created this one. And all I could really find about it was that it was grown from distilled human blood and it was able to emit beams of red light. So there's another useless power.

Oh my God. Hey, did you get it? Did you make us one of the good ones? I made us, I don't know. It doesn't do much. I'm sorry.

It blinks.

At best, it's a party trick.

Meanwhile, the homunculi is just in extreme pain every time it blinks. It opens its mouth and eyes.

Yeah, they don't care. They've made a little Cyclops from X-Men Cyclops, not Cyclops. Or really just a butter robot from Rick and Morty. What's my purpose? You shoot red light. Oh, no.

It would be cool to put on a red light homunculi at a dance party, though. I feel like it would be like a disco ball in the 1600s.

Oh, my God.

Party time. The best documentation we have for the existence of a homunculi comes from Dr. Emil Bezetzny's book Sphinx, published in 1873. Now, I feel like at this point in human history, some of these people should know better. I feel like the skeptical part of me feels like this guy was bullshitting this.

It's the 1870s? Like, the Civil War happened. Someone being like, you know, we would have won if my homunculi reinforcements were finished. What the fuck are you talking about homunculi when like Harvard exists and shit?

So he writes that two Austrian alchemists in the late 16th century, Count Johann Ferdinand von Kufstein and Abbey Galony, created ten living homunculi in only five weeks. Like many homunculi, they were grown in sealed jars, filled with water and eventually buried under heaps of manure. They were treated with some special, but again, unspecified solution. So probably Arcanum of Blood or Philosopher's Stone. And it doubled the size of eight of these homunculi, producing a series of one foot tall specimens. No two homunculi looked the same, and each had its own identity. So eight were physical mannequins known respectively as the King, the Queen, the Knight, the Monk, the Nun, the Seraph, the Minor, and the Architect.

I love it. I love what I'm hearing. I want to own the whole set. I want like a homunculi toy set from this.

Yeah, dude. And clothes pertinent to their identities were manufactured for them. So they had their little costumes.

Oh my God, this rules.

Each of these eight homunculi was fed with special pink tablets every three to four days, and their water was changed once a week. On at least one occasion, it's written, the King homunculus escaped from his jar and was earnestly trying to remove the seal on the jar housing the Queen when he was spotted by Count Cuffsteen's butler. He was then chased by Cuffsteen and the butler, and the King soon fainted from exposure to air and was put back inside his receptacle.

Sure.

Which is hilarious that this King was so horned up. He was so horny, he escaped and was like pounding on the Queen jar.

I hope it's a discussion they had prior. I don't hope he's not just like a fucking deviant abuser.

Yeah.

We hope they had like some sort of system of communication between jars where she's like, meet me at midnight, knock three times.

Yeah. And I want to say, someone who's seen Bride of Frankenstein more recently than I have can probably speak to this. But I think this is the bit that's literally used in Bride of Frankenstein. Like I'm pretty sure, I don't know if it's called a king in the movie, but I'm pretty sure one of them escapes and is like trying to mate with the other. And that's part of what drives the whole like Frankenstein's monster needs a bride conversation in the movie. I can't quite remember, but they may have stolen the bit from Count Kuffstein.

Well, Frankenstein's from the early 1800s, I think. And this is from the late 1800s?

Yes, but I'm saying Bride of Frankenstein, the movie from the 1930s. The remaining two homunculi were non-corporeal and only appeared when Galoni tapped on their jars and chanted certain magical words, at which point a face would materialize in the jars. In one jar, the liquid would turn blue when the face appeared, and in the other jar, the liquid would turn red. The red spirit homunculus was fed on blood and its water was changed every two to three days, but the blue spirit homunculus was never fed and its water was never changed, which seems like a punishment. I also kind of imagined the blue one, like that big face in Power Rangers.

Oh, yeah, Zord.

Zord, who gave them all the missions. I feel like they created a Zord.

I think they never changed his water either.

The Power Rangers were super irresponsible homunculi owners. Actually, wait, are the Putty Patrol from Power Rangers? They're kind of homunculi.

Oh, that's definitely fucking homunculi. One million percent. And all you got to do is punch them in the chest, and they disappear. So that's like, I don't know, they're so disposable. These little fucking, they're definitely, they're definitely homunculi. They're just tall homunculi.

Yeah, no, they definitely, because I didn't really include it, because like I said, I was trying to keep it to pure homunculi, but golems in like Jewish folklore are considered like an offshoot.

No, no, I have been thinking golem this whole time.

Yeah.

They kind of activate, that seemed very golem to me.

Yeah, it's sort of an offshoot of the same mythology. Anyway, so there were 10 homunculi. All of them were psychic and could answer questions concerning future events. They always predicted the correct outcomes, of course. What kind of homunculi would you be if you couldn't predict the outcomes of events?

You would just be that one shitty fucking one that shoots red beams.

Yeah, he's like, oh man, I never get anything right. They were also apparently, and this is part of what makes this particular thing interesting unless it is all just made up. Apparently, they were observed by lots of people, including notably, now I don't know who these counts were, but two counts, Count Franz Josef von Thun and Count Max Lamberg, both apparently observed these homunculi. Now, there's two things about this case. One, I find very funny. The site that I found most of this information on, selfdefinition.org, theorizes that these homunculi may in fact have been African Clawed Frogs brought back by travelers from the tropics. Now, as the resident frog expert on this podcast, I can tell you African Clawed Frogs don't really look anything like people, but what's hilarious to me is that they made costumes for these things.

Well, that's why they looked like people.

I know. Imagine.

If they dressed the frogs like people.

Imagine 10 jars with 10 African Clawed Frogs, and one of them's dressed like a queen, one of them's dressed like a miner. I'm going to be on my deathbed thinking about an African Clawed Frog dressed like a knight.

I mean, frogs, you got to kiss a lot of them to meet a prince. I mean, they've been somewhere within the royal spectrum of storytelling for a long time, so I'm not surprised our dress on them like it.

We should try to make that the episode art, an African Clawed Frog dressed like a knight.

I still have PTSD from your fucking frogs from the last two weeks.

You know, I'd say the audience...

I refuse to do any more frog material.

The audience has...

Yes, there is a contingent of the audience who seems to be very pro frog on the show, but I make the final decision on what gets released.

That's true.

Which is why this episode will never air.

The second thing I find interesting about this case is that no one knows what happened to the homunculi, but there is a clue that we might sort of be able to find one of them. So at some point...

Oh, fine. Does this episode become a fucking scavenger hunt?

No, I wish.

Listen, everyone, we have a Google Map link we're sending. We found an incredibly small Stuart little size graveyard. We're thinking that's where it is.

I mean, sort of. At some point, the jar containing the monk homunculus, say that 10 times fast, was accidentally dropped. It smashed to pieces on the ground and the homunculus was killed. And according to the writing in Sphinx, the homunculus' body was then buried somewhere on the grounds of Kufstein's Tyrolean residence. The problem is no one knows where the residence was. But theoretically, if someone could figure out where this guy lived, a dig could be undertaken and we might be able to find a homunculus corpse. Although at this point, however many hundreds of years on, I feel like our poor little homunculmonk has probably returned to the earth by now.

Did you watch, there was a documentary a couple years ago about like these people trying to find the place where they dumped all those ET. Atari games?

Oh yeah, yeah, I watched that.

Yeah. I'd watch a documentary of like the Oak Island of looking for homunculi remains. I'd watch that.

Well dude, the Oak Island producers are the same ones who produce Secrets of Skinwalker Ranch.

Yeah, so if we can get one where it's like the hunt for homunculi, I'd watch the shit out of that.

Yeah, let's put it this way. If there's one thing that production company knows how to do, it's stretch a show about digging for something over multiple seasons.

Well, the first season of Skinwalker Ranch, there's a gentleman on there who like is adamant that they can't dig.

No, I know.

So that's one great way to like...

When the producers found out about that, they probably were doing backflips. They're like, oh my God, we don't even need to start digging until the second season, because this guy won't even let us dig for the first season.

Dragon, baby.

So Ed, that's all I've got on homunculi. Where would you place these little bastards on the fear tier?

This is the weirdest episode we've done, and it probably won't be how many of them go, but I place anyone who tried to make a homunculi fucking super high in the fear tier, because they are insane broken people with a god complex. Because there's not a single part, like there's never an ingredient in there where it's like, I did that without creating real chaos.

Yeah.

But the actual homunculi themselves, I mean, as long as I can outrun them, which I can, because me walking would be creating so much more distance than they're at a full sprint. But they're psychic. They can talk to you through telepathy. I can see, and they know everything, I can kind of see them causing real trouble. Where it's like, even from the confines of their jar, just like, putting into your mind, like weird future shit, and like making you doubt things.

Moving the moon.

Yeah, like I can see them using their powers for bad. Like they're just gaslighting everyone.

Yeah.

I also feel like, I don't know, I jump when I see a spider and that's small. So the idea of me just in bed and like a little person, like just coming over my foot, like getting to the top of a mountain, I don't even know. I'd be so scared and like weirdly freaked out. And then they like talk to me through like my mind.

They say you eat eight spiders a night in your sleep or something. So how many homunculi are you swallowing?

Well, as you know, I kind of famously couldn't swallow pills for a long time. So I'm pretty sure I'm gagging immediately on the first homunculi that enters my mouth. So I'm not worried about swallowing homunculi, which I'm sure at a certain point is in a recipe.

So you got to swallow nine homunculi and fucking create an army of them, eat them all, shit them out, put the shit into a cow. I will say, I mean, the only thing that might place this high on the fear tier is we all know what the top of the fear tier is. It is Ed's hot bucket of piss kit.

Which is definitely an ingredient.

Which is definitely an ingredient in creating homunculi. So in that sense, it's probably, you know, it might be near the top.

I don't think in reality and in practice, but I like where you're going with this, which is it's born of the greatest fear.

So by the transitive property of fear, it needs to be.

Yeah, then technically this is the prince of fear.

It is, but it's also the least likely fear to affect my life. So I'm putting this one very low. I would say Homunculus is the very bottom of my personal fear tier so far, but that's okay. Something's got to be at the bottom. And next week we'll be back with something that ranks much higher on my personal fear tier. Until then, you know where to find us. Same scared time, same scared station. I'm Chris Cullari, and I'm Ed Voccola, and someday we'll come up with a better sign off. Bye bye.

Scared All The Time is co-produced and written by Chris Cullari and Ed Voccola.

Edited by Ed Voccola.

Additional support and keeper of sanity, Tess Feifel.

Our theme is the track Scared by Perpetual Stew.

And Mr. Disclaimer is ****.

No part of this show can be reproduced anywhere without permission. Copyright Astonishing Legends Productions.

Tonight. We are in this together.

Together.

===TRANSCRIPT END===