Theos-Talk Archives (March 1997 Message tt00007)

>Parcelsus has been reproached for his belief in the possibility
>of generating homunculi; but a deeper insight into the process
>of Nature will show that such a thing is not necessarily
>impossible. Modern authorities believe it to be not impossible.
>Moleschott thinks that we may perhaps yet succeed in
>establishong conditions by which organic forms may be generated;
>Liebig is of the opinion that chemistry will yet succeed in
>making organic substances by artificial means. Goethe says in
>his "Faust": ...
>This sounds to me as animated shells, growing from germs, rather
>than human parts cobbled together like Frankenstein's monster.

Yes, HPB mentions both Homunculi and Frankenstein's monster in
her comment. The homunculi as given by Hartmann and
Frankenstein's monster as given by Shelly are both descriptions
of fabricating organisms by artificial means. The Paracelsus
description is, I believe, a very metaphorical one while the
Frankenstein story is itself an allegory told in the language of
the Victorian industrial age.

Other medieval stories of the homunculi, as I recall,
characterize them as artificially produced miniature people who
are evil in temperament or fragmented. Shelly's Frankenstein is
generally taken to be an allegory of the machine age's potential
for evil through the violation of nature via scientific
knowledge.

Another metaphor of the homunculi is found in the Snow White
Fairy tale, where the seven dwarfs are indeed homunculi of a
sort--each being personality fragments of Snow White ie "Dopey",
"Sleepy", "Sneezy", "Doc" etc., and the point of the story is her
eventual reintegration. The point in all three of these stories
is that the artificial beings are incomplete in some way.
Further, in the two examples HPB uses, the Homunculi and the
monster are fabricated by an unnatural means.

I believe that both Shelly's manufacture by sewing together body
parts and Paracelsus' burying of sperm in horse manure are really
allegorical descriptions of an unnatural manufacture, and nothing
is to be gained by the study of these details as literal
processes. Therefore, the question I asked myself when reading
the earlier SD passage, is whether modern science is working on
the creation of life using an unnatural process. I don't believe
that cloning qualifies, because nature occasionally clones
embryos thus producing identical twins.

We know from experience that these twins are each complete. But
modern science is also concerned with the creation of organic
substances out of inorganic ones, and the manipulation of genetic
codes. Both of these processes have the potential of someday
manufacturing organisms that may be quite alive, but like the
homunculi and Frankenstein, they may be incomplete and inadequate
compared to the products of nature.

It is the later process, the manipulation of genes, that appears
to me to have the most potential for the usurping and controlling
the very processes that were once the exclusive domain of nature.
Here, is where I believe that the warnings of Shelly, Medieval
philosophers and HPB have the most immediate application in
today's world. I feel that it is only a matter of time before
these technologies will begin to merge together bringing about
the potential for the production of wholly new artificial beings
with fabricated genetic patterns, rather than the duplication of
existing ones, as is done in cloning.