There are many systems of magick (gratuitous “k” included) that I find very interesting. The idea of bending the rules of the world to your personal will. The truth is, many modern scientific accomplishments have their origin and beginnings with magick and occult wisdom. A lot of what we’d consider to be modern science actually evolved from magickal thought and practice. Doesn’t science try bend and change the physical world to our collective will? It is easy to find the origins of chemistry in the ancient practices of alchemy, for example. With science, we just tend to understand the rules of the game a little bit better.
Don’t get me wrong, there are many strange practices and dead ends in magick and alchemy. Take the homunculus. I’d heard of the homunculus before, but about a year or so ago a friend was telling Anna and I about a group here in Salt Lake that was trying to create their own. It is one thing to know about a legend, but to hear that modern people are actually spending their life and time trying to do something so… bizarre. Since that conversation, the homonculus has kind of taken over our imagination, and we seem to come across these strange little people everywhere. In art, jewelry, literature, all over!
The homonculus is a man-made artificial human being, similar to the unthinking and dumb Jewish golem, except the homonculus has it’s own will, personality and is usually thought to be about the size of your thumb. There are many different legendary ways to make a homonculis, but the local SLC alchemists buried a mixture of semen and blood under a pile of dung during the full moon. A fully formed miniature human was supposed to emerge from that pile of dung to do their creator’s bidding, as long as the creator fed it blood. From what I understand, after extracting their experiment from the poop our local alchemist’s thought they might have seen some sort of cell division, but even that is in doubt. Wasn’t successful. How strange is that? I just don’t understand why they’d go through all that trouble. If they wanted to create human life, why not just do it the old fashioned way? Seems like it’d be a lot more enjoyable.
