1. A miniature man, once imagined by spermists to be present in human sperm.
2. The nerve map of the human body that exists on the parietal lobe of the human brain.
From the Embryo Project Encyclopedia:
The term homunculus is Latin for “little man.” It is used in neurology today to describe the map in the brain of sensory neurons in each part of the body (the somatosensory homunculus). An early use of the word was in the 1572 work by Paracelsus regarding forays into alchemy, De Natura Rerum, in which he gave instructions in how to create an infant human without fertilization or gestation in the womb. In the history of embryology, the homunculus was part of the Enlightenment-era theory of generation called preformationism. The homunculus was the fully formed individual that existed within the germ cell of one of its parents prior to fertilization and would grow in size during gestation until ready to be born.
The origin of the homunculus concept of a pre-existing fetus is usually credited to Dutch telescopist and microscopist Nicolaas Hartsoeker. He receives this credit largely because it was his sketch in the 1694 Essai de Dioptrique of a homunculus in a sperm cell that illustrated the concept most clearly. However, the Italian anatomist Marcello Malpighi proposed in 1673 that the entire structure of the embryo was present in the egg from the very beginning, and that the gestation period involved the growth and unfolding of that pre-existing structure. Around the same time, the French metaphysician Nicolas Malebranche discussed the idea of emboîtement, meaning encasement, for which preformationism is infamous. Emboîtement describes not just a homunculus in the egg cell or sperm cell, but an infinite train of homunculi stretching back to Adam and Eve.From Ancient Origins.net:
In Renaissance medicine, it was believed that the main life-giving force in reproduction came from the man in the form of the semen. The womb was believed to simply be a warm, nutrient-rich vessel for the embryo to grow and be nourished, though the womb was believed to provide the raw materials needed to make an adult. The raw material which the fetus used to mature were considered important in determining what kind of individual the person would become.
This idea that the semen is the main ingredient needed to produce new life in the womb and that the womb is just a passive vessel goes back to Aristotle, who was considered the primary authority on natural science in the Medieval and late Classical worlds.
Aristotle did not believe that humans could be artificially made outside of the natural mode of sexual reproduction and childbirth, but his ideas did leave open such a possibility. If the human womb was only a vessel for the fetus, then it could be theoretically exchanged with another vessel provided that human semen was used. Other than the sperm, it was thought that all that was needed was a warm chamber and some sort of raw material which could even be rotting meat.
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 , purportedly written by the Greek philosopher Plato himself. The materials required for the creation of the homunculus include human semen, a cow or ewe and animal blood, whilst the process includes the artificial insemination of the cow / ewe, smearing the inseminated animal’s genitals with the blood of another animal, and feeding it exclusively on the blood of another animal. The pregnant animal would eventually give birth to an unformed substance, which would then be places in a powder made of ground sunstone (a mystical phosphorescent elixir), sulphur, magnet, green tutia (a sulphate of iron) and the sap of a white willow. When the blob starts growing human skin, it would be required to be placed in a large glass or lead container for three days. After that, it has to be fed with the blood of its decapitated mother for seven days before becoming a fully-formed homunculus. Other recipes required a female monkey or a mare instead.
In the Book of the Cow , there are two similar procedures for producing the homunculus. Instead of a cow / ewe, a female monkey is used in one, and an unidentified female animal in another. Additionally, different ingredients are used for the powder, and the incubation period of the blob in the vessel is extended to 40 days. All three types of homunculus have their own specific functions.
The first type of homunculus may be used to make the full moon appear on the last day of the month, allow a person to take the form of a cow, a sheep or even an ape, allow one to walk on water and know things that are happening far away. The second type of homunculus can be used to enable a person to see demons and spirits, as well as to converse with them, whilst the last type of homunculus can be used to summon rain at unseasonable times and produce extremely poisonous snakes.
The homunculus was believed to have supernatural powers such as the ability to control the motion and appearance of the moon and allow humans to transform themselves into sheep and cows. Fluids from the body of the homunculus were believed to endow the maker of the homunculus with the ability to walk on water among other supernatural abilities.
From Wikipedia:
The homunculus has also been compared to the golem of Jewish folklore. Though the specifics outlining the creation of the golem and homunculus are very different, the concepts both metaphorically relate man to the divine, in his construction of life in his own image.
The homunculus is commonly used today in scientific disciplines such as psychology as a teaching or memory tool to describe the distorted scale model of a human drawn or sculpted to reflect the relative space human body parts occupy on the somatosensory cortex (the "sensory homunculus") and the motor cortex (the "motor homunculus"). Both the motor and sensory homunculi usually appear as small men superimposed over the top of precentral or postcentral gyri for motor and sensory cortices, respectively. The homunculus is oriented with feet medial and shoulders lateral on top of both the precentral and the postcentral gyrus (for both motor and sensory). The man's head is depicted upside down in relation to the rest of the body such that the forehead is closest to the shoulders. The lips, hands, feet and sex organs have more sensory neurons than other parts of the body, so the homunculus has correspondingly large lips, hands, feet, and genitals. The motor homunculus is very similar to the sensory homunculus, but differs in several ways. Specifically, the motor homunculus has a portion for the tongue most lateral while the sensory homunculus has an area for genitalia most medial and an area for visceral organs most lateral. Well known in the field of neurology, this is also commonly called "the little man inside the brain." This scientific model is known as the cortical homunculus.
Homunculi can be found in centuries worth of literature. These fictions are primarily centred around imaginative speculations on the quest for artificial life associated with Paracelsian alchemy. One of the very earliest literary references occurs in Thomas Browne's Religio Medici (1643), in which the author states:
"I am not of Paracelsus minde that boldly delivers a receipt to make a man without conjunction, ..."
- The fable of the alchemically-created homunculus may have been central in Mary Shelley's novel Frankenstein (1818). Professor Radu Florescu suggests that Johann Conrad Dippel, an alchemist born in Castle Frankenstein, might have been the inspiration for Victor Frankenstein.
- German playwright Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's Faust, Part Two (1832) famously features an alchemically-created homunculus. Here, the character of Homunculus embodies the quest of a pure spirit to be born into mortal form, contrasting Faust's desire to shed his mortal body to become pure spirit. The alchemical idea that the soul is not imprisoned in the body, but instead may find its brightest state as it passes through the material plane is central to the character.
- William Makepeace Thackeray wrote under the pen name of Homunculus.
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