Artificial Beings: Homunculus

19th century engraving of an homunculus
of Goethe's Faust,
second part
(Public domain)

With today's post I begin a series devoted to artificial beings populating several areas of culture, folklore, science, fantasy and science fiction which ended up appearing in many fictional works including, of course, roleplaying games.

In this first chapter I will talk about the homunculi.

A short history about the homunculi

The word homunculus (coming from Latin and meaning 'little man') is used to designate a portrayal of a small human being, about 30 centimeters tall, created through alchemy giving rise to a new living being who can be ordered to carry out all kind of tasks.

Belief in the homunculi is based in Preformationism, an ancient biological theory holding that organism develop from tiny versions of themselves, so the shape of all living beings exist before birth (nowadays this theory is obsolete and ontogenesis is preferred).

Portrait of the alchemist Dschābir ibn Ḥayyān
Ashburnhamiani Codex, 1166
Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, Florence
(Public domain)

Portrait of Paracelsus
16th century
(Public domain)

The Swiss physician, alchemist and astrologist Paracelsus (1493 – 1541) refers to homunculi for the first time in his works De homunculis (c. 1529 – 1532) and De natura rerum (1537), both with descriptions of the methods to create them as well as the knowledge needed to obtain the philosofer's stone (used to convert lead into silver or gold and even to obtain the eternal life elixir), although Zosimos of Panopolis (end of the 3rd century and beginnings of the 4th) and Jābir ibn Hayyān (passed away near 806 – 816) had talked about the creation of artificial life before.

The "recipes" to create homunculi are very unusual and esoteric and can add colour to any more or less grisly dark and gothic fantasy tale (of course these don't work, otherwise we would have a lot of homunculi circulating in the streets).

Paracelsus proposes the following method:

That the sperm of a man be putrefied by itself in a sealed cucurbit for forty days with the highest degree of putrefaction in a horse's womb, or at least so long that it comes to life and moves itself, and stirs, which is easily observed. After this time, it will look somewhat like a man, but transparent, without a body. If, after this, it be fed wisely with the Arcanum of human blood, and be nourished for up to forty weeks, and be kept in the even heat of the horse's womb, a living human child grows therefrom, with all its members like another child, which is born of a woman, but much smaller.

Grafton, Anthony (1999). Natural Particulars: Nature and the Disciplines in Renaissance Europe. MIT Press.
Cited in the article Homunculus (Wikipedia)

And Jean-Baptiste Pitois this other one:

Would you like to make a Mandragora (*), as powerful as the homunculus (little man in a bottle) so praised by Paracelsus? Then find a root of the plant called bryony (*). Take it out of the ground on a Monday (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 branches of verbena (*); then wrap it up in a piece of a dead man's winding-sheet and carry it with you everywhere.

Christian, Paul [Jean-Baptiste Pitois]. Historie de la Magie, du monde Surnaturel et de la fatalité a travers les Temps et les Peuples. 1870.
Translated by James Kirkup and Julian Shaw Edited and Revised by Ross Nichols as The History and Practice of Magic. New York: Citadel Press, 1969
Cited in the article Homunculus (Wikipedia)

(*) Be careful, these plants are mostly toxic in their natural state (I'm not responsible of any incident misusing them).

Chymical Wedding
of Christian Rosenkreutz
(1616)
(CC BY-SA 2.5)

Johannes Valentinus Andreae
(Public Domain)

Afterwards homunculi also appeared in Chymical Wedding of Christian Rosenkreutz (1459), published anonimously in Germany in 1616 (but attributed to Johannes Valentinus Andreae (1586 – 1654) and it's also said that in 1775 Count Johann Ferdinand von Kufstein created, with help by the Italian cleric Abbé Geloni, ten homunculi able to see the future (wahrsagenden Geister, 'scrying ghosts'), stored in crystal jars in Viena's masonic lodge and it seems that they were seen by many dignataries visiting it, as assured by Emil Besetzny in his book Die Sphinx (1873) (which you can read in German through Google Books) and Franz Hartmann (1838 – 1912) in the biography The life and the doctrines of Philippus Theophrastus Bombast of Hohenheim : known by the name of Paracelsus (1887) (which can be read in it's 1945 English edition through Internet Archive and Universal Teosophy).

Homunkulus in der Phiole.
Famulus Wagner und Mephistopheles.
Goethes Faust. Mit Bildern von F. Simm.
Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlagsanstalt 1899, S. 126.

Oil portrait
of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Joseph Karl Stieler, 1828.

In more recent times homunculi appear in other fiction works, like in the second volume of Faust (1832) by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749 – 1832), The Magician (1908) by William Somerset Maugham (1874 - 1965), Foucault's Pendulum (1988) by Umberto Eco or Hellboy comicbooks by Mike Mignola with Roger, a human-sized homunculus appearing as a secondary character in the story Wake the Devil, found inside a ruined castle in Romania he will take part in many adventures of the BPRD until his destruction in the story The Black Flame.

Homunculi in roleplaying games

After looking at the history of homunculi it's time to comment some games in which these creatures appear.

First of all I recommend you to read Aquelarre, the demoniac and medieval roleplaying game created by Ricard Ibañez and first published in 1990 (Wikipedia | Rolmasters), with the description of a spell used to create homunculi. The game has reached its third edition and can be found published in Spanish by Nosolorol and translated into English published by Chaosium.

If you like more Dungeons & Dragons and/or its derived games you may consult the following bestiaries:

• Homunculus - Monsters - D&D Beyond
• Homúnculo (System Reference Document 5.1) Español
• Dungeons and Dragons Homunculus - D&D 3.5 PBP RPG
• Homunculus - Monsters - Archives of Nethys: Pathfinder RPG Database

Besides the previous links you may also find interesting to consult Alchemy by James McLellan, a supplement available at DriveThruRPG as "Pay-What-You-Want" (with a suggested amount of $0.00) offering the possibility of using alchemical processes in compatible games with the 5th edition of Dungeons & Dragons and is easily adaptable to other rulesets.

Axis Mundi

Finally I offer you, in the text of the post as well as at the downloadable links below, game statistics for an homunculus created with the system to generate monsters and adversaries offered by the retroclone Axis Mundi, written by Jose Carlos "Kha" Domínguez and published by 77Mundos which I helped to correct and polish up being part of the game test team (it can be used straight with the first editions of Dungeons & Dragons and can be adapted to more advanced versions or used with similar rulesets, like OSR-like games).

Homúnculus
Number appearing (HD):	1
% in hide-out:	100%
Movement:	12
Armour class:	11 (Ascending)
Hit dice:	1d6 HP (less than 1 HD)
Attacks:	2 claws, bite
Damage:	1d3, 1d3, 1d6
Saving throws:	As a Level 1 Warrior
Reaction:	-4 to +3 or Always Attacks (it will depend on the mission entrusted by his creator)
Moral:	12
Treasure type:	M* (2d4 mo, in case the referee consider it to be adequate or possible)
Type/Form:	Construct/Humanoid
Size:	Small
XP:	5
Special skills:	Stealth (-2 to Alert Skill) Specialist skills (Climbing 3, Stealth 2)
Immunities:	Magical control effects, breathable gas, poison
Weaknesses:	Protection against evil

Downloadable links
Spanish:	Google Drive	4Shared
Catalan:	Google Drive	4Shared
English:	Google Drive	4Shared

This entry it's also available in the following languages:
Castellano Català