Spell: Grow a Little Man! March 18, 2018
Author: Beach Combing | in : Medieval, Modern , trackback
Location
Germany, mid Europe?
Aim
to create a small living man
Ingredients
horse manure, semen, a gourd, some human blood.
Method
(i) Hollow out the centre of the gourd and place ripe horse manure with the semen inside it.
(ii) Seal the gourd up.
(iii) After forty days, or after the semen begins to move itself the gourd can be open
(iv) Take the small humanoid found within and binding it in warm horse manure feed it daily with some human blood for forty weeks.
(v) remove the small child from the horse manure, which should now be fully developed. Note that it will be much smaller than a human baby.
(vi) you must now educate the little man until he (or she?) begins to show intelligence.
Dangers
Most spells in our collection can be explained away as a bit of rustic tom-foolery. Make no mistake, if your local priest finds out that you are growing little men in your cellar you are going to be in desperately serious trouble. Paracelsus hints at the extraordinary nature of the spell: ‘Now this is one of the greatest secrets which God has revealed to mortal and fallible man. It is a miracle and marvel of God, an Arcanum above all arcane, and deserves to be kept secret until the last times, when there shall be nothing hidden, but all things shall be made manifest.’ Translated = don’t share this recipe with the inquisition. (Goodrick-Clarke, 175 for De natura rerum, note that Paracelsus also writes about Homunculi in De vita longa)
Antiquity
This was recorded by Paracelsus, a great iconoclast, in the early 1500s. He claimed that the spell was the truth behind the mandrake legend. Reading his description the natural assumption would be that Paracelsus had grown several nursery fulls of these little men…
Help: Can anyone find any parallels to this medical ritual, drbeachcombing AT yahoo DOT com
For references and explanation of the project and tag index: Beach’s Book of Shadows.
One thing that bothers me slightly is the reference to the pumpkin, in Goodrick-Clarke’s translation a cucurbite: they only crossed the Atlantic in the later 1500s. Wonder what the original word was? Should we think of a turnip?!
