Homunculi

The Anthroparion is a tiny man, a kind of homunculus. He is found, for example, in the visions of Zosimos of Panopolis, an important alchemist of the third century. To the group which includes the Anthroparion belong the gnomes, the Dactyls of classical antiquity, and the homunculi of the alchemists.

Jung defines the homunculus as belonging to a symbolic cluster — Anthroparion, gnomes, dactyls — all of which personify the minuscule autonomous agencies of the unconscious within the alchemical and mythological imagination.

Jung, Carl Gustav, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, 1963thesis

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the metallic men who dwell in the mines, the crafty dactyls of antiquity, the homunculi of the alchemists, and the gnomic throng of hobgoblins, brownies, gremlins, etc.

Jung situates alchemical homunculi within a cross-cultural array of diminutive spirit-figures that collectively point toward the unconscious as the domain of the infinitesimally small and psychically autonomous.

Jung, Carl Gustav, The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, 1959thesis

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Where, for instance, numerous homunculi, dwarfs, boys, etc. appear, having no individual characteristics at all, there is the probability of a dissociation. Such forms are therefore found especially in schizophrenia, which is essentially a fragmentation of personality.

Jung and Kerenyi argue that plural homunculi in dreams or visions signal psychic dissociation, distinguishing pathological fragmentation of personality from normal manifestations of the child-motif's multiplicity.

Jung, C. G. and Kerényi, C., Essays on a Science of Mythology: The Myth of the Divine Child and the Mysteries of Eleusis, 1949thesis

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the homunculi, the little creatures in women's dreams, are always busy building more doors, more dams, more security, lest the secret escape.

Estés deploys homunculi as dream-figures who actively construct psychic defenses around shaming secrets, translating the alchemical image into a clinical observation about the compulsive architecture of repression.

Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Ph D, Women Who Run With the Wolves Myths and Stories of the Wild, 2017thesis

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He also believed that one could make gold and engender homunculi. This aspect of it was so predominant that one is inclined to forget that alchemy meant very much more to him than that.

Jung notes that Paracelsus held a literal belief in the engendering of homunculi, while insisting this naive dimension conceals a deeper 'philosophical' purpose that exceeds the merely technical.

Jung, C. G., Collected Works Volume 3: The Psychogenesis of Mental Disease, 1907supporting

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the little metal man of late antiquity, the ἀνθρωπάριον, who, till far into the Middle Ages, on the one hand inhabited the mine-shafts, and on the other represented the alchemical metals, above all Mercurius reborn in perfect form.

Jung traces the genealogy of the homunculus back to the late antique Anthroparion, linking it to Mercurius and to the alchemical aspiration for rebirth in perfect, miniaturized form.

Jung, Carl Gustav, The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, 1959supporting

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the little metal man of late antiquity, the ἀνθρωπάριον, who, till far into the Middle Ages, on the one hand inhabited the mine-shafts, and on the other represented the alchemistic metals, above all Mercury reborn in perfect form — as Hermaphroditus, filius sapientiae, or infans noster.

Kerenyi and Jung jointly identify the miniature metallic man — precursor to the alchemical homunculus — as an embodiment of Mercurius reborn, connecting the figure to the divine child mythology.

Jung, C. G. and Kerényi, C., Essays on a Science of Mythology: The Myth of the Divine Child and the Mysteries of Eleusis, 1949supporting

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as homunculus, 93, 132; of plants, 125-126; and raven, 26, 35-36; research on, 6-9; theriomorphic shape of, 35, 63-66, 132-135; transmigration of, 64, 71, 80, 125

Bremmer's index indicates that the early Greek free-soul was conceptualized in homuncular form, situating the figure within archaic Greek soul-doctrine as a miniature anthropomorphic image of the person.

Jan N. Bremmer, The Early Greek Concept of the Soul, 1983aside

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