Chemistry Reference
In-Depth Information
tality. Like the Philosopher's Stone for transformation of metals, the
elixir of youth was a catalytic substance, usually a powder or liquid. As
pharmacy developed from herbalism this alleged elixir achieved greater
credibility.
These two aspects of alchemy were studied and written about at
length by the Arabs for whom they were associated with the Islamic
faith, part of a holy search for perfection. In medieval Christian Europe it
was a very different story. These two projects were cause enough for
suspicion but the third major preoccupation of alchemy finally placed it
beyond the tolerance of the Church.
(c) Creation of homunculi. Compared with the previous two, this pro-
ject might seem less desirable, even bizarre, but it constituted an even
greater threat to the social fabric and to the doctrines of the medieval
Church. Although the other claims of alchemy involved a degree of arro-
gance in the profession of 'unnatural' powers, the attempt to produce a
tiny human being (always a masculine person) was an example of ex-
treme hubris, since it claimed to by-pass both the Creator and the di-
vinely ordained method for reproduction. It challenged the Church's
teaching that the soul was created at the moment of conception and mim-
icked both the Greek legend of Prometheus moulding humans from clay
and breathing life into them, and the creation story of Adam in
Genesis
.
The sub-title of
Frankenstein
is '
or, the Modern Prometheus
' and in her
epigraph from Milton Shelley makes specific reference to the parallel be-
tween Frankenstein's creation of his Monster (an outsize parody of the
homunculus) and the genesis of Adam:
Did I request thee, Maker, from my clay
To mould me man? Did I solicit thee
From darkness to promote me? [Shelley 1996, p. 3]
The Monster, too, compares his own creation to that of Adam. “Remem-
ber, that I am thy creature: I ought to be thy Adam: but I am rather the
fallen angel, whom thou drivest from joy for no misdeed.”(Shelley 1996,
p. 66)
We can understand the appeal of the homunculus-peddlers better if
we realize that robots are of the same conceptual family. They, too, rep-
resent 'beings' we have created at will through our intellect, without re-
