Transcript

Ep. 76 Homunculus · Privycast

0:00
>> Speaker A: Could you imagine if your doctor was also, like,
0:03
really into alchemy? Like, no thanks.
0:07
Actually, no, thanks. I feel weird
0:09
going to a doctor if I know they
0:12
vape or, like, smoker.
0:29
Welcome back to privy. Privy
0:32
is a podcast about bathrooms
0:35
recorded from my home
0:37
bathroom. I'm your host,
0:40
Hunter Hoover, and I love
0:42
bathrooms. Quick, uh, check
0:45
in. Uh, November
0:48
is here. We've arrived. We've made it.
0:51
I've got to be honest. Um,
0:54
I work strange schedules. I work at a school,
0:58
at a public high school. Shout, uh,
1:01
out. Uh, and I work at a
1:03
church. I work with teens. And
1:07
October, November and December are the busy
1:09
seasons. So this episode is pre recorded.
1:13
But that doesn't mean that we can't get
1:15
into.
1:19
Really get some tongue on those lips. You know what I'm saying?
1:22
That's what she said. Uh,
1:25
it's November. Get yourself in the
1:28
mood, if you will. Um, you know what's
1:30
weird, by the way, here on privy,
1:33
it's still
1:37
spoop key season
1:39
because we are
1:42
but five mere days removed
1:45
from that spooky nerduel Hallows Eve
1:48
holiday. And what's weird about
1:50
holidays is this
1:54
is my brief Jerry Seinfeld
1:56
bit at the front of the episode. What's the deal with
1:59
Holland? No, but the weird thing is,
2:02
I call it the, like,
2:05
we're not going to talk about what I call it, but it has to do with the
2:08
load. And anyway, but,
2:10
uh, there's this notion that
2:14
you can be more amped and
2:16
in the holiday spirit, let's take.
2:19
It's. It's right upon us. It's right.
2:22
I can almost taste it. And if
2:25
you're like me, I used to get Tim Gettys get
2:28
hyped for Christmas at, like,
2:32
November 1, Halloween
2:35
night. The tree used to go up. Now, my
2:37
sweet son, his birthday is November
2:40
2. And so we cannot let
2:43
the Christmas season overshadow his
2:46
day. And so we wait. We
2:49
hold off on the Christmas cheer. Now, what I
2:52
want to point out is a
2:54
guy like me can get in the holiday
2:57
cheer month to a month
3:00
and a half before the holiday
3:02
arrives. But what's weird
3:05
is the day after the
3:07
holiday happens, it's like, yeah, it's kind of
3:10
done now. I'm, um, still kind of into
3:13
it. But we did the thing, and
3:16
that's what happens for spooky season. We
3:19
get to the end of October, and we instantly go, man, I, uh,
3:22
guess things are done being a little creepy. Not
3:25
today. Today,
3:28
yet in November. And definitely not because of
3:31
poor planning and programming, we are still in
3:34
spooky season. And we're here to talk
3:37
about. Well, we'll get to it, because
3:40
first I have to tell you about, uh, recently, uh,
3:43
and not so recent bad time you hear this, but whatever,
3:46
you get it. With the power of the Internet, I have
3:49
preloaded this one,
3:52
but I farted so hard,
3:55
like, it actually hurt.
3:58
I actually thought I tore something.
4:01
Not the boring holio itself, but probably like
4:04
that tainted skin right between the boring
4:06
holio and the other stuff, I just felt like I
4:09
ripped it. I just felt like I did that
4:12
and I didn't check.
4:15
But I'm pretty confident I'm good now.
4:18
But, yeah, I farted so hard, it actually
4:20
hurt. It actually hurt a little bit.
4:24
Also, just a couple weeks before recording,
4:28
a few weeks back, Michael Wall, former, uh, guest
4:31
of the show. Michael Wall was on the show, and his
4:34
lovely daughter Bethany, uh, got married.
4:37
And we had the privilege of attending her wedding.
4:40
And what was really great
4:43
know, we pull up to Spokane, Washington, and within
4:46
minutes of being in this lovely city, I
4:49
am just stared face to face. And by face,
4:52
I mean my face and his butt crack to
4:54
this just homeless gentleman
4:57
who is just showering in the thing.
5:00
Uh, and I'm not trying to make a comment
5:03
about how somebody might bathe themselves if they don't
5:06
have a place to do it. I'm, um, just saying that we were
5:09
not in this city for more than just a few
5:11
seconds. And I am full view of
5:14
a butt crack, a soggy
5:17
one at that. So there you go.
5:20
But it's still spooky season here at privy, and
5:23
today we're going to explore something
5:26
pretty wild and honestly, kind of
5:28
messed up. You know how sometimes you
5:31
hear about something and think, man, that is
5:34
completely whack. That is
5:37
so whack. That's more whack than seeing a
5:40
dude's butt crack 5 seconds into being in
5:43
Spokane. You know what I'm saying? And
5:46
then you begin to look into it,
5:48
only to find out that what you had
5:51
originally heard was just the beginning. It's
5:54
going to get way more whack than that, and
5:57
that's going to be, uh, us this week. So allow
5:59
me to take you on the journey from
6:02
whack to more whack. Or whacker. As
6:05
I say, it's probably a bad word. Whacker. I don't know.
6:08
Sounds bad. First of
6:11
all, up front, I want to give a content
6:13
warning this week. This week,
6:17
we will be talking about human discharge
6:19
and excrement. Quite a lot. A lot more than
6:22
I usually want to, um, especially
6:26
talking about human excrement. And this
6:29
is where the quotes come in here.
6:31
Discharge. But isn't that
6:33
kind of the nature of this show, to talk about human
6:36
excrement? One of
6:39
the pastimes I love, but don't have a lot of time to
6:42
do is dungeons and dragons. I
6:45
know, edgy. This dude
6:47
must be cool. But
6:51
in one of my readings and preparing
6:54
for one of my previous dungeons and dragons
6:57
campaigns, years ago, I stumbled upon a
7:00
monster that caught my attention and has lived
7:03
in my brain in a strange way ever since.
7:06
Now, the description of this
7:08
monster was that of a human
7:11
shaped creatureformation.
7:14
I say human shaped because as we're going to
7:17
learn time and time again,
7:20
it is not human, or
7:22
perhaps not fully or exactly
7:25
human. This monster is
7:27
an entity that often is controlled by
7:30
a magic using character in the game, usually
7:33
a sorcerer or occasion wizard. Scram,
7:36
wizard. It is often used to
7:38
spy on people by offering the
7:41
magician a vessel by which they can
7:44
occupy two spaces at once
7:47
and see what it sees.
7:49
This homunculus
7:53
does the human magician's bidding.
7:56
Now, this week, we are going to
7:59
talk about the homunculus. It's not too wild
8:02
yet. We're still entry level voodoo
8:05
mama juju situation at this point. You got
8:08
creepy wizard. He does creepy spell and
8:10
overtakes weird human thing.
8:13
Now, we need to talk about this, because
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it is not until we
8:19
begin to talk about what a
8:21
homunculus is made out of
8:24
that things begin to get
8:27
a little unhinged and off the rails. Remember,
8:29
this is a conglomeration of
8:33
nonliving things that then is animated
8:35
to be living. The things that can
8:38
be mixed or formed to form a
8:41
homunculus include clay,
8:44
dirt, mud, hair,
8:47
feathers, urine, poop.
8:50
And what's going to be an unfortunate refrain
8:53
this episode. Semen.
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Can we not,
9:02
like, can we just not. Do you know what I
9:04
mean?
9:08
I went back and forth for like a
9:10
minute trying to decide if
9:13
sperm or semen would be more
9:15
appropriate, and I just couldn't figure it
9:18
out. So we are going to just continue.
9:22
The idea here is that some wizard or hocus
9:25
pocus man would poop and apparently do
9:28
much, much more to that pile of poop
9:31
and mix it with some dirt and actual
9:34
crap, and then mix that up like a toddler
9:37
making a mud pie in a backyard. My son made a
9:40
wild mud pie. I know that he said, I
9:43
chopped a tomato and put it in there, and I totally
9:46
believe him. But you're making, like, this
9:48
weird poop
9:51
shiz mud pie.
9:55
Then, like, 6th grade art class, they mold
9:58
the mixture into, like, a human shaped form,
10:01
which then they
10:04
animate by projecting their identity
10:07
into that mix of poop and hair and other weird
10:10
fluids. Um, now,
10:12
I want to note that this monster does
10:15
not have to contain poop
10:18
or male
10:20
reproductive fluid as an ingredient of
10:23
its form. But,
10:25
well, it was listed.
10:28
So at some point someone said, well, we
10:31
could include those things. It is
10:34
possible to include them.
10:37
And so because of this, this
10:40
monster has lived in my brain as the poop monster
10:43
since that day, years ago. And here's the
10:45
deal. As is the
10:48
case with the history of most
10:51
monsters, the more you look,
10:53
the deeper your regret runs. Like, just
10:56
the deeper it gets, that's
10:59
what. Anyway, in the
11:02
13 hundreds, the black death struck the
11:05
continent of Europe. And by mid 1350,
11:08
this led to a resurgence of discovery and
11:10
art, and in the Renaissance period. And
11:13
while we think primarily of the art of the
11:16
Renaissance, you know the ninja Turtles? Ever heard
11:19
of them? You have Donatello. You have
11:21
Michelangelo. You have da
11:24
Vinci. You have
11:26
Raphael. You get it? But there was another
11:29
facet of the Renaissance that kind of gets
11:32
overlooked, and that's the
11:34
exploration of medicine. Uh,
11:37
and this is where the quotes come in big time.
11:40
Quote, the sciences, you can't
11:43
see this at home, but the sciences in quotes,
11:45
because we're going to find out that this science
11:48
was not really science. I'm not a scientist, but
11:51
I can smell a turd when there's one in the
11:54
room.
11:57
While some of the work and discovery that was being
12:00
done at this time was legit,
12:02
others were trying to turn lead into
12:05
gold. You know, alchemy.
12:09
One of the folks on the scene,
12:12
uh, was a man by the name of Philippus
12:14
Areolis Theophrastus Bombastus
12:17
von Hollenheim, known by
12:20
most, and, uh, let's be honest, probably by his
12:23
friends as Paracelsus.
12:28
Paracelsus was a
12:30
swiss physician,
12:33
alchemist and philosopher. Because
12:36
back then, nowadays,
12:40
if you're a doctor, often you're either, like, general
12:42
practitioner or you have a specific focus.
12:46
But back then, to be a doctor, you also had to
12:49
be trying to mix weird things together to make gold and
12:52
also do philosophy. And maybe the
12:54
staying in your lane thing would have been a better thing,
12:57
but Paracelsis was a physician,
13:00
alchemist and philosopher. Nowadays, could you
13:02
imagine if your doctor was also
13:05
really into alchemy? Like, no, thanks.
13:08
Actually, no, thanks. I feel weird
13:11
going to a doctor if I know they vape
13:14
or, like, smoke or something. To me,
13:17
uh, there's no doctors that listen to this. That's just
13:20
impossible to imagine that a doctor listens to this. But if you
13:23
do, just know from me to you, if you smoke or
13:26
vape and you're a doctor, you just kind of lose a little bit of credibility to
13:29
me. Either that or somebody has lied to
13:31
somebody along the lines about the danger of that and
13:34
whatever. But, yeah, I'm going to go with
13:37
you lose credibility. But Paracelsus
13:40
made a lot of contributions in his
13:43
time in the field of chemistry.
13:46
Paracelsis pioneered the use of chemicals
13:49
and minerals as treatment or medicine, and likely
13:52
named the compound or
13:55
the element zinc. I don't know which it is
13:59
he purported, which means that
14:02
he believed in and spread probably
14:04
a bad idea
14:07
of hermeticism, which says
14:10
that you are sick because your
14:12
humors are off. It's fake. But
14:15
that was 500 years ago, essentially,
14:18
as far as I can tell, your
14:21
humors are like your chemical
14:24
cocktail that's like swirling around in you, and you got all
14:27
these different biles and fluids. And when
14:29
those get dysregulated, it is
14:32
the result of every illness. All illnesses are because
14:35
of that. Now, the other thing
14:38
here was paracelsis was way down
14:41
with the use of opium as treatment. In
14:44
short, he might have got a little fly on his own
14:47
supply, if you know what I'm saying. And I'm
14:50
not a cop. His work in
14:52
toxicology is often touted as being
14:56
the bedrock of our understanding
14:59
of poisoning and better yet,
15:02
the cure for poisoning. In short, the
15:05
dude liked to get his hand on the ball
15:07
and possibly the bong from time to
15:10
time. Now, while some of his
15:12
ideas could be linked to helpful discoveries, there
15:15
are a number of his ideas that are less so.
15:18
And as we will explore others that really
15:21
get you asking, how often did you hit up those
15:24
opiate stocks? But for
15:27
our things today, about
15:29
500 years before Gary Gygax put
15:32
the homunculus into dungeons and dragons,
15:35
Paracels wrote of it in his De
15:38
natura rareum in 1537.
15:41
He writes, and strap in, folks, because,
15:44
boy, did he write. He says,
15:47
quote, the sperm of a man
15:50
be putrefied by itself in a
15:52
sealed cucumber for
15:55
40 days with the highest degree of putrefication
15:58
in a horse's womb, or at least so
16:01
long that it comes to life and moves itself and
16:04
stirs, which is easily observed.
16:07
After this time, it will look somewhat like a
16:10
man, but transparent without a body. If
16:13
after this, it be fed wisely with the
16:16
arcanum of human blood
16:19
and be nourished for up to 40 weeks and be
16:22
kept in the even heat of the horse's womb,
16:24
a living human child grows therefrom with
16:27
all its members, like another child, which is born of
16:30
women, but much smaller.
16:34
Now,
16:36
allow me to interpret. Just. I'm going to give you
16:39
the hunter's cliffs notes of
16:42
what Paracelsis is writing in
16:45
Dana chira rerum.
16:47
First you take human sperm
16:50
of the man. Now it's supposed to be
16:53
putrefied. I'm not sure what that means. I think it
16:56
means it's stored safely.
16:59
Whatever. Um, you store
17:01
that inside
17:05
a, ah, horse's womb for 40
17:08
days. Now, after
17:10
40 days, that
17:13
sperm will begin
17:15
to move and function
17:18
and look exactly like a small
17:21
human man. It's going to look like
17:24
a full grown person, but it's going to be
17:27
small like a baby.
17:30
After this, all you got to do
17:33
is feed it a constant supply of human
17:35
blood for 40 weeks,
17:38
and you will have a living human child.
17:44
What in the flipping heck? Paracelsis.
17:47
This makes Frankenstein sound like a cuddly
17:50
puppy. Or Frankenstein, you get it?
17:53
The monster. But according to
17:56
Paracelsus, the homunculus, which in Latin
17:58
translates the little man, is just a
18:01
smaller version of a regular human that you can grow, essentially,
18:04
from raw male semen. Now,
18:07
lest you hear that and go, well,
18:10
how could they really think that? They didn't
18:13
really think that, right? They probably
18:16
have not brought into the fertilization theory of
18:19
conception. Like, more on that in a moment, unless you hear this
18:22
and go, wow, these dudes must have been,
18:25
like, way lost and outfield. Maybe they were on
18:28
drugs, am I right?
18:30
Um, I should remind
18:32
you, these were religious men
18:35
who believed creating a person in this way
18:38
was tapping into the divine portion
18:41
of who we are having been made in the image of God.
18:45
And may I just say that
18:48
interpretation is lacking. But similar
18:51
desires are found across most cultures. Uh,
18:53
islamic alchemy sought the
18:56
creation of life in the Jabrian corpus. It's
18:59
related to the jewish idea of a golem.
19:03
And here's the deal. And I don't know if I believe
19:06
this, but there are writings which
19:08
noted eyewitnesses that claimed they
19:11
did create these things. I think that's
19:14
some freaking lies is what that is.
19:16
But in short,
19:18
Paracelsus'little, man in the bottle,
19:21
the homunculus, or according to his own
19:24
writings, the little man in the horse carcass,
19:27
lent itself to a pretty wild medical
19:29
theory and an even wilder swath of
19:32
folktales, or in our case, monster
19:35
stories. First,
19:37
the idea was that male sperm
19:40
would be able to bring forth a person on its
19:43
own.
19:46
Is the result or possibly
19:49
resulted in it's. A real chicken in the egg
19:51
predicament. But it's called preformationism.
19:54
Essentially, this view argues that
19:57
there's already a little dude inside the
20:00
sperm. You just got to get him to grow up to be a big
20:03
guy. And all a woman does is gives that
20:06
little dude a little home to chill and be warm
20:08
in now.
20:12
Yeah. It insinuates that inside the sperm cell is a group
20:15
of actually, just a little guy, uh, a homunculus, if you
20:17
will, living inside of it. And given the right
20:20
environment, it can grow and live.
20:24
The purporter of this theory was a man named
20:26
Nicholas Heartsucker.
20:29
Hatsucker. Heartsucker. And again, his
20:31
argument is that sperm semen
20:34
is actually just a little man that you can't
20:37
see. Here's the problem, though.
20:40
At that point, it's turtles all the way down,
20:42
because if the little man in your sperm has an
20:45
exact copy of a human person, then the little
20:48
man in your sperm also has a little man in his
20:51
sperm. It's
20:54
homunculus all the way down. And I'd
20:57
like to quit saying the term sperm now,
21:00
but this
21:03
became known as, well, the homunculus
21:06
argument, a logical fallacy that requires an
21:09
infinite regress of unprovable
21:12
cause and effects.
21:14
It's little dudes in the semen all the way
21:17
down. Huh? I imagine that if
21:20
these blokes knew
21:23
about genes and DNA, they would be
21:25
shouting, yes, the genes.
21:28
That's what I meant. That's what I'm talking about.
21:32
And if you take the weird language out of it, that is kind
21:35
of what DNA and genes do. Like,
21:38
they carry the code for
21:41
making that new little man. It's a cool
21:44
thing that was designed. But
21:46
Paracelsis also led to a
21:49
trainload of folklore.
21:52
The homunculus is related in
21:55
nature to the mandrake, the mythical creature
21:58
mandrake, and not the actual mandrake plant.
22:01
Pretty much whenever the homunculus monster
22:03
emerges, it is in search for a person
22:06
to create or retrofit life.
22:09
The concept brought us Frankenstein's monster.
22:12
Van Gogh's Faust features a homunculus that
22:15
seeks to become a real boy, if you will.
22:18
There's a dude who is trying to make a homunculus
22:21
with his
22:23
deposits and a chicken
22:26
egg. Like, that's today. That's modern
22:28
times. We don't need
22:31
to explore that freakish behavior
22:36
that brings back some wild and
22:38
concerning days and stories, mentoring in the
22:41
poor chickens we used to have on our campus.
22:44
Those chickens have seen some things. I'll tell you what.
22:48
And if you think Pinocchio isn't a homunculus
22:51
adjacent being. You guessed it, the little
22:54
puppet is. The
22:56
homunculus is a monster
22:59
created from some sort of concoction.
23:02
Sometimes mud, sometimes
23:04
poop, and seemingly always
23:08
sperm. He's a nasty
23:10
monster that, for many, has served
23:13
as humanity's attempts at creating life.
23:16
Not like the whole children having process
23:19
isn't already creating life. Like
23:22
God kind of made a pretty rad system. Why
23:25
do we have to, anyway?
23:28
But this monster is a kind of shell that
23:31
can be inhabited. The homunculus.
23:34
Or as I like to think of him, the dookie
23:36
monster. I mean, I
23:39
made a homunculus today, but it got flushed
23:43
and it wasn't animated or anything, but
23:48
it smelled like it had
23:50
Ben.
23:53
That's enough of this. We hope he didn't spook you too
23:56
bad. Thank you so much for listening. Um,
23:59
and this is the end of Spook d season. We're, uh,
24:02
going to be back to some regular programming here. I
24:05
hope you enjoyed it. Thank you so much for being
24:08
here. We love that you're here, as always.
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It just helps others find the show, and it's
24:58
a huge, uh, kick for us here to have
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that. As always, we want to
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thank Kevin McLeod for the use of bar
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room ballet as our intro and outro music.
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You can find Kevin's
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music@incompetent.com and his music is
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licensed under Creative Commons license Attribution
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40. Thanks, Kevin.
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This has been another episode of Privy. Thank you so
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much for joining us. Thank you for listening.
25:26
We love you all. And as
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always, don't forget to
25:31
flush.