Speaker 1: You're listening to an airwave media podcast.
Speaker 2: You ever hear the one about the mad scientists who
Speaker 2: tried to create life, about how things got complicated and
Speaker 2: the monster itself wondered if it had a soul or
Speaker 2: if it was merely a puppet that looked like a
Speaker 2: sentient being. Oh, that story's old, really old, perhaps far
Speaker 2: older than you might imagine. Before Commander Data, before Pinocchio,
Speaker 2: before Frankenstein, there was the man made monster called the Homunculus.
Speaker 2: And if you wanted to make a Homunculus, you really
Speaker 2: had to take matters.
Speaker 3: Into your own hand.
Speaker 4: It's actually quite unlike anything we've ever seen before.
Speaker 5: A giant, hairy creature Part eight, Part mass in Luckness,
Speaker 5: a twenty four mile long bottomless lake in the Highlands
Speaker 5: of Scotland. It's a creature known as the Luckness Monster.
Speaker 4: Monster tal.
Speaker 2: Welcome to Monster Talk, the science show about monsters. I'm
Speaker 2: Blake Smith and today Ben Radford and Karen Stolesno and
Speaker 2: I interview a historian of science. It's a really fun
Speaker 2: interview about a monster that's a little known today, but it's
Speaker 2: had more of an impact on history and scientific thought
Speaker 2: than you might imagine. And just so we're clear. The
Speaker 2: word monculus has a more common meaning in science today. Roughly,
Speaker 2: it's used to represent the idea of consciousness being a
Speaker 2: little being inside you, and that's a great topic for
Speaker 2: discussion on its own, but outside the scope of this episode.
Speaker 2: This episode is about one of the strangers creatures we've
Speaker 2: ever discussed on Monster Talk, and come to think of it,
Speaker 2: I should mention right now that we're going to be
Speaker 2: talking about some of the more solitary aspects of human
Speaker 2: sexuality in this episode. So if you have young ones listening,
Speaker 2: this might be a good time to switch over to
Speaker 2: see what those wacky kids big pictures science are up to.
Speaker 3: You've been warned more Instrutle. So today we're going to
Speaker 3: interview Professor William R.
Speaker 2: Newman of Indiana University's Department of History and Philosophy of Science.
Speaker 2: He's the author of seven books, including Promethean Ambitions, Alchemy,
Speaker 2: and The Quest to Perfect Nature, which includes a fascinating
Speaker 2: chapter on the topic of today's show, the homunculus. So
Speaker 2: just getting started, let's begin with the basics. What is
Speaker 2: a homunculus.
Speaker 6: Yeah, well, I mean a homunculus was essentially an artificial
Speaker 6: human being.
Speaker 2: I mean so you know, I had always imagined them
Speaker 2: as being something that an alchemist might create as a
Speaker 2: little servant or a helper. But I'm not really sure
Speaker 2: that's accurate. Was it more of a science experiment or
Speaker 2: were they supposed to actually be useful or what's sort
Speaker 2: of the purpose there.
Speaker 6: Well, that's a complicated question because these quests to create
Speaker 6: our artificial humans have a long history.
Speaker 7: Actually, they go back to.
Speaker 6: Probably late antiquity, the early Muslim period maybe, and anyway,
Speaker 6: the goal changed over time, right, I mean, I could
Speaker 6: give you an entire history of this if you like,
Speaker 6: but it's a little bit elaborate.
Speaker 2: Yes, we'd love to hear a long form you know,
Speaker 2: maybe you know, five minutes or so or whatever you
Speaker 2: can on.
Speaker 6: The history of the monculus if you get all right,
Speaker 6: all right, well look I'll whole.
Speaker 3: Chapter, so I know you can get some words out of.
Speaker 7: All right, I'll start at the beginning.
Speaker 8: Yeah.
Speaker 4: The earliest you know, really identifiable on monculus is in
Speaker 4: this Arabic story called the Story of Solomon and Apsal,
Speaker 4: which is a frustrated love affair between these two character
Speaker 4: There is Solomon and Absol, and it turns out that
Speaker 4: Solomon is a homunculus who was created by his father,
Speaker 4: this mythical king Harmanus, who may be Hermes Trismegistus, another
Speaker 4: mythical figure, who wanted to have a child without as
Speaker 4: it were, you know, defiling himself by having sexual intercourse.
Speaker 4: That's the primary message behind this story that it's possible
Speaker 4: to have an artificial child in a bottle.
Speaker 7: Basically, what the king.
Speaker 4: Does is he masturbates and produces some seman that way
Speaker 4: and puts it in a mandrake root, a hollow mandrake root,
Speaker 4: and then his court advisor, a wise man named kalie Kulas,
Speaker 4: apparently heats it up for a period of time and
Speaker 4: generates this child, Solomon in the mandrake root. Now, the
Speaker 4: purpose of this, if there is a purpose, is once
Speaker 4: again simple for this king to be able to remain
Speaker 4: an ascetic and yet have a child. Right. So, the
Speaker 4: homunculus Solomon is apparently a pretty normal human being. He
Speaker 4: doesn't have magical powers or anything like that. He just
Speaker 4: happens to be a child that is produced artificially. But
Speaker 4: as you progress through time, the role of the homunculus
Speaker 4: changes so that by the time you get to the
Speaker 4: sixteenth century and Paracelsus, who is quite an amazing character
Speaker 4: in his own right, talks about the Homunculus, or at
Speaker 4: least somebody writing under the name of Paracelsus, and a
Speaker 4: work called on the Nature of Things. The homunculus has
Speaker 4: become this sort of semi magical figure who has all
Speaker 4: sorts of prophetical powers and can help the owner of
Speaker 4: the homunculus somehow to win battles in this sort of thing. So, yeah,
Speaker 4: the role of the homunculus changes as the legend evolves
Speaker 4: over time.
Speaker 1: And didn't the ingredients change as well that we used
Speaker 1: in this formula.
Speaker 4: No, actually not. It's actually in this text that I'm
Speaker 4: talking about. Was published in fifteen seventy two, this work
Speaker 4: on the Nature of Things, which is probably not really
Speaker 4: by the historical Paracelsus. The homunculus is once again produced
Speaker 4: out of human sema that is sealed up in a
Speaker 4: flask and allowed to incubate for I believe forty days
Speaker 4: and forty nights.
Speaker 8: So I'm trying to picture this is it basically just
Speaker 8: is a human size figure. In a lot of the
Speaker 8: Lord that I've read, it was supposed to be a small,
Speaker 8: tiny man anywhere from six inches to a few feet high?
Speaker 8: Is it? What does the physically look like? Is it
Speaker 8: just like a small person? What is it?
Speaker 7: Yeah?
Speaker 4: Well, in this part a Selsian treatise, it starts out small,
Speaker 4: but the author is ambiguous as to whether it grows
Speaker 4: to a fully sized figure or not. So you could
Speaker 4: really read the text either way. And yeah, certainly some
Speaker 4: other texts that talk about homunculi do maintain that, Yeah,
Speaker 4: they would remain small, but the smallness is not really
Speaker 4: the key issue. What's really key about all of these
Speaker 4: reports that I mentioned so far is that they claim
Speaker 4: that the homunculus is produced out of semen alone. Now
Speaker 4: that really is important if you think in terms of
Speaker 4: pre modern theories of human generation. I mean, all of
Speaker 4: this really ultimately harks back to Aristotle and of course
Speaker 4: Aristotle's follower Galen, the medical writer of the second century AD,
Speaker 4: because these guys bought into the theory that the way
Speaker 4: human generation works is that the semen, the male semen
Speaker 4: acts on the menstrual blood of the female. So the
Speaker 4: female menstrual blood supplies the matter and the semen provides
Speaker 4: the form. All right, So what that means is that
Speaker 4: if you could create a human being without the menstrual blood.
Speaker 4: You'd be creating it without the matter. That's sort of
Speaker 4: celestial human being that was not weighed down by the
Speaker 4: sort of prison of material existence. I think that's the
Speaker 4: operative idea behind this.
Speaker 2: How did Aristotle become such a major influence in medieval Europe.
Speaker 3: I've always been curious about that.
Speaker 4: Well, Yeah, Aristotle, of course wrote a huge corpus, and
Speaker 4: he was a brilliant man.
Speaker 7: He was sort of.
Speaker 4: The creator in a way of formal logic, and his
Speaker 4: logical works had been known in the early Middle Ages.
Speaker 4: It's his works on natural philosophy in particular that came
Speaker 4: to be known in the twelfth century and later in
Speaker 4: Western Europe.
Speaker 7: And it happened that.
Speaker 4: A huge movement to translate Greek scientific works into Latin
Speaker 4: from Arabic. The Arabs had translated a lot of this
Speaker 4: stuff already in the Arabic took place during the twelfth century.
Speaker 4: And this was more or less coincident with the period
Speaker 4: when the universities started coming into existence in twelfth thirteenth century.
Speaker 4: So at the same time as you have this marvelous
Speaker 4: institution of organized knowledge coming into existence, namely the European universities,
Speaker 4: you're also getting this huge quantity of material translated from
Speaker 4: Arabic into Latin, much of which happens to be Aristotle's works, right,
Speaker 4: So it's kind of a fortunate coincidence in a way
Speaker 4: that you have all of this material coming at the
Speaker 4: same time with this institution of learning and suddenly becoming
Speaker 4: available to the learned world.
Speaker 2: Was this kind of this information, this Aristotelian knowledge, or
Speaker 2: at least at the alchemy level, was in the homunculus
Speaker 2: legend in general? Was it widely known, was it widely
Speaker 2: believed in by the general populace, or was this something
Speaker 2: just for their you know, the medieval nerd.
Speaker 4: You know, I would say on one level, it was
Speaker 4: for the medieval nerd. That is, it's something that theologians
Speaker 4: discussed and some of their treatises and then alchemists discussed.
Speaker 7: However, on another.
Speaker 4: Level, people did believe, certainly, I think widely, that there
Speaker 4: were demons and so forth they could visit one at
Speaker 4: night and collect one's you know, nocturnal emissions and so forth,
Speaker 4: and make monsters out of them. And what happened was
Speaker 4: that various theologians then interpreted that sort of legendary idea
Speaker 4: about what demons could do. They interpreted that as the
Speaker 4: creation of amuncula. So it's sort of an intermixture of
Speaker 4: popular belief and the kind of scientific gloss on that
Speaker 4: popular belief.
Speaker 1: And so what separated alchemy from black magic in the
Speaker 1: eyes of medieval authorities.
Speaker 4: They really were very, very distinct in the eyes of
Speaker 4: medieval authorities. The reason for that is because you know,
Speaker 4: alchemy per se, right, was just a manipulation of matter.
Speaker 4: You took various minerals, or, in the case of making amunculus,
Speaker 4: which you know really wasn't a common thing, right, you
Speaker 4: take bodily fluids and so forth. But all of that
Speaker 4: was considered to be perfectly natural. Right. It didn't involve,
Speaker 4: let's say, the invocation of demons, it didn't involve witches,
Speaker 4: it didn't involve sacrifices or anything of that sort. It
Speaker 4: was just a natural activity, rather like cooking, right, So
Speaker 4: there's no particular reason why it should have been associated
Speaker 4: with magic. And generally speaking, if you mean by magic
Speaker 4: demonic magic, it wasn't.
Speaker 8: Personally first heard about the homunculus when I was a
Speaker 8: teenager playing Dungeons and Dragons, uh, and so I sort
Speaker 8: of a lot of times when I'm when i'm we're
Speaker 8: talking about these monsters and these creatures. One of the
Speaker 8: things I sort of flashed back to is, uh, is
Speaker 8: being being a teenage nerd looking through the Monster Manual
Speaker 8: and I actually happen to have a copy of the
Speaker 8: D and D fourth Edition. In the Monster Manual, it
Speaker 8: says that the alignment of it varies from for example,
Speaker 8: chaotic good to lawful evil. Uh, how does that sound right?
Speaker 8: What was what? What was Were they sort of aligned
Speaker 8: with its creator? Or was it just sort of did
Speaker 8: they have free will? What was the what was the
Speaker 8: thought the thought on that?
Speaker 4: Well, again, it depends on what author you're reading. Right,
Speaker 4: in this old story of Solomon and Absol, you know
Speaker 4: this created homunculus, Solomon just seems to be a perfectly
Speaker 4: normal human being. Right. On the other hand, if you
Speaker 4: look at some of the medieval treatises to discuss a monculi,
Speaker 4: they argue that they are more or less insentient. There's,
Speaker 4: for example, treatise ascribed to Thomas Aquinas, so it's not
Speaker 4: really by him, probably written in the fourteenth century, called on.
Speaker 7: The Essences of the Essence of Essences, and.
Speaker 4: This particular treatise talks about creating the homunculus as a
Speaker 4: kind of.
Speaker 7: A medical.
Speaker 4: Product. That's to say, the homunculus's blood is useful for
Speaker 4: some sort of maladies. But the homunculus, according to this author,
Speaker 4: will never actually have a rational mind. Okay, it can
Speaker 4: only vegetate, and it can you know, experience sensory material,
Speaker 4: but it can never reason. So it can never really
Speaker 4: be a fully human being. And that is a position
Speaker 4: that various other authors take as well. Right, So it
Speaker 4: just depends on which author you read. I mean, there
Speaker 4: was a lot of Actually this was one of the
Speaker 4: arguments about the homunculus. Can it actually be a fully
Speaker 4: rational human being? Or would God, in his wisdom prevent
Speaker 4: man from being able to create another fully human being.
Speaker 8: It sounds like it sort of touches on the Frankenstein
Speaker 8: you know mythology of this, you know, this artificially created
Speaker 8: entity and you know, is it a human? Is it
Speaker 8: not a human? You know, where does it go from there?
Speaker 6: No?
Speaker 4: Absolutely, that's that's a really good point. And I think
Speaker 4: Mary Shelley was in fact drawing on some of this
Speaker 4: older material about the creation of artificial human beings when
Speaker 4: she wrote Frankenstein. Yeah, they considered a lot of this
Speaker 4: sort of ethical issues you know that now come up
Speaker 4: in bioengineering and so forth. A lot of these issues
Speaker 4: came up in the context of discussing the homunculus.
Speaker 7: So it was sort of a moral problem, an ethical problem.
Speaker 4: It was kind of a focal point for discussion about issues,
Speaker 4: for example, the role of women in human generation. Is
Speaker 4: it the one just a hollow flask? As it were
Speaker 4: ridiculous as that sounds in terms of modern generative theory,
Speaker 4: you know, from the perspective of the Medievals and early moderns,
Speaker 4: it made a certain amount of sense. So there was
Speaker 4: a discussion about this and various other issues, again concerning
Speaker 4: the proper use for the homunculous. Is it ethically okay
Speaker 4: to dissect the homunculous and use its body parts, for example,
Speaker 4: in medicine. I mean, that's very much like the stem
Speaker 4: cell debate. You know, they were considering these same sorts
Speaker 4: of issues, though of course they couldn't do any of
Speaker 4: the things that we now can do.
Speaker 2: It's interesting, though, because it's not just Frankestine, it's also Pinocchio.
Speaker 2: I mean, the story you were talking about sounds like, yeah,
Speaker 2: a lot like Pinocchio, and you know, and not just
Speaker 2: stem cells, but also robotics and AI.
Speaker 3: It seems like this is a story or a creature.
Speaker 2: That, even though it's not widely known, I think by
Speaker 2: the general populace, it's got resonance at so many levels.
Speaker 2: It's just a fascinating legend. Did most of the lore
Speaker 2: in your research deal with how to make them? I
Speaker 2: guess I am still kind of curious about what can
Speaker 2: they do if you actually create one?
Speaker 3: Do they have? Are they? Are they servitors? Are they?
Speaker 3: Do they? Are they? You know?
Speaker 4: What?
Speaker 3: What can they do?
Speaker 4: Curiously, the medieval sources and and there's one in particular,
Speaker 4: beyond the one ascribed to Saint Thomas, there's another one
Speaker 4: that's even more bizarre, called the.
Speaker 7: Book of the Cow.
Speaker 4: And the Book of the Cow is from an Arabic manuscript,
Speaker 4: though we only have it in Latin. It got translated
Speaker 4: into Latin at some point, and that describes the creation
Speaker 4: of a homunculus that is uh intended to be dissected,
Speaker 4: and then you're supposed to be able to do stuff
Speaker 4: like uh uh use its blood to anoint your feet,
Speaker 4: and you'll be able to walk on water, and you know,
Speaker 4: all sorts of really bizarre claims about what this will
Speaker 4: allow you to do if you use its bodily fluid
Speaker 4: in one way or another. This is in fact part
Speaker 4: of a medieval and magical tradition called organotherapy, where you
Speaker 4: use different body parts to cure different types of diseases.
Speaker 4: Like if you have a bad headache, recurrent headache, you're
Speaker 4: supposed to go out and eat some human brain. If
Speaker 4: you are having a you know problem, you know, a
Speaker 4: sexual problem, you know, you're supposed to ingest bits of
Speaker 4: genitals or something like this. This is sometimes called direct
Speaker 4: apotheca filth pharmacy for obvious reasons.
Speaker 7: And this, this.
Speaker 4: Book of the Cow is full of that sort of thing.
Speaker 4: It's a very strange text.
Speaker 7: I have to say.
Speaker 3: So it's also a sympathetic magic.
Speaker 4: Right, yes, right, This is not explicitly demonic magic. It's
Speaker 4: a kind of natural magic, you know. That is to say,
Speaker 4: using the secret powers of material things, adding them together
Speaker 4: to you know, create more powerful medicine and so forth.
Speaker 1: You mentioning earlier you were talking about using the homunculus's
Speaker 1: blood for melodies and Frankenstein as well. I understand that
Speaker 1: the homunculus was kept alive by being fed human blood.
Speaker 1: So I'm wondering how the creature fits in with the
Speaker 1: larger vampire traditions.
Speaker 7: Oh, that's an interesting question. Yeah, it's true.
Speaker 4: In the pseudo Paracelsian book on the Nature of Things,
Speaker 4: he does say. The author does say that you're supposed
Speaker 4: to feed the homunculus what he calls the arcanum of
Speaker 4: human blood, which is probably blood that is combined with
Speaker 4: a mineral acid and allowed to sit for a while.
Speaker 4: It's not entirely clear what this arcanum of human blood is.
Speaker 7: I don't think there's.
Speaker 4: A direct connection with the vampire legend, but there are
Speaker 4: all sorts of, of course, miraculous properties associated with human blood,
Speaker 4: particularly the idea that it contains some sort of pneumatic
Speaker 4: spiritual substance that has life giving properties. So I think
Speaker 4: that's what the pseudo Paracelsian author is drawing on.
Speaker 8: I'm trying to picture, you know, sort of how this
Speaker 8: fits in the broader scheme of monsters and things like that.
Speaker 8: I mean, were there were there was it a case
Speaker 8: of where there were many of these monculated running around
Speaker 8: or is it a case of where there were really
Speaker 8: only one or two or three sort of you know,
Speaker 8: you could basically you could just name them instead of
Speaker 8: just calling them by their generic name.
Speaker 2: Uh.
Speaker 8: You know again you talked earlier about the one with Paracelsus.
Speaker 8: Are there supposed obviously? Are there races of these? Are
Speaker 8: there thought to be? You know many of them are
Speaker 8: just sort of a singular entity or how does that work?
Speaker 4: Well, if you look at the theologians who discuss the
Speaker 4: origin of races like the Huns in particular, there's a
Speaker 4: tradition that the Huns were created by intercourse between demons
Speaker 4: and humans, and that receives a kind of homuncular and reportation. Actually,
Speaker 4: in the fifteenth century, the way that this sort of
Speaker 4: intercourse was supposed to happen was a succubus, a female
Speaker 4: demon was supposed to come during a dream and you know,
Speaker 4: induce nocturnal emissions which would then be collected by this
Speaker 4: demon and somehow then transferred to human female and doctored
Speaker 4: up to create in this case, the sort of super race,
Speaker 4: namely the Huns. Another example of this kind of story
Speaker 4: is in the tradition that the Celtic magician Merlin was
Speaker 4: a monster produced in this fashion. So yeah, some people
Speaker 4: did think that that the Huns were race of homunculi,
Speaker 4: so obviously they didn't stay small.
Speaker 2: How does a homunculus compared to wait, the plural is homunculi, right, yep, okay, right,
Speaker 2: So in case you ever run into more than one,
Speaker 2: How does a monkeylus compared to a gollum or other
Speaker 2: kinds of magical living creations from.
Speaker 3: Lore of the time.
Speaker 7: Yeah, that's a really good question. Some people have argued
Speaker 7: that the golam.
Speaker 4: Tradition is closely related to the monculus tradition. I think
Speaker 4: they're very, very distinct, actually, because if you look at
Speaker 4: the way that a golam was supposed to be created,
Speaker 4: it was supposed to be done by verbal magic, you know,
Speaker 4: employing the magic of Hebrew letters the golum. One story
Speaker 4: from the sixteenth century is a golam was.
Speaker 7: Made out of clay with the.
Speaker 4: Hebrew word ms on its forehead, meaning truth, and then
Speaker 4: the first letter was erased, converting that to the word
Speaker 4: for death, and then the golum would collapse. Unfortunately, in
Speaker 4: this particular story, it collapses on its maker because he
Speaker 4: didn't have the good sense to get out of the
Speaker 4: way when he erased the first letter.
Speaker 7: But you see, all of that has.
Speaker 4: To do with creating something by means of words. It
Speaker 4: has nothing to do with this sort of wet a
Speaker 4: life method that the alchemists were involved in, using semon
Speaker 4: and so forth. It's an entirely different tradition in my opinion.
Speaker 1: Obviously, the homunculus is closely tied into mythology and folklore.
Speaker 1: Were there different culture bound versions of the homunculus around
Speaker 1: the world or did it stick more or less faithful
Speaker 1: to its original version?
Speaker 4: Well, in the sense you know that the homoculus involves
Speaker 4: this attempt at artificial generation employing males only. I mean,
Speaker 4: there is a very distinct tradition of this, again going
Speaker 4: back to this late Antique or early Islamic period and
Speaker 4: carrying through all the way to the seventeenth century. Certainly,
Speaker 4: so that is a very distinct tradition. But what changes
Speaker 4: is the interpretation of the homoculus, that is, what does
Speaker 4: it do, what is it good for? And again, and
Speaker 4: I think a lot of this devolves upon using the
Speaker 4: homunculus as a way of sort of raising ethical concerns
Speaker 4: about the limits of what we would call science. Actually,
Speaker 4: I think that the homunculous issue, right, whether human beings
Speaker 4: can make an artificial human is closely related to the
Speaker 4: alchemical issue of whether alchemists can make gold. In the
Speaker 4: one case, it is a question of whether we can
Speaker 4: make the very pinnacle of creation itself, namely the human being.
Speaker 4: And the other case is the question whether we can
Speaker 4: make the pinnacle of mineral creation, namely our artificial gold.
Speaker 4: So the two issues are actually closely interrelated, and they
Speaker 4: were topics that people like to discuss. You know, it's
Speaker 4: sort of in a way thought experiments.
Speaker 7: You might say.
Speaker 8: One of the things that really intrigued me about homunculi
Speaker 8: is that they're not that well known. You know, if
Speaker 8: you look in the you know, the penally of all
Speaker 8: these different monsters you've got wear wolves, of course, are
Speaker 8: empires are always permently hot, bansheese, ghosts, elves, trolls, things
Speaker 8: like that. But but homunculi are you know, certainly far
Speaker 8: less known. What what do you suppose that is? Is
Speaker 8: it just a matter of just authors and and and
Speaker 8: you know, filmmakers just aren't as interested in these creatures
Speaker 8: because they don't kill people and they're not as threatening,
Speaker 8: or do you think why do you think they've been
Speaker 8: sort of overlooked in in pop culture?
Speaker 4: I couldn't really answer that question except to say that
Speaker 4: maybe they haven't been overlooked as much as you're suggesting.
Speaker 4: I mean, if you view again, you know, Mary Shelley's
Speaker 4: Frankenstein as a sort of modern day derivation of these
Speaker 4: old legends about artificial life, then you know, maybe they
Speaker 4: really haven't been ignored.
Speaker 8: Yeah. But I mean, for example, if you if you
Speaker 8: ask people about Frankenstein, they're not going to say, oh,
Speaker 8: that's a that's a version of the homunculus.
Speaker 4: But actually there are, if I recall correctly, homuncula i
Speaker 4: in the Hollywood Sollywood version of Frankenstein.
Speaker 2: Actually it's Pride of Frankenstein. Yeah, that's where they show up. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 2: that I was actually going to bring that up. They
Speaker 2: show up in the I forget the name of the character.
Speaker 2: Was that Messenger is the actor, I believe, and he
Speaker 2: brings in these He's got these little beakers with.
Speaker 3: Little homunculus homunculi.
Speaker 2: And they appear to be you know, tiny people dressed
Speaker 2: in the in the in the period costumes, and it's
Speaker 2: an amusing.
Speaker 3: Scene unless you know the lore of the homunculus.
Speaker 2: And then it's kind of creepy because, uh, that old
Speaker 2: man's been busy.
Speaker 8: Well, I guess that that's one of the things that
Speaker 8: this sort of strikes me is that is that, you know,
Speaker 8: certainly if you look at its origin and its ties
Speaker 8: to alchemy and and you know, life creation, it's it's
Speaker 8: very very interesting, at least it is to us. But
Speaker 8: in terms of you know, again compared to werewolves, compared
Speaker 8: to vampires, ghosts and things like that, you can see
Speaker 8: how it would be somewhat less interesting, just sort of
Speaker 8: other than from a historical point of view. If you're
Speaker 8: going to write a story about monculus, then sort of okay,
Speaker 8: well we've created him, now what to do. He doesn't
Speaker 8: turn into a bat, you know, he's not in terms
Speaker 8: of wherewolf, he's not going to thank chains.
Speaker 4: So it was basically a sort of Ariadite tradition, I think,
Speaker 4: the mounculus, but it was related once again to these
Speaker 4: more popular folk traditions, for example the man Drake. I
Speaker 4: already mentioned that in the story of Solomon and Absol.
Speaker 4: But there's another connection with the Homunculus too, and that
Speaker 4: is with another Paracelsian work, this one by the genuine Paracelsus,
Speaker 4: where he says that the mandrakes that are sold on
Speaker 4: the street that look like human beings are completely fraudulent. Okay,
Speaker 4: they're carvings made by swindlers. But he says there's another
Speaker 4: kind of man drake that is a homunculus. And this
Speaker 4: harkens back to an old story about the mandrake as
Speaker 4: a gallows man galgenmn galgan manline, as they say in German,
Speaker 4: and the idea was that the mandrake root is formed
Speaker 4: beneath the bodies of decaying criminals who've been left on
Speaker 4: the gibbet after being hanged. And the idea that Paracelsus
Speaker 4: is developing is that what happens is that bodily fluids
Speaker 4: from the decaying body dripped down into the ground and
Speaker 4: are incubated in the warm ground. And the demand drake
Speaker 4: is literally a homunculus made the same way that you
Speaker 4: would do it artificially, except that you would have flask
Speaker 4: if he did it artificially. So there is a definite
Speaker 4: interconnection there between the folk legend of the mandrake as
Speaker 4: a little miniature human being and the homunculus. In other words,
Speaker 4: Paracelsus is providing a sort of scientific explanation in the
Speaker 4: science of his day of a mandrakes really come about?
Speaker 2: After considering that legend and then also the writings of
Speaker 2: Aristotle on the same topic, considering how powerfully generative sperm
Speaker 2: was considered to be by people of the time, did
Speaker 2: they fear what would happen if you masturbated?
Speaker 3: I mean, was that like a real beyond just the
Speaker 3: sin concerns?
Speaker 2: Was that like a real issue about what people were
Speaker 2: doing with their semen?
Speaker 4: Yeah? I was. In particular, Paracelsus and yet another work
Speaker 4: that specifically devoted to the Mongulus writes extensively about the
Speaker 4: dangers of retention of semen. This was an actual medical
Speaker 4: aile month that's described in most medieval medical texts.
Speaker 3: The Yeah, I'm horribly familiar with it.
Speaker 4: The idea was that if you retain sema, and at
Speaker 4: least if you, you know, take Paracelsus's view, it's literally
Speaker 4: going to turn into homuncula inside of your body, right,
Speaker 4: associates all sorts of horrible alements with that. So you
Speaker 4: either have to get it out of your body, you know,
Speaker 4: by having children, or he actually suggests, well, you should
Speaker 4: go castrate yourself.
Speaker 8: Does those those two options? Excuse me?
Speaker 4: I'm sorry, you sure don't want to retain it in
Speaker 4: your body. That's a very very bad thing according to Paracelsus.
Speaker 8: Wow, I'm on the wrong path. I'm afraid.
Speaker 1: Were there any references or ties to the story of
Speaker 1: Owner and then from the Bible?
Speaker 7: You know, I can't think of any.
Speaker 4: Actually, Paracelsus does base a lot of his ideas on
Speaker 4: biblical sources. But what he's thinking of, in particular, this
Speaker 4: business about self castration, goes back to the Gospel of
Speaker 4: Matthew as I recall, where there's a passage saying something
Speaker 4: to the effect that there are two types of eunuchs,
Speaker 4: those who are castor than those who castrate themselves. And
Speaker 4: he takes that as a kind of an injunction that
Speaker 4: you should go out and take the matter into your
Speaker 4: own hands, so to speak.
Speaker 8: Wise, wise man, justin elders would be proud. I was
Speaker 8: reading one version of the story. I talked about how
Speaker 8: Paracelsus died of alcoholism, and that his monculus personally died
Speaker 8: along with him, maybe because he was no longer available
Speaker 8: to defeat his blood. Other versions suggest that it's actually
Speaker 8: still alive, you know, five hundred years later. What the
Speaker 8: game of his mounculus.
Speaker 4: Well, look, I mean, the genuine Paracelsus does not tell
Speaker 4: us to make a MONCULI. The genuine Paracelsus is the
Speaker 4: one who warns us about retention of semen. This work
Speaker 4: that is ascribed to Paracelsus on the Nature of Things
Speaker 4: is not really by him. This was published in fifteen
Speaker 4: seventy two, and it's just using some Paracelsian ideas to develop.
Speaker 7: Its own concepts.
Speaker 4: And it doesn't actually say that Paracelsus or the whoever
Speaker 4: this author was, made homunculus right. Instead, what it does
Speaker 4: is it tells you how to make a homunculus. Now
Speaker 4: that's a very very different thing, And I'm glad you
Speaker 4: raised that point because that raises an interesting issue about
Speaker 4: how people could have believed these things. In general, same
Speaker 4: thing was alchemical gold.
Speaker 7: Not too many.
Speaker 4: Alchemical texts say well, I made gold by means of
Speaker 4: the philosopher's stone.
Speaker 7: Rather they tell you how to do it right. In
Speaker 7: other words, it's.
Speaker 4: A kind of a lack of boundary between actually doing
Speaker 4: experiments and thought experiments. And I think that the homunculus
Speaker 4: was a sort of thought experiment.
Speaker 8: But it was a thought experiment that anybody could pretty
Speaker 8: much do right. I mean, anybody, any man who has
Speaker 8: access to you know, a jar and you know, a
Speaker 8: place to store it for forty days and forty nights
Speaker 8: can figure out whether this works or not.
Speaker 3: Right, you mean it's a testable hypothesis.
Speaker 8: Yes, that's exactly what.
Speaker 4: Yeah, and very likely people did try it, but you
Speaker 4: won't find anybody admitting to try it.
Speaker 1: Interesting question.
Speaker 3: Then I'm just saying I have things I won't say.
Speaker 2: I was interested to discover there's two pair of celsus,
Speaker 2: so there's a pair of paracelsus.
Speaker 3: That's kind of funny.
Speaker 2: I just am fascinated by this topic and it surprises
Speaker 2: me that.
Speaker 3: That it is, you know, so little known, like I say,
Speaker 3: outside of well monster nerves and in the history of
Speaker 3: science people. Right.
Speaker 2: I did notice that the mandrake legend, though, did make
Speaker 2: it into the Harry Potter series. I don't think. Yeah,
Speaker 2: they used the idea that they were raising real mandrakes
Speaker 2: in the magic I don't forget a magical herb garden
Speaker 2: that they had, and they had to feed them blood
Speaker 2: not their own.
Speaker 3: But yeah, it was.
Speaker 2: It was of course, if you pull them from the
Speaker 2: ground and they scream, well then that's lethal. So it
Speaker 2: was a fairly accurate rendition of the legend. They left
Speaker 2: off the part about collecting semen from under a gibbet,
Speaker 2: but you.
Speaker 4: Know, oh yeah, you know you mentioned the mandrake. There's
Speaker 4: also the story of a basilisk, this mythical creature that
Speaker 4: supposedly could kill you by looking at you, right, So
Speaker 4: the only way to kill it was to wear a
Speaker 4: suit of mirrors, and then it would have to look
Speaker 4: at itself and die.
Speaker 9: Well.
Speaker 4: Actually, this very same text of Pseudo Paracelsus, it contains
Speaker 4: the method the recipe for making amunculus, also tells you
Speaker 4: how to make a basilisk. And the way to make
Speaker 4: a basilisk is to take a human female's menstrual blood
Speaker 4: and seal that up for forty days and forty nights,
Speaker 4: and that'll produce a basilisk. So, to my mind, what
Speaker 4: this illustrates is that it's a kind of a warped
Speaker 4: eugenic experiment.
Speaker 7: Right.
Speaker 4: If you take a pure male right as it were,
Speaker 4: which is a monculus because it's made from male sema alone,
Speaker 4: it's this wonderful little being that can foretell the future
Speaker 4: and help you win battles. If you take a sort
Speaker 4: of pure isolated female on the other hand, which is
Speaker 4: the basilisk made from menstrual blood. Well, you get a basilisk, right,
Speaker 4: which has kind of a magnified It's a kind of
Speaker 4: magnification of all of the bad properties that were associated
Speaker 4: misogynistically with females, like the ability of a woman supposedly
Speaker 4: to ruin a mirror if she looks at it while
Speaker 4: she's having her period, right, Or that she can supposedly
Speaker 4: by holding a bottle of wine turn it sour. Well,
Speaker 4: the basilisk, of course, has the same sort of power.
Speaker 4: Only if a basilisk looks at you, it kills you, right, So.
Speaker 7: That sort of thing is going on too.
Speaker 4: It's this kind of weird, misogynistic eugenic thought experiment in
Speaker 4: the production of the muska, the homunculus, and the.
Speaker 3: Basilisk, absolutely fascinating.
Speaker 1: I think you started to answer this one, but why
Speaker 1: would someone go to the trouble of creating a homunculus.
Speaker 1: It seems like an awful lot of work, And surely
Speaker 1: in the Middle Ages there would have been plenty of
Speaker 1: slaves and street urchins and others that you could have
Speaker 1: forced into being a helper of some kind or with
Speaker 1: the typical duties requiring more magical abilities.
Speaker 4: Well, yeah, a pseudo Paracelsus claims that the homunculus, if
Speaker 4: you carry it around with you, will help you in
Speaker 4: various ways, foretelling the future and helping you in battle.
Speaker 4: Those are the two things that you mentioned, which are
Speaker 4: magnifications I think of heroic virtues that were associated with males.
Speaker 7: Right.
Speaker 4: There's also another link here, possibly with the man drake,
Speaker 4: because it was thought that if you had a man
Speaker 4: drake and you kept it sealed up or even in
Speaker 4: a bottle, it would bring you good luck. Some stories
Speaker 4: from the sixteenth and seventeenth century say that it'll even
Speaker 4: double your money if you have it wrapped up and
Speaker 4: put in a little box, right, and you put a
Speaker 4: coin in it and come back the next day, you'll
Speaker 4: have two coins, this sort of thing. So I think,
Speaker 4: once again that's the kind of bleed through the mandrake
Speaker 4: legend to the mounculus legend. So yeah, it was thought
Speaker 4: by some people to have real practical uses.
Speaker 1: And a bit like a genie as well.
Speaker 8: Yeah. In fact, in fact, that's that's a great transition
Speaker 8: to what I was wondering, which is that, as you said,
Speaker 8: it sort of came from Arabic Arabic origins and and
Speaker 8: the main I mean, there's a there's a variety of
Speaker 8: Arabic and Muslim influenced creatures, primarily genies and gin But
Speaker 8: I'm wondering how this fits in with, for example, the Qur'an,
Speaker 8: because we have we have we have genies you mentioned
Speaker 8: explicitly and repeatedly in the Quran, our homunculi mentioned in there.
Speaker 8: And if so, what's the connection between Islama and homuncula.
Speaker 4: I don't think that a moncular iron man in the Quran,
Speaker 4: though I can't swear to it. Yeah, I'm not sure
Speaker 4: there's a direct connection with Islam per se. There were
Speaker 4: plenty of Arabic sources, however, that did you know, talk
Speaker 4: about the creation of the homunculus. Another one that I
Speaker 4: haven't mentioned is the huge corpus of alchemical and natural
Speaker 4: magic treatises ascribed to Jabri even Ion. This Jabri even
Speaker 4: Ion supposedly lived in the eighth century and was supposedly
Speaker 4: a student of a person who's rather famous in the
Speaker 4: Islamic Habith literature named Jaffar Asadik. So there is some
Speaker 4: sort of connection there with Ismaili Islam, but not a
Speaker 4: connection directly with the Quran as far as I know,
Speaker 4: But at any rate, this jab Here, in some of
Speaker 4: the jab Here treatises, which can't possibly go back to
Speaker 4: the eighth century, they must be much later, you do
Speaker 4: have descriptions of the creation of an artificial human being
Speaker 4: in a kind of a rotisserie that is intended to
Speaker 4: be made out of a crystalline substance that mimics the
Speaker 4: celestial spheres at the center of which you make this
Speaker 4: artificial human being once again out of human semen, and
Speaker 4: it's supposed to have marvelous abilities. You're supposed to be
Speaker 4: able to convert female into a male this way, so
Speaker 4: once again you've got this sort of sexual agenda going,
Speaker 4: and it's supposed to have other magical properties as well.
Speaker 4: So yeah, there was a huge literature on artificial generation
Speaker 4: in Islam, but not so much linked to the Qoran
Speaker 4: per se.
Speaker 8: Right, And I guess the other thing that jumps to
Speaker 8: mind is that another big distinction between gin and homunculus
Speaker 8: is that is that gin were explicitly created by Allah
Speaker 8: and by God, whereas in the case of a monkeylis
Speaker 8: that they're not, I mean, you know, they're presumably you know, humans,
Speaker 8: albeit ones who have magical ability, but humans creating this
Speaker 8: instead of instead of gods. That's that's a very different
Speaker 8: origin there.
Speaker 4: Yeah, and then in fact that's the big issue. That's
Speaker 4: the big issue with a homunculus. Can a human being
Speaker 4: create another in souled individual or is that only God
Speaker 4: that can do that? And again that's where you get
Speaker 4: this discussion as to whether the homunculus can have a
Speaker 4: real soul, a rational soul that allows it to be
Speaker 4: full of human or not. And of course it's very
Speaker 4: convenient if you can say that no, it can't have
Speaker 4: a rational soul, because then you're free to dissect it
Speaker 4: and use its organs and so forth for all sorts
Speaker 4: of various magical or medical purposes.
Speaker 2: In terms of alchemy lore, it seems like alchemists are
Speaker 2: probably given a pretty.
Speaker 3: What do you, I guess, a bulleted sort.
Speaker 2: Of version when you go through high school and you know,
Speaker 2: college or at a low level college.
Speaker 3: Looking at the history of science, we.
Speaker 2: Get this sort of like they wanted to turn you know,
Speaker 2: basementals into gold, They wanted to find in the elixir
Speaker 2: of life, they wanted to create artificial life. And I
Speaker 2: think it seems like there was a lot more going
Speaker 2: on there, But this sort of claim seems like something
Speaker 2: that's imminently testable.
Speaker 3: Yet it was there a lot of.
Speaker 2: I mean, they obviously hadn't invented the scientific method by
Speaker 2: this point, and there wasn't really peer review exactly, but
Speaker 2: people were clearly communicating with one another, if by no
Speaker 2: other means than by comparing other people's writings and taking notes.
Speaker 3: So how did this sort of.
Speaker 2: Evolve into modern science? When did people think they were
Speaker 2: just making a recipe and the cake didn't rise? I mean,
Speaker 2: how did they account for the failure to be able
Speaker 2: to reproduce some of these effects?
Speaker 4: Yeah, that's a big question because you're talking about a
Speaker 4: huge period of time here, right. But look, I mean,
Speaker 4: even in the seventeenth century, right, there were very many
Speaker 4: people who took the claims of alchemy seriously, and of
Speaker 4: course Isaac Newton is one of them. So was Robert
Speaker 4: Boyle and John Locke. All of these guys were seriously
Speaker 4: involved in alchemy. Newton spent about thirty years studying alchemy,
Speaker 4: and we have his laboratory notebooks as a matter of fact,
Speaker 4: describing in great detail the experiments that he did. So
Speaker 4: the bottom line is they actually could do quite a
Speaker 4: lot of chemistry, and the term alchemy in the early
Speaker 4: modern period included not just the attempt to transmute base
Speaker 4: metals into gold, and included the whole realm of what
Speaker 4: we would call nowadays technical chemistry, right, which included all
Speaker 4: sorts of stuff like making alcoholic beverages, that is to say,
Speaker 4: isolating the ethyl alcohol out of them by means of distillation,
Speaker 4: making pigments that artists used. You know, you have artists
Speaker 4: handbooks from the fourteenth century, for example, that say, if
Speaker 4: you want to buy yellow pigment, go to alchemists and
Speaker 4: get it from them, because they know how to make it.
Speaker 4: So there's a whole realm with technical chemistry that was
Speaker 4: involved here. There was also a huge, huge realm of
Speaker 4: what we would call pharmacology, what they called cumiatria or
Speaker 4: yatro chemistry, that is, using traditional alchemical techniques like sublimation, distillation, lucidation,
Speaker 4: and so forth in the service of making drugs. Right. So,
Speaker 4: all this stuff is going on and people are by
Speaker 4: the sixteenth and seventeenth century, the general populace is coming
Speaker 4: to the awareness of what we would call the benefits
Speaker 4: of industrial chemistry. So you know, the transmutation of base
Speaker 4: metals and gold. That was just one part of this
Speaker 4: huge field.
Speaker 1: Well, build just a final question. We always like to
Speaker 1: ask our guests to tell us about their favorite monster.
Speaker 1: So what's your favorite monster?
Speaker 7: My favorite monster? Gosh, that's a tough one.
Speaker 4: Well, I guess you know. The one that I've written on,
Speaker 4: if he is a monster, certainly is the homunculus. But
Speaker 4: then there's the basilisk and the manager ache as well,
Speaker 4: which also qualify I suppose, so I think, yeah, No,
Speaker 4: my main sort of fascination with all of this is
Speaker 4: these attempts to create artificial life in general, and also
Speaker 4: the tweak life. Yeah. Actually, I'd like to say something
Speaker 4: about that. The alchemist's attempt to alter life didn't just
Speaker 4: limit itself to creating sort of arizots human beings. They
Speaker 4: also were interested in making modifications. And it's under that
Speaker 4: rubric of changing human beings that is, that's one of
Speaker 4: the avenues by which alchemy entered the popular discussion and
Speaker 4: helped to create the sort of image of the mad
Speaker 4: scientist in the nineteenth century. And this actually has been
Speaker 4: picked up in mainstream discussions of actually amazingly bioengineering and
Speaker 4: what I'm thinking of in particular is the use that
Speaker 4: at Leon Cass made in the President's Council on Bioethics
Speaker 4: under the George W. Bush administration of Nathaniel Hawthorne's story
Speaker 4: The Birthmark, which is about an alchemist who tries to
Speaker 4: alter his wife by removing a birthmark from her faith
Speaker 4: birthmark that looks like a hand and she's totally beautiful
Speaker 4: in every other way, but this birthmark drives him crazy.
Speaker 4: His name is Aylmer, but he's very clearly not just
Speaker 4: a chemist, though Hawthorne uses that term. He's an alchemist
Speaker 4: if you look at what he has in his laboratory,
Speaker 4: the kind of experiments he does, their traditional alchemy experiments.
Speaker 4: So at any rate, he kills his wife in the process.
Speaker 2: Boiler alert. Hey, but it works. He gets rid of
Speaker 2: the birthmark.
Speaker 7: He gets rid of the birthmark, but he kills his wife.
Speaker 4: So the President's Council in Bioethics made this required reading
Speaker 4: because they wanted to make people think about what Cast
Speaker 4: called the yuck factor. The yuck factor being what Cast
Speaker 4: viewed as a sort of trans chronological ethical good that
Speaker 4: people carry within themselves that he thought, you know, would
Speaker 4: make this sort of abuse of science, abhorrent to people.
Speaker 4: I happen to think that's completely wrong in my view.
Speaker 4: Hawthorne was in fact drawing explicitly on this alchemical discussion
Speaker 4: of artificial life and tweaking nature. And you know, this
Speaker 4: is something that people learn about, it's not something that
Speaker 4: you're born with.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: I think a lot of ethics require a little bit
Speaker 2: of training, so you can sort of draw your conclusions
Speaker 2: from a greater body of work than you may have
Speaker 2: conceived yourself. And then there's the sort of things that
Speaker 2: you sort of innately come to conclusions based on your experiences.
Speaker 3: This is complicated. I'll have to get Masimopilut here to
Speaker 3: talk about it.
Speaker 7: Is complicated, complicated book.
Speaker 4: But what people don't realize is that this discussion that
Speaker 4: was introduced by casts into you know, bioengineering considerations, actually
Speaker 4: has this long history going back to you know, the
Speaker 4: early Middle Ages, where alchemy plays a key part. So
Speaker 4: in a way, this we're still discussing the homeonculus. We
Speaker 4: just don't realize it.
Speaker 3: You've made that case very coachingly.
Speaker 8: But it's a fascinating topic on Yeah, this was.
Speaker 3: Great, thank you, and of course we'll put a link
Speaker 3: to your book in the show notes?
Speaker 5: Is it?
Speaker 3: What are you working on now? Is there anything we
Speaker 3: have to look forward to coming up?
Speaker 4: I am editing all of Isaac Newton's alchemical writings, which
Speaker 4: comprise about a million words, and if you could put
Speaker 4: a link to our site, I would appreciate that greatly.
Speaker 2: Sure, But are you doing anything important? That's beantastic. Yeah,
Speaker 2: that'd be a great.
Speaker 3: Thing to put in the show notes, and absolutely we'll
Speaker 3: put a link to it.
Speaker 2: So how do you find his writing? Is it pretty engaging?
Speaker 2: I heard he was kind of a dry read, but
Speaker 2: I've read in myself unfortunately.
Speaker 4: Well, it depends on what part of it you're looking at.
Speaker 4: He actually wrote a really fascinating little treatise on what
Speaker 4: he calls the vegetability of metals, and what he's concerned
Speaker 4: with is bringing metals to life literally so they'll grow
Speaker 4: and multiply.
Speaker 5: They.
Speaker 4: Newton, like a lot of alchemists in the period, interpreted
Speaker 4: processes like crystallization and dendritic growths of one sort or another,
Speaker 4: as you know, actual living processes. And we have some
Speaker 4: video clips on our site that show how this works.
Speaker 4: So it would be great if you could put links
Speaker 4: to that.
Speaker 3: Stuff. Yeah for sure.
Speaker 2: I mean, you know, if you've ever watched crystals grow,
Speaker 2: it does have some really interesting parallels, and if you
Speaker 2: follow the evolutionary theory, it may be more than a coincidence,
Speaker 2: right So.
Speaker 4: Yeah, well, yeah, in silica gardens in particular, and that
Speaker 4: is something that people in the seventeenth century were interested in.
Speaker 6: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Absolutely, we'll put those links in the shows. This was
Speaker 3: really really interesting.
Speaker 1: So well, thank you.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: So it's probably the most we've ever talked about the
Speaker 2: process of masturbation and the products of it. Maybe, I mean, well,
Speaker 2: I mean, you know that we'll leave in the show.
Speaker 2: I mean, thank you very much. This has been a wonderful,
Speaker 2: wonderful interview.
Speaker 7: Think well, I really enjoyed it. It was a pleasure. Thank you.
Speaker 2: More Obstrutle, thanks for listening to this episode of Monster Talk.
Speaker 2: We've been talking with Professor William Newman about the homunculus
Speaker 2: in the history of science and alchemy. A link to
Speaker 2: his book on alchemy, Promefean Ambitions, will be in the
Speaker 2: show notes. Also in the notes be a link to
Speaker 2: his web project, which is going through the notes of
Speaker 2: Sir Isaac Newton. Monster Talk is an official podcast of
Speaker 2: Skeptic Magazine. The views and puns on this show do
Speaker 2: not necessarily represent the opinions or sense of humor of
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Speaker 3: Did I ever tell you about my first pinpal? No,
Speaker 3: There used to be the show on there used to be.
Speaker 2: The show on this show called Big Blue Marble that
Speaker 2: came on the seventies and on Saturday mornings.
Speaker 3: It was like the first thing to come on before
Speaker 3: the cartoons came on.
Speaker 2: And so I would get up in the morning and
Speaker 2: you know, be anxious to watch cartoons, and I would
Speaker 2: wait and the first thing to come up be Big
Speaker 2: Blue Marble. And at the end they kept saying you
Speaker 2: could get a pim pal, you know, just send a
Speaker 2: letter to here and we'll hook you up with a
Speaker 2: pim pal. And so I didn't really know what to
Speaker 2: do exactly, but I wrote a letter and it was like,
Speaker 2: you know, what's your name, where do you live? Do
Speaker 2: you you know, what do you like to do? Just
Speaker 2: you know, different things, different questions.
Speaker 3: You know. It's like, you know, my name is Blake,
Speaker 3: you know, whatever it is.
Speaker 2: I send it out and then I don't think much
Speaker 2: about it, and then, like I don't know, four or
Speaker 2: five weeks later, I get a letter back and it's
Speaker 2: just yes.
Speaker 3: No three. I have no idea what the questions were.
Speaker 3: I never wrote back. I was like, that's ridiculous.
Speaker 2: Anyway, Okay, I got to go take care of the kids,
Speaker 2: eat them or whatever it is that they need.
Speaker 3: I feed them blood and get them out of their
Speaker 3: jars and walk them so.
Speaker 8: As well as you shouldn't.
Speaker 3: All right, guys,