Journal Birthing a homunculus

[Romolo]

1. Inception

Nearly midnight. I shuffled barefoot over the cobblestones towards the edge of the backyard. At the wall, I knelt and dug out some soil with a cupped hand. The soil was dry and laced with roots as thin as hair. When the glass jar was full to the brim, I turned south and held up my offering to heaven. Instantly, the full moon slid over the oval opening of the jar. A solid, terrifying coincidence. The glass flared with a dull glow, cradling an egg of darkness inside… I whispered a triple prayer to the Triple Goddess, Nurse of the World.

I carried the jar inside and placed it on my altar. With a blunt sea urchin stick, I started to crush an eggshell into the soil. Both the hollow egg and the stick were gifts I had received one week earlier from a dear friend; witch, childless, restless soul… It had not been my wish to destroy her beautiful hand-painted egg, but it had broken earlier that evening, and rather than leaving it half-destroyed, it now served a better purpose: fully obliterated, merged into this midnight soil. The sea urchin stick had three rims and carried a pareidolic trace of faces.

I sealed the jar and blew out the candle.

 

[Romolo]

2. Incubation

I did not bury the jar, but pressed it down horizontally into the soil outside, in front of my altar (a sacred sand stone). I covered the jar with wet leaves. The first leaves to fall down, the ones most eager to decay... A few days later, I brushed them off, revealing the glass.

The upper half of the jar faces heaven, the bottom half faces the Underworld. Icubation. In vitro... The glass reflects the sky and shines like a mixture of milk and oil. I can see the dark soil inside. It reminds me of the glass dome you see in chapels, used for statues of saints. Horizontal, like the coffin, but also like the incubator in hospitals. We enter and leave this world horizontally, never upright.

"He who would read and understand the Book of Nature must walk its pages with his feet," said Paracelsus. It is aligned with my understanding of the four elements and the Four Powers of the Sphinx. Water brings down fire ("to will") and air ("to know"). Both fire and air rise on the right side of the Tree of Life, whereas water and earth, the katatonic forces, break those forces down again. From force to form... Water is "to go, to dare, to do": experience. The cup preserves. Experiences are what we remember. It is the place where knowledge can be understood and trickle down, down, deep and truly... Experiences are what's saved in our inner world. No knowledge can be infused into the soul without the experience.

My homunculus will not incubate for 40 days, like in the grim experiments of Paracelsus, but only one lunar month. In the ten days remaining before birth, I must think more about the role of decay. "Decay is the beginning of all birth," Paracelsus wrote. "It transforms shape and essence, the forces and virtues of nature. Just as the decay of all foods in the stomach transforms them and makes them into a pulp, so it happens outside the stomach. Decay is the midwife of very great things! It causes many things to rot, that a noble fruit may be born; for it is the reversal, the death and destruction of the original essence of all natural things. It brings about the birth and rebirth of forms a thousand times improved. . . . And this is the highest and greatest mysterium of God, the deepest mystery and miracle that he has revealed to mortal man." (from: Alchemy, the art of transformation)

 

[Romolo]

3. Autumn & decay

I tried to incorporate thoughts of decay into my "Great Work". What struck me during one of my walks was this cliché saying that the Death card in Tarot means "radical change", "leave behind what you don't need", "cut off the dry branches", and all kinds of variations on this metaphor. It is a feeling often felt or formulated in autumn. "Let go of your dead leaves". What they get wrong (and I believe Paracelsus would agree) is that nothing really can every go away. When you read the Book of Nature and observe all that surrounds you, it becomes clear how things decompose, nurture, compost and are reintegrated into the world. Nothing is left behind.

This offers a grandiose opportunity when compared to Summer. Towards the end of Summer you can already feel a restlessness, a cerain boredom that can tip over into decadence, laziness, spleen... The flowers become a parody of themselves. The fruit starts to rot. Autumn offers decay: real authentic change, real reintegration of the old. Powerful lessons and advanced understanding. I believe Autumn is the true season of witchcraft. Diligent Virgo commands the fields, Scorpio lays await in the puddles. The veil in-between is the thinnest, the spectrum of colors is the deepest, the broadest, the most spectacular.