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Homunculi vs. Tulpas


JaySkyecrest

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So I just finished both series of Fullmetal Alchemist, and because of that I have also been researching some real definitions of Alchemy terms such as Homunculus. A homunculus by definition from actual Alchemical texts, is a little artificially created human. Also often in medieval paintings of homunculi, they are often depicted as being created in a flask. Now, scholars apparently are unsure whether the concept of a homunculus was originally meant to be taken literally or metaphorically. However, while thinking about this, it occurred to me that if taken metaphorically, the concept could be seen very, very close to tulpas and tulpamancy. The flask could represent the mind, in which a small, artificially made human is grown. Thoughts?

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Hrrrm master has started looking into alchemy (not very far yet) but as a lot of alchemy is symbolic and not necessarily physical methods, that could make sense.

 

One of the parts of alchemy is to create a laboratory in your mind that you can do work in, while pondering your own nature etc. Sounds a lot like a wonderland to me.

 

We will keep an eye out for any related things in our reading.

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I think it depends on what metaphorically creating a human means. An aspect about tulpas (that I've seen) is that they are often times portrayed as characters, or sometimes beings with over exaggerated personalities or physical traits. Now I haven't looked into alchemical texts, but if there are guidelines or a process uses to create a homunculus, then maybe it'd be a start to analyze that process and see how it lines up with tulpamancey.

 

Truly a fascinating idea though, we might look into this.

I'm IBreakGames, a genuine dude.

 

We gave up on using different colors for each of us, so there's Al, Ollie, and Eva. We're all rabbits, get over it.

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Perhaps Homunculi was simply another word for tulpamancy? I'm not sure about alchemy texts and the monks who created tulpas and whatnot, but if they were two separate identities who never came into contact with each other, one could imagine how they started coining their own terms for the philosophy. Probably not though, if they were literally trying to create a physical body for the artificial life forms.

 

I'm not going to listen to you guys since you are all probably just talking to yourself and don't really have a tulpa like me.

 

 

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Well, as far as scientific homunculi go, it's an exaggerated humanoid where the features are sized based on how much of the brain they use. As for in this sense of the term, it seems more like what they call "golems" as far as the spirit/meta community goes. Not really into that stuff, so I cannot say for certain.

 

An actual homunculus: https://visalakshiramani.files.wordpress.com/2010/07/homunculus.png

"We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit." -Aristotle

 

"When you arise in the morning, think of what a precious privilege it is to be alive - to breathe, to think, to enjoy, to love." -Marcus Aurelius

 

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The phenomenon could have popped up in different forms and gone by different names, I'm actually pretty certain of that. Though I don't think a connection to construct creation is going to make me want to look in to Alchemy.

 

Other than that, I'm not sure of what the connection would imply about the modern practice. Unless we're going to be seeing a bunch of would-be alchemists come by.

 

(As a side note: I like the term "tulpamancy" less and less each time I see it. If Sushi's definition of "Divining the future using beings made of magic" didn't do it, the sense that the term marks us as psuedo-wizards definitely did.)

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