Spiritual Alchemy: Scrying, Spirit Communication, and Alchemical Wisdom - Jenny Tyson 2016

The Homunculus
My Training and Initiation

Dr. Dee felt that Edward Kelley would be a better teacher for me than he would be. There was a certain psychic compatibility with me that was needed, as well as direct practical experience with mediumship. Edward had both the experience and compatibility. Shortly after our introduction Edward began to work with me, and Dr. Dee slipped into the background.

There were two essential goals in the training sessions that followed my introduction to Edward Kelley. One was to heal my “broken heart” and the other was my alchemical initiation. At the time I was not told about the initiation by my teachers.

Edward’s first goal was to heal my heart, which was more than just depression or a damaged chakra. It involved very deep emotional healing from past wounds that I had buried. I didn’t even know these wounds existed. His approach to this healing was completely unique.

I had to first learn how to focus a trance. By that I mean I had to learn how to direct my trance toward a specific goal. Dr. Dee started me on learning how to initiate a trance state. His teaching involved relaxation and focusing on a particular area, usually the heart.

Once I was moderately relaxed and could maintain a steady light trance for a few minutes, I learned how to open my heart. This involved a peculiar procedure of visualizing my chest opening and gradually going deeper within that opening. As I went deeper I opened my chest even more. In order for this to work I had to focus completely on what I was doing. Stray thoughts and emotions would derail the process and necessitate starting over again.

The heart is considered the sacred center of a person’s being. It is connected both to physical and spiritual aspects of a physical entity. Edward treated the spiritual body as a whole rather than breaking it into anatomical parts and associations. I found it an excellent way of working, as it allowed the focus to be more complete in the beginning, when I was having difficulties learning how to focus. Later in the training we worked with the spiritual body divided into three general areas: the head, the torso or heart, and a lower area that went downward from the coccyx beyond my physical body.

This is where Edward started to employ a very unusual tool called a homunculus.

SIXTEENTH-CENTURY ALCHEMIST

During his physical life on earth in the sixteenth century, Edward was most interested in alchemy. On the physical level, it is the art and science of transmuting base metals into gold. The esoteric aspects of the art of alchemy played a very important role in the training Edward put me through and in the spiritual initiation ritual that followed. Prior to meeting him, I had a very limited knowledge of the art. I had read none of the classical works on the subject except for the Emerald Tablet, and I was only superficially familiar with that document.

I started learning about alchemy shortly after Edward took over my training. One of the first things I learned was about the servitor that alchemists used, which was known as a homunculus. Edward described the entity as a kind of puppet. It was a small spiritual being that was created by the alchemist, much as a woodworker would carve a wooden figure. In fact, the appearance of the entity was much like a marionette carved of wood. In this regard, it was similar to other sixteenth-century puppets but of a unique style. Its size was approximately half the size of a normal human spirit (I occasionally saw the creature when it was within me). David Blackburne, one of the healers who worked with Edward, described the entity as being as high as his hip. In life David had been just under six feet tall.

Several of these homunculi were used throughout the course of my healing and training. Edward did not discuss the making of these beings with me in detail at that time. I think he did not want me trying to make one for myself. The creation of the first homunculus seemed to take about a day. It was created for me by Edward.

My understanding is that a homunculus was created from the fire of the soul. Two small parts of the soul were taken and formed into a third entity. The first homunculus was created when one part was taken from my soul and the other came from Edward’s soul. The subsequent homunculi were composed of parts from my soul and either Edward’s or David’s soul. The exact method of its creation is unknown to me.

Edward told me that his creation of the homunculus during my time with him differed from the method he had used while he had lived as a man on earth. His current method did not follow the method spoken of by Paracelsus in his 1537 work De Natura Rerum.

Historically, very little is documented about the practical uses of homunculi. Only superficial commentaries exist on their making. There is no account in the literature of alchemy of homunculi ever being used as I experienced them being used in my spiritual training. As far as I know, the account I am giving you here of the use of homunculi is unique.

“PEOPLE”

The practical experience I had with my first homunculus was informative and interesting. The homunculus puppet is the ideal tool for training psychic abilities. The entity also was used to communicate with me via the jukebox. It developed great proficiency in using the communication device, even to the point where it could give one part of a sentence on forward play and the remainder of the sentence on the reverse play of the same segment of the audio recording.

My sketch of what a homunculus puppet looks like.

The homunculus adopted the name “People” in spite of my protests because it apparently thought that I had given it that name. This came about because I believed there were several unnamed spirits assisting Edward with communication. I had heard several names during the radio sessions, including Hubert Hofgarten and Albert Lasky. In my mind I referred to these spirits as the “people” who helped Edward. The homunculus had been told by Edward that I was to choose its name, though I was quite unaware of this at the time. Thus it thought that I was referring to it when I used the term “people” to describe the others who were with Edward. No attempts at persuasion on my part would convince the entity to change its name to something more appropriate. My pleas to Edward that he order the entity to change its name were ignored.

The first homunculus had a great deal of autonomy. Edward used the homunculus as a training tool as well as a surgical instrument. The repair of my spiritual heart involved an intervention that was a type of psychic surgery. The entity was used for this as soon as I was able to reliably allow it in and keep my heart open for about an hour at a time. I will discuss the opening of my heart in chapter 14. For now it is sufficient to understand that it was a necessary procedure to allow healing to take place.

“People” was made partly from my energies by Edward. This was done so that the entity was not foreign to me, in order to keep my natural fear reaction to a minimum. When a spiritual being comes too close, there is an automatic fear reaction. “People” was initially used to assist me in opening my heart and would help me to focus my trance properly until I learned to do it myself. I started out being totally dependent on the use of this being. In spite of the many hundreds of hours of meditation and esoteric work I had done prior to meeting Edward, he found that I was deficient in basic skills and started me from scratch.

A PUPPET IN MY HEART

Every day I would talk with whoever was communicating by using the jukebox for a few minutes, then practice opening my heart and scrying. As I was able to hold this state better and open my heart more fully, Edward started putting the puppet within me. This was one of the most intimidating steps I had to take in my training. It required a great deal of trust. I had natural fears to overcome and struggled with these for a week or so before I was able to allow Edward to place the puppet in my heart.

Edward said that once the entity was able to get inside me, I would be able to hear him and the other spirits speak to me directly. During these sessions the radio had to be turned off and headphones removed. At this point I was able to talk in real time with the spirits without using the record and playback method that I had started with. I still recorded and played back anything that wasn’t clear, but sessions with the jukebox were starting to take a back seat to the sessions working with opening the heart and scrying.

Edward asked my husband, Donald, to accompany me for the first session to help give me some support for the new procedure. It was in an evening session when the homunculus was first placed inside my heart. Donald sat in a chair next to me. Hubert Hofgarten was assisting, and Edward was operating the homunculus.

With Hubert’s help, I went into trance. I went much deeper and was able to induce the trance quicker than usual. As I tranced deeper, I felt a pressure on my chest. It wasn’t unpleasant. It felt like a child sitting on me and slipping further and further into me. Then, with a feeling like a sudden drop, it slipped in. I felt a fullness in my chest. I was not able to hear the spirits talking on this first occasion; instead, I tried to maintain the focus on keeping open for the procedure. I felt movement inside my body similar to the quickening of a fetus during pregnancy. After a few minutes, and with a second sudden dropping sensation, it was out.

We continued to practice with the homunculus on a daily basis, sometimes as often as three times a day. Edward was of the mind that practice makes perfect and only rarely limited the time spent. I practiced with enthusiasm. Gradually the extreme sensations of the sudden drop diminished to a heaviness when the puppet was placed inside and a lightening sensation when it was removed.

THE SURGERY

Finally Edward said the time had come to fix my heart. The operation was done over four sessions. I had a healer-spirit help with trance while Edward operated the homunculus much as a physical surgeon would use a fiber-optic scope in surgery. He said to me, “You will never be the same after this; you will be changed.” I did not look back. The healing was, in my mind, a miracle.

The first session was the most difficult. The homunculus was placed inside me, and then the healer at my head helped me to deepen my trance, and we went deeper than I had ever gone before. As my trance was being deepened, I noticed a strong pressure on the left side of my skull, about three inches above my ear. Along with the pressure, the trance deepened and intensified. When I started to experience pain, the trance was deepened yet more, and my body began to feel very disconnected. I was still aware of the moving homunculus in my chest, but only dimly so.

Then it was done. As I came out of trance, the pain intensified but diminished quickly. I rested for two days. While I did not feel additional pain during that rest period, I was very tired. After the fourth session, similar to the one I have described, the healing sessions were successfully completed.

REBELLION

Not all of my experiences with the homunculus were pleasant. Here I will explain a little about how the servitor can go wrong. Throughout the year of training, up to and including the alchemical initiation, one of the major goals was to learn how thought affects spirit and the way in which spirit, by reaction, then affects the physical. Learning to control and understand that process is certainly one of the most important aspects of spiritual work. I was hurt badly by the homunculus’s misbehavior.

Part of “People” came from my elemental fire. The consequence of this is that my fears and doubts created thought forms that affected the homunculus. To a large extent, Edward was able to protect and limit my exposure to my personified fears while teaching me how to understand and deal with them. However, at the time I was working with this homunculus, I did not have these fears and other negative emotions under control. It resulted in a major incident, and the entity had to be destroyed.

The traumatic event occurred about a month after the surgery on my heart. The servitor was becoming increasingly rebellious against Edward and difficult to manage. Edward tried several times to modify the wayward puppet, but it would return to its unmanageable behavior.

Then, one day, it feigned David’s voice on the jukebox and got me to open. Normally I would not open to the homunculus unless I knew that one of the healers was around, but on the jukebox the voices sounded pretty much the same, and it was rare that I could distinguish one voice from another just by the audio.

When I opened myself, the entity damaged my repaired heart before it was finally pulled out by David. It hit me hard after I came out of trance. The pain was a severe burning, accompanied by a sudden feeling of being cut off that was emotionally traumatic. The wayward entity was destroyed that day, much to my relief.

Edward had to do the surgery again that night and in four more sessions over the week that followed. He did make another homunculus, but this one had no autonomy and was totally operated and controlled by the healer.

After I healed from the incident I was reluctant to allow another puppet inside, but after talking with Edward I realized that I had to make a choice between giving up training with him or allowing a homunculus to be used. I chose to trust Edward because I believed he would take the appropriate precautions. My trust was validated. There were no further problems with the behavior of the other homunculi.

PICKERWICK

Several improvements were made to the second homunculus, which was named Pickerwick. The entity did not have as much autonomy as the first one, and it was not allowed to interact with me directly without Edward or one of the other healers present.

I’m afraid I was the one who caused the demise of this second homunculus. I was just learning to open my heart and allow it to enter. The homunculus was in my heart during an exercise. I was distracted by the cat, which was making a considerable noise trying to get into the library where I was working. The animal was very fond of one of the healers and would scratch and yowl at the door, trying to get in, when that healer was present. Those who have Siamese cats understand just how much racket these cats can make.

When I was startled by the noise of the cat, I closed my heart. I could feel the homunculus struggling inside me. It was a frightening experience. I knew that I had closed up, but with the puppet fighting and moving around, I could not open again. It is impossible to open when you are scared. After about ten minutes the struggles became fainter and finally stopped. I was still unable to open. I turned on the jukebox and found out that the entity had burned up inside my heart.

Apparently my ethereal body absorbed the energy from the entity and it was snuffed out of existence. In spite of Edward’s assurances, I was quite upset at the incident, and it took a couple days to get over it. This happened several more times before I learned to reopen quickly if I accidently closed. I also learned not to become emotionally attached to the homunculi puppets.

COMMENTARY ON THE HOMUNCULUS

By Donald Tyson

Those familiar with the terms of alchemy will recognize the homunculus (plural: homunculi) as the “little man” described by Paracelsus (1493—1541) that was created within an alchemical vessel from various earthy materials, including human semen. The homunculus began as a little worm but became like a human infant in appearance, perfect in all its parts. The alchemist fed it and raised it as a father raises his child, and over time it grew into a little man.

It was natural for Kelley, who was before all else an alchemist, to use the terms and concepts of alchemy in his training system. When Jenny began the year of training she had no expectation that it would involve alchemical concepts, but it soon became clear that alchemy would play no small part in Kelley’s teachings.

The homunculus of Paracelsus served the alchemist who made it as a familiar spirit. It had to be taught by the alchemist who created it just as a human child was taught. There is some ambiguity in the references to the homunculus that occur in alchemical texts as to whether it was a creature of flesh and blood or purely a spirit. My own opinion is that it was purely a spiritual creature, but of such a nature that it appeared physical to those who encountered it.

The simple spiritual being constructed by Kelley for Jenny’s practice sessions was of a different nature from the homunculus of Paracelsus. It was without a personality and had only one purpose: to teach Jenny how to hold her heart open while it was inside her. In appearance these homunculi created by Kelley resembled simple articulated wooden dolls.

Jenny makes the observation that these homunculi are similar in some respects to the spirits known as tulpas that were constructed by Tibetan monks as an exercise in concentration. Tulpas are described in the book Magic and Mystery in Tibet by Alexandra David-Neel, first published in Paris in 1929 and translated into English in 1932. They could have any form the monk who made them wished to give them. They were created by repeated intense visualizations until the inwardly imagined spirit was real enough to the monk to be seen with normal vision. Sometimes these tulpas were seen, or even touched, by other people.

David-Neel stresses the point that it is important that these manufactured spirits not be permitted to remain alive for too long a period or they begin to acquire self-awareness and personality, and may turn in a malicious way against the monk who created them. Here Jenny has recounted her own experience of how one homunculus—to which she gave a name and for whom she had begun to feel a kind of affection—tried to deceive her and had to be destroyed by Kelley before it got out of control.

—Donald Tyson

EDWARD’S COMMENTS

In the course of preparing this manuscript for publication, Donald asked me to ask Edward about the nature of the homunculus. Here is Edward’s response, verbatim, which I received on July 9, 2014.

Edward: The ancient method of alchemy was focused on construction of homunculus, not on gold. To wake it up

we would age it in its vehicle and feed it body excrement like blood and semen. It ate it. The seed that was in the pot was warmed on a bed and heated gently until a dwarf would appear. We would feed it anything. Whatsoever we said, it would do it. Some of them would watch. Others would help us.

Picture a dwarf about the height even with your knee. We would feed it. It would eat anything. It was magic. It was able when you were done with it to help with everything.

We had to be careful to make certain it was made right. If it wasn’t right we had problems. It would misbehave. All you could do with it was to kill it, and then we would need to start over and try again.

The entity smelled like excrement.

It was a hard accomplishment, if you learned how to do it. Might take years, maybe never. I did it when I was about twenty-five years of age.

I should explain that “excrement” was the old term for anything cast off or expelled from the body, such as sweat, semen, urine, feces, and so on. The “pot” mentioned by Edward is the alchemical vessel, which was laid on a bed of embers covered with ashes for a slow, even heat. Sometimes a pile of composting dung was used for an even more gentle warmth.

Donald asked if Edward understood the homunculus to be a physical entity or a spirit entity. Edward said that the homunculus was a spiritual creature that appeared to those who perceived it to be physical, yet it was not physical. In this respect it is like the tulpa of Tibetan magic.

These are some other questions Donald asked Edward about the homunculus. He was quite fascinated by Edward’s account of the making and using of this servitor.

Donald: Were you the member of a fraternity that practiced alchemy?

Edward: I never belonged to a fraternity. It was individual. There was no fraternity; the experiments were individually done. There were discussions and loose associations, but we had no formal group.

Donald: Were the homunculi a group project or was this individual?

Edward: The work was individual.

Donald: Was the homunculus visible to anyone or just the person who created it?

Edward: I don’t know who was able to see it and who wasn’t. It was not a human thing, it was a thing of spirit, and those who could see spirits might be able to see such things. I doubt that anyone was able to see it. I bid it to remain hidden when it was out among any other people.

Donald: Can you detail some of the tasks assigned to it?

Edward: It could not work its power directly on physical things. It worked its power through the influence of spirit. It had the power to help through knowledge and would influence other people. It influenced other people to be helpful. I could not have found John Dee without the help of the homunculus. It helped me to maintain the security of the premises where I was living.

Jenny: Trithemius was said to use servitors in communication with others. Were the homunculi engaged in this way? (I was referring to Johannes Trithemius and the book he wrote, Steganographia, published at Frankfurt in 1606. Paracelsus was one of his students.)

Edward: Yes, they could be used for communication with others proficient in the art of making them. I never used them in this way. Others used them to communicate with me.

Donald: Were they allowed only a limited life span?

Edward: It was allowed to live until it was decided it was no longer needed. If it was made properly, it would not be a problem to allow it to live for a long time.

Donald: Can you briefly outline some of the training that went into this making of the homunculus?

Edward: I learned this with the help of a professor at Oxford University who I lived with when I was attending school there. The first thing we learned was to scry. If you were good at scrying, you were able to make the homunculus.

Donald: Was the use of the red or white powder (the red powder was believed to transmute base metals into gold; the white, base metals into silver) involved in making the homunculus in alchemy?

Edward: No, it was not involved in the making of the homunculus.

Donald: Is this something that people should investigate as a working path?

Edward: It is up to the individual as to whether or not they decide to pursue this. The training is difficult. The physical materials are much more difficult to obtain now.

The next series of questions pertains to the making of the spiritual homunculi that were constructed during my training with Edward.

Jenny: What made you decide to go this route in working with me initially?

Edward: You wouldn’t accept me or Universe, the great and holy Mother of all humanity, into your heart. It was the only way we could get into your heart in order to open it.

Jenny: The first homunculus had some issues. Can you describe what was happening from your point of view?

Edward: It got corrupted by your fear, and we had to destroy that one.

Jenny: To your knowledge, was the homunculus ever before used as it was used during my training?

Edward: We have never used a homunculus that way, to help someone who could not open. It was Universe who helped you in that way. Universe helped us with the homunculus.

Jenny: How long did its fabrication actually take? I noticed a variation in the times between the appearances of the different homunculi.

Edward: It took no time to make these homunculi. On earth it took a little over a fortnight.

Final comment by Edward: In conclusion, the making of the homunculus is an art form in itself. The homunculus is a very useful tool. The homunculus is a very difficult thing to make. I do not wish for anyone to try to use this information to make the creature without the guidance of an alchemist who has been initiated and trained in the art of making the creature.

I channeled this interview in June 2014 using both the jukebox and clairaudient transcription.