A homunculus ( , , ; "little person") is a representation of a small human being, originally depicted as small statues made out of clay. Popularized in sixteenth-century alchemy and nineteenth-century fiction, it has historically referred to the creation of a miniature, fully formed human. The concept has roots in preformationism as well as earlier folklore and alchemic traditions. The term lends its name to the cortical homunculus, an image of a person with the size of the body parts distorted to represent how much area of the cerebral cortex of the brain is devoted to it. History Alchemy The homunculus first appears by name in alchemical writings attributed to Paracelsus (1493–1541). De natura rerum (1537) outlines his method for creating homunculi: Comparisons have been made with several similar concepts in the writings of earlier alchemists. Although the actual word "homunculus" was never used, Carl Jung believed that the concept first appeared in the Visions of Zosimos, written in the third century AD. In the visions, Zosimos encounters a priest who changes into "the opposite of himself, into a mutilated anthroparion". The Greek word "anthroparion" is similar to "homunculus" – a diminutive form of "person". Zosimos subsequently encounters other anthroparia in his dream but there is no mention of the creation of artificial life. In his commentary, Jung equates the homunculus with the Philosopher's Stone, and the "inner person" in parallel with Christ. In Islamic alchemy, takwin () was a goal of certain Muslim alchemists, and is frequently found in writings of the Jabirian corpus. In the alchemical context, takwin refers to the artificial creation of life, spanning the full range of the chain of being, from minerals to prophets, imitating the function of the demiurge. One set of instructions for creating animal life found within the Jabirian Kitab al-Tajmi involves finding a vessel shaped like the animal and combining the animal's bodily fluids within it, then placing the vessel at the center of a model of a celestial sphere as heat is applied to it. Some of the alchemists believed that these methods originated somewhere in India or Southeast Asia. The homunculus continued to appear in alchemical writings after Paracelsus' time. The Chymical Wedding of Christian Rosenkreutz (1616) for example, concludes with the creation of a male and female form identified as Homunculi duo. The allegorical text suggests to the reader that the ultimate goal of alchemy is not