Compatibility · Bridge
The Alchemist's Library
Homunculus and Ars Magna
Both come to understand, by very different routes. The Homunculus wanders through big questions at night while Ars Magna builds frameworks by daylight. Ars Magna wants to systematise the Homunculus's thoughts, and the Homunculus wants to ask Ars Magna what systems are for.
Together
Big ideas with structure: the Homunculus's insights, sorted into Ars Magna's tables, start to look like actual philosophy.
Friction
Ars Magna wants a definition. The Homunculus believes defining things is how you lose them.
The myths agree
Both names ended up on alchemical books. A large body of alchemical treatises was falsely attributed to Llull, who in fact opposed the idea of transmuting metals, and the homunculus recipe comes from De natura rerum, a work attributed to Paracelsus.