lurching in the pit of the stomach that marks an encounter with something truly outrageous - as in suddenly seeing for oneself what he did with the dark rocks looming above the Virgin's head. Coming face-to-face with Leonardo's wilful, brilliant and intentionally blasphemous masterpiece is a moment of truth that many would rather not experience.
Nor could Leonardo have guessed at another extraordinary sideeffect of using his own face as the model for Christ on the Shroud - although no doubt he would have exploded with laughter if he had. Although there had been depictions of Jesus as bearded before the Turin Shroud went on display in the late fifteenth century, after that watershed Christ's appearance in popular art changed specifically to resemble it. Suddenly the divine look was standardized into a very tall (although never quite so tall as Shroudman, for obvious reasons), broad-shouldered man with reddish hair parted in the middle, a long nose and hauntingly beautiful, regular features. In other words, our general cultural perception of what Jesus looked like is none other than Leonardo - another shocking triumph for the inspiration of The Da Vinci Code. Just think of all those plaster statues, the countless stained-glass windows and twisted bodies on crucifixes not as images of a first-century Jewish teacher and mage at all, but a fourteenth- fifteenth-century Italian homosexual heretic who hated Christ with all his Johannite heart. Again, there is that disturbing shift in the pit of the stomach, as yet again the foundation of our collective unconscious lifts - and shudders slightly.
One day the `Shroud' may be prominently displayed where it belongs - in a museum of photography or science and technology, where the fruits of the Da Vinci heresy can be freely appreciated for what they are, far away from pilgrims, priests, candles and incense. The Shroud does not deserve to be prayed over, but then perhaps nothing does.
Although the authorities' suppression of scientific experiment and intellectual enquiry from the early days of Christianity to the Age of Enlightenment was patchily inconsistent - depending largely on the attitude to learning of each individual pope - it is true to say that in general the Church frowned on too much knowledge, debate and thinking. And it surely is no coincidence that the Latin and Greek for `knowledge' - respectively scientia and gnosis - represent the two aspects of learning that it most abhorred. As a blend of much that was anathematized, being a left-handed-gay-vegetarian- Johannite-photographer-aviator-anatomist, Leonardo got away with an enormous amount, due mostly to friends in high places, but even he often thought it prudent to move from place to place quite quickly from time to time. (It was only at the end of his life, in 1513, when Pope Leo X began to express his distaste for Leonardo's anatomical work that he ceased his obsessive dissection in hospitals, charnel houses and graveyards.)
However, although in many ways his contribution to human knowledge and to the annals of heresy was unique, Leonardo was merely the bright blossoming of an ancient tradition of working behind closed doors, away from misunderstanding, the rack and the stake. Usually these secretive scholars were known as `alchemists', a sort of convenient umbrella term for what we would acknowledge simply as research scientists. Alchemy proper, however, was a complex business, often involving mystical and spiritual exercises, with a strong sexual content: once again, we discuss that sacred sexuality is the background to an eminent esoteric tradition 56
True alchemists often positively welcomed their bad reputation as idiotic charlatans who insanely wasted their lives attempting to turn base metal such as lead into pure gold. To be dismissed as one of these empty- headed materialistic `puffers' could mean being left alone to concentrate on much weightier matters such as searching for the fabled Philosopher's Stone, an elixir that would bestow not only near-immortality, but also supreme spiritual knowledge and wisdom. Every child the world over today knows that one Nicholas Flamel is rumoured to have found this magical substance, thanks to J. K. Rowling's Harry Potter books, but few realize that he really existed. Flamel lived and worked in fourteenth-century Paris with his beloved wife Perrenelle, with whom it is said he achieved the `Great Work' on 17 January 1382. As a result, rumours still abound that they lived for hundreds of years.
While it is untrue that all popes were equally anti-learning as far as the laity was concerned, the activities of most alchemists were deemed to be inherently beyond the pale. Many sought not only to transmute base metal - be it their own souls or a heap of uninspiring lead - into something purer and finer, but some attempted to blast through all restrictions and enter the truly Luciferan world of creating life in the laboratory. Stories circulated about the original `test-tube babies', said to be unholy little homunculi, created without the usual procreation specifically to scurry around to do their master's bidding as occult servitors. Needless to say, the homunculi were, at least in the vast majority of alleged cases, the product of over-heated imaginations, but it does reveal that scientists condemned for trying to `play God' are not unique to the twenty-first century.
However, the great physician and alchemist/sorcerer Aureolus Philippus Theophrastus Bombast von Hohenheim - otherwise known simply as Paracelsus (1493-1541) - declared boldly `It is necessary to know evil things as well as good; for who can know what is good without also knowing what is evil?'s' An active Luciferan in this sense, he claimed to have actually made several such little monsters using a process he described as follows:
Let the semen of a man putrefy by itself in a sealed cucurbite with the highest putrefaction of venter equinus for forty days, or until it begins at last to live, move, and be agitated, which can easily be seen. At this time it will be in some degree like a human being, but, nevertheless, transparent and without a body. If now, after this, it be every day nourished and fed cautiously with the arcanum of human blood, and kept for forty weeks in the perpetual and equal heat of venter equinus, it becomes thencefold a true living human infant, having all the members of a child that is born from a woman, but much smaller. This we call a homunculus; and it should be afterwards educated with the greatest care and zeal, until it grows up and starts to display intelligence.'
(Sceptics would no doubt point out that some movement was virtually guaranteed in putrefying matter after a certain time - but from nothing more occult than maggots.)
In 1658, Gian Battista della Porta, the sorcerer who was arrested for projecting images using a magic lantern (see above), proposed to show `how living Creatures of divers kinds, may be mingled and coupled together, and that from them, new, and yet profitable kinds of living Creatures may be generated.'S9 Della Porta aimed to produce through magical means all sorts of animate gimmicks, writing instructions on `how to generate pretty little dogs to play with'.60 However, Paracelsus saw a greater practical potential in the little homunculi, writing:
Now, this is one of the greatest secrets which God has revealed to mortal and fallible man. It is a miracle and a marvel of God, an arcanum above all arcana, and deserves to be kept secret until the last of times, when there shall be nothing hidden, but all things shall be manifest. And although up to this time it has not been known to men, it was, nevertheless, known to the woodsprites and nymphs and giants long ago, because they themselves were sprung from this source; since from such homunculi when they come to manhood are produced giants, pygmies and other marvellous people, who get great victories over their enemies, and know all secrets and hidden matters 61
Even the great Paracelsus clearly had areas of his imagination that were still marked, as on the old maps, `Here there be Dragons'. It was said that he willed that when he became old, he would be cut into small pieces and buried in horse manure in order to resurrect as a virile young man. Unfortunately, his servant dug him up too soon, and ruined the marvellous plan.
As the self-styled `Christ of Medicine'' - he also gave one of his names to the word `bombastic', because of his overbearing manner. Paracelsus studied alchemy and chemistry at Basle University before researching minerals, metals and the occupational diseases of miners. Because he believed that `like acts on like' in minute doses, he is credited with the discovery of homeopathy, as well as inventing `ether as an anaesthetic and laudanum as a tranquillizer' [and] he was the first to describe silicosis, and `traced goitre to minerals found in drinking water'.63 Announcing `If the spirit suffers, the body suffers also', he was also clearly a pioneer of what we would call holistic medicine. A major influence on subsequent generations of physicians, even his ideas about homunculi were taken seriously.
In 1638 Laurens de Castelan made the point in his `Rare et Curieux Discours de ]a Plante Appelee Mandragore' that although most people rejected Paracelsus' theories his homunculus could still have been `a bit of diabolical magic' - in other words, it may have been real, but created by devilish means. In 1672 the scientist Christian Friedrich Garmann wrote of the evolution of the human egg, musing about the possibility that conception could take place outside the womb, in an article about `the chemical homunculus of Paracelsus' M And in 1679 Scottish doctor William Maxwell wrote in his De Medicina Magnetica that `just as salts of herbs can reproduce the likeness of the herb in the test tube, so the salt of human blood can show the image of a man - 'the true
