📌 In This Deep Dive
Apple TV+ series Small Prophets draws its premise of prophetic homunculi in jars directly from 16th-century alchemical treatises by Paracelsus and 18th-century accounts of Count von Kuefstein’s ten bottled spirits. Creator Mackenzie Crook adapted these real esoteric legends into a modern tale of hidden family secrets. Beyond the screen lies a 500-year history of laboratory recipes, lost diaries, and secret Masonic societies, tracing how ancient alchemy shaped the show’s central mystery.
Sometimes you have to put things in context. Nowadays, in the 21st century, a “true story” usually implies a news event covered by the media, backed up by footage anyone can watch, something that could be brought to a courtroom trial or tested in a laboratory. But jump back three or four centuries, before recordings, photographs, or reporters writing up daily stories for newspapers: what was a “true story” back then, if not an account passed down by word of mouth that you had to believe simply based on how many people vouched for it?
So yeah, in that sense, we can say there really is a true story behind the new Apple TV+ series Small Prophets. There’s a very specific recipe explaining how to create a homunculus inside a glass jar, a creature capable of answering any question and predicting the future. A formula that was written down, passed along, tested by other men, and surrounded by eyewitness accounts from people who claimed they saw those homunculi with their own eyes. These were stories circulating through secret alchemical circles at the time, committed to paper, and published in books that have survived all the way to the present day.
This is the story of those few individuals throughout history who swore they created homunculi, and how those tales eventually reached Mackenzie Crook, the creator of Small Prophets.
Paracelsus and the Recipe for Homunculi
The first time the creation of homunculi was officially discussed was back in the sixteenth century, inside a treatise attributed to one of the most influential figures of the era: Paracelsus.
Paracelsus was a Swiss physician, widely considered a pioneer of modern toxicology and a key figure in the transition from medieval alchemy to modern medicine. He was a respected doctor, lectured at the University of Basel, and strongly advocated for empirical analysis as the most reliable path to knowledge. At the same time, he also published books on astrology, esoteric philosophy, and magical rituals.
Homunculi were first written about in De Natura Rerum, a collection of books printed in 1537. One of those volumes details the exact recipe for creating a homunculus according to Paracelsus, a formula so famous it even has its own entry on Wikipedia.
“The sperm of a man must be putrefied by itself in a sealed cucurbit for forty days with the highest degree of putrefaction in a horse’s womb, or at least so long that it comes to life and moves itself, and stirs, which is easily observed. After this time, it will look somewhat like a man, but transparent, without a body. If, after this, it be fed wisely with the Arcanum of human blood, and be nourished for up to forty weeks, and be kept in the even heat of the horse’s womb, a living human child grows therefrom, with all its members like another child, which is born of a woman, but much smaller.”
Back then, it was just a set of instructions, passed down with the quiet confidence that they would actually yield results. From that point on, other alchemical writings over the years continued to explore the creation of homunculi, and eventually, it became part of a secret body of knowledge held by only a select few in the world.
There was no proof, of course, nor any group of credible witnesses who could confirm that the recipe actually worked. That was until years later, in the 1700s, when increasingly persistent stories began to circulate about a local authority figure in Vienna who had, apparently, actually succeeded in creating ten homunculi capable of predicting the future…
Count von Kuefstein and his Ten Homunculi
This part of the story is told brilliantly in this article published a while ago on Crazy Alchemist, complete with a breakdown of how the tale survived to this day and even a link to the digital version of the book that contains it.
The man in question was Johann Ferdinand II von Kuefstein, the fifth son of one of the most powerful men in the Habsburg Empire. Living between 1727 and 1789, his life was dogged by debt and a constant inability to pull himself out of financial ruin. Parallel to this struggle, however, he became an influential figure in Central European Freemasonry, gaining access to what were then considered the “supreme secrets” of alchemical and theurgic knowledge at the time.
During a trip to Italy, he met a certain Abbé Geloni, another Freemason who belonged to the secret order of the Rosicrucians, a group that historically held the works of Paracelsus in high regard. Von Kuefstein and Geloni spent five intense weeks in a monastery in the Calabrian mountains. With them was Josef Kammerer, a servant of Von Kuefstein who assisted them with their laboratory experiments and wrote down his own account in personal diaries. Those pages were partially destroyed, then recovered and reconstructed decades later, eventually becoming part of the book Die Sphinx, published in 1873 by the Austrian doctor Emil Besetzny. The book is available in digital form on the Bavarian State Library website: it’s written in German, and the chapter on the “prophetic spirits” (die Wahrsagenden Geister) begins on page 110.
This is where the story starts to look eerily similar to the one told in the Apple TV+ series Small Prophets. Count von Kuefstein’s homunculi consisted of a King, a Queen, a Knight, a Monk, an Architect, a Miner, a Seraph, a Nun, and two invisible spirits—the most powerful of all—the Blue Spirit and the Red Spirit. They were created inside glass jars, submerged in pure water, fed foul-smelling concoctions mixed up in the lab, and regularly venerated with prayers and incense. Geloni even dressed each one in attire fitting their specific role.
The ten glass jars were transported with great care to the count’s residences in Vienna in the late 1770s. The servant Kammerer made a point of carefully writing down all the necessary instructions for feeding the homunculi and changing the water they lived in. Then von Kuefstein joined an existing secret lodge and started organizing regular meetings to question the homunculi. To attend those meetings, people supposedly had to swear oaths of secrecy even stricter than the ones required in Masonic gatherings at the time. Each homunculus was able to answer questions related to its specific domain: the King and Queen handled politics, the Monk and Nun covered religion, and so on, while the blue and red spirits, the most powerful of the group, could answer absolutely any question.
According to Kammerer’s accounts, the spirits proved they could predict very specific events, like the birth of twins to the man questioning them, or locating a missing local child. It’s also said that one of the spirits, the Monk, actually died, while the King broke out of his jar one day and started leaping from one piece of furniture to another, screaming, until he collapsed completely exhausted. And Kammerer wasn’t the only one writing down these stories. In 1788, another Freemason, August Siegfried von Goué, wrote about the Viennese count who kept ten spirits in glass jars and claimed he had actually seen “something” inside one of them. Apparently, it was a well-known story that circulated widely through the drawing rooms of Vienna during those years.
Then, suddenly, nothing more was ever heard of them. The count refused to speak on the matter again, dying under a cloud of mystery a few years later. The servant Kammerer’s writings were torn in half, with the surviving fragments recovered nearly a century down the road. Those accounts were recorded right inside the ledgers used to manage the count’s personal bookkeeping, kept like travel journals documenting his daily life with the Count. They were anything but creative fiction written for public consumption.
These are the historical facts. How much of them belongs to a “true story” is something you can only decide for yourself through your own reading of the tale.
From Paracelsus to Mackenzie Crook: The Inspiration Behind Small Prophets
In this interview with Rayo, Small Prophets creator Mackenzie Crook (who also plays Gordon, Michael’s eccentric boss at the store) confirmed that the inspiration struck years ago while he was reading a book about Paracelsus. The story of his homunculi left such a deep impression that it stayed with him for years, slowly maturing until the time came to develop it into what eventually became the Apple TV+ series.
In Small Prophets, the formula for creating the homunculi is passed down by the father, stemming from tales he uncovered during his years in Egypt. The whole story ties into a unique father-son dynamic and Michael’s own personal tragedy, as his partner vanished without a trace years earlier. Asking the homunculi for the truth behind her disappearance becomes his only real hope of finding her, setting off an adventure that may well continue into a second season.
Frequently Asked Questions
The characters and modern plot are fictional, but the central premise is directly rooted in historical alchemical records. The show draws from 16th-century treatises by Paracelsus and 18th-century eyewitness accounts of Count von Kuefstein, who allegedly created ten prophetic homunculi in glass jars.
A homunculus (Latin for “little man”) is an artificially created miniature human being in alchemy. Historically believed to possess supernatural intellect and the power to foresee future events, they were said to be grown inside sealed glass containers using secret biological and chemical recipes.
Count Johann Ferdinand II von Kuefstein was an 18th-century Austrian nobleman and Freemason. According to journals kept by his servant Josef Kammerer (later published in the 1873 book Die Sphinx), Kuefstein and an Italian alchemist generated ten distinct spirits in glass jars in 1775, using them as personal oracles during secret lodge meetings in Vienna.
Mackenzie Crook confirmed that his inspiration came years ago after reading about Paracelsus’s 1537 treatise De Natura Rerum. The idea of laboratory-grown beings in glass jars stayed with him for years until he adapted the Renaissance legend into a modern, intimate story about a father, a son, and a missing woman.
