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into the present century: Eliphas Levi, most famous of the turn-of-the-century High Magicians, claimed that "man came out of the slime of the earth, and his first appearance must have been in the form of a rough sketchthe first men were, in this case, a family of gigantic, sensitive mandragores, animated by the sun, who rooted themselves up from the earth." (14) In German Alraune, these creatures were, in Northern European legend, supposed to grow up where hanged men's semen fell on the earth. In some cases, mandrake figures were cast as familiars, gifts from the Devil to the magician who might consult them or set them to deliver messages or any small task.

One of the most famous of the Sufi fables, the Story of Salaman and Absal, was written in the 1400s by the Persian poet Jami but dates in its original form from around the year 0. It tells the story of a king who, on the advice of a wise man, abstains from sexual intercourse in order to improve his mind. When he wishes to produce an heir, he seals up his semen inside a mandrake-root vessel and gives it to the wise man, who then performs some unspecified ritual which results in the creation of a perfect and rational male child. This child then grows to adulthood, falls in love with a woman (much to his father's disgust), and eventually flees with her across the ocean, but eventually abandons her for Aphrodite and finally Aphrodite for a return to celibate philosophy and rulership of his father's kingdom. (2) In this story one can see rather clearly echoes of the mannikin or fairy-child stories mentioned above, as well as startlingly precognisant suggestions of later notions of the homunculus.
In the modern (post-Enlightenment) era, the new mechanistic philosophy of living things meant that when thinkers once again turned to the question of artificial life, the new idea was not one of a clay statue infused with a soul, but rather a complex feat of engineering from which a living thing appeared through some process which we would now describe as "emergent complexity". Frankenstein's electrically reanimated monster, probably the most famous example, can perhaps be viewed as an intermediate in this sequence, bridging the alchemical tradition (and the animistic and medievalist leanings of the Romantic movement) and the optimistic mechanism of the Industrial Revolution.
More recently, the writers who address the creation of intelligent life by humankind and the deeper questions thereby raised are largely science

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