Alchemical Shadows Homo Mimeticus and Eidolons of Artificial Intelligence

In his famous poem ‘Eidolons’(1876) Walt Whitman extends the Greek concept for the idealized or spectral image of a person to include the soul of the Earth (‘the mighty Earth eidolon’) and even the stars and planets. In this article I depart from Whitman’s cosmic interpretation of these mimetic eidolons and reframe these figures within contemporary debates on posthumanism where human fate is entangled with nonhuman forces beyond the nature/culture divide. I will focus on the question what our perception and interpretation of our high-tech and posthuman self-image can learn from ancient sources of the alchemical tradition, a tradition that is full of mythical images of human’s connections to the non-human that operate on the ‘mimetic unconscious’. As such, alchemy itself can be considered as the low-tech (for)shadow of our high-tech future that still holds infinite wisdoms that are worthwhile reconsidering and updating for the protean future of mankind.