Monsanto’s U.S. Patent 5,723,765, “Control of Plant Gene Expression,” patents the concept of any plant engineered to kill its own embryos and applies to every species. Renaissance alchemists called this the “seedless seed,” a goal the Venetian metallurgist Vannoccio Biringuccio recorded in 1540 alongside the alchemical claim to convert bread and herbs into flesh in a flask. In Transhumanism: A Grimoire of Alchemical Agendas (2011), Joseph Farrell and Scott de Hart read the industrial realisation of that five-hundred-year-old alchemical objective as a scheduled stage in a coordinated program running six millennia, and they follow the same continuity through every branch of contemporary technology addressed to the transformation of human nature.
Farrell and de Hart both hold doctorates in theology from the University of Oxford, and both write from within the tradition of patristics and the history of Christian doctrine that first put the questions of ancient cosmology into their hands. By 2011 Farrell had published a series of books on the alchemical roots of modern science (The Philosophers’ Stone, 2009), on Nazi secret weapons research (Reich of the Black Sun, 2004), on ancient banking oligarchies (Babylon’s Banksters, 2010), and on ancient texts as possible records of high antiquity (The Cosmic War, 2007, and Genes, Giants, Monsters, and Men, 2011). Transhumanism is the direct successor to his and de Hart’s earlier joint work The Grid of the Gods (2011), which established the topological metaphor of the physical medium that this book applies to the transhumanist program. Their books are issued by Feral House and Adventures Unlimited Press, are not carried by university presses, and are rarely engaged by mainstream academics. That reception is a documented feature of alternative research generally, and the material rewards attention on its own terms.
The book appeared in 2011, at a moment when transhumanism was moving from academic speculation into public visibility. Ray Kurzweil’s The Singularity is Near had been published in 2005 and was becoming a Silicon Valley scripture; a year after Transhumanism appeared, Kurzweil joined Google as Director of Engineering. The Human Genome Project had been declared complete in 2003, though it had found only twenty thousand genes instead of the hundred thousand predicted, quietly falsifying the “gene for X” model that had justified two decades of funding. Monsanto was in protracted litigation with farmers over patent infringement on genetically modified seeds. DARPA’s transhumanist research programs had been documented by Joel Garreau in Radical Evolution (2005) but had received little critical scrutiny outside defence-technology circles. The Rockefeller Foundation’s twentieth-century history of eugenics funding, including the direct pipeline to pre-Nazi Germany, was documented in academic sources and largely absent from mainstream public accounts. The fragments of the argument existed in scattered specialist literatures and were nowhere assembled. This book assembled them.
The full summary unpacks three of the book’s most consequential findings. The first is the direct pipeline of Rockefeller money into pre-Nazi Germany, documented in a May 1932 telegram from the foundation’s Paris office funding twin studies aimed at “effects on later generations of substance toxic for germ plasm,” a genetic-specific bioweapon research program initiated a full year before the Nazis took power and later codified into law as the Nuremberg Race Laws. The second is the Renaissance alchemical objective of “male parthenogenesis,” recorded in Paracelsus’s De natura rerum as the isolation of male seed in a flask to produce a “transparent, almost bodiless homunculus” possessing all “secret and hidden things” without instruction, and traced to the University of Pennsylvania experiment in which two male mice, using cells converted to egg cells, became the parents of a third. The third is the alchemical Aquinas of the Aurora Consurgens, whose theology-stopping vision of December 1273 made him call the Summa Theologica worthless as straw and may have led the greatest theologian of the Latin West to spend his final months writing an ecstatic treatise on the primordial androgyny of God and Man. The patent number for Monsanto’s terminator seed is 5,723,765. It applies to every plant on earth.
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