"Oh brave new world that has such people in it!"

It seems that all the scientific excitement right now is percolating around Craig Venter's impending creation of the first form of artificial life (via monkeyfilter.com).

Perhaps the most fitting quote I've heard in connection with this event comes from Aldous Huxley's "Brave New World" (though originally from Shakespeare's "The Tempest"), which ironically predicts such biological engineering in contrast to the myth of a 'noble savage' who sees through the Soma haze of this utopian future at the sexual, familial, and moral degradation such genetic manipulation might produce. These are perhaps the kinds of controversial questions Venter hopes to raise with his brash step forward into a somewhat foolish new world. Incidentally, Huxley's society's delight in the intoxications of Soma is drawn from the pre-Hindu Vedic culture of India, where it took pride place in their sacrificial rituals and stirred the warriors into battle frenzy. A far cry from the tripped-out mellow of Huxley's anti-utopia.

Bioengineering is a rather modern plot twist however, even Mary Shelley's "Frankenstein" was a 'modern Prometheus' born from fears of the Industrial Revolution. Humans have been trying to usurp the creative abilities of the gods since at least the Renaissance, when the ancient Hermetic texts of the mythic Hermes Trismegistus were translated, and drawing wild comparisons between science and magic was all the rage. Trismegistus's "To Asclepius" from the "Corpus Hermeticum" in particular claimed to record the rituals ancient Egyptian priests used to bring spirits into statues and animate them to life, which compares to the Kabbalistic technique of creating golems by inserting a scroll into a statue's mouth. Pico Della Mirandola, as exemplary of the Renaissance Man archetype, praised human individuality and ability above the rest of creation, claiming that we could learn the words with which God spoke the world into existence. And though we have up till now not been able to speak life itself into existence, and it still may be too soon to say, the magical power of language to create is perhaps responsible for the enormity of the world's cultures, from myths, to laws, to the varied interactions of our every day.