The Legend of the Golem From Rabbi Loew to the Robot
"...twelve hours had the day; in the first the earth was gathered, in the second he became Golem...., in the fourth a soul was infused into him..."(Babylonian Talmud).
Prague is the "magic city" par excellence: but there are two locations absolutely magical.
The first is the Golden Lane (so called because it housed many alchemists' workshops) with the Powder Tower, at Rahd.
The second is located beyond Vysehrad, south of the great bend of the Vltava (Moldava), in the heart of Staré Město (Old Town) which includes the Staroměstské náměstí (Market Square) with the Church of St. Mary of Tyn (Tynsky chram), the astronomical clock tower, the monument to Huss, and the building where W.A. Mozart stayed.
From there, walking towards Josefov - the old Jewish quarter - and just a few meters away, in the alley of Maslova, there is a Jewish restaurant with the evocative name: "U Golema" (The Golem).
We are indeed just a few steps away from the house of Rabbi Loew, from the Vltava, and from Charles Bridge: between here and Hradcany is concentrated the entire history of the city. Already the seat, from the 9th century, of the Kings of Bohemia, from the 14th century it also became the seat of the Holy Roman Empire; in the 16th century it came under the direct rule of the Habsburgs.
Still in the 16th century, during the anti-Hussite struggles and the "Thirty Years' War," under Rudolf II, Prague experienced its magical and legendary moment.
And it is precisely under Rudolf II that, during one of the periodic Pogroms, the legend of the Golem originated, attributed to Rabbi Loew, who probably created it with the help of the English sorcerer and Kabbalist John Dee (1527-1607, creator of the "Sigillum Emeth" talisman still kept at the British Museum).
The allure of the places, and the evocative power of the names, in the night lit only by the lights of the spires of Tyn, evoke sensations of a reality outside of time and space: as if ghosts of the past became tangible, among the shadows of the night, in the labyrinth of narrow streets stretching between the Jewish Cemetery, the Old Synagogue, and the Jewish Museum.
In this magical hour from the corner of the Rabbi's House, the unsettling figure of the Golem seems to emerge, shadow among shadows - not known whether a simulacrum of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein or a satanic sneer of Nosferatu.
Outside of metaphor, what was the Golem? And more importantly, what did the Golem represent?
In Aramaic, the word Golem means "inert matter" and is used in the Talmud in the commentary on the biblical narrative of Creation. According to this tradition, the Golem was a sort of human embryo, of man at the primitive stage, made from mud before the infusion of divine breath. In the tradition that developed within the Central European Jewish "diaspora," it was a clay colossus whose creation secret was supposed to be known only to rabbis.
Around this core of traditions, and in the area of the "Magic Triangle" (Prague, Turin, London), many legends have been created. Here resided rabbis, alchemists, and Kabbalah experts.
Paul Johnson reminds us that various authors contributed to the dissemination, between the 15th and 17th centuries, of the works of Gamaliel ben Pedahzur and, probably, Abraham Mears right in that area where magic had already spread and, with it, the legend of the Golem.
Rabbi Loew (who lived in Prague between 1520 and 1609) is said to have created the Golem as an autonomous creature; but we cannot forget that, already in 1508, Rabbi Salomon ibn-Gabirol had created a female version of the Golem.
Moreover, a similar legend had spread in Germany, Poland, and Czechoslovakia, already during the 11th century. Certainly, from the 17th century, the legend related to the Golem of Loew had solidified especially in the Magic City of Prague.
This is where the most famous Golem was created at the beginning of the 17th century, to defend the ghetto from the oppressions and from one of Rudolf II's pogroms.
The legend continues narrating that the Golem, over time, acquired human characteristics and ended up rebelling against its creator. Thus, Loew was forced to destroy it.
Because the Golem, created without a breath of life from an immovable mass of mud, was animated by inscribing on its forehead the signs ALEPH, MEM, and THAU: the Hebrew signs that compose the Kabbalistic name of Adam. For the Talmudist, the Golem derived directly from the creation of the first man (incidentally, I note that the word Golem, in the Bible, is encountered only once, in a passage of the Psalms, never fully clarified).
According to another tradition - as Hebrew does not carry vocalization - the reading of the signs should be EMET (meaning "truth").
In either case, by erasing the sign ALEPH, the Golem, like a suddenly deactivated Robot, decomposed. The remaining letters (Mem and Thau which are pronounced METH) correspond to the word death.
There is no doubt that ideally the Golem constituted the most powerful magic of practical Kabbalah (which Eliphas Levi defined as Goetia or Black Magic): its result was the creation of the artificial man (which Paracelsus had already addressed), not forgetting or underestimating the legends connected to the vitality of the mandrake root.
In the circumstance that in Magic a Ba'al Shem (i.e., a master of the name) breathed life by pronouncing one of God's secret names along with a special formula, it is possible to find the connection between Magic and Kabbalah in the legend of the Golem.
The story of the Golem and its wider perception were contributed to by two novels: "Der Prager Golem" by Chaim Bloch and "Der Golem" by Meyrink. But the fame of Loew and the knowledge of the legend is due to David Gans, Bohemian writer and scientist (1541-1613) author of a treatise on astronomy and geography with the imaginative title: "Nech-Mad We-Maim" (pleasant and dear).
Further information about the Golem has been handed down by the aforementioned John Dee.
I do not believe that the Golem was an autonomous creation of Loew, nor that its legend was a creation of the Prague culture; personally, I am convinced that the Golem found an illustrious and immediate predecessor in Paracelsus's "homunculus."
Paracelsus was the pseudonym under which the distinguished Swiss scholar (born in Etzel in 1493) Philippus Aurelius Teophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim hid. Like the enlightened men of the time, he became known for his studies in alchemy and medicine, but also in Hermeticism, philosophy, and magic. He was defined as "the divine," probably in the sense of diviner).
In everyday life, beyond his undeniable merits as a researcher and scholar, he was a particularly pompous and arrogant man in which the name Bombastus (whence the English word "bombastic") best describes his faults.
It is enough to consider that the pseudonym Paracelo, which he himself attributed, means "greater than Celsus" (the maximum medical authority of Ephesus in the 1st century AD).
He taught at the University of Prague "necromancy", "carmina" (magic formulas), "veneficia" (sorcery), "Vaticinia" (prophecies), "incantations" (spells) and those "vaticinia" that were typical of the "Jases" (Polish Gypsies), the "Shinti" (Lithuanian Gypsies), and the “Rôm” local Bohemian Gypsies.
This type of culture linked Paracelsus to Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa (born in Cologne in 1486). They are credited with introducing terms still in use today: like "alcohol" (from the Arabic al kohol) or from the German “alka” (in turn from all-Geist, ghostly) terms that indicated the universal solvent needed in the accomplishment of the Great Work.
But only to Paracelsus does the Hermetic tradition attribute the production of life in a test tube: the so-called homunculus.
Paracelsus claimed:
"If human seed, enclosed in a hermetically sealed glass ampoule, is buried for forty days in horse manure and appropriately magnetized, it begins to move and take life. After the prescribed time, it takes form and likeness of a human being, but will be transparent and without a physical body. Artificially fed with arcanum sanguinis hominis for forty weeks and kept at a constant temperature, it will take on the appearance of a child born of woman, but much smaller. We call such a being homunculus and it can be educated and raised like any other child until adulthood, when it will obtain judgment and intellect..."
But even Paracelsus's homunculus did not have the right of primogeniture. According to ancient Magic, another method existed to produce the Homunculus and it involved the use of the mandrake root that, just extracted from the earth, has the shape of a little man.
It was claimed that the mandrake root, credited with magical and curative virtues, if it developed under the body of a hanged man, harvested by a black dog during the dark hour before dawn, washed and nourished with milk and blood, transformed, precisely, into a homunculus.
And yet: a homunculus would have been obtained by David Christianus, professor at the University of Giessen from an egg of a black hen.
Whatever the formula and the origin of the homunculus, it essentially was a tiny servant with superhuman intelligence, put at the service of magicians and alchemists in their difficult searches.
With all probability, the homunculus, and thus the connected Golem, derives from the myth of Prometheus or the Sumerian Enlil who create humanity with clay. Nor does the mythic-legendary vision stop there: the gods also participate in the game and enrich it with details halfway between science and science fiction.
Thus, Vulcan constructs seven mechanical gold maids who help him at work; gold and silver dogs (symbol of immortality) guard the palace of Alcinoo; again to Vulcan, Simonides (556-468 BC) attributed the construction of the giant bronze Talos intended for the surveillance of the coasts of Minoan Crete; an animal, not better identified, is finally represented in a statuette is preserved in the Musée de l'Homme in Paris and presided over the guardianship of the island of Nukuoro.
Golem and Homunculus, then: artificial beings with the duties of guardian or zero-cost worker. Imagination thus anticipates the technological Robot, a literary creature created for the first time in 1929 by Karel Capek in the satirical theatrical work R.U.R. (Rossum's Universal Robots). The term indicated mechanical men as efficient as they are devoid of personality (even within the realm of Robots, there is a distinguished predecessor because it is said that already in 1200 Albertus Magnus made use of a mechanical brass man).
What is the significance of the Golem? Obviously, in asking this question I exclude the possibility of a historical reality: in my opinion, the Golem (or any of the Golems that the legend is replete with) was never created, as neither was life ever given to the Homunculus or the Mandragola root. I believe that attempts in that direction were made, but I can confidently exclude that, outside of the cases where the “creation” gave life to proven mechanical structures (like the invincible “chess player”), the attempts went beyond illusion or, worse, swindling for the gullible.
Nor, to explain the phenomenon, must we believe – as attempted by various Edward Kellys or John Dees – that the homo philosophicus considered himself capable of repeating the creator's work (regardless of the meaning attributed to the Talmudic-Kabbalistic statement that the man who found the name of God would be able to perform miracles).
The truth is, when we talk about phenomena that are connected with Kabbalah and Alchemy, we are moving on terrain that is of the most stringent esoteric nature: their reading, therefore, must be done in the light of the principles of esotericism considering them also as “icons” [i.e., symbols] of an otherwise unspeakable reality. From this perspective, it is not possible to search for a physically identifiable Golem, even among the mists of legend because the Golem physically never existed in the same way as alchemical gold or the philosopher's stone.
In an esoteric sense, the Golem is nothing more than the personification of human aspiration to a renewed level of life, not constrained by the fetters of human reproduction, to undergo the events of a limited life, bound by human passions and desires. In this aspect, the Golem is almost a Doctor Jekyll (the absolute good) opposed to the malefic Mr. Hyde (the absolute evil).
And the search has had neither success nor end.
