The earliest Golem stories date to early Judaism. The Talmud uses the word as "unformed" or "imperfect" and according toTalmudic legend, Adam is called "golem," meaning "body without a soul" for the first 12 hours of his existence.
In jewish folklore Golem is an animated amorphous being created by magic, often to serve his creator. The Kabbalistic Sefer Yezirah ("Book of Creation") contains instructions on how to make a golem. Most versions include shaping the golem into a figure resembling a human being and using God's name to bring him to life, since God is the ultimate creator of life. Other sources say once the golem had been physically made one needed to write the word emet (אמת, "truth" in the Hebrew language) on the golem's forehead and the Golem would come alive. The golem could then be deactivated by removing the aleph (א) in emet, thus changing the inscription from 'truth' to 'death' (met מת, "dead").
There are several old legends about Golem from different parts of the world, but one of the most famous is the Golem of Prague, which was created in the sixteenth century by the Rabbi Juda Loew ben Bazalel. The purpose of the creature was to protect the Ghetto from antisemitic attacks. In other stories, like in the older legend of Chelm, the Golem is created to do hard work for his creator
"To protect the Jewish community, the rabbi
constructed the Golem out of clay from the banks of the Vltava river,
and brought it to life through rituals and Hebrew incantations. As this golem
grew, it became increasingly violent, killing gentiles and
spreading fear. A different story tells of a golem that fell in love, and when
rejected, became the violent monster seen in most accounts. Some versions have
the golem eventually turning on its creator or attacking other Jews."
A Polish Kabbalist,
writing in about 1630–1650, reported the creation of a golem by Rabbi Eliyahu
thus: "And I have heard, in a certain and explicit way, from several
respectable persons that one man [living] close to our time, whose name is R.
Eliyahu, the master of the name, who made a creature out of matter [Heb. Golem]
and form [Heb. tzurah] and it performed hard work for him, for a
long period, and the name of emet was hanging upon his neck,
until he finally removed it for a certain reason, the name from his neck and it
turned to dust".
The legend of Golem is used in several
movies, books, computer games, stories, metal music etc. with little or no
knowledge of the meaning behind the legend. So I feel quite content that I can
use the story for my purposes and focus on the parts I'm interested in
which are the notion of creating life (being god) out of dead matter and the
Golem figure as an unshaped clay misfit trying to to find a context for him,
her, it.
Linus Ersson
Linus Ersson
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