The patchwork entity that is my
soul
Calls itself
Frankenstein in the
cold mirror
The
amalgam of parts
The
golem that
rots
An
empty machination
Formed of
bailing wire and
tinkertoys
And a few
scraps that were not torn
Meager shards,
salvaged from the gutter
Rag Doll
Rag Doll
Just another
scrap of cloth
It is
all that I own.
This not being one of my higher ranked
nodes, I reckon it could use some improvement. Okay, so the
poetry bites. It's old, and I'm not much of a poet. Nonetheless there's a concept behind it that I still like. If I remember correctly (and I frequently do not) the feeling that went into it's
creation was that I could do nothing
unique or
original. It seemed at the time that every idea I dreamed up was just a mixing and
rehashing of old ideas. Thus I was not a unique
human, and just some sort of
animate construct, created from random scattered bits of
pretty cloth and
wire, whatever idea I happened to find 'shiny' enough to be appealing.
Symbolically speaking, of course.
Really though, there's a
truckload of excellent
symbolism behind the Golem. So, I'm going to make my best attempt a
factual write up on the legend. Be
warned, however, that I am about as far from an expert on the subject as you can get. The entire list of my
Hebrew credentials is that
Yom Kippur fell on my birthday a few years back.
The golem is a piece of Hebrew legend which has its basis in
qabalah (hebrew: learned wisdom. See
cabala,
Kabbalah). One of the main ideas behind the cabala is
the potencey of language. It involves a belief that every word, letter and number in the
Torah is divine, that the words themselves hold
the power of creation within them, and that by devoted study and
meditation on the book, one can discover these secrets. One of the things one can accomplish with such learnings is the creation of a golem.
The golem, in the most general sense, is an
artificial being brought to life by some form of magic. In the context of the Kabbalah, there are several recorded ways to create a golem. Nearly all of them involve a
ritualistic use of language, such as placing a scroll with the name of God written on it in the golem's mouth, or writing '
emeth' on the golem's forehead.
Purity is extremely important in the creation of a golem. The
clay must be taken from
virgin soil, and the
water used must have never been placed in a vessel. The people (or person) who seek to create the golem must purify themselves physically and
spiritually beforehand. The idea is that impurities are
barriers that stand between the creator of the golem and
God. Thus, the golem will always be
imperfect, because a human cannot be perfectly pure. Usually they are depicted as being
mute.
The most famous golem is probably '
The Golem of Prague'. He was supposedly created to protect the Jews of
Prague from the
blood libel, which he did.
There are many
parables about individuals who create a golem, only to have some misfortune occur as a result, usually because they used the golem for a task which was not pure in purpose.
Anyway, perhaps you can see why I find the myth
fascinating on many levels. The idea of
inanimate matter that walks and lives appeals to the biologist in me. We can, if we so choose, view ourselves in such a manner, as
spontaneous golems of a sort, or perhaps more appropriately as golems who don't know who their
creator is. It's interesting to contrast one's impression of what it might be like to be a golem with what it is like to be a human in such a
context. It's easy to
empathize with the golem. Individually they are mysterious, mute and must perform the tasks given them by their creators, but do they
think, do they
feel? The golem is a silent,
powerless character, much like ourselves. Language is a powerful thing, I think, and the legend of the golem has a lot of that in it.
Plus, I always wanted to be
somebody's protector. A
Catcher in the Rye, so to speak.
So that's my golem stuff. Please, if you have any corrections, or better information,
/msg me. Looking for this stuff online is
insane. Not only is Kabbalah spelled about forty different ways, but 90% of what turns up is not good
information, but how-to guides by
crazy wannabe mystics. Makes me feel like I stepped into a page out of
Focault's Pendulum.
On an amusing side note, dictionary.com says:
"There are no less than two dozen variant spellings of kabbalah, the most common of which include kabbalah, kabala, kabalah, qabalah, qabala, cabala, cabbala, kaballah, kabbala, kaballah, and qabbalah"