Gustave Meyrink and The Magickal Golem

Gustav Meyrink uses this legend . . . in a dream- like setting on the Other Side of the Mirror and he has invested it with a horror so palpable that it has remained in my memory all these years." - Jorge Luis Borges

Gustave Meyrink, the Austrian dandy and author of the occult masterpiece The Golem, was born on January 19, 1868 in Vienna, the illegitimate son of a German aristocrat, Baron Karl Warnbüller von und zu Hemmingen, and a Jewish actress. Meyrink shares a birthday with an American writer with whom he shares many qualities—Edgar Allan Poe—and as a writer of brooding early twentieth century tales of dark foreboding and things that go bump in the night, and day, in his native Prague, he to a large extent out-Kafka's his more famous contemporary, Franz Kafka, himself. Meyrink, perhaps more than Kafka and another leading Prague writer of the day, the poet Ranier Maria Rilke, helped define the Czech capital as a city of mystery, the haunt of the alchemists and occultists of old.

Legend has it that Meyrink, on the brink of suicide with a loaded pistol in hand, heard someone scratching at his front door. Curious as to what it might be, he found a small pamphlet had been slipped under the door. The little pamphlet was entitled The Afterlife. Meyrink felt, perhaps understandably, as if the hand of God had intervened at his hour of need and he set off on a whirlwind quest to learn all that he could about mysticism, theosophy, and the occult.

The golem is a legendary man-made creature who comes into being, typically, as a result of an intense meditative experience—literally he is thought into being. Many magickal esoteric traditions hold dear the concept that knowing (and speaking) God's true name—the Tetragrammaton—imbues the speaker with magickal, invocative powers, quite literally the ability to cast spells or manifest thought into action. In Jewish tradition, and the golem is a traditional Jewish concept, speaking God's true name is forbidden. The four letters of the Tetragrammaton--YHVH, Yod Heh Vav Heh—have magickal correspondences with the four elements and are sign posts to a transformative journey of the soul. The four initiatory stages of the Tetragrammaton also correspond to the initiatory stages of development hinted at in the alchemist's goal of changing base metal into gold which is, in truth, a road map to personal transformation, the true magician's gold.

Think of the golem then as a rabbinical Frankenstein creature, perhaps, a being brought forth through the mixture of clay and virgin water and intense meditation, a wish made manifest in the real world. Legend has it that the golem of Rabbi Loew, from the sixteenth Century, still lives in an attic in Prague and that during World War II a nazi officer went into the attic with the intention of killing the golem and was, instead, killed himself. Rabbi Loew's golem is the most famous of all golems—a creature who was created, so the legends say, to defend the Jews of Prague from outside attack.

There is also a tradition that the biblical Adam, he who was brought in to being as a man of clay, was also a golem and that the breath of life given as God's gift was the power of the soul—the missing ingredient in the golem's quest for true manhood—and it is the soul, God's breath, that sets man apart from the manufactured body of water and clay—the golem. The word golem most probably is derived from the Hebrew word gelem, which means "raw material". There is also a legend that all golems cannot speak—hence the reason why golem has crept into Yiddish slang as a euphemism for dim-witted or stupid. If a golem could learn to speak he would also be given a soul—another metaphoric rendering of the idea, perhaps, of the power inherent in the utterance of God's true name.

Meyrink's literary genius was in taking the golem legend and transforming it into a work that hints at the initiatory path the aspiring master must travel. The power, truly, to create, to make the word of God manifest in physical form is the underlying thematic esoteric underpinning of this work. It is a tale of horror but a tale too showing a path to transformation.