Kneel to the Son of Clay
There are myths that curve recursively through time and space, which seem to have the force of prophecy. Whether they are songs of doom and death or tales that promise us rebirth, they happen over and over again, so much so that you have to wonder what our group mind is trying to tell us.
Math said, ‘Let us use our magic and enchantments to conjure up a woman out of flowers.’ By then Lleu had the stature of a man and was the handsomest lad anyone had ever seen. Math and Gwydion took the flowers of oak and broom and meadowsweet and from these conjured up the loveliest and most beautiful girl anyone had seen; they baptized her with the form of baptism that was used then, and named her Blodeuedd.
—The Mabinogion (“Math the Son of Mathonwy”)
The sorcerer poet Virgilius of Naples gained a great reputation for animating statues… the same art was known to medieval magicians. Gerbert (Pope Sylvester II), Robert Grosseteste, Albertus Magnus and Roger Bacon are all credited with the manufacture of talking brass heads that would give advice and answer any questions put to them. Albertus Magnus is also said to have made a metal man that grew so loquacious that his student, Thomas Aquinas, finally smashed it to pieces.
—Bob Rickard and John Mitchell, Unexplained Phenomena: A Rough Guide Special
One of the great axioms of magic was expressed by that dark muse of Providence as do not call up that which you cannot put down. Math’s creation proved unwilling to love the man she was created for (and whether or not she was justified in plotting to kill him is not the point… only that creating a woman with free will and then expecting her to obey you blindly really isn’t very smart) and Aquinas felt compelled to destroy his master’s brass automata… was it merely because it talked too much? Or did it talk too well?
Why should the Son of Fire kneel to the Son of Clay?
—The Quran
Prometheus’ creation of the Truth out of clay and his breathing life into it might have reminded some Jews of the creation of man out of dust and the induction of life by God, a fact which possibly facilitated the absorption of this tradition in Jewish sources.
—Moshe Idem, Golem
The story, reduced of all of its charm and poetry, is as follows: To protect the people of Chelm (or Prague, depending on which version you hear or read) a Rabbi with great knowledge of the Qabbalah (specifically, the Qabbalah as influenced by the thoughts of Moses de Leon in the Zohar some two to three centuries earlier) created a man out of clay and placed the Hebrew word emet on its forehead. (Or, he placed in the mouth of the golem one of the secret names of God, again depending on your source.) This word, linking the Golem to the spheres of the ten sefirot, and beyond them to En Sof, the unknowable source of all life. Having thus been empowered, the clay statue came to life and protected the Jews of Chelm (or Prague) from pogroms and other persecutions… at first.
However, much like Blodeuedd, or the monster Frankenstein created, the Golem soon grew in strength and intelligence until the Rabbi who created him (Sometimes Elijah of Chelm, sometimes Rabbi Loew of Prague, sometimes someone else) felt that he needed to be destroyed. “Therefore, using the secret gematria of Cabalistic formulas for the second time, the Maharal returned the clay hulk of his creature to its original inanimate condition by withdrawing from its mouth the Shem, the life creating, ineffable name of God that he had placed there when first he made him.” (All thanks to Nathan Ausubel.) Whether the word be the Hebrew for truth or one of the names of God, it has power… because it contains information. It personifies knowledge.
Diotallevi told me that the first Sefirah is Keter, the crown, the beginning, the primal void. In the beginning He created a point, which became Thought, where all the figures were drawn. He was, and was not, He was encompassed in the name yet not encompassed in the name, having as yet no name other than the desire to be called by a name… He traced signs in the air; a dark light leapt from His most secret depth, like a colorless mist that gives form to formlessness, and as the mist spread, a burst of flames took shape in its center, and the flames streamed down to illuminate the lower Sefirot, and down, down to the Kingdom.
—Umberto Eco, Foucault’s Pendulum
The descent of divine power during creation is represented by the Flaming Sword (or “Lightning Flash”) descending from Kether to Malkuth. The ascent of matter rising toward godhood (the “journey of return”) is symbolized by the serpent climbing the tree. The sword and the serpent together represent the complete cycle of creation (descent of God into matter) and evolution (towards reunion with the One).
—Bill Whitcomb, The Magician’s Companion
We are makers and namers, and our myths reverberate with the sound of Vulcan’s Forge, of Prometheus stealing fire from the gods. What does this have to do with the Golem, a man made of clay and animated by the power of God? Think about Eden, with the Serpent in the Tree telling Adam and Eve to eat from the Tree of Knowledge… think of their banishment, when Angels with Fiery Swords blocked their path. You can’t go back the way you came… you have to go forward. Modern Christians often interpret the serpent as Satan, and they are technically correct… but Satan merely means The Adversary, and as those who have read the Book of Job might notice, the Adversary is not God’s enemy… he is the prosecutor of the divine court, and we are on trial. Another way to look at it is quality control… We are being tested to see how well we work. In the book of Genesis, God gathers dust to make Adam. In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground; for out of it wast thou taken: for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return. Genesis 3:19. In other words, the first man was made of dust (and what is dust, if not basically dirt… sometimes dirt fallen from space, sometimes particulate matter from the soil, but basically dirt) and animated through the power of God. He was not born. He did not have a navel. He was made. And like most of his successors, the created, he rebelled against his creator and was punished. At least he was allowed to live, the golem of Eden, and to propagate his kind. That’s more than Frankenstein gave his Adam.
We are all golems. Indeed, it’s possible to look at the Book of Genesis and see not punishment, but programming. Eat bread until you die. You will only function so long, so create more of yourselves. Were we prototypes, unready for mass market release, and Satan jumped the gun by introducing knowledge into our neurolinguistic networks? We look at ourselves and see living beings… indeed, we define life by those characteristics of it we display. But are we correct? Indeed, do our definitions of life have any meaning at all? Many peoples throughout history believed that everything, from a blade of grass to a rock, had a degree of spirit and life. This is called animism and today, we mostly scoff at it… until our car breaks down, or our computer deletes a file we need. Then we curse them as recalcitrant. Well, either they’re alive or they aren’t, I say… and if they aren’t yet, that doesn’t mean we won’t make them so.
Information, understanding, knowledge… these are integral parts of life. Shades of the crawling chaos, Nyarlathotep, Lovecraft’s personification of the dark side of science and progress… basically, information without any moral weighing. Doing because you can, not because you should. Well, every day we get closer and closer to copying the divine trick, of making the inanimate truly animated with the inspiration (to breathe in, originally, to draw in the spirit) of the spark of life. Is it possible that all life on Earth, from the earliest prokaryotes to the most magnificent whales, are all of them machines? Are we machines? Not figuratively, and not composed of cables and wires… are we designed nanotech colonies, sophisticated Von Neumann machines with some purpose programmed into our neurolinguistics? We think, and how we express our thoughts influences how we think… and our myths are sophisticated packets of language requiring a great deal of processing. What are we being told about ourselves, and what are we being warned about? Why do all of our mythical creations rebel? Is it because we did, and because we are unable to avoid passing our limited worldview on? Charles Fort thought we were property, but even slavery would be preferable to finding out we are merely deluded mechanisms.
Then again, maybe that’s what the myths are for, to elevate us. You can’t get back the way you came. After all, while we often create awful things, we do create. Perhaps that long-ago infusion of knowledge was all part of the picture. Prometheus eventually got off of that rock… and the Son of Fire did kneel before the Son of Clay. We are here, we do think, and we do create. Perhaps in our very creation we will complete the cycle of the Tree of Life, and ascend towards reunion with the one… or maybe we will build something else entirely. We have already built towers that God felt the need to destroy, and developed new ways of speaking and thinking. Perhaps our creations will wax loquacious and we’ll need to destroy them… or, like Pygmalion, perhaps they’ll become so lifelike that we will grow to love them. How interesting, in the face of our recent exploration of language as either a virus or programming, that it wasn’t until the metal man began to speak too often that Aquinas had to destroy it. Was it introducing contagion to his orderly system of faith? The seduction of new ideas, framed in ways he’d never conceived of before? The exchange of information may define reality. It certainly defines us. There is so much left that we don’t know, after all. Do not call up that which you cannot put down. Is that what our maker did?
Matt Rossi, the author of Things That Never Were (MonkeyBrain, 2003), is entirely unexciting on first glance. His hair is a dirty blond color, his eyes a dull green that calls to mind beer bottles abraded by the ocean, and his demeanor mildly absent-minded. He has no dark secrets. He does not know the 72-fold Name of God, nor can he catalogue the mysterious hosts that populate the otherworld lying alongside this one. Any rumors that he raises young turtles to grow up and become Gamera are lies intended to smear him. His leather jacket does not hold the Sigillum Dei Aemeth, the Yellow Sign, or the secret true path of the Otz Chaim, and he is certainly not Atlantean in any way. He’s from Rhode Island.
Copyright © 2004 by Matthew Rossi.
