The Golem, as Imagined by Borges and Lem

Argentine magical realist Jorge Luis Borges includes the Golem among the creatures included in his 1957 bestiary, The Book of Imaginary Beings.

“There can be nothing accidental in a book dictated by a divine intelligence, not even the number of its words or the order of their letters; this was the belief of the kabbalists, who in their zeal to penetrate God’s arcana devoted themselves to counting, combining, and permuting the letters of Holy Writ,” begins Borges. “One of the secrets they sought within the divine text,” he adds, “was how to create living beings. […]. ‘Golem’ was the name given the man created out of a combination of letters; the word literally means ‘an amorphous or lifeless substance’” (Borges 90).

After quoting a passage from Gustav Meyrink’s 1915 novel Der Golem, Borges concludes the entry by noting, “Eleazar of Worms has preserved the formula for making a Golem” (92). Borges proceeds to summarize the formula as follows:

“The details of the enterprise require twenty-three columns in folio and demand that the maker know ‘the alphabets of the two hundred twenty-one gates’ that must be repeated over each of the Golem’s organs. On its forehead one must tattoo the word ‘EMET’ which means ‘truth.’ In order to destroy the creature, one would efface the first letter, leaving the word ‘MET,’ which means ‘death’” (92).

Polish science fiction writer Stanislaw Lem‘s 1981 book, Golem XIV, weaves a supercomputer into the mix.