The type of material used in the golem must be uncontaminated, while the ritual to give life to the golem is verbal and usually involves the Hebrew name of God. For example, the creator of the golem has to be someone pure, clean, and close to God. There are numerous texts describing the formation of a golem, and although there are variations in its procedures, all these tend to coincide in certain points. According to these Jewish writings, creating a golem is an extremely difficult task. But the truth is that if we go by the original sacred texts-also called Kabbalistic texts-that describe the creation of a golem, the reality is different. In fantasy books, it is shown that almost anyone can create a golem using simple magic spells. In video games, you can create a golem with a few key combinations. Nevertheless, the same idea about life being created from inert matter appears again in other places of the Old Testament, as we will see later. It is interesting to note that the word “golem” appears only once in the entire Bible, in the text we just quoted. The Jews believe that the phrase was said by Adam, the first human, and the term “golem” used there literally means “unfinished substance.” The text says: “Your eyes saw my unformed limbs,” as translated from golmi ra’u enecha. The earliest mention occurs in Psalm 139:16, written around the fifth century BC. However, the first mention of the term took place many centuries before in one of the most influential books in history, the Bible. After all, we just saw that the concept of golems as such seems to have emerged in those times. When it comes to finding the first written reference to golems, one would expect to read such mention in some book or magical text of the Middle Ages. This text supposedly described the way God created life, and thus, the Rabbis could learn to create their own living version of a clay man, the golem. Throughout medieval times, there were many rumors that some Jewish teachers or “Rabbis” had learned to perform the rituals contained in a sacred text called Sefer Yetzirah. These sculptures were supposedly harmless, although if they were not restrained, they could run away.īut the description of golems as we know them today comes from Jewish folklore.
On the other side of the world, in ancient Greece, there was the story of an inventor named Daedalus who built living statues.
But these beings had no soul, so they wreaked havoc on the Earth, and in the end, they had to be destroyed. For example, the Mayan myth of creation describes that before the first humans, the gods created wooden men. These myths were born in different times and in different regions of the world. For the definition we have just seen, there are many ancient stories about the first golems.
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