The Golem

Austrian author Gustav Meyrink (1868 - 1932) looms large in the history of occult fiction. He was a man whose fascination with the realms beyond ran deeper than curiosity, who credited the mysterious appearance of an esoteric pamphlet with saving him from suicide. He also ran afoul of the law for crossing the streams of supernatural intervention and banking regulations, resulting in him spending two months in prison. It would be fair to call him—like so many of his fellow seekers of the early 20th Century—complicated.

I went into The Golem fully expecting to find a folk horror-inflected story of a magical clay giant defending a Jewish community, but that is not at all what I experienced. Meyrink’s 1915 novel follows an amnesiac jeweler named Pernath who’s living in the ghetto of Prague. He becomes entangled in the rivalry between a consumptive student and Pernath’s landlord’s son, which sets off a chain of events that ultimately lead Pernath into peril and a spiritual awakening.

Occult novels fall into two basic categories: “holy shit look at all these naked witches that I don’t agree with but that I am still very invested in showing you” (hi Dennis Wheatley) and “I’m going to hang my personal occult beliefs onto a narrative so I can communicate this to the broader world.” The Golem very much falls into the latter category, drawing the reader in with a suspense narrative and then layering on kabbalism, tarot, the astral plane, and all manner of esoterica until leading to a highly symbolic resolution.

The titular golem doesn’t wind up wreaking revenge or going Frankenstein-haywire the way folks familiar with Paul Wegener’s cinematic adaptations might expect. Instead it exists in the peripheries, a phantom that strikes fear into the ghetto while simultaneously representing the oppression of the people who live there.

Am I mad about the bait and switch? No. Not a single bit. This was an unexpected journey I was delighted to take.

Illustration from The Golem by Hugo Steiner-Prag, 1916. Check out more on 50 Watts