Short Stories of Jorge Luis Borges - The Giovanni Translations (68 page)
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Authors: Jorge Luis Borges (trans. by N.T. di Giovanni)
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The Golem
In a book inspired by infinite wisdom, nothing can be left to chance, not even the number of words it contains or the order of the letters; this is what the Kabbalists thought, and they devoted themselves to the task of counting, combining, and permutating the letters of the Scriptures, fired by a desire to penetrate the secrets of God. Dante stated that every passage of the Bible has a fourfold meaning the literal, the allegorical, the moral, and the spiritual. Johannes Scotus Erigena, closer to the concept of divinity, had already said that the meanings of the Scriptures are infinite, like the hues in a peacock’s tail. The Kabbalists would have approved this view; one of the secrets they sought in the Bible was how to create living beings. It was said of demons that they could make large and bulky creatures like the camel, but were incapable of creating anything delicate or frail, and Rabbi Eliezer denied them the ability to produce anything smaller than a barley grain. ‘Golem’ was the name given to the man created by combinations of letters; the word means, literally, a shapeless or lifeless clod.In the Talmud (
Sanhedrin
, 65b) we read:
If the righteous wished to create a world, they could do so. By trying different combinations of the letters of the ineffable names of God, Raba succeeded in creating a man, whom he sent to Rabbi Zera. Rabbi Zera spoke to him, but as he got no answer, he said: ‘You are a creature of magic; go back to your dust.’ Rabbi Hanina and Rabbi Oshaia, two scholars, spent every Sabbath eve studying the Book of Creation, by means of which they brought into being a three-year-old calf that they then used for the purposes of supper.
Schopenhauer, in his book
Will in Nature
, writes (Chapter 7): ‘On page 325 of the first volume of his
Zauberbibliothek
[Magic Library], Horst summarizes the teachings of the English mystic Jane Lead in this way: Whoever possesses magical powers can, at will, master and change the mineral, vegetable, and animal kingdoms; consequently, a few magicians, working in agreement, could make this world of ours return to the state of Paradise.’
The Golem’s fame in the West is owed to the work of the Austrian writer Gustav Meyrink, who in the fifth chapter of his dream novel
Der Golem
(1915) writes:
It is said that the origin of the story goes back to the seventeenth century. According to lost formulas of the Kabbalah, a rabbi [Judah Loew ben Bezabel] made an artificial man the aforesaid Golem so that he would ring the bells and take over all the menial tasks of the synagogue.
He was not a man exactly, and had only a sort of dim, half-conscious, vegetative existence. By the power of a magic tablet which was placed under his tongue and which attracted the free sidereal energies of the universe, this existence lasted during the daylight hours.
One night before evening prayer, the rabbi forgot to take the tablet out of the Golem’s mouth, and the creature fell into a frenzy, running out into the dark alleys of the ghetto and knocking down those who got in his way, until the rabbi caught up with him and removed the tablet. At once the creature fell lifeless. All that was left of him is the dwarfish clay figure that may be seen today in the New Synagogue.
Eleazar of Worms has preserved the secret formula for making a Golem. The procedures involved cover some twenty-three folio columns and require knowledge of the ‘alphabets of the 221 gates’, which must be recited over each of the Golem’s organs. The word Emet, which means ‘Truth’, should be marked on its forehead; to destroy the creature, the first letter must be obliterated, forming the word met, whose meaning is ‘death’.
The Griffon
Winged monsters, says Herodotus of the Griffons in his accounts of their continual warfare with the one-eyed Arimaspians; almost as sketchy, Pliny speaks of their ears and their hooked beaks, yet judges them fabulous (X, 70). Perhaps the most detailed description of the Griffon comes from the problematic Sir John Mandeville in Chapter 85 of his famous
Travels
:
From this land men shal go unto the land of Bactry, where are many wicked men & fell, in that land are trees that beare wol, as it were shepe, of which they make cloth. In this land are ypotains [hippopotamuses] that dwel sometime on land, sometime on water, and are halfe a man and halfe a horse, and they eate not but men, when they may get them. In this land are many gryffons, more than in other places, and some say they haue the body before as an Egle, and behinde as a Lyon, and it is trouth, for they be made so; but the Griffen hath a body greater than viii Lyons and stall worthier than a hundred Egles. For certainly he wyl beare to his nest flying, a horse and a man upon his back, or two Oxen yoked togither as they go at plowgh, for he hath large nayles on hys fete, as great as it were homes of Oxen, and of those they make cups there to drynke of, and of his rybes they make bowes to shoote with.
In Madagascar, another famous traveler, Marco Polo, heard the rukh spoken of and at first understood this as a reference to the
uccello grifone
, the Griffon bird (Travels, III 36).
In the Middle Ages, the symbolism of the Griffon is contradictory. An Italian bestiary says that it stands for the Devil; usually it is an emblem of Christ, and this is how Isidore of Seville explains it in his
Etymologies
: ‘Christ is a lion because he reigns and has great strength; and an eagle because, after the Resurrection, he ascended to heaven.’
In Canto XXIX of the
Purgatorio
, Dante has a vision of a triumphal chariot (the Church), drawn by a Griffon; its eagle portion is golden, its lion portion white mixed with red in order to signify according to the commentaries Christ’s human nature. (White slightly reddened gives the colour of human flesh.) The commentators are recalling the description of the beloved in the Song of Solomon (V: 10-11): ‘My beloved is white and ruddy . . . His head is as the most fine gold . . .’
Others feel that Dante wished to symbolize the Pope, who is both priest and king. Didron, in his
Manuel d’iconographie chrétienne
(1845, writes: ‘The pope, as pontiff or eagle, is borne aloft to the throne of God to receive his commands, and as lion or king walks on earth with strength and might.’
Haniel, Kafziel, Azriel, and Aniel
In Babylon, the prophet Ezekiel saw in a vision four beasts or angels, ‘And every one had four faces, and every one had four wings’ and ‘As for the likeness of their faces, they four had the face of a man, and the face of a lion, on the right side: and they four had the face of an ox on the left side; they four also had the face of an eagle.’ They went where the spirit carried them, ‘every one straight forward’, or as the first Spanish Bible (1569) has it,
cada uno caminaua enderecho de su rostro
(‘each one went in the direction of his face’) which of course is so unimaginable as to be uncanny. Four wheels or rings, ‘so high that they were dreadful’ went with the angels and ‘were full of eyes round about them . . .’
An echo from Ezekiel may have been in the mind of St John the Divine when he spoke of animals in the fourth chapter of Revelation:
And before the throne there was a sea of glass like unto crystal: and in the midst of the throne, and round about the throne, were four beasts full of eyes before and behind.
And the first beast was like a lion, and the second beast like a calf, and the third beast had a face as a man, and the fourth beast was like a flying eagle.
And the four beasts had each of them six wings about him; and they were full of eyes within: and they rest not day and night, saying, Holy, holy, holy, Lord God Almighty, which was, and is, and is to come.
In the most important of Kabbalistic works, the
Zohar
or Book of Splendour, we read that these four beasts are called Haniel, Kafziel, Azriel, and Aniel and that they face east, north, south, and west. Stevenson remarked that if such beings were to be found in Heaven, what might not be expected of Hell.A beast full of eyes is sufficiently awful, but Chesterton went further in the poem ‘A Second Childhood’:
But I shall not grow too old to see
Enormous night arise,
A cloud that is larger than the world
And a monster made of eyes.
The fourfold angels in Ezekiel are called Hayoth, or Living Beings; according to the
Sefer Yeçirah
, another of the Kabbalist books, they are the ten numbers that were used by God, together with the twenty-two letters of the alphabet, to create the world; according to the Zohar, they came down from Heaven crowned with letters.
The Evangelists drew their symbols from the four faces of the Hayoth: to Matthew fell the man’s face, sometimes bearded; to Mark, the lion’s; to Luke, the calf’s; and to John, the eagle’s. St Jerome in his commentary on Ezekiel has attempted to reason out these attributions. Matthew was given the man’s face because he emphasized the humanity of Christ; Mark the lion’s because he declared Christ’s royal standing; Luke the calf’s because it is an emblem of sacrifice; John the eagle’s because of Christ’s soaring spirit.
A German scholar, Dr Richard Hennig, looks for the remote origin of these symbols in four zodiacal signs which lie ninety degrees apart. The lion and the calf give no trouble; the man has been linked to Aquarius, who has a man’s face; and the eagle is evidently Scorpio considered an ill omen and therefore changed. Nicholas de Vore, in his Encyclopedia of Astrology, sustains the same hypothesis and remarks that the four figures come together in the sphinx, which may have a human head, the body of a bull, the claws and tail of a lion, and the wings of an eagle.
Haokah the Thunder God
Among the Dakota Sioux, Haokah used the wind as sticks to beat the thunder drum. His horned head also marked him as a hunting god. He wept when he was happy and laughed in his sadness; heat made him shiver and cold made him sweat.