Back to Interesting Facts

Beings and Creatures and Texts and the Canon share exactly one link in the atlas, and it runs from a legendary being back to the book its own animation is said to come from.

A Talmudic Idea Before a Prague Legend

The golem is a Jewish idea before it is a story. The Talmud reports that the sage Rava created a man and sent him to Rabbi Zeira, who, receiving no answer when he spoke to it, told it to return to dust. Medieval German pietists treated the practice of animating a figure of earth by permutations of Hebrew letters as a contemplative exercise, not a way of getting a servant. The famous golem of Prague, made by Rabbi Judah Loew and shut down when it ran out of control, is not attested in Loew's own lifetime and appears in print only in the nineteenth century.

The Book of Formation

Sefer Yetzirah, the Book of Formation, is the short, dense treatise the letter permutation practice is tied to, describing how the universe was created through thirty two paths of wisdom, the ten sefirot and the twenty two letters of the Hebrew alphabet. It is a seed text of later Kabbalah, and the atlas records it as the textual ground the golem tradition stands on, the reason the connection between a creature and a canon runs through this text and no other.

Where To Read More

• GolemConstructsThe being whose animation is tied to one text's letter-permutation practice
• Sefer Yetzirah (Book of Formation)Kabbalistic TextsThe textual ground the atlas records the golem tradition standing on