Cabbalistic Cinema -Part 1

The Fall of the Gnostic Anthropos

by  Eric G. Wilson

 

Eric Wilson is Professor of English at Wake Forest University. He has written a number of books, including the critically acclaimed Against Happiness: In Praise of Melancholy (2008). His most recent book is My Business Is to Create: Blake's Infinite Writing (2011).  We offer here the 2nd Chapter from his Secret Cinema: Gnostic Vision in Film. New York: Continuum (2006). It appears with permission. This excerpt is presented in two sections of three parts each.

 

The Perfection of Cary Grant

 

There are days when a person seeks the cinema not to flee the rough edges but to sand them smooth. In this mood, one does not yearn for an alternative realm blissfully foreign to the botched material plane; one hopes to experience this every­day world–composed of car wrecks and divorces, robins and dirt–in its finest light.

 

The moviegoer strides into the picture house for its vibrant strokes, its shim­mering images of perfect forests, of men as graceful as Adam unfallen and women as alluring as Eve. He takes pleasure in the insouciance of George Clooney and the gorgeous yearning of Julia Roberts.

 

Witnessing these beautiful forms, he imagines the possibilities of his own life. He believes for an instant that he might meld into the hero and seduce the heroine, that in his better moments he resembles this man or that his wife in the right light looks like that woman.

 

 

 

The Golem and Modern Fantasy

 

Stoked on reverie, the movie goer watches his personal history trans­form into preparation for beautiful success. Such a state of mind intimates the secret alliance between movie going and golem-mak­ing (The "golem" is a man made of mud and magically animated with God's word.).

 

To go to a film in this mood is to yearn for Eden, the material beyond decay, the self unvexed by fear and desire. The exquisite forms on the screen–a Clooney or a Roberts but also a Grant or a Loy–become splendid realizations of potential for truth and beauty and goodness that most of us possess but fail to actualize. But in worshipping these artificial shapes, one risks experiencing the opposite of Eden: imprisonment in the superficial conventions of the fallen world.

 

Cary Grant and Myrna Loy as they appear in the movie theater are crass commodities as much as ideal models, machines of the system as much as meditations on redemption. If mimicking these figures can lead to miraculous realization, then copying these same performers can also result in monstrous violation: the blurring of natural and arti­ficial, animate and inanimate, human and mechanism.

 

This same tension between miracle and monster troubles the history of golem-making.  In fashioning the golem, the magus (the magician who creates the golem) is often torn between the admirable desire to form a being that approaches Adam and the less noble yearning to concoct a servant. The for­mer impulse might result in spiritual fulfillment, a living model of innocence regained. The latter might end in ignoble affront, a machine moving like a man.

 

Embodying this tension between miracle and monster, the golem becomes a proxy for Grant or Gable. The artifice of the magus and the illusion of the direc­tor are sites of liberation and control, organic exuberance and dull mechanism. To mimic the Cabbalistic golem or Cary Grant–to be a mystic magus or a maven of the movies–is to suffer these same conflicts: to entertain transcendence, to risk mechanism.

 

 

The Self-Conscious Golem Film

 

Certain films that focus on the Cabbalistic motif of golem-making self-con­sciously explore this affinity between the matter of the android and the subject of the cinema. These meditations on the conjunction between miracle and monstros­ity reflect the double bind of the attempt to embody freedom in a determined pat­tern.

 

The golem movie is an artistic depiction of the hero's struggle to reconcile mechanical limitations with human affections. This sort of film is also a mechani­cal production that inculcates clichés reducing behavior to rote movement. Both vision of redemption and commodification of existence, the golem film erases itself, leaving viewers trapped between agency and engine.

 

This imprisonment might induce despair. But this same entrapment could witness an illuminated machine, cogs blessed with consciousness–a projector that irradiates light and sound, elegant motions, and profound reflections.

 

The Story of the Golem:

The Fall of the Gnostic Anthropos

 

The golem flourished in Jewish mythologies of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. However, this living clay had its origin in the second and third centuries, when Gnostics were making myths of the perfect anthropos and his fall into imperfection. These myths of decline take three basic forms: emanation, error, imprisonment.¹

 

In a Coptic gospel, the anthropos is the first manifestation of the hidden god. This androgynous human reveals and contains all universes, from highest to low­est. At the head of his highest universe is Setheus, the original god in his aspect as creator. From Setheus issues a current that first coheres into the glories of the pris­tine heavens, descends through the quivering intermediate realms, and falls into matter, where it animates seeds with life and souls with knowing. All beings, regard­less of their place in the continuum, possess the potential of the anthropos, are ema­nations of his powers.²

 

In John's Secret Book, the anthropos falls farther down on the chain of emanations and serves exclusively as a model for the material Adam. In John's cosmogony, the hidden god first gives birth to a thought, the Barbelo. From this couple issues a fam­ily of spiritual aeons. Among these is Geradamas, the "perfect human being."

 

After the creation of Geradamas, Sophia, wisdom, the last of the aeons, tries to rise above her appointed place. From her error emerges an "imperfect product," Laltoboath, who immediately creates the inferior universe in which we now suffer. Meanwhile, Sophia reverses her mistake. With the help of the eternals, she convinces her son to create Adam, a material version of Geradamas. Through further actions of the eternals, Adam is charged with a spiritual faculty that connects him to his heavenly archetype.³

 

In a third, Manichean myth, the first man himself fills into the material world. In the beginning the universe is divided between the god of light and the deity of darkness. The dark world attacks the light. To counter, the god of light creates the primal man. This Urmensch descends into matter, where he is ostensibly defeated by evil forces. After this apparent decline, the king of light calls the wounded man home. The anthropos returns to the light but part of his soul remains behind, impris­oned. To free these sparks, the bright spirit creates the material cosmos.

 

Each time a person of matter hears the call of the light, he liberates part of the imprisoned soul. When all people apprehend the call, the Primal Man will be fully liberated and matter annihilated.

 

The Cabbalistic Return to Perfection

 

After the emanation, the error, and the imprisonment–after the fall–the question becomes: How does one return to the immaterial anthropos if one is moored to the physical cosmos? The Gnostics responded by claiming that the only way to return to the perfect Adam is by escaping matter through asceticism or death. This is the way of ascent, the rise from time to eternity.

 

But there is another path to the anthropos, one of descent. The medieval and Renaissance Cabbalists developed this latter mode. Though the Cabbalist was desirous of returning to Eden, he knew that this redemption could be achieved only through intense experiences of matters darkest realms. This embrace of matter to conquer material touches the core of golem-making: freedom is fate.

 

According to Gershom Scholem, the Cabbalistic myth of Isaac Luria, developed in the middle years of the sixteenth century, was a "response to the expulsion of the Jews from Spain, an event which more than any other in Jewish history down to the catastrophe of our time gave urgency to the question: why the exile of the Jews and what is their vocation in the world?"⁴

 

Shaken by this 1492 removal, Luria developed a cosmogony more tragic than even that of the Gnostics: the broken cos­mos emerges from God himself, so vast and powerful that he must annihilate him­self to make space for the world and shatter his products to spread his force. The universe is God in exile. Luria's cosmogony is grounded on the Zohar, a revision of Genesis from thir­teenth-century Spain that reaches back to the Gnostic redactions of the second century. ⁵

 

The invisible tree of God in mystical Eden is reflected by the tree of Life and the tree of Knowledge in green Eden.  Adam Kadmon (Man Projection) finds its double in unlapsed Adam. The letters of the En-Sof (the Cabbalistic version of the hidden God, the Infinite) undertake to model the Book of Nature, perfect before Adam misread it.⁶

 

Adam's transgression severed heaven and earth. Before his hubris, the entire cos­mos was Eden. Each part enjoyed concord with other parts. All parts harmonized with the whole. The whole concurred with the part. Adam's attempt to rise above his place threw the world into disarray. Blighted trees barely recalled the branches of the pleroma. Adam contracted to a fragment of his spiritual double. His creative words scattered into mere signs. The universe suffered exile from God.⁷ In Luria, this tragedy is even more intense.⁸

 

The Paradox of the Golem: Sin and Magic

 

This exile produced the golem. The word, golem, "unformed," appears in Psalm 139:16, where Adam claims that his substance was formless and imperfect before God shaped and perfected him. The Talmud elaborates, claiming that Adam on his first day, before he had received soul and language, was a golem. A midrash from the second or third century claims that the preformed Adam was a golem with the size and power of the cosmos.

 

In a legend from the Haggadah, this cosmic Adam contracts after his fall to the proportions of a giant human. The golem Adam is a material version of Adam Kadmon as well as a condensation of the earths power.⁹

 

These two features foreshadow the contradictory traits of later golems: the animat­ed clay is a redemptive restoration of the dismembered primal man and a violent precipitation of the earths force. Golem legends of the Middle Ages and Renaissance emerged from third- and fourth-century tales of rabbis who brought clay to life.

 

 

God's Alphabetic Power

 

These tales are grounded on the idea that only sin separates humans from God, and thus that a sinless being can create life. This rabbi magic influenced the alphabetical theurgy of the Cabbala. The Rook of Creation (c. A.D. 300-600) emphasizes this alphabetic power, claiming that God made the world from letters. If God can create from scripts, a person in concord with God can do the same. The earliest discussions of the golem are twelfth- and thirteenth-century commentaries on this idea.

 

The primary questions of these glosses are two. Can a magus create a being equal to or superior to humans, anthropos returned? Or is the magician capable only of crafting an unintelligent tel­lurian creature, fallen man intensified?¹⁰

 

These questions point to two views of magic. In one, growing from the Book of Creation, the universe is magical. Each creature thrives through its participation in God's alphabet. A person's practice of God's magic is not a violation of sacred order but a realization of spiritual potential.

 

In the other view, based on the Zohar, magic is a result of the fall, Adam's violation of God's law. Magical knowledge emerges from the leaves of the tree of Knowledge with which Adam covered his nakedness after he eats the fruit. Magic in this instance is a veil covering Adam's shame. If the magic of the Book of Creation requires transcendence of fear and desire, a return to Eden, then the magic intimated by the Zohar results from fear and desire and marks the separation between Eden and man.

 

Most medieval visions of the golem issue from the former tradition. However, later legends of the golem are con­nected to the latter tradition.¹¹

 

From Redemption to Monster

 

In the Middle Ages, the Cosmological magic of the Book of Creation was prac­ticed by proponents of "ecstatic Cabbala." Adepts such as Eleazar of Worms and Abraham Abulafia saw golem-making as a culmination of the mystical experience, a symbol of union with Godhead. Both instructed adepts to form mud into a man and to animate him by reciting sacred letters.

 

Once made, this figure served no prac­tical purpose. It was not put to work or made to protect. It was simply a "demon­stration" of the "power of the holy Name." It was a revelation of the unity between spirit and matter that was severed after the fall, a sacred technology recalling the adept to this harmony.This symbolical golem was dissolved as soon as it was made.¹²

 

These visions of the ecstatic Cabbala soon became moored to folk tales focus­ing on the golem's violence. These currents originated in the tales surrounding Rabbi Loew of seventeenth-century Prague. Apparently, around 1580, Loew fash­ioned a golem from the muck of the Vltava River and animated it with his Cabbalistic word magic. Though he likely used it as a servant, he more importantly deployed it as a protector of the Jews of the ghetto, who were then facing anti-Semitic violence from the Gentiles.¹³

 

This golem upset anti-Jewish plots and punished those who persecuted the Jews. However, as the creature grew in size and strength, it threat­ened his maker and his people. Loew reversed his spell and returned the creature to dust. I he golem's remains are ostensibly still in the attic of the Altneuschul Synagogue in Prague. He might return one day.¹⁴

 

Loew's golem suggests this troubling conclusion: when one wishes to destroy matter with matter itself, one risks sinking deeper into the deathly mire than ever before. Issuing from a tradition hoping to restore a fallen world to its former Eden, the golem is a mechanism meant to move against the grain of material existence.

 

In some cases, if crafted by a magus beyond fear and desire, the creature can embody the unfallen anthropos and lead its maker back to the unity. However, the risks are high, because in order to fashion such a sacred machine, one must sink into matter, break its clods, moisten it into mud, and smooth it into a man. In undertaking this labor, one is hard-pressed to avoid taking on the limitations of material existence–fear and desire, decay and death–and imbuing the golem with human traits.

 

The creation of a redemptive golem becomes even more difficult when one fashions the creature to undertake human chores–sweeping the floor, protecting the oppressed. Though these are not ignoble activities, they are woven into the fabric of space and time. If the golem is designed to carry out these tasks, it is prone to take on the wants and aversions of its maker, to become vulnerable to love and death.

 

Add to these problems the fact that the golem increases in size and power daily, and you have the possibility of a horrendous monster.