1. See Carl H. Kraeling, Anthropos and Son of Man, 38-53, for an excellent discussion of the figure of the anthropos. For a discussion of these three forms of declension, see Rudolph, Gnosis, 91.

2. Jean Dorresse, The Secret Books of the Egyptian Gnostics, 81-6.

3. Secret Book according to John, 23-51.

4. Gershom Scholem, On the Kabbalah and Its Symbolism, 197-98. Though Scholem remains the mas­ter of Cabbala explication even after fifty years, two more recent scholars have added mightily to our knowledge of Jewish mysticism. Moshe Idel's Golem, the definitive study of the android strain in Jewish mysticism, has been indispensable. In a more general way, Eliot R. Wolfson's Through a Speculum That Shines and Language, Eros, Being have inspired my thoughts on Cabbala. Both books are brilliantly eclectic works on Jewish literature and other strains of religious and philosophical thought.

5. Scholem, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism, 208-17. The Cabbalistic version of the hidden God is En-Sof, the Infinite. Like the unknowable monad of the Gnostics, this unfathomable being manifests his depths in pristine emanations, known as Sefiroth, the "numbers" by which God flows from infinite to finite. The first Sefirah, Keter, crown, is a moment of great crisis in which God transforms his fullness to nothing, the void from which all forms emerge. This nothing contracts into something, wisdom, Hokhmah, the first graspable manifesta­tion of the En-Sof.

  This point expands into the next Sefirah, Binah, intelligence, a reservoir in which the beings of the cosmos exist in ideal outline. These three pow­ers–akin to abyss, seed, and womb–compose mystical Eden, the font of the immanent divine current. From this spring flow the other seven Sefiroth: Hesed, love; Gevurah, power; Rakamim, compassion; Netsah, endurance; Hod, majesty; Yesod, founda­tion; and Malkhuth, the kingdom, model for Israel. These seven emanations of Eden are spiritual archetypes of the virtues of En-Sof. Like the Gnostic pleroma, these Sefiroth constitute a spiritual organism. They are the tree of God, with each branch inflecting the unknowable root. They are also the Adam Kadmon (Man Projection), the Cabbalistic anthropos. They are further a divine language made of the twenty-two letters of the Hebrew alphabet.

  The theogony of the Sefiroth, their spiritual unfolding, is inseparable from their cosmogony, their material formations. The creation of the visible cosmos corre­sponds to the outflow of the invisible emanations. The two processes are continu­ous: the unseen manifestation of God's mystery seamlessly translates to the physi­cal revelation of the ten archetypes.

6. Ibid., 215-17.

7. Ibid., 230-35.

8. Ibid., 233-35. The En-Sof's first act was sell-exile. To form a space in which to create new beings, the Godhead engaged in a "with­drawal," Tsimtsun: a self-banishment, a violent retreat. Following this contraction was an equally forceful expansion, a gush of light from the alienated En-Sof into the emptiness. The first form of this current was Adam Kadmon. Through its eyes, the Sefiroth broke forth in ten vessels of light. The bowls of the first three Sefiroth were strong enough to hold their beams, but the vessels of the lower seven shattered in the force. The fragments, Kelipot, pulled the light of the Sefiroth to the material world and exiled En-Sof and Adam Kadmon from their spiritual origins. The visible cosmos is a dark waste of shards hiding ever-living sparks. The pious acts of humans gather the fragments, free the light, and return God from exile. This is Tikkun, restoration, the hard journey back to Eden.

9. Scholem, On the Kabbalah, 162.

10. Ibid., 176-82.

11. Ibid., 175.

12. Ibid., 190. In his novel The Golem (1915), Gustav Meyrink explores the golem of ecstatic magic. Though Meyrink is not entirely true to the Jewish traditions of the golem, he nonetheless captures the spirit of this creature in exploring its relationship to his protagonist, Athanasius Pernath, a cutter of fine jewels living in the Jewish ghetto of Prague in the early twentieth century. Because shock treatment has wiped out his memory, Pernath is trapped in a sordid present but haunted by dim recollections of a happier life.

  A modern-day Adam, he has been ripped from an Eden that he can now barely remember. He begins to have visions of a golem that stalks the streets of Prague every thirty-three years, apparent­ly committing horrendous crimes. This is none other than the legendary creature of Rabbi Loew. Periodically coming to life and troubling the ghetto dwellers, this being reflects several currents of mean­ing: it is the microcosm of the ghettos architecture, one with the enigmatic buildings that seem almost alive and sinister; it is the paradoxical population of the ghetto, comprised of mystical saints and mur­derous rogues; it is the spiritual potential of all men, inseparable from the anthropos.

  Embodying these levels–the material, the conflict between matter and spirit, and the spiritual–the golem gathers and transcends the three stages of the alchemical work: nigredo, albebo, rubedo. He doubles and inspires the spir­itual quest of Pernath, who struggles through the chaos of the ghetto in hopes of reconciling the oppo­sitions that tear his soul. In the end, he realizes the golem within, achieving a balance between past and present, matter and spirit. This union is figured by his union with a young woman who dreams of pro­ducing a hermaphrodite, symbol for the philosopher's stone.

13. According to Moshe Idel in Golem, Johann Reuchlin in De Arte Cabalistica (1517) was the first to mention the golem as a being created as a servant (177-79). As Idel points out elsewhere, the "blue­print" for the Loew legend is actually Rabbi Elijah of Chem. A Polish Cabbalist writing between 1630 and 1650 reports that Elijah fashioned a golem two generations before Loew. Elijah apparently "made a creature out of matter [golem] and form [zurah] and it was performing hard work for him, for a long period, and the name of truth ['emet] was hanging upon his neck, until he took, finally, for a certain rea­son, the name from his neck and it turned to dust." "The Golem in Jewish Magic and Mysticism," 30.

14. Elie Wiesel, The Golem, 32.