The Golem: Gustav Meyrink and the Mysticism of Prague

An unnamed man finds the name Athanasius Pernath inside a hat he has taken by mistake. It fits him unusually well. In the dream that contains most of Gustav Meyrink’s The Golem, he inhabits Pernath’s life: a gem engraver in Prague’s Jewish ghetto, uncertain of his past, drawn into other people’s secrets and into experiences he cannot explain. Before the legendary creature has acquired a clear shape, something intimate has already become strange. A man’s name, memories, and sense of being himself can belong to someone else.

I found out about this book by reading Jung. Although it is a relatively small book, I paced it through the week, reading a bit every night. The atmosphere held me: the confined streets, the uneasy proximity of neighbors, the difficulty of finding a place from which Pernath could decide what was happening to him. His uncertainty spreads beyond the things he sees. It reaches the person doing the seeing.

Spoilers: this essay discusses the novel’s central encounters and ending.

A presence taking shape

Pernath’s visitor brings a book with a damaged illuminated initial in the chapter called Ibbur. The repair is a recognizable piece of work for an engraver, but as Pernath reads, the words acquire bodily life before him. The object he should be able to handle draws him into an experience over which his skill gives him little control.

This is where the idea of the Golem as an unacknowledged part of the self begins to disturb me. Pernath can feel something as alien while also finding it inseparable from his own consciousness. His missing past makes the distinction especially painful: he cannot simply consult a continuous memory of himself and dismiss whatever fails to fit. An unfamiliar impulse or image may threaten the identity he has, yet that identity is already incomplete.

Jung makes the hat a precise point of contact. In Psychology and Alchemy, while discussing a dream involving another person’s hat, he connects Meyrink’s hat exchange with a change of personality. The narrator’s identification with Pernath carries him into experiences Jung associates with the unconscious. Through the hat, a familiar object opens into an unfamiliar life. Psychology has entered the novel, but it has not explained everything Pernath meets there.

Pernath is also surrounded by people whose fears and desires precede his arrival. The Golem belongs to their recollections, their arguments, and the streets they share. Any reading confined to his private unconscious has to account for that wider presence.

The creature and the people who fear it

The puppeteer Zwakh tells of an unnamed rabbi who made an artificial servant. A magical slip of paper placed behind its teeth animated it; when the rabbi forgot to remove the paper one evening, the servant ran through the streets destroying what it encountered. The rabbi ended the destruction by taking out and destroying the paper.

The danger begins after the creation has succeeded. Its usefulness depends on an act that must be remembered, and the creator’s omission becomes other people’s danger. Making something work does not finish one’s responsibility for what it does.

Zwakh’s servant story and the later Prague tradition of a golem protecting a threatened Jewish community answer different human needs. One imagines delegated labor; the other, protection. The traditions also vary in their means of animation: in a familiar version, the Hebrew word emet, truth, becomes met, dead, when the letter aleph is removed. Zwakh’s paper behind the teeth is the mechanism relevant to his account.

The religious background holds together several different acts of giving life. Genesis describes God forming a human being from dust and giving him breath; Psalm 139:16, outside the Torah, uses golem for unformed substance. In Sanhedrin 65b, Rava creates a man who cannot answer Rabbi Zeira; Hanina and Oshaya create a calf. Speechlessness distinguishes Rava’s creature from the person who addresses it. Zwakh’s servant can act with destructive force while remaining dependent on the paper that animates it. The danger depends on what the maker gives the creature and what the creature can do without him.

Meyrink’s wandering apparition is stranger still. Zwakh describes a beardless man in old-fashioned clothes, reported roughly every thirty-three years, who walks through the quarter and disappears. The terror exceeds the observable action. When Zwakh recalls his own encounter, he remembers an inward cry identifying the Golem before he could see the stranger clearly. Other frightened faces then crowd around him, asking whether he has seen it.

He names the Golem before he can see it clearly; the crowd confirms a recognition that came first. Each person’s fear finds witnesses in people who are themselves afraid. The creature appears to stand apart from them, while the confidence that it is the Golem gathers between them.

How dread becomes a shared presence

Zwakh proposes a spiritual or psychic epidemic that passes through the ghetto once in a generation. He imagines accumulated thoughts acquiring visible form and reaches for a tuning fork: its vibration becomes audible when it makes the wood beneath it resonate. In his comparison, the Golem takes form in the resonance between the apparition and the people who fear it.

I find this more unsettling than a creature with an identifiable maker. The servant legend allows us to follow responsibility back to a rabbi and a forgotten act. In Zwakh’s conjecture, the participants cannot easily stand outside what they help to sustain. Fear passes between them, acquires the apparent solidity of a common experience, and returns to each person as something larger than private feeling.

The novel offers an image of contagious dread, not a theory of crowd behavior. Its imagined ghetto is shaped by Meyrink’s occult interests and by stereotyped representations of Jewish life. The protective golem tradition responds to persecution; Zwakh asks how a presence becomes perceptible. A community can share a fear without having invented the danger.

Pernath’s imprisonment introduces a more ordinary danger. Under interrogation, he recalls the watch bearing Zottmann’s name that Wassertrum gave him and understands how it could implicate him in a murder. The watch makes the trap tangible: Wassertrum has deliberately implicated him. Pernath has enemies who cannot be explained away as facets of his psyche.

Kafka sharpens the difference. Josef K. in The Trial never receives a clear account of his charge; Pernath can begin to identify the evidence used against him. Knowing how one has been trapped still leaves the ordeal to be endured. Meyrink’s promise of spiritual escape must therefore answer a world in which suffering is also deliberately inflicted.

Hillel’s difficult reassurance

Hillel, the archivist and perhaps my favorite character, gives the visitor another meaning. He asks Pernath to suppose that the figure he calls the Golem signifies the awakening of the dead through the innermost spiritual life. The same encounter that has frightened Pernath may belong to the beginning of an awakening.

Hillel connects this possibility with the book Pernath has read. In his explanation of Ibbur, Pernath’s soul has become pregnant with the spirit of life. This makes incompleteness capable of receiving something: the self is vulnerable to an arrival it did not command, but the arrival’s unfamiliarity cannot by itself determine its worth.

Pernath does not greet this promise serenely. Hillel’s claim that the awakened person can no longer die frightens him into longing for the ordinary path of dying. The reassurance asks him to surrender assumptions by which he has understood his life. Hillel’s gentleness matters because the promise itself has failed to comfort him.

I am drawn to Hillel partly for this tension. His presence gives Pernath relief; his teaching frightens him. Spiritual guidance here can care for a man and still disturb him. Pernath has to discover whether the promised awakening can become a life he is able to inhabit.

Meyrink’s mysticism draws on a mixture of Jewish and other esoteric traditions. Hillel belongs to the novel’s spiritual imagination rather than representing Kabbalah as a whole. Meyrink himself moved through occult circles and converted to Buddhism in 1927. Meyrink’s own search makes the attraction to awakening unsurprising; Pernath’s fear keeps it from becoming easy consolation.

The figures around Pernath can still be read symbolically: Wassertrum’s possessiveness, Angelina’s pull of desire, Hillel’s guidance. I would keep that reading alongside their particular actions. Pernath’s inward life becomes more legible through these relationships; reducing the people entirely to pieces of him would erase the difference between being guided, desiring someone, and being deliberately harmed.

Returning the hat

The framing narrator returns at the end and sees what looks like spiritual completion from a distance. Seeking the hat’s owner, he reaches a garden where he sees Pernath with Mirjam, Hillel’s daughter. Pernath’s face resembles his own so closely that the narrator feels he is looking into a mirror. The resemblance survives the return to waking life.

Yet the exchange is unequal. A servant returns the narrator’s hat and explains that Pernath never wore it: he noticed the mistake immediately. The narrator is not invited into the garden. He has inhabited Pernath’s experience without acquiring Pernath’s place in the world or his apparent fulfillment.

The spiritual escape that first distinguished Meyrink from Kafka now looks less complete. Pernath appears with Mirjam inside the garden; the man who witnessed his life remains outside. Sharing another’s experience has not made the two men interchangeable. Even the object that joined them must be returned.

Here the Golem’s individual and collective meanings meet. Zwakh’s neighbors may help make a feared presence perceptible; Pernath meets an otherness Hillel calls awakening, while Wassertrum harms him by entirely human means. The novel never resolves these into a single cause. At the garden, the narrator sees his own face in another man and returns the hat. Resemblance has brought him closer; the other life remains its owner’s.

Sources

Gustav Meyrink, Der Golem, 1915 German text, Project Gutenberg eBook 51476.

C. G. Jung, Psychology and Alchemy, Collected Works, volume 12, translated by R. F. C. Hull, §§52–53, especially the discussion of Meyrink’s hat at §53.

Jewish Museum Berlin, “Golem: From Mysticism to Minecraft”: variants of animation, the protective Prague legend, and stereotypes in Meyrink’s representation of the ghetto.

Genesis 2:7; Psalm 139:16; Babylonian Talmud, Sanhedrin 65b, the Rava–Zeira and Hanina–Oshaya passages.

Sten Wistrand, “Gustav Meyrink’s The Golem. A Sensationalist Shlock Novel or an Esoteric Vision of the World?”, LIR.journal 12 (2020), pp. 11–52, especially pp. 16–18. The linked distinction between Jewish tradition and Meyrink’s esoteric synthesis draws on this discussion.

Bavarian State Library, “Gustav Meyrink (1868–1932)”, estate exhibition, biographical chronology.

Franz Kafka, Der Prozess (The Trial), Project Gutenberg eBook 69327: the opening arrest and the absence of a disclosed charge.