Technology is now captivated by the delusion of recreating human intelligence, and that this fantasy already had a mythological precedent in the golem.

Join us on Telegram, Twitter, and VK.

Contact us: info@strategic-culture.su

In the previous article, we touched upon the fact that Kabbalah was studied by men who made very important contributions to modern science, which emerged in the Catholic world. We also saw that these men were not Jewish; thus, an influence of Kabbalah on science is not the same thing as the influence of Jewish scientists on science. In fact, contrary to what the current revisionism undertaken by IQ fetishists professes, the participation of Jews in modern science was insignificant until emancipation, and this was due to the peculiar obscurantism of medieval Judaism.

Curiously, in the Renaissance and the beginning of modernity, men of science became superstitious, renewing, for example, interest in astrology (a discipline refuted since the time of Cicero). In an era of urban enrichment and increased book production, there was no shortage of opportunities for the human interest in what is presented as hidden, veiled, and highly secret, to manifest itself. If alchemy aimed for the philosopher’s stone and the elixir of youth, capable of making anyone rich and young forever, Kabbalah promised something close to that, and which was perhaps a requirement for alchemy: mastery of the secrets of Creation.

In On the Kabbalah and its Symbolism, Gershom Scholem presents an exposition on the golem (a legendary Jewish creature) which includes a myth very close to the current conception of science, and therefore suggests that today’s science is influenced by a Kabbalistic view of nature.

Let’s first look at what a golem is: a living clay doll, made by a Jewish sage that emulates God’s creation of Adam. In the aforementioned book, we learn that for the Jew, man has much more power to create than for a Christian. For example, by spilling sperm outside the woman’s body, the man becomes the father of demons, of spectral creatures that seek a body (from which one can only conclude that the Pornhub rabbi wants to fill the world with demons…). Thus, at a man’s burial, it is necessary to prevent the legitimate heirs from attending before the purification of the body, since their spectral, bastard brothers want to harm them. Hence, it can be seen that the idea of ​​man creating life magically was not foreign to the Kabbalistic mind.

“Kabbalah” comes from Hebrew and means “tradition.” Instead of clinging to the letter of the Old Testament and Talmudic interpretations, the Kabbalist seeks to have access to a mystical tradition, older than Judaism itself, and uses this magical knowledge to relate to the Torah. He may, for example, say that the Torah is a set of letters that can be read in a variety of ways; that the Torah is, in its entirety, a great name of God in full; that in the New Age the white of the Torah (the paper) will be legible and the Law will change, because today only the black (of the letters) is readable. In short, a lot of nonsense. Imagine saying that “Do not step on the grass” is a name, or that it is equivalent to “No dot pest no eth ragss”. It becomes difficult to tell someone not to step on the grass.

In any case, the divine character of the Torah is not denied – quite the contrary. Having knowledge of the Torah means having divine knowledge and thus acquiring magical powers. Therefore, by mastering the Torah, a very righteous man could perform a crazy ritual (which perhaps includes filling the house with earth and dancing in circles) to create a golem: a humanoid made of clay, capable of following instructions and acting as a servant. Although there are precedents in the Zohar (Sephardic) and even in an anecdote from the Babylonian Talmud (when rabbis make a calf and eat it after studying a certain Book of Creation), the golem, with that name, is an invention of the Ashkenazim.

In the most usual versions of the myth, the golem has emeth, “truth,” written on its forehead. When a letter is erased, meth remains, meaning “dead,” and the golem dissolves into inanimate earth. It is advisable to kill the golem because it will grow indefinitely and become dangerous to its creator.

However, Scholem found a, let’s say, Nietzschean version of the golem myth dating from the beginning of the 13th century in Languedoc:

“The prophet Jeremiah busied himself alone with the Book Yetsirah [Book of Creation]. Then a heavenly voice went forth and said: Take a companion. He went to his son Sira, and they studied the book for three years. Afterward they set about combining the alphabets in accordance with the Kabbalistic principles of combination, grouping, and word formation, and a man was created to them, on whose forehead stood the letters YHWH Elohim Emeth [God is truth]. But this newly created man had a knife in his hand, with which he erased the aleph from emeth there remained: meth. Then Jeremiah rent his garments [because of the blasphemy: God is dead, now implied in the inscription] and said: Why have you erased the aleph from emeth? He replied: I will tell you a parable. An architect built many houses, cities, and squares, but no one could copy his art and compete with him in knowledge and skill until two men persuaded him. Then he taught them the secret of his art, and they knew how to do everything in the right way. When they had learned his secret and his abilities, they began to anger him with words. Finally, they broke with him and became architects like him, except that what he charged a thaler for, they did for six groats. When people noticed this, they ceased to honor the artist and came to them and honored them and gave them commissions when they required to have something built. So God has made you in His image and in His shape and form. But now that you have created a man like Him, people will say: There is no God in the world beside these two! Then Jeremiah said: What solution is there? He said: Write the alphabets backward on the earth you have strewn with intense concentration. Only do not meditate in the sense of building up, but the other way around. So they did, and the man became dust and ashes before their eyes. Then Jeremiah said: Truly, one should study these things only in order to know the power and omnipotence of the Creator of this world, but not in order really to practice them.”

Propaganda is the soul of business. Despite recommendations against its use, the fact is that Kabbalist masters claimed to possess magical powers similar to those of God himself. The idea was that deciphering Creation through religious studies gave such powers. The mere belief that so-and-so has unlocked the domains of creation serves to exert power over all credulous men, whether Jewish or not. Hence the possibility of the influence of Kabbalah infiltrating science even when Jews did not participate in it.

The Kabbalah becomes all the more seductive the more common sense gets used to believing that “they” are lying to you, and that the Truth was hidden in a certain period of History. In other words, this truth became more seductive in Protestant environments of the early modern period, where anti-Catholic propaganda claimed that everything your parents and grandparents believed was a lie, because since the times of the Roman Empire Christendom had been deceived by an ecclesiastical gang founded by the Devil. The environment was all the more favorable because, by promising that purity is found in more ancient times, it positions the Jews as privileged inhabitants of this uncorrupted world.

Protestantism aims to rewind the history of Christianity to a point before Catholic corruption. Once one begins to rewind, nothing prevents one from reaching Judaism and, consequently, Kabbalah. This was full of pseudepigraphical texts, that is, books with authorship falsely attributed to a third party. For example, if the Babylonian Talmud alluded to a Book of Creation capable of making rabbis produce a calf, in 1562, in Mantua, someone thought it a good idea to print a volume in Hebrew entitled Book of Creation and attribute its authorship to Abraham, the Old Testament patriarch. In other words, during the Renaissance, Jews and occultists read a magic manual made in contemporary Italy and believed it to be a secret work of Abraham.

Regarding the relationship between the golem and modern science, Scholem gathers various versions of the golem to point out that, in one of them, there is a more accurate anticipation of Paracelsus’ homunculus, since the golem is created from clay inside a retort. And so we learn that the Father of Toxicology believed he was capable of producing a homunculus by placing human sperm along with the rotten uterus of a mare and other disgusting things inside a retort.

What stands out in the version of the golem story reproduced above is its modernity, or even postmodernity. In it, man is able to “kill God” (to make him insignificant) through knowledge of the secrets of Creation – or, in modern terms, through knowledge of nature. The function of science becomes pragmatic: to unveil the secrets of nature in order to manipulate it as if it were its author. In Francis Bacon’s formulation, to torture nature to extract its secrets, because knowledge is power. Knowledge is instrumental, since theory is subordinate to technique.

While Bacon’s ideas of torturing nature and that knowledge is power are well-known, the same cannot be said of his idea that science is magic. In this regard, it is worth quoting the scholar of religions Jason Josephson:

“Bacon described his famous experimental method […] explicitly in terms of magic. As he put it in De Dignitate et Augmentis Scientiarum (The dignity and advancement of learning, 1623): ‘Magic aims to recall natural philosophy from a miscellany of speculation to a greatness of works,’ which was exactly what he was trying to do with his own project. Bacon further defined magic ‘as the science which applies the knowledge of hidden forms to the production of wonderful operations; and by uniting (as they say) actives with passives displays the wonderful works of nature.’ Magic was a pragmatic, or instrumentalist, form of natural philosophy of exactly the sort Bacon saw as missing from scholasticism. Bacon […] also aimed to improve magic. As he argued in De augmentis, ‘I must here stipulate that magic, which has long been used in a bad sense, be again restored to its ancient and honorable meaning. For among the Persians magic was taken for a sublime wisdom, and the knowledge of the universal harmony of things.’” (The Myth of Disenchantment, p. 46)

In other words, once you start rewinding history, there’s no need to stop, and every book that’s supposedly older than the Roman Church is a potential bearer of secrets that “they” don’t want you to know. That’s the mentality behind the occult surge of the Reformation era.

Finally, another thing that stands out in this view of science is the possibility of man placing himself as an “other” in relation to nature. In fact, God is literally supernatural (the author of nature is above it). Man, however, seeing himself as an emulator of God, ends up placing himself as a kind of supernatural manipulator of nature, as if he were outside the scope of scientific studies (except for the physiological aspect). Human nature, which occupied classical philosophy so much, disappears with the advent of modern science, which so privileges technique and the domination of nature.

The situation becomes even stranger when we consider that technology is now captivated by the delusion of recreating human intelligence (AI), and that this fantasy already had a mythological precedent in the golem.