Grimoire. Golem

Gustav Meyrink (1868—1932) in his famous novel «The Golem» («Der Golem»; 1915), which is a virtuoso interpretation of the legend from the 16th century about the clay homunculus created by the legendary Prague cabbalist Rabbi Löw.

This edition of the book is notable primarily for its significantly more developed reference apparatus compared to the previous publication (2004) — a thoroughly revised introductory article and new, analytically oriented marginalia, without which it is impossible to understand this one of the most mysterious works of world literature, whose compositional dominant is a rather dark cabbalistic concept that views man not as an independent, autonomous self, but as a manifestation of some higher essence, whose sacred archetype is passed down from generation to generation, reproducing in descendants the same original image of the «genius of the kind», who for various reasons was unable to fulfill his earthly mission and is now forced to be reborn until the genealogical chain is closed by the spiritual realization of one of his incarnations — a distant descendant, who, having traversed the black abyss of initiatory death, will be resurrected in the last phase of the hermetic mystery, transforming the mortal «golemic» being of the neophyte into the immortal «body of glory» of that androgynous philosophical substance, which adepts traditionally call AEnigma Regis.