From the Hebrew word "golem" is translated as "something unprepared."
Tourists who come to Prague today wander for a long time through the narrow streets in search of the old synagogue, where, as local residents say, you can still see the remains of a golem - a clay man, once revived by a Prague rabbi.
According to the laws of Kabbalah
Many argue that they saw the golem with their own eyes, but, although there is no documentary evidence of this, there are too many legends that have survived for them to turn out to be mere fiction.
This story took place in Prague in the 16th or early 17th century. In the Jewish quarter lived Rabbi Yehuda Leib ben Bemayel, a great magician and alchemist. His extensive library contained a valuable manuscript - the work of an unnamed Kabbalist "Secrets of the Mysteries", which described in detail the mystical ritual of creating a golem - a clay idol capable of performing any work for people.
The rabbi had long dreamed of making such a doll for himself so that it would help ring the bells of the Old-New Synagogue. Finally, he made up his mind. For seven days and nights Yehuda created in his laboratory with the help of assistants a golem according to the laws of Kabbalah from red clay, diligently imitating the actions of God at the time of the creation of Adam.
The golem came out as tall as a ten-year-old child, with a yellowish face and slanting Mongol eyes. As soon as the rabbi put a parchment in his mouth with a secret word written on it, the golem revived, began to grow rapidly and soon reached gigantic proportions. It turned out that he hears and understands everything, only he cannot speak, because speech is a divine gift, like the soul.
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Yehuda announced to his assistants that he had decided to name the golem Joseph, who, according to legend, was half-man, half-demon and at one time saved the wisest interpreters of the Talmud from many misfortunes.
The rabbi told his wife that he had picked up the unfortunate holy fool on the street, who was also dumb.
In the house, Joseph began to carry water, chop wood and, naturally, help his creator in the synagogue. The rabbi was frightened by the unprecedented size and power of the golem, but he reassured himself that the idol was an obedient slave to the amulet. No piece of paper - no golem. Every Friday night, Yehuda took the parchment out of his mouth and for the entire Saturday (the day God created man) deprived Joseph of his ability to move.
But one day the rabbi, absent-mindedly, forgot to pull out the amulet. And the irreparable happened: obeying an unconscious desire, the earthen image leaped from its place and rushed along the narrow streets of Prague, destroying everything in its path and killing tens and hundreds of Christians."
The city was littered with corpses. This went on for several days. Finally, on the following Friday, when the clock struck noon, and the golem continued to rush through the city like a demon of death, ambassadors came to the rabbi's house. “Rabbi,” they said, “the golem destroyed half of Prague. Soon there will be no Christians left at all.
Some today argue that the remains of the golem still lie in the tower of this synagogue, covered with a web of cobwebs. They believe that human eyes should not see them, no one is allowed even to touch the cobweb, because whoever dares to do so will die immediately. The word that can revive the Golem is forever lost, it melted in the air … Therefore, the web on the remains of the clay monster is getting thicker every year.
They tell how one daredevil climbed down the rope from the roof of the synagogue to look inside. But as soon as he was at the window, the rope broke, and the curious one crashed to death.
Already in our time, a journalist tried to get into the mysterious tower using a ladder, but as soon as he began to climb it, the steps broke, and the sensation hunter twisted his neck, falling from a great height.
Tradition has it that every thirty-three years a tall, beardless man with a Mongolian-type face, dressed in an old-fashioned shabby jacket, appears on the streets of old Prague. With a measured, stumbling step, he crosses block after block and disappears near the old synagogue building. The inhabitants of the quarter are afraid of him. And he is afraid of people - at the sight of a passer-by, his huge figure becomes smaller and smaller until it disappears altogether.
Homunculus Master
Many sorcerers of the past have tried to give life to clay creatures. Some even had several servants in the house - golems. It was believed that their owners have secret power, power over the forces of the universe.
Akin to golems and the so-called homunculi. Alchemists believed that laboratory methods could produce not only gold, but also an artificial being of human nature.
Some philosophers of antiquity, for example, Zosima of Greece, and sorcerers - the magician Simon - claimed that they managed to create a homunculus. By this, they incurred the suspicions of those around them, who began to consider them also homunculi. After all, anyone who managed to complete such an incredibly difficult task, according to generally accepted concepts, was himself a supernatural being.
“However,“officially”the first homunculus was made by the alchemist Arnold de Villanova, who lived in the 13th century. He may have inspired Mary Shelley to write Frankenstein. But the generally recognized master of the manufacture of homunculi was still Paracelsus - a Swiss physician and alchemist. It was he who described in detail how an artificial man can be made. However, this recipe is not one that can be used at any time."
“The first step was to take a flask, put a decent amount of human sperm in it, and then seal it. The flask with semen was buried in horse manure for 40 days, and after being removed from there, it was subjected to magnetization (the essence of this process is not clear enough). During this period of gestation, the homunculus, a fragile and transparent protohuman, was believed to take on its shape."
Then the flask was supposed to be opened to start feeding the little man. This was done by daily adding a small amount of human blood, while maintaining the temperature around the flask, like in the womb of a mare. After 40 weeks, if done correctly, you will have a fully developed, proportionally built human baby, only very small. It should grow back to its normal size over time.
He can be raised and trained, Paracelsus instructed, like any other child until he grows up and can take care of himself.
Medieval occultists also created homunculi from earth, wax and metals. The mysterious creature made its master invulnerable, helped to get rich and famous. In addition, according to legend, the owner of the homunculus was able to seduce any woman.
The devil himself was considered the father of the homunculi. And the magician had to sell his soul to him for the fact that the latter endowed soulless objects with his devilish power. And this agreement could only be terminated with the help of complex magical rites.
Damn dolls saw what was hidden from the eyes of ordinary people, and told
about this to their owners, who used the knowledge gained with the greatest benefit for themselves. Of course, the monster from the retort was nothing more than a mediator - secret information came from the Prince of Darkness himself, who, as you know, knows everything that happens in the world.
A man and a woman from a flask
In the 17th century, it was believed that the homunculus is enclosed in the sperm and, when it enters the mother's body, only increases in size. This view was called animalculism. Its founder was A. Levenguk, the creator of the microscope.
A hundred years later, the Italian biologist Antonio Wallinsneri put forward an even more fantastic version. He decided that if an egg contains a ready-made organism, then it should also contain eggs, each of which has an even more miniature organism, and so on, ad infinitum. Thus, the very first egg contained all subsequent generations, nested in one another - a kind of biological matryoshka.
And this is far from the only superstition. Since ancient times, there has been a theory about the spontaneous generation of life. There was, for example, the following correct recipe for obtaining a bee swarm: Take a young calf, kill it with a blow to the head and bury it in the ground in a standing position with the horns outward, leave it in this form for a month, then cut off the horns, and a beautiful bee will fly out of them Roy.
“The English naturalist Ross wrote in a scientific treatise: To dispute that beetles and wasps originate from cow droppings is like arguing against reason, common sense and real experience. Even such complex animals as mice do not necessarily have to have fathers and mothers, if anyone doubts this, let him go to Egypt and there make sure that the fields are positively teeming with mice emerging from the dirty mud of the Nile River, which is great a disaster for the population!"
The owners of homunculus carefully hid them from prying eyes so that they would not be accused of witchcraft, since in the Middle Ages such an accusation meant a direct road to the fire!
In the secret documents of the legendary Rosicrucians about the creation of homunculi, the following is written: “In a vessel, the dew of May, collected on the full moon, mixes two parts of male and three parts of female blood from pure and chaste people. This vessel is placed on a moderate fire, which is why the red earth will be deposited below, while the upper part is separated into a clean bottle and from time to time is poured into the vessel, into which one more grain of tincture from the animal kingdom is poured. After a while, a stomp and whistle will be heard in the flask, and you will see in it two living creatures - a man and a woman - absolutely beautiful. By means of certain manipulations, you can maintain their life throughout the year, and you can learn anything from them, because they will be afraid of you and honor you."
“In 1775, Count von Küfstein, who was the personal secretary of Emperor Franz Joseph, gave birth to certain beings in Tyrol, which he called spirits. The count's assistant left diaries, from which it followed that as a result of alchemical experiments, ten human entities were obtained in sealed bottles. The spirits swam in these huge bottles and were about 23 cm in size. Later, the creatures grew to about 35 cm, they showed secondary sexual characteristics (in men, beards)."
The count fed these creatures every three or four days with some kind of substance in the form of balls the size of a pea, and once a week changed the water in bottles to pure rainwater. "Spirits" were used by von Kuefstein during Masonic meetings for divination, which was usually confirmed as attested by many Masonic manuscripts and books. Homunculi possessed visible and tangible bodies, spoke and acted like humans.
In the end, the count, who brought all this devilry to life, began to atone for sins and save his soul. Later he got rid of the “spirits” by destroying them.
Experiments in the Third Reich
In the twentieth century, the scientists of the Third Reich were engaged in the creation of a kind of "homunculus". In a suicide statement made by the FBI microbiologist Wolf Heinrich Brenner on November 6, 1997, he spoke about the successful experiments on human cloning conducted by his teacher Otto Siegfried Kline back in the 30s and 40s.
Nazi scientists used for their experiments the secret knowledge of the dead Atlantean civilization, preserved by adherents of occult orders. In the process of experiments, more similar to magical rituals, as stated by Brenner, his teacher Kline received quite viable clones of specific people, including his own, which was later exported to the United States and lived to be 49 years old.
The resulting clones completely lacked consciousness, which fully corresponds to the idea of the ancient magicians about the soul (mental body), which turns out to be one in two identical bodies, and there were only the simplest reflexes.
In the middle of the 20th century, the Italian explorer Petruccio, inspired by the developments of the Nazi mystics, conducted his own experiments, which became a sensation at that time. He managed to grow a human embryo in a test tube to the point where it is born. The question arose about what to do next. Science was silent. Raising a fully artificial person is extremely difficult, and Petruchio was forced to interrupt the experiment. The press of those years wrote a lot about this promising undertaking, while the church reacted extremely negatively to the experiments, believing that such an embryo could not have a soul.
Petruchio's experiments were further developed mainly in attempts to grow a living organism using lower animals: fish, frogs, and warm-blooded animals such as sheep and rabbits. Paracelsus' idea of growing an organism from one cell turned out to be productive. It has been confirmed by genetic research. However, if in Paracelsus a living organism was to be obtained from a male seed, then according to current views it is possible from almost any cell of the body, each of which, according to modern geneticists, carries a full set of hereditary information …
Gennady FEDOTOV