If the righteous wished to create a world, they could do so. By trying different combinations of the letters of the ineffable names of God, Raba succeeded in creating a man, whom he sent to Rabbi Zera. Rabbi Zera spoke to him, but as he got no answer, he said: ‘You are a creature of magic; go back to your dust.’ Rabbi Hanina and Rabbi Oshaia, two scholars, spent every Sabbath eve studying the Book of Creation, by means of which they brought into being a three-year-old calf that they then used for the purposes of supper.
Schopenhauer, in his book Will in Nature, writes (Chapter 7): ‘On page 325 of the first volume of his Zauberbibliothek [Magic Library], Horst summarizes the teachings of the English mystic Jane Lead in this way: Whoever possesses magical powers can, at will, master and change the mineral, vegetable, and animal kingdoms; consequently, a few magicians, working in agreement, could make this world of ours return to the state of Paradise.’
The Golem’s fame in the West is owed to the work of the Austrian writer Gustav Meyrink, who in the fifth chapter of his dream novel Der Golem (1915) writes:
It is said that the origin of the story goes back to the seventeenth century. According to lost formulas of the Kabbalah, a rabbi [Judah Loew ben Bezabel] made an artificial man the aforesaid Golem so that he would ring the bells and take over all the menial tasks of the synagogue.
He was not a man exactly, and had only a sort of dim, half-conscious, vegetative existence. By the power of a magic tablet which was placed under his tongue and which attracted the free sidereal energies of the universe, this existence lasted during the daylight hours.
One night before evening prayer, the rabbi forgot to take the tablet out of the Golem’s mouth, and the creature fell into a frenzy, running out into the dark alleys of the ghetto and knocking down those who got in his way, until the rabbi caught up with him and removed the tablet. At once the creature fell lifeless. All that was left of him is the dwarfish clay figure that may be seen today in the New Synagogue.
Eleazar of Worms has preserved the secret formula for making a Golem. The procedures involved cover some twenty-three folio columns and require knowledge of the ‘alphabets of the 221 gates’, which must be recited over each of the Golem’s organs. The word Emet, which means ‘Truth’, should be marked on its forehead; to destroy the creature, the first letter must be obliterated, forming the word met, whose meaning is ‘death’.
The Griffon
Winged monsters, says Herodotus of the Griffons in his accounts of their continual warfare with the one-eyed Arimaspians; almost as sketchy, Pliny speaks of their ears and their hooked beaks, yet judges them fabulous (X, 70). Perhaps the most detailed description of the Griffon comes from the problematic Sir John Mandeville in Chapter 85 of his famous Travels:
From this land men shal go unto the land of Bactry, where are many wicked men & fell, in that land are trees that beare wol, as it were shepe, of which they make cloth. In this land are ypotains [hippopotamuses] that dwel sometime on land, sometime on water, and are halfe a man and halfe a horse, and they eate not but men, when they may get them. In this land are many gryffons, more than in other places, and some say they haue the body before as an Egle, and behinde as a Lyon, and it is trouth, for they be made so; but the Griffen hath a body greater than viii Lyons and stall worthier than a hundred Egles. For certainly he wyl beare to his nest flying, a horse and a man upon his back, or two Oxen yoked togither as they go at plowgh, for he hath large nayles on hys fete, as great as it were homes of Oxen, and of those they make cups there to drynke of, and of his rybes they make bowes to shoote with.
In Madagascar, another famous traveler, Marco Polo, heard the rukh spoken of and at first understood this as a reference to the uccello grifone, the Griffon bird (Travels, III 36).
In the Middle Ages, the symbolism of the Griffon is contradictory. An Italian bestiary says that it stands for the Devil; usually it is an emblem of Christ, and this is how Isidore of Seville explains it in his Etymologies: ‘Christ is a lion because he reigns and has great strength; and an eagle because, after the Resurrection, he ascended to heaven.’
In Canto XXIX of the Purgatorio, Dante has a vision of a triumphal chariot (the Church), drawn by a Griffon; its eagle portion is golden, its lion portion white mixed with red in order to signify according to the commentaries Christ’s human nature. (White slightly reddened gives the colour of human flesh.) The commentators are recalling the description of the beloved in the Song of Solomon (V: 10-11): ‘My beloved is white and ruddy . . . His head is as the most fine gold . . .’
Others feel that Dante wished to symbolize the Pope, who is both priest and king. Didron, in his Manuel d’iconographie chrétienne (1845, writes: ‘The pope, as pontiff or eagle, is borne aloft to the throne of God to receive his commands, and as lion or king walks on earth with strength and might.’
Haniel, Kafziel, Azriel, and Aniel
In Babylon, the prophet Ezekiel saw in a vision four beasts or angels, ‘And every one had four faces, and every one had four wings’ and ‘As for the likeness of their faces, they four had the face of a man, and the face of a lion, on the right side: and they four had the face of an ox on the left side; they four also had the face of an eagle.’ They went where the spirit carried them, ‘every one straight forward’, or as the first Spanish Bible (1569) has it, cada uno caminaua enderecho de su rostro (‘each one went in the direction of his face’) which of course is so unimaginable as to be uncanny. Four wheels or rings, ‘so high that they were dreadful’ went with the angels and ‘were full of eyes round about them . . .’
An echo from Ezekiel may have been in the mind of St John the Divine when he spoke of animals in the fourth chapter of Revelation:
And before the throne there was a sea of glass like unto crystal: and in the midst of the throne, and round about the throne, were four beasts full of eyes before and behind.
And the first beast was like a lion, and the second beast like a calf, and the third beast had a face as a man, and the fourth beast was like a flying eagle.
And the four beasts had each of them six wings about him; and they were full of eyes within: and they rest not day and night, saying, Holy, holy, holy, Lord God Almighty, which was, and is, and is to come.
In the most important of Kabbalistic works, the Zohar or Book of Splendour, we read that these four beasts are called Haniel, Kafziel, Azriel, and Aniel and that they face east, north, south, and west. Stevenson remarked that if such beings were to be found in Heaven, what might not be expected of Hell.A beast full of eyes is sufficiently awful, but Chesterton went further in the poem ‘A Second Childhood’:
But I shall not grow too old to see
Enormous night arise,
A cloud that is larger than the world
And a monster made of eyes.
The fourfold angels in Ezekiel are called Hayoth, or Living Beings; according to the Sefer Yeçirah, another of the Kabbalist books, they are the ten numbers that were used by God, together with the twenty-two letters of the alphabet, to create the world; according to the Zohar, they came down from Heaven crowned with letters.
The Evangelists drew their symbols from the four faces of the Hayoth: to Matthew fell the man’s face, sometimes bearded; to Mark, the lion’s; to Luke, the calf’s; and to John, the eagle’s. St Jerome in his commentary on Ezekiel has attempted to reason out these attributions. Matthew was given the man’s face because he emphasized the humanity of Christ; Mark the lion’s because he declared Christ’s royal standing; Luke the calf’s because it is an emblem of sacrifice; John the eagle’s because of Christ’s soaring spirit.
A German scholar, Dr Richard Hennig, looks for the remote origin of these symbols in four zodiacal signs which lie ninety degrees apart. The lion and the calf give no trouble; the man has been linked to Aquarius, who has a man’s face; and the eagle is evidently Scorpio considered an ill omen and therefore changed. Nicholas de Vore, in his Encyclopedia of Astrology, sustains the same hypothesis and remarks that the four figures com
e together in the sphinx, which may have a human head, the body of a bull, the claws and tail of a lion, and the wings of an eagle.
Haokah the Thunder God
Among the Dakota Sioux, Haokah used the wind as sticks to beat the thunder drum. His horned head also marked him as a hunting god. He wept when he was happy and laughed in his sadness; heat made him shiver and cold made him sweat.
Harpies
In Hesiod’s Theogony, the Harpies are winged divinities who wear long loose hair and are swifter than the birds and winds, in the Aeneid (Book III), they are vultures with a woman’s face, sharp curved claws and filthy underparts, and are weak with a hunger they cannot appease. They swoop down from the mountains and plunder tables laid for feasts. They are invulnerable and emit an infectious smell; they gorge all they see, screeching the whole while and fouling everything with excrement. Servius, in his commentaries on Virgil, writes that just as Hecate is Proserpina in hell, Diana on earth, and Luna in heaven, and is called a threefold goddess, so the Harpies are Furies in hell, Harpies on earth, and Dirae (or Demons) in heaven. They are also confused with the Parcae, or Fates.
By order of the gods, the Harpies harried a Thracian king who unveiled men’s futures, or who bought a long life with the price of his eyes, for which he was punished by the sun, whose works he had insulted by choosing blindness. He had prepared a banquet for all his court and the Harpies contaminated and devoured the dishes. The Argonauts put the Harpies to flight; Apollonius of Rhodes and William Morris (The Life and Death of Jason) tell the fantastic story. Ariosto in Canto XXXIII of the Furioso transforms the Thracian king into Prester John, fabled emperor of the Abyssinians.
Harpy comes from the Greek harpazein to snatch or carry away. In the beginning they were wind goddesses, like the Maruts of Vedic myth, who wielded weapons of gold (the lightning) and milked the clouds.
The Heavenly Cock
According to the Chinese, the Heavenly Cock is a golden-plumed fowl that crows three times a day. The first, when the sun takes its morning bath on the horizons of the sea; the second, when the sun is at its height; the last, when it sinks in the west. The first crowing shakes the heavens and stirs mankind from sleep. Among the offspring of the Cock is the yang, the male principle of the universe. The Cock has three legs and perches in the fu-sang tree, which grows in the lands of sunrise and whose height is measured by thousands of feet. The Heavenly Cock’s crowing is very loud, and its bearing, lordly. It lays eggs out of which are hatched chicks with red combs, who answer his song every morning. All the roosters on earth are descended from the Heavenly Cock, whose other name is the Bird of Dawn.
The Hippogriff
To signify impossibility or incongruence, Virgil spoke of breeding horses with griffons. Four centuries later, his commentator Servius explained that the griffon is an animal which in the top half of its body is an eagle and in the bottom half a lion. To strengthen his text he added that they detest horses. In time, the expression Jungentur jam grypes equis (‘To cross griffons with horses’) came to be proverbial; at the beginning of the sixteenth century, Ludovico Ariosto, remembering it, invented the Hippogriff. Eagle and lion are united in the griffon of the ancients; horse and griffon in Ariosto’s Hippogriff, which makes it a second generation monster or invention. Pietro Micheli notes that it is more harmonious than the winged horse Pegasus.
A detailed description of the Hippogriff, written as for a handbook of fantastic zoology, is given in Orlando Furioso (IV, 18):
The steed is not imagined but real, for it was sired by a Griffon out of a mare: like its father’s were its feathers and wings, its forelegs, head, and beak; in all its other parts it resembled its mother and was called Hippogriff; they come, though rarely, from the Rhiphaean Mountains, far beyond the icebound seas.
The first mention of the strange beast is deceptively casual (II, 37):
And by the Rhone I came upon a man in arms, reining in a great winged horse.
Other stanzas give us the wonder of this creature that flies. The following (IV, 4) is well known:
E vede l’oste e tutta la famiglia, E chi a finestre e chi fuor ne la via, Tener levati al ciel gli occhi e le ciglia, Come l’Ecclisse o la Cometa sia.Vede la Donna un’alta maraviglia,Che di leggier creduta non saria: Vede passar un gran destriero alato,Che porta in aria un cavalliero armato.
[And she saw the landlord and all his house, and some at the windows and some in the street, their eyes and brows lifted to the sky as though it were an Eclipse or Comet. The Lady saw a wonder on high not easily to be believed: she saw pass over a great winged steed, bearing through the air a knight in arms.]
Astolpho, in one of the last cantos, unsaddles and unbridles the Hippogriff and sets it free.
Hochigan
Ages ago, a certain South African bushman, Hochigan, hated animals, which at that time were endowed with speech. One day he disappeared, stealing their special gift. From then on, animals have never spoken again. Descartes tells us that monkeys could speak if they wished to, but that they prefer to keep silent so that they won’t be made to work. In 1907, the Argentine writer Lugones published a story about a chimpanzee who was taught how to speak and died under the strain of the effort.
Humbaba
What was the giant Humbaba like, who guards the mountain cedars in that pieced-together Assyrian epic Gilgamesh, which may be the world’s oldest poem? Georg Burckhardt has attempted to reconstruct it, and from his German version, published in Wiesbaden in 1952, we give this passage:
Enkidu swung his axe and cut down one of the cedars. An angry voice rang out: Who has entered my forest and cut down one of my trees?’ Then they saw Humbaba himself coming: he had the paws of a lion and a body covered with horny scales; his feet had the claws of a vulture, and on his head were the horns of a wild bull; his tail and male member each ended in a snake’s head.
In one of the later cantos of Gilgamesh, we are introduced to creatures called Men-Scorpions who stand guard at the gate of the mountain Mashu. ‘Its twin peaks [in an English version by N. K. Sandars] are as high as the wall of heaven and its paps reach down to the underworld.’ It is into this mountain that the sun goes down at night and from which it returns at dawn. The Man-Scorpion is human in the upper part of its body, while its lower part ends in a scorpion’s tail.
The Hundred-Heads
The Hundred-Heads is a fish created by a hundred ill-tempered words uttered in the course of an otherwise blameless life. A Chinese biography of the Buddha tells that he once met some fishermen who were dragging in a net. After much toil they hauled up on to the shore a huge fish with one head of an ape, another of a dog, another of a horse, another of a fox, another of a hog, another of a tiger, and so on, up to one hundred. The Buddha asked the fish:
‘Are you Kapila?’
‘Yes, I am,’ the Hundred-heads answered before dying. The Buddha explained to his disciples that in a previous incarnation Kapila was a Brahman who had become a monk and whose knowledge of the holy texts was unrivalled. Upon occasion, when his fellow students misread a word, Kapila would call them ape-head, dog-head, horse-head, and so forth. After his death, the karma of those many insults caused him to be reborn as a sea monster, weighed down by all the heads he had bestowed upon his companions.
The Hydra of Lerna
Typhon (the misshapen son of Tartarus and Terra) and Echidna, who was half beautiful woman and half serpent, gave birth to the Hydra of Lerna. Lemprière tells us that ‘It had 100 heads, according to Diodorus; fifty according to Simonides; and nine according to the more received opinion of Apollodorus, Hyginus &c.’ But what made the creature still more awful was that as soon as one of its heads was cut off, two more sprouted up in their place. It was said that the heads were human and that the middle one was everlasting. The Hydra’s breath poisoned the waters and turned the fields brown. Even when it slept, the pollution in the air surrounding it could cause a man’s death. Juno fostered the Hydra in her efforts to lessen Hercules’ fame.
In succeeding tasks with other beasts, Hercules inflicted deadly wounds with arrows dipped in the gall of the Hydra.
A sea crab friendly to the Hydra nipped Hercules’ heel when he stepped on it during his struggle with the many-headed monster. Juno placed the crab in the heavens where it is now a constellation and the sign of Cancer.
Short Stories of Jorge Luis Borges - The Giovanni Translations Page 59