Demons, Dybbuks, Ghosts, & Golems
The sinister power of life-force gone awry.
By Jay Michaelson
What is the soul? Look for it, and it can't be seen; define
it, and it eludes description. And yet, for the ancients, the idea that life
could exist without a soul was unimaginable. However, the Talmudic and kabbalistic
rabbis did not make a strict distinction between body and soul, either. Unlike,
for example, Plato, most Jewish thinkers had a notion of life-energy that was
quasi-materialistic. The spiritual world and the material world were interwoven,
and actions in one could directly affect the other--for better or for worse.
The Power of Creation
The most important process in the material world, for most
of the Kabbalah, is that of creation itself. This, after all, is what God does:
creates the world and bring it into being. And it is what humans, in their
deepest imitation of God, do as well. Sexuality, reproduction, differentiation,
and the bringing forth of life were considered great cosmic mysteries and awesome powers bestowed upon human
beings. Spiritual production, too, was important to the Kabbalists: a person's
deeds create worlds, order the cosmic array, and participate in the divine
process of destruction and repair.
That's when all goes right, of course. But what about when
the life-energies are misappropriated? What happens when something goes wrong?
The mythic structure of the Kabbalah provided many colorful
answers to that question: demons and dybbuks, golems, and ghosts are all the results of
misspent life energy. But the Kabbalah does not develop its ideas out of
nowhere; they are part of a long history of Jewish speculation about shedim (demons, also a word used to
refer to foreign gods) and demonic personalities such as Lilith.
As compared with other ancient Near Eastern texts, in which
demons play a central role, the Bible is nearly silent about the existence of
supernatural beings. But not the Talmud. The Talmud has a rich, though vague,
demonology. Houses of study are described as being filled with demons when
sexual energy is not properly channeled. Great rabbis are able to perceive
demons sitting on the right and left hands of every person. They are able to
harness the divine creative energies to create animals which can then be
consumed for food. And, in the Talmudic world, spirits are everywhere: they
haunt dark places, homes, even the crumbs left on the dinner table. For
example, consider the omnipresence and omnimalevolence of demons described in the
Talmud in Berakhot 6a:
"It has been taught: Abba Benjamin says, If the eye had
the power to see them, no creature could endure the demons. Abaye says: They
are more numerous than we are and they surround us like the ridge around a
field. R. Huna says: Every one among us has a thousand on his left hand and ten
thousand on his right hand. Raba says: The crushing of the crowd in the Kallah [yearly public] lectures comes from them. Fatigue in the knees
comes from them. The wearing out of the clothes of the scholars is due to their
rubbing against them. The bruising of the feet comes from them."
Rarely does the Talmudic literature go into detail about
exactly how demons and magical creatures come into being, or whether they are
really independent beings "out there," or merely psychological
realities. If the latter, of course, then we today can perhaps understand this
foreign-sounding discourse--after all, who among us has not been plagued by
"demons" in their work or sexual life? As in the source above,
"demons" (mazzikim, a word
which might be better translated "harmful beings") could be seen as
anything that causes decay, pain, and the depletion of life-energy.
But there's reason to think that the text in Berakhot is not
referring to metaphorical demons, as it goes on to say, "If one wants to
discover them, let him take sifted ashes and sprinkle around his bed, and in
the morning he will see something like the footprints of a cock."
Unlike the Talmud, kabbalistic demonology is more detailed. Some
demons are formed whenever a man improperly spills his seed--a sin considered
so heinous by the Kabbalah because it subverts the creative process. Other
demons are, as in the Christian myth, rebellious angels, or in the case of
Lilith, primordial humans who disobeyed the divine plan. In all cases, they are
instances of life-energy gone awry. In the proper functioning of the cosmos,
energy flows like a cycle: down from heaven, then back up in the form of proper
ritual action. But when the energy is misappropriated, as in masturbation or
rebellion, its intense power falls into the realm of shadow.
The mythic narratives of the Kabbalah may be difficult for
us to understand today, but not if we situate them within the deep concerns--particularly
those related to conception and childbirth--of the kabbalists and ordinary Jews
who lived in a time of great uncertainty. Just as bearing children was central
to one's identity, it was also rife with peril. Miscarriage, infant mortality,
illness, and birth defects were all far more common in the medieval world than
they are today. Bearing children was awesome and terrifying.
As, of course, was death. If we are all possessed of
life-energy, then what happens to that energy when we die? Ideally, it returns
to its Source--or, in some Kabbalistic texts, it transmigrates
to a new incarnation in the process of gilgul,
the wheel of death and rebirth. In this way, none of the vital life energy is
lost; it is all, as it were, recycled, and a soul's work left unfinished in one
life may be completed in a subsequent one. Moreover, since there is a finite
number of "root-souls" that continue incarnating, some Kabbalists
believed they could identify which departed souls shared a "root"
with the mystic. For these Kabbalists, death was not the end of life; it was an
interruption, or a change of phase, in the soul's pilgrimage.
The Dybbuk
But sometimes the process goes wrong. In such cases, a
variety of ills may befall the soul. The most well-known of these is the
phenomenon of the dybbuk, or
possession, when one soul "sticks" onto another. Possession by a dybbukcan happen for a number of reasons. Perhaps the departed soul is
sinister and the living person innocent. Or, conversely, the departed soul may
have been saintly, but wronged by the living; in this case, possession by a dybbukis essentially punishment (or revenge) for an improper act. Or,
apparently, possession may happen almost at random.
The most popular dybbukin Jewish cultural history is that of
S. Ansky's well-known play, The Dybbuk
(1920), which describes how the soul of a betrayed man comes back to haunt the
body of his betrothed.
The Ibbur
There are other "possession" possibilities as well.
A soul may visit a person during sleep, bringing messages from the beyond or
prophecies about the future, or it may haunt a place, as in popular ghost
stories. Sometimes the soul of a departed righteous person may
"impregnate" the soul of a living person, the process described by
Lurianic Kabbalah as ibbur--though
unlike the dybbuk, ibburis usually positive, not negative. Sometimes
a righteous soul undergoes ibburso it can complete a task or perform a mitzvah.
Sometimes it does so for the benefit of the "host" soul. Really, ibburis no different from possession by a dybbuk--but
practically speaking, they are polar opposites, as the former is benign and the
other sinister.
In all of these cases, the ordinary processes of life-energy
are being diverted, for either positive or negative reasons. And life energy,
above all, is powerful. When put to proper ends, the transmission of life
energy, by means of sex or supernatural activity, is the godly act of
maintaining the cosmic flow. But anything that powerful can also create great
evil.
The Golem
Perhaps the most well-known example of this phenomenon, as
transmuted by a variety of European sources, is that of the golem, the artificial anthropoid
animated by magic. The Talmud relates a tale of rabbis who grew hungry while on
a journey--so they created a calf out of earth and ate it for dinner. The
Kabbalists determined that the rabbis did this magical act by means of
permuting language, primarily utilizing the formulas set forth in the Sefer Yetzirah, or Book of Creation. Just
as God speaks and creates, in the Genesis story, so too can the mystic. (The
word Abracadabra, incidentally, derives from avra k'davra, Aramaic for "I create as I speak.") Thus,
under the rarest of circumstances, a human being may imbue lifeless matter with
that intangible, but essential spark of life: the soul.
The Kabbalists saw the creation of a golemas a kind of
alchemical task, the accomplishment of which proved the adept's skill and
knowledge of Kabbalah. In popular legend, however, the golem became a kind of folk hero. Tales of mystical rabbis
creating life from dust abounded, particularly in the Early Modern period, and
inspired such tales as Frankenstein and
"The Sorcerer's Apprentice."
Sometimes the golem saves the Jewish community from persecution or
death, enacting the kind of heroism or revenge unavailable to powerless Jews. Often,
however, Jewish folktales about the golem tell what happens when things go awry--when
the power of life-force goes astray, often with tragic results.
The classic narrative of the Golem tells of how Rabbi Judah
Loew of Prague (known as the Maharal; 1525-1609) created a golem to defend the
Jewish community from antisemitic attacks. But eventually, the golem grows
fearsome and violent, and Rabbi Loew is forced to destroy it. (Legend tells
that the golem remains in the attic of the Altneushul in Prague, ready to be
reactivated if needed; this legend reappeared recently in Michael Chabon's The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier &
Clay). Likewise in Paul Wegener's expressionist film The Golem (1920), the golem is a brutish creature whose powers are
all-too-easily turned to destructive ends.
This is, of course, a perfect encapsulation of the same
anxiety that underlies so much of the mystical speculation about demons, dybbuks, ghosts, and golems: the
power of life is so strong, that it brings both promise and terror.
Jay Michaelson is the
author of God in Your Body: Kabbalah, Mindfulness, and Embodied Spiritual
Practice.
