The Golem is Pernath’s doppelganger and it manifests itself in a room with no doors – that is, in an area of the mind which is inaccessible to normal consciousness. The Golem is before all else an exploration of the problem of identity, a ‘painful quest for that eternal stone that in some mysterious fashion lurks in the dim recesses of … memory in the guise of a lump of fat’.

Exploration of consciousness … deep currents of European thought! It is not compulsory to be so serious about it all. The Golem is also the glittering farrago of a master of charlatanry in which all the props of melodrama are skillfully deployed. Besides the artificial monster or doppelganger, we have the mysterious murder, the one woman who is all women – the Eternal Woman –, the puppets, the hermaphrodite, the tarot cards, revenge for love, the secret of criminals and much else besides. The plotting is all wild and preposterous. Some of the characters wear rags, others wear shiny opera hats and white gloves but they all – Pernath the amnesiac hero, Jaromir the deaf mute silhouette artist, Wassertrum the pawnbroker, Zwakh the marrionetteer, Rosina the prostitute, Hillel the Cabalist, Charousek the poor student, Habal Garmin ‘Breath of Bones’ – they all are driven through dark and narrow streets of Prague like playing cards before the wind.

Still it is necessary to insist that however weird or supernatural the events of this novel may seem, the novelist has simply taken his lived experience and transformed it into art. At the beginning of 1891 we find that Meyrink was a bank manager in Prague; his interests boating, flirtations and social climbing. Before the end of the year he has suffered a nervous breakdown, attempted suicide and been saved from further attempts by the providential appearance of an occultist pamphlet under his door. The flirtation with suicide appears in this novel. In 1891 also Meyrink becomes a founder member of the Theosophical Order of the Blue Star. The years of esoteric research had begun. He became a disciple of Bo Yin Ra (a German humbug who taught bogus oriental wisdom), corresponded with Annie Besant and had a chilly encounter with Rudolf Steiner. He exposed fraudulent mediums. He made textual and practical researches into alchemy. Later under the influence of sixteenth century Paracelsean ideas about the ‘Filthy Dispensary’ he was to become convinced that the key to the Philosopher’s Stone was to be found in the excrement that flowed through the sewers of Prague.

Meyrink studied the Cabala of course, but also Buddhist and Hindu philosophy, and the fruits of those studies are to be found in The Golem. He experimented with hashish, yoga, sleep deprivation, fasting and breathing rituals. He took to drinking gum arabic twice a day in the hope of inducing visions. He had visions. All his novels and short stories were based on visionary experiences. It was probably in 1901 that he had his first great visionary experience. At Moldau one winter’s night he was sitting with his back to a church clock tower when he saw that same clock tower in perfect but magnified detail with its clock face floating suspended before him in the sky. It was at this moment he reports that he passed from thinking in words to thinking in pictures and he became a writer. A little later, in a T.B. sanatorium in Dresden, he wrote his first story, ‘The Burning Soldier’. It was published in the famous satirical periodical Simplicissimus.

The following year he became involved in a mysterious sequence of scandals. While still married to his first wife, his affection for Philomena Bernt, who finally became his second wife in 1905, drew him into a series of duels with the officer corps of one of Prague’s smart regiments. Then there was scandal at the bank. Meyrink was rumoured to be relying on advice from the spirit world to direct the bank’s affairs. There was also talk of money having been misappropriated. He was thrown into prison and, perhaps as a result of rough treatment was temporarily paralysed.