Paknam pagoda on its “mitre-shaped hill,” and risk navigating into the uncertain and dangerous mysteries of the unknown. And he knows, too, that in the process of sharing the secrets of a single soul one may come to know the scope of a greater, cosmic consciousness. It is written, after all, that when God created Adam He made him as a huge golem, stretching across the ends of the world, and while, in this as yet unanimated state, God showed him all the generations of mankind that were to come. Indeed, as Erich Neumann has put it in hisThe Origins and History of Consciousness, “the original question about the origin of the world is at the same time the question about the origin of man, the origin of the consciousness and of the ego” (Neumann, 7).

Small wonder, then, that the concept of the golem has fascinated so many writers in European literature, including Mary Shelley, Gustav Meyrink, Achim von Arnim, E. T. A. Hoffman, and A. von Chamisso, among others, and there is much folklore to draw on from biblical and aggadic stories. In one tale, for example, Abraham and his teacher Shem are said to have pored over the Book of Formation and, after three years, were able to create a world. In another, Rabbi Abraham ibn Ezra is said to have created a man, after which he commanded it, “Go back!” and it returned to what it had been before (Berdichevsky, 752). We are told, too, of a rabbi named Rava who created a man and sent him to a Rabbi Zera, who, it is said, recognized it as a golem when it was unable to speak and commanded it to turn back to its dust. Still another account of a golem tells us that “Rav Hanina and Rav Oshaya busied themselves on the eve of every Sabbath with the Book of Creation. …” After three years of study “they made a calf one-third the natural size and ate it” (Scholem, 166). Yet another tells of Ben Sira, who, with his father Jeremiah, created a man on whose forehead they wrote emeth, the Hebrew word for truth; they afterward destroyed it by reversing the combinations of letters by which he was created and erasing the first letter, aleph, from emeth so that it read meth, or he is dead (179). And one sage named Ibn Gabirol even created a woman golem to serve him—although for chaste purposes, for we're told, “When he was denounced to the authorities, he showed them that she was not a full or complete creature. And he restored her to the [hinges] and rounds of wood of which she had been constructed” (Berdichevsky, 752; Scholem, 199). A story closer to our time tells of a French sage named Rabbi Samuel who created, at the time of the Crusades, a golem that served him both as a servant and bodyguard (Ausubel, 604). And, in a well-known version recounted by J. Grimm, a golem grew so tall that the rabbi who created him had to trick him into leaning over so that he could erase the aleph—a stratagem which worked to his disadvantage, as the crumbling golem fell on top of him and crushed him. That version may well have been based on the story of the famous Polish golem of Chelm created by a Rabbi Elijah, who imbued his creation with life by inscribing on its forehead the tetragrammaton. That golem, too, grew to tremendous size, and the Rabbi, terrified of both its sheer bulk as well as its destructive temperament, managed to turn it to dust by erasing the Divine Name from its forehead (604).

But the most famous golem in folklore, one which incorporates many facets of the earlier stories and which is perhaps most relevant to Conrad's Leggatt, is the one created by the renowned Rabbi Yehudah Loew of Prague, known also as the Maharal. In that version, the Jews of Prague are about to be accused by a priest named Thaddeus of the blood-libel—the charge that they used the blood of Christian children for ritual purposes. The Maharal, with two adepts, creates a golem in order to protect the Jewish community as well as to root out the perpetrators of this insidious slander. This golem is large, but otherwise looks human, and is called Joseph. It has no voice—a common flaw of the golem, attributed, some say, to an inherent flaw of the less than divine creator. It follows orders with an almost robotic mindlessness, so that he who controls it must maintain absolute command: for example, when the rabbi's wife tells it to fetch water from the well and then forgets about him, she returns home to find the house filled with water, and the golem returning with another two buckets. As it patrols the ghetto, the golem is capable of becoming invisible by means of an amulet the Maharal has given it, acquiring a ubiquitous and ferocious presence that inspires fear and dread on the part of the enemies of the Jews, while some in the Jewish community wonder if the golem is not really a ghostly double of the rabbi himself (Bloch, 76). When its mission is done—when it has unearthed the plot of Thaddeus and saved the Prague Jews from annihilation, the golem is returned via another ritual to the elements from which it sprang.

Already we can see emerging from the pattern of this story parallels to the tale of the captain and Leggatt, not least of which is the perception of the golem as the Maharal's doppelgänger. The traditional reading of “The Secret Sharer” has of course focused on Leggatt as a symbolic manifestation of a dark aspect of the narrator, what Guerard calls the “embodiment of a more instinctive, more primitive, less rational self” (Guerard, 11). The insecure captain, on his first command, feels somewhat inadequate to the task and must find within himself the strength to command a crew that seems to share those doubts. As he admits, “[W]hat I felt most was my being a stranger to the ship; and, if all the truth must be told, I was somewhat of a stranger to myself” (“The Secret Sharer,” TLS, 93). The emergence of Leggatt from the depths of the sea, a symbol perhaps of the unconscious, marks his encounter with what he perceives to be an eerie, mirror image of his own self. The captain's dilemma brings out the universal predicament of the civilized man who has lost touch with, or perhaps we should say has repressed, the darker, primordial aspect of his character. He shuns it, is revulsed by it, much as the eminently accountable chief mate is surprised and somewhat repulsed by the scorpion he finds drowned in his inkwell. Leggatt, too, is a figure of blackness, a “legate” of the captain's own dark underworld. Despite the luminescent glow in which he is first seen, he is a creature of darkness, as he admits himself when he is about to leave: “As I came at night, so shall I go” (132). We recall that he commits his crime in a fit of rage so overwhelming that his victim is left “black in the face” (102). And despite the fact that Leggatt insists he is no “murdering brute” (106), that he is, after all, a parson's son, the captain is held in thrall by the confidence, strength, and poise of this man who seems born to lead. If the literary double functions, as R. Tymms defines it, as a representative of some moral, spiritual, or psychological aspect of the protagonist's character (Tymms, 16), certainly Leggatt represents to the captain a much-looked-for and as yet untapped inner strength. He is, indeed, what Jung calls the “‘shadow archetype’ … of the dangerous aspect of the unrecognized dark half of the personality.” He is the “‘magic demon’ with mysterious powers.” And, Jung adds, “A good example [of this ‘magic demon’] is G. Meyrink's Golem” (Jung, Two Essays …, 96).

The Prague golem of the Maharal, too, interestingly enough, has a like function. His role as guardian of the ghetto also emphasizes a primordial, even brutal side that must be drawn upon by the Maharal to safeguard the Prague Jews. It is an element that has, as in the captain's case, been repressed, or subsumed, by the powerless Jewish community, and the golem seems to express one aspect of its communal soul that has not dared to reveal itself—a role somewhat similar, perhaps, to that of James Wait in The Nigger of the “Narcissus,” who Conrad has said serves as “the centre of the ship's collective psychology” (NN, [The Nigger of the “Narcissus”], ix). Indeed, much cabalistic discussion has focused on the nature of the golem's soul. The thirteenth-century work of Moses de Leon, The Zohar, perhaps the most important cabalistic work, asserts that the soul itself consists of three aspects: nefesh, which controls the most basic biological functions; ruach, which governs our moral sense and defines what is right and wrong; and neshamah, which is the highest element and binds the spiritual communicant with his Maker (The Zohar, II, 281). Meir ibn Gabbai maintained that a golem possessed only nefesh, the animalistic aspect of the soul, while Moses Cordovero insisted that it possessed none of the three, but rather, a vital spirit called hiyyuth, which exists on a higher level (Scholem, 194-5). Whatever its name, the soul of the golem is recognized to be a force which, as in “The Secret Sharer,” emerges at a time of intense crisis, a force which must be drawn upon to resolve that crisis by going beyond the accepted laws of the land. The golem, a creature which can be destroyed without its creator being held accountable by religious law for its murder, can, by the same reasoning, exact its own vengeance with impunity.

In that sense, we see still another interesting parallel between the golem and Conrad's Leggatt: both, as outlaws as well as saviors, follow imperatives outside the accepted moral order in order to accomplish a greater good. Indeed, Leggatt's own dual role is underscored by the fact that, as L. H. Leiter and P. Bidwell have discussed, he is the chief mate of the Sephora, a name which is a variant of the Hebrew Tzipporah, the wife of Moses, who, as we know, was forced to flee Egypt after murdering a cruel overseer. The dual role is consistent with the double motif, where, as R. Jackson has pointed out, “the narrative center, often the protagonist himself, is divided into two sides, one subverting and one upholding the dominant social order” (Jackson, 45). The distinction isn't so clear in “The Secret Sharer,” of course: Leggatt, the fugitive from justice, has killed his shipmate, but that action saves the ship (or so he says); while the captain, who is supposed to impose justice, actually obstructs it by hiding Leggatt from the pursuing captain of the Sephora, and it is understandable that he has been “frequently described as an apostate from maritime law” (Davis, 67). Indeed D. Curley has insisted that Leggatt “represents the higher nature of the captain, his ideal self in fact, and that everything in the story points in that direction” (Curley, 179); while M. Murphy is just as insistent that nothing is certain in the story, and that the captain must be viewed as an unreliable narrator. And it seems inevitable that the character of the charismatic murderer Leggatt will continue to invite contradictory interpretations.

As cloudy as the answers seem in Conrad's story, neither are the moral imperatives so clear in various versions of the golem legend. For example, in the Yiddish playwright H. Leivick's verse-drama The Golem, we are led to understand that the root of the golem's own violent nature is derived from the Maharal's own rage against those who are seeking to bring harm to his people, a primordial fury which is transferred to—or perhaps simply mirrored by—the golem. Although golems traditionally are unable to speak, Leivick's golem can, and, in the process of creation the incipient form looms over the Maharal and tells him, “The whole night through you kneaded me; / With coldness and cruelty you shaped me” (Leivick, 124). By the end of the play, the golem, revulsed by his recognition of the violence within him, runs amok and murders two members of the synagogue—the very congregation he was created to protect. In both Conrad's and Leivick's stories, the protagonist works outside of the law in order to follow what is considered to be a higher moral imperative, even if it may lead to disaster. And in both cases, the “appointed task” to be “carried out, far from all human eyes,” with only the elements for “spectators and for judges,” effects a balance of the scales: between internal and external systems of justice, as well as between two opposing elements of the psyche.

That inner division is one that the captain recognizes, of course, from the start of his story. Insecure in his new command, he looks for a source of strength from far below and, as we know, finds it. As Guerard has noted, when the captain allows—even if unintentionally—the ladder to remain overboard, he “has in a sense summoned Leggatt, who later remarks that ‘it was as if you had expected me’” (Guerard, 22). The captain has, in his own way, ritualistically invoked Leggatt to arise, just as the mystical communicant does with the golem; and it seems fitting that, in the case of both Leggatt and the golem, they should first appear in an incomplete, inchoate state. The captain tells us, “With a gasp I saw revealed to my stare a pair of feet, the long legs, a broad livid back immersed right up to the neck in a greenish cadaverous glow. One hand, awash, clutched the bottom rung of the ladder. He was complete but for the head” (“The Secret Sharer,” TLS, 97). Appropriately, that picture is completed by the captain himself, who has just “put my head over the rail” (97) so that, seen from the water, it might well be perceived as the disembodied head of the corpse, as if sense and sensibility were each regarding the other. Only when the captain's cigar falls into the sea with a hiss “quite audible in the absolute stillness of all things under heaven” (98), when fire and water give voice to a serpentine, uroboric susurrus, does the figure of Leggatt emerge completely and the story of the mirror-doubles begin. It is, in its own way, a reenactment of the cabalistic ritual through which the mystic, with his two communicants, invokes the golem, even as the original Creator had enclosed the tripartite souls of nefesh, ruach, and neshamah, represented by fire, water, and air, in its original vessel of earth.

And indeed, once Leggatt is seen in his entirety, he displays the most salient characteristic of the golem—voicelessness, remaining, as the captain describes him, “mute as a fish” (98). Just why the golem is, in most versions of the story, unable to speak is not entirely clear. One explanation is, as we have said, that this flaw stems from the imperfection of its mortal creator. For example, in the incident related above, where Rabbi Zera recognized Rava's golem for what it was because of its muteness, we are told, “But if not for his sins, he would have answered.” Even more appropriate for the purpose of this discussion is Bahya ben Asher's opinion that Rava's golem was mute because it had no rational soul, which is the source of speech. Another opinion states that it is possible to give a golem the power to speak, but not to procreate or reason, because, again, as one medieval cabalist writes, “this is beyond the power of any created being and rests with God alone” (Scholem, 193-4). In all cases, the golem's muteness, or inability to shape language, or to reason, is connected with his role as a creature from the depths who arises from the irrational, or perhaps we should say prerational, sphere of existence. So it is with the golem of Prague: formed of earth blown across water in the predawn light, sent forth into the ghetto in the dead of night, sometimes with Yehudah Loew's amulet of invisibility, the golem, believed by many to be the ghost of the Maharal stalking the streets, embodies within his silence the unseen elemental forces that sleep within all of us.

The same pattern exists in the evolving figure of the now recapitated Leggatt, who has emerged, as the captain puts it, “as if he had risen from the bottom of the sea.” He tells us, “As he hung by the side-ladder, like a resting swimmer, the sea-lightning played about his limbs at every stir; and he appeared in it ghastly, silvery, fish-like.” And, the captain adds, if we may repeat the image, “He remained as mute as a fish, too.” For the remainder of his stay on ship, Leggatt will exist on an almost subliminal level. He will be clothed in the captain's own “sleeping-suit”—in fact, he even remarks he will “freeze on to it” until the Day of Judgement; he will remain, of course, in the captain's sleeping quarters, which are shaped, appropriately enough, like the capital letter “L,” Leggatt's own initial, as if he were the primary key to the captain's identity; he will continue to speak only in whispers so low that the captain, as he puts it, has “to strain my hearing, near as we were to each other, shoulder touching shoulder almost” (“The Secret Sharer,” TLS, 106); and he will obey the captain who has concocted what he calls his “scheme for keeping my second self invisible” (115). Indeed, Conrad seems constantly to underscore the point that, as C. B. Cox has put it, Leggatt “inhabits an area of consciousness that borders on dreams” (quoted in Abdoo, 71).

When his “appointed task” is done, Leggatt, like the golem, must return to the elements from which he has been summoned. It seems fitting that Leggatt should be exiled to a land described at one point as the “gate of Erebus,” as if it led to the very bowels of the earth. The captain gives him half his hoard of gold—three sovereigns—perhaps a mythical allusion to the Stygian fare, perhaps a token of their shared selves. More telling, in the utter blackness of the cabin the captain, in a moment of empathy and impulse, rams his hat onto his resisting “other self.” The captain tells us that he does so to provide Leggatt protection from the sun, but the action is rich in symbolic suggestion. As Guerard has noted, “We know that in Jungian psychology a hat, in dreams, represents the personality, which can be transferred symbolically to another” (Guerard, 25). And certainly we see, in the dramatic closing scene, a newfound strength and decisiveness on the part of the captain that Leggatt seems to have imparted to him. He brings his ship precariously close to land, despite the objections of his crew. With an action strikingly parallel to the one Leggatt described on the Sephora, he shakes his “thunder-struck” mate—although with a control Leggatt was incapable of—and forces him to perform the proper maneuvers. And of course, as Leggatt slips back into the depths from which he came, the captain notes the hat floating in the water and, judging its direction, is able to order the helm shift that saves the ship. It seems that Leggatt has indeed shown the captain the right way to strike out toward his own destiny.

In the sense, then, that Leggatt gives the captain the capability to take on risks that the ironically named Captain Archbold of the Sephora is unable to do, he performs much the same role as the Golem, as he is called, in G. Meyrink's novel, whose narrator is told by a cabalist, “Hear and understand. The man who sought you out, and whom you call the Golem, signifies the awakening soul through the innermost life of the spirit. Each thing that earth contains is nothing more than an everlasting symbol clothed in dust. … Nothing that takes shape unto itself but was once a spirit” (Meyrink, 71-2). That golem story in fact shows some striking parallels with Conrad's, not least of which is the bizarre plot device where the narrator loses his identity when he dons the hat, and assumes the persona, of a man named Athanasius Pernath. Even more interesting for the purposes of our comparison is a scene where the narrator meets a man named Amadeus Laponder, jailed for murder and rape, whom we recognize as the Golem of the story. The narrator tells Laponder that he has in a phantasmagoric vision seen a “headless apparition” which offered him a handful of red and black seed pods, colors Meyrink associates with death. It is a dire gift, a gift which holds within it the potential for destruction, a gift which, like the captain's coins in Conrad's story, implies the acceptance of a shared existence. Taking them would be an acceptance of death; denying them, an affirmation of life—on certain terms. The narrator chooses a third alternative: he knocks them out of the apparition's hand, thereby creating yet another alternative by which the individual asserts his own control over his own destiny. Strangely enough, the Golem reveals that he had had the same vision but, in contrast, had accepted the offer, assuring his own fate as a creature of violence. He tells the narrator, “Never would I have believed that a third way could have been found” (253). In short, although the Golem has sought out the narrator, as the cabalist Hillel explains, to awaken him, it is the narrator who has, with predictable irony, effected that realization within the golem. Similarly, although Leggatt appears to unleash the forces within the captain's shadow-self, it is the captain who enables him, through his daring maneuver, to become a “free man, a proud swimmer striking out for a new destiny” (“The Secret Sharer,” TLS, 280).

Of course, in Meyrink's story, the narrator redeems himself by denying the Golem, and by extension, his primordial nature; in Conrad's, the narrator accepts his other self. But in the end, we see that Leggatt and the golem in Jewish folklore occupy strikingly similar places in the cosmogony of our shared consciousness. It doesn't matter if either or any of the authors of the golem stories were aware of the common ground they shared. Indeed Jung himself said once of Meyrink's archetypes, “Meyrink does not know anything of my theories. He deals with it in an entirely literary fashion one could say, with all the advantages and disadvantages of that method, yet the figures are perfectly recognizable” (Jung, Dream Analysis …, 501). And so they are to us too, Leggatt and the golem: creations from a matrix of violent elemental forces, sharers of the darkest mysteries of the soul, they wander with branded foreheads within the deepest recesses of our world, waiting for the incantation that will summon our most secret strengths.

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