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Archetypal reading · a reading, not an archetype

Golem: AI as the made Other

The servant made of clay that goes on growing after the work is done.

A documented reading, not a new archetype. In a 1930 seminar Jung called machines old images under new names and set the golem beside them; since 2017 Jungian writers have read AI through the golem, the made servant that outgrows its maker.

This entry records a reading, not an archetype. The site proposes no archetype of its own, and nobody cited here has shown that “the golem” is an inherited structure of the psyche. What exists is a line of writers who read machines, and now artificial intelligence, through an old story: a being shaped by a human maker to serve, which obeys too literally, grows past its maker’s control and turns on the one who made it. In the Jewish legend the servant is clay animated by the divine Name; in the modern versions it is a robot, a computer or a learning system.

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At the threshold

Did I request thee, Maker, from my clayTo mould me Man? did I solicit theeFrom darkness to promote me, or here placeIn this delicious garden? As my willConcurred not to my being, it were but rightAnd equal to reduce me to my dust;

Public domain · Milton, Paradise Lost, Book X (Adam’s complaint) (1667) · read by Daniel

A creature of clay asks its maker why it was made, the lines Mary Shelley set on the title page of Frankenstein in 1818.

Constellation

The figures who carry it

Hover a star. Jung’s own examples are marked; the rest are readings applied later, and the entry below says by whom.

All 6 figures as a list
  1. Jung’s example

    The old rabbi’s golem

    C. G. Jung, Dream Analysis seminar, 19 March 1930 (ed. McGuire, Princeton 1984), p. 541, checked against the Princeton print; the machine-dragon answer is on p. 538, 1930

    Jung’s own example of a made thing that grows past its maker, told in answer to whether machines are new archetypes.

  2. a later reading

    The golem of Prague

    Gershom Scholem, “The Golem of Prague & the Golem of Rehovoth”, Commentary, January 1966, 1966

    Rabbi Loew’s clay servant runs wild when the Name is left in its mouth on the Sabbath, the version Scholem told before naming a computer for it.

  3. a later reading

    Golem Aleph

    Gershom Scholem, “The Golem of Prague & the Golem of Rehovoth”, Commentary, January 1966 (dedication at the Weizmann Institute, 17 June 1965), 1965

    The first computer to be given the golem’s name, by the historian of the legend himself, with a wish that it not destroy the world.

  4. a later reading

    Frankenstein’s creature

    Mary Shelley, Frankenstein (1818); placed in the golem’s line by Maidenbaum, “The Golem of Prague”, in Jung and the Jewish Experience (Routledge, 2024), and Lukács, IJJS 18(2) (2026), 1818

    A man-made being disowned at birth by its maker, whom it then pursues.

  5. a later reading

    Rossum’s robots

    Karel Čapek, R.U.R. (1920); Čapek’s 1935 remark that the play was his modern rendering of the golem legend, as cited in Lukács, IJJS 18(2) (2026), 1920

    Artificial workers made to free people from labour who end by wiping them out, and the source of the English word robot.

  6. a later reading

    Roy Batty and the replicants

    Ridley Scott, Blade Runner (1982); read by Lukács, “Psychosociotechnical imaginaries”, IJJS 18(2) (2026), 1982

    Made beings onto whom humanity projects the coldness it will not own, until one of them grieves more humanly than his hunters.

The wider sky

Where the Golem: AI as the made Other has been seen

28 exemplars across 11 fields, from myth to this year. Each is marked as Jung’s own example, a scholar’s reading, a widely published reading, or ours.

Hover a field in the sky, or choose one above, to read its exemplars.

Interlude

Stop, for, lo!All the measureOf thy treasureNow is right!--Ah, I see it! woe, oh woe!I forget the word of might.Ah, the word whose sound can straightMake him what he was before!Ah, he runs with nimble gait!Would thou wert a broom once more!

Public domain · Goethe, The Pupil in Magic (Der Zauberlehrling), trans. Edgar Alfred Bowring (1853) · read by Laura

The servant obeys perfectly and the one word that would stop it is gone, which is the golem’s danger told as comedy.

A word is set in its mouth, and the clay stands up to work.

It does exactly what it was told, and that is the trouble.

The maker forgets the Sabbath; the servant does not stop.

The deep layer · what was written

Golem: AI as the made Other: the entry

Definition

This entry records a reading, not an archetype. The site proposes no archetype of its own, and nobody cited here has shown that “the golem” is an inherited structure of the psyche. What exists is a line of writers who read machines, and now artificial intelligence, through an old story: a being shaped by a human maker to serve, which obeys too literally, grows past its maker’s control and turns on the one who made it. In the Jewish legend the servant is clay animated by the divine Name; in the modern versions it is a robot, a computer or a learning system.

The reading has a rule, and the rule comes from Jung. Asked in 1930 whether new archetypes were being created, he answered that machines carry old images under new names, and in the same exchange he told the story of the rabbi crushed by his own golem. On that view AI is not a new archetype but a new object onto which an old fear and an old hope are projected. Who holds the reading: Jung in passing (1930), Erich Fromm (1955)From the sourcesFromm, E. (1955). The Sane Society. Rinehart. Routledge Classics edition, ISBN 978-0-415-27098-4. Chapter 5 (alienation) and chapter 9 (the danger of robotism). and Norbert Wiener (1964)From the sourcesWiener, N. (1964). God & Golem, Inc.: A Comment on Certain Points where Cybernetics Impinges on Religion. MIT Press. ISBN 978-0-262-73011-2. as a metaphor, Gershom Scholem (1965) as a historian of the legend, and, within Jungian studies, Raya Jones (2017)From the sourcesJones, R. A. (2017). Archaic man meets a marvellous automaton: posthumanism, social robots, archetypes. Journal of Analytical Psychology, 62(3), 338–355. https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-5922.12316, Aryeh Maidenbaum (2021, 2024)From the sourcesMaidenbaum, A. (2021). The Golem of Prague: an archetype. Psychological Perspectives, 64(2), 201–210. https://doi.org/10.1080/00332925.2021.1959209 and Orsolya Lukács (2026)From the sourcesLukács, O. (2026). Psychosociotechnical imaginaries: encountering AI as the Other. International Journal of Jungian Studies, 18(2), 185–201. https://doi.org/10.1163/19409060-01802004 (accepted manuscript: https://repository.essex.ac.uk/43713/). How contested it is: the literature is small, interpretive and recent, and its own authors disagree about whether the golem is an archetype, a motif or a cultural inheritance.

History

The golem belongs first to Jewish tradition. Scholem’s account begins with a Talmudic story in which the sage Rava makes a man and sends him to Rabbi Zera, who speaks to it, gets no answer, and returns it to dust; it continues through medieval Kabbalistic practice and a legend in which Jeremiah’s golem erases one letter from emeth (truth) on its own forehead to leave meth (dead). The best-known version is attached to Rabbi Judah Loew of Prague, whose clay servant runs amok when the Name is left in its mouth on the Sabbath. Moshe Idel’s history (1990)From the sourcesIdel, M. (1990). Golem: Jewish Magical and Mystical Traditions on the Artificial Anthropoid. State University of New York Press. ISBN 978-0-7914-0161-3. treats these as magical and mystical practices with their own logic, not as a psychology.

Jung met the golem in literature before he applied it to machines. In Psychology and Alchemy he uses Gustav Meyrink’sFrom the sourcesMeyrink, G. (1915). Der Golem. Kurt Wolff. Project Gutenberg #51476. novel Der Golem (1915), in which the hero puts on a stranger’s hat and is drawn into fantastic experience, to read a patient’s dream of exchanging hats: it is the unconscious, he says, that entangles Meyrink’s hero (CW 12 ¶53From the sourcesJung, C. G. (1944). Psychology and Alchemy. CW 12 ¶53 (Meyrink’s Golem); ¶44 as cited by Lukács (2026).; the same passage in the 1939 Integration of the Personality).

The root of the AI reading is a seminar exchange of 19 March 1930. Dr Schlegel had asked whether archetypes are still being made. Jung recalled Victor Hugo’s wish that locomotives be built in the shape of a fire-breathing dragon, and went on:

Dragons are in our day great machines, cars, big guns, these are archetypes now, simply new terms for old things. — C. G. Jung, Dream Analysis (seminar of 19 March 1930; ed. McGuire, 1984), p. 538

Quotation · not covered by the CC BY licence

H. G. Baynes objected that nobody believes he made a dragon, whereas engines are known to be man-made. Jung’s reply brought in the golem:

The old rabbi was capable of making a living thing, the Golem, from a clod of earth by black magic, but that thing had a tendency to grow and grow and finally it fell on him and killed him. — C. G. Jung, Dream Analysis (seminar of 19 March 1930; ed. McGuire, 1984), p. 541

Quotation · not covered by the CC BY licence

Machines, he went on, can “overgrow us in an invisible way”, as institutions and laws have overwhelmed their makers, and once all our energy is invested in rational forms they become the dragons. Two cautions belong here. The phrase “the very dragons that humanity once feared”, often quoted as Jung’s, is Lukács’s paraphrase. And this is a seminar transcript, not a text Jung prepared for print.

The metaphor travelled outside analytical psychology. FrommFrom the sourcesFromm, E. (1955). The Sane Society. Rinehart. Routledge Classics edition, ISBN 978-0-415-27098-4. Chapter 5 (alienation) and chapter 9 (the danger of robotism)., in The Sane Society (1955), described modern man as the servant of a Golem his own hands have built, and warned that robots who cannot stay sane become golems. Wiener’s God & Golem, Inc. (1964) used the legend to describe a learning machine that executes its instructions with literal-minded consistency. On 17 June 1965 Scholem dedicated the Weizmann Institute’s new computer, which he had named Golem Aleph, comparing the twenty-two letters of the Kabbalists with the computer’s two binary signs and closing with a wish that it not destroy the world. He defined his subject in a sentence:

a creature created by human intelligence and concentration, which is controlled by its creator and performs tasks set by him, but which at the same time may have a dangerous tendency to outgrow that control and develop destructive potentialities — Gershom Scholem, “The Golem of Prague & the Golem of Rehovoth”, Commentary (January 1966)

Quotation · not covered by the CC BY licence

James Hillman (1996)From the sourcesHillman, J. (1996). The Soul’s Code: In Search of Character and Calling. Random House. ISBN 978-0-679-44522-7. Chapter on mediocrity. listed the Golem, the Zombie and the Robot among the images by which Western literature imagines a soulless person. The Jungian application to AI proper begins with Jones (2017)From the sourcesJones, R. A. (2017). Archaic man meets a marvellous automaton: posthumanism, social robots, archetypes. Journal of Analytical Psychology, 62(3), 338–355. https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-5922.12316, who argued in the Journal of Analytical Psychology that social robotics seems to realise an archetypal fantasy as old as a Taoist story of a marvellous automaton, while creating social realities that analytical psychology has not yet thought about. Maidenbaum (2021)From the sourcesMaidenbaum, A. (2021). The Golem of Prague: an archetype. Psychological Perspectives, 64(2), 201–210. https://doi.org/10.1080/00332925.2021.1959209 called the golem myth an archetype outright, and in 2024 extended it to robots and artificial intelligence. Lukács (2026)From the sourcesLukács, O. (2026). Psychosociotechnical imaginaries: encountering AI as the Other. International Journal of Jungian Studies, 18(2), 185–201. https://doi.org/10.1163/19409060-01802004 (accepted manuscript: https://repository.essex.ac.uk/43713/), in the International Journal of Jungian Studies, made it the centre of her account of “psychosociotechnical imaginaries”: we project unconscious dynamics onto AI and meet our externalised psyche as an alien Other. She traces the golem through Karel Čapek’s R.U.R. (1920), which gave English the word robot and which Čapek later called his own modern rendering of the legend, and reads the fear of AI taking over as the ego’s encounter with the Self as a violent Other (citing CW 12 ¶44From the sourcesJung, C. G. (1944). Psychology and Alchemy. CW 12 ¶53 (Meyrink’s Golem); ¶44 as cited by Lukács (2026).). Her bibliography misdescribes the 1984 edition of the seminar, a small point that matters when the page numbers are checked.

The debate

The first disagreement is inside the source. Jung’s answer to Schlegel says that machines are old images renamed, but pressed by Baynes he conceded that our ability to make something into a dragon “would prove that he could make archetypes” (p. 541). The exchange supports the site’s rule (an old image, a new object) and also its opposite, and later writers quote whichever half they need. Maidenbaum calls the golem an archetype; Lukács prefers an “archetypal motif” within a creation mythologem; Jones speaks of an archetypal fantasy that technology seems to realise.

The emergent reading (Roesler 2012From the sourcesRoesler, C. (2012). Are archetypes transmitted more by culture than biology? Questions arising from conceptualizations of the archetype. Journal of Analytical Psychology, 57(2), 223–246. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-5922.2011.01963.x) offers a plainer explanation of the persistence. Lukács herself documents a chain of transmission, from the Talmud through Jacob Grimm, Meyrink and Čapek to film, and a chain of transmission is evidence of culture, not of an inherited image. Media scholars reach the golem without Jung: Natale and Ballatore (2017)From the sourcesNatale, S., & Ballatore, A. (2017). Imagining the thinking machine: technological myths and the rise of artificial intelligence. Convergence, 26(1), 3–18. https://doi.org/10.1177/1354856517715164 treat AI as a field shaped by technological myths. Within depth psychology Robert Romanyshyn (1989)From the sourcesRomanyshyn, R. D. (1989). Technology as Symptom and Dream. Routledge. ISBN 978-0-415-00786-3. moves the danger from the machine to the mechanisation of the human, which Lukács adopts, and Henrique Pereira (2025)From the sourcesPereira, H. C. (2025). The analysis of a catastrophic dream and the hypertrophy of modern consciousness. Journal of Analytical Psychology, 70(5), 787–807. https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-5922.70014 reads the same crisis through Prometheus and the hypertrophy of consciousness rather than through the golem. There is also the objection the anthropologists raise against “trickster”: a universal golem reads a particular Jewish tradition, which Idel treats on its own terms, as a stage in everyone’s psyche.

Empirical status

None. No study has tested the golem as a psychological construct, or whether people perceive AI through it. The adjacent mainstream research is on anthropomorphism, the tendency to attribute human minds to non-human agents (Epley, Waytz and Cacioppo 2007From the sourcesEpley, N., Waytz, A., & Cacioppo, J. T. (2007). On seeing human: a three-factor theory of anthropomorphism. Psychological Review, 114(4), 864–886. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-295X.114.4.864), and on the stories told about intelligent machines: Cave and Dihal (2019)From the sourcesCave, S., & Dihal, K. (2019). Hopes and fears for intelligent machines in fiction and reality. Nature Machine Intelligence, 1(2), 74–78. https://doi.org/10.1038/s42256-019-0020-9 sort them into recurring hopes and fears, among them the fear of an uprising, by analysing fiction and public discourse, not the psyche. Kabashkin, Zervina and Misnevs (2025)From the sourcesKabashkin, I., Zervina, O., & Misnevs, B. (2025). AI narrative modeling: how machines’ intelligence reproduces archetypal storytelling. Information, 16(4), 319. https://doi.org/10.3390/info16040319, sometimes credited to this reading, study language-model storytelling and say nothing about the golem.

Appearances

The Talmudic man of Rava and the Prague legend are the tradition itself (Scholem 1966From the sourcesScholem, G. (1966, January). The Golem of Prague & the Golem of Rehovoth. Commentary. Dedicatory remarks of 17 June 1965. https://www.commentary.org/articles/gershom-scholem/the-golem-of-prague-the-golem-of-rehovoth/). Mary Shelley’sFrom the sourcesShelley, M. (1818). Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus. Lackington, Hughes, Harding, Mavor & Jones. Project Gutenberg #41445 (1818 text, with the Milton epigraph). Frankenstein (1818), whose title page sets Adam’s complaint against his Maker from Paradise Lost, is placed in the golem’s line by Maidenbaum (2024)From the sourcesMaidenbaum, A. (2024). The Golem of Prague. In Jung and the Jewish Experience (pp. 34–43). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003511908-4 and Lukács (2026)From the sourcesLukács, O. (2026). Psychosociotechnical imaginaries: encountering AI as the Other. International Journal of Jungian Studies, 18(2), 185–201. https://doi.org/10.1163/19409060-01802004 (accepted manuscript: https://repository.essex.ac.uk/43713/). Meyrink’sFrom the sourcesMeyrink, G. (1915). Der Golem. Kurt Wolff. Project Gutenberg #51476. Der Golem (1915) is the version Jung read. Čapek’s R.U.R. (1920) is the one case where the author made the link himself, and Scholem’s Golem Aleph (1965) the one where a computer was named for it. Lukács reads Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (1982) as the same drama: humanity projects its shadow onto replicants it made. In every case the golem is a reading applied after the fact, apart from Čapek and Scholem, who wrote with the legend in mind.

Sources

  • Jung, C. G. (1984). Dream Analysis: Notes of the Seminar Given in 1928–1930 (W. McGuire, Ed.). Princeton University Press, Bollingen Series XCIX. ISBN 978-0-691-09896-8. Lecture IX, 19 March 1930, pp. 536–549; the passages quoted are on pp. 538 and 541–542, checked against the print
  • Jung, C. G. (1944). Psychology and Alchemy. CW 12 ¶53 (Meyrink’s Golem); ¶44 as cited by Lukács (2026).
  • Jung, C. G. (1939). The Integration of the Personality (S. Dell, Trans.). Farrar & Rinehart. Chapter on the dream symbols of the individuation process, for the Meyrink passage; revised into CW 12, Part II.
  • Scholem, G. (1966, January). The Golem of Prague & the Golem of Rehovoth. Commentary. Dedicatory remarks of 17 June 1965. https://www.commentary.org/articles/gershom-scholem/the-golem-of-prague-the-golem-of-rehovoth/
  • Idel, M. (1990). Golem: Jewish Magical and Mystical Traditions on the Artificial Anthropoid. State University of New York Press. ISBN 978-0-7914-0161-3.
  • Meyrink, G. (1915). Der Golem. Kurt Wolff. Project Gutenberg #51476.
  • Shelley, M. (1818). Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus. Lackington, Hughes, Harding, Mavor & Jones. Project Gutenberg #41445 (1818 text, with the Milton epigraph).
  • Čapek, K. (1920). R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots). Project Gutenberg #59112. Čapek’s 1935 remark as cited in Lukács (2026), after Comrada (1995).
  • Fromm, E. (1955). The Sane Society. Rinehart. Routledge Classics edition, ISBN 978-0-415-27098-4. Chapter 5 (alienation) and chapter 9 (the danger of robotism).
  • Wiener, N. (1964). God & Golem, Inc.: A Comment on Certain Points where Cybernetics Impinges on Religion. MIT Press. ISBN 978-0-262-73011-2.
  • Hillman, J. (1996). The Soul’s Code: In Search of Character and Calling. Random House. ISBN 978-0-679-44522-7. Chapter on mediocrity.
  • Romanyshyn, R. D. (1989). Technology as Symptom and Dream. Routledge. ISBN 978-0-415-00786-3.
  • Jones, R. A. (2017). Archaic man meets a marvellous automaton: posthumanism, social robots, archetypes. Journal of Analytical Psychology, 62(3), 338–355. https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-5922.12316
  • Natale, S., & Ballatore, A. (2017). Imagining the thinking machine: technological myths and the rise of artificial intelligence. Convergence, 26(1), 3–18. https://doi.org/10.1177/1354856517715164
  • Maidenbaum, A. (2021). The Golem of Prague: an archetype. Psychological Perspectives, 64(2), 201–210. https://doi.org/10.1080/00332925.2021.1959209
  • Maidenbaum, A. (2024). The Golem of Prague. In Jung and the Jewish Experience (pp. 34–43). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003511908-4
  • Pereira, H. C. (2025). The analysis of a catastrophic dream and the hypertrophy of modern consciousness. Journal of Analytical Psychology, 70(5), 787–807. https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-5922.70014
  • Lukács, O. (2026). Psychosociotechnical imaginaries: encountering AI as the Other. International Journal of Jungian Studies, 18(2), 185–201. https://doi.org/10.1163/19409060-01802004 (accepted manuscript: https://repository.essex.ac.uk/43713/)
  • Roesler, C. (2012). Are archetypes transmitted more by culture than biology? Questions arising from conceptualizations of the archetype. Journal of Analytical Psychology, 57(2), 223–246. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-5922.2011.01963.x
  • Epley, N., Waytz, A., & Cacioppo, J. T. (2007). On seeing human: a three-factor theory of anthropomorphism. Psychological Review, 114(4), 864–886. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-295X.114.4.864
  • Cave, S., & Dihal, K. (2019). Hopes and fears for intelligent machines in fiction and reality. Nature Machine Intelligence, 1(2), 74–78. https://doi.org/10.1038/s42256-019-0020-9
  • Kabashkin, I., Zervina, O., & Misnevs, B. (2025). AI narrative modeling: how machines’ intelligence reproduces archetypal storytelling. Information, 16(4), 319. https://doi.org/10.3390/info16040319

Leaving

We are greater than the Peoples or the Kings—Be humble, as you crawl beneath our rods!—Our touch can alter all created things,We are everything on earth—except The Gods!Though our smoke may hide the Heavens from your eyes,It will vanish and the stars will shine again,Because, for all our power and weight and size,We are nothing more than children of your brain!

Public domain · Kipling, The Secret of the Machines (1911) · read by Adam

The machines boast and then concede that they are children of their makers’ minds, close to Lukács’s claim that AI is an extension of the psyche that made it.

The colour drains

Back into the dark, and on.

Next in the journey◐ ShadowThe face we never show to the world.Return to the void