Techno-Kabbalah: The Performative Language of Magick and the Production of Occult Knowledge

And begin by combining this name, YHVH, at the beginning alone, and examine all its combinations and move it and turn it about like a wheel, front and back, like a scroll, and do not let it rest, but when you see its matter strengthened because of the great motion, because of the fear of confusion of your imagination and the rolling about of your thoughts, and when you let it rest, return to it and ask it, until there shall come to your hand a word of wisdom from it, do not abandon it.

--Abraham Abulafia (in Eco 1987:27)

It [the Sepher Yetzirah]'s a book on mysticism, not mysticism itself. [...] But I suspect someone is trying to play a trick on you.

--a Hebrew scholar to Agent Mulder
The X-Files, "Kaddish," 16 February 1997

The Text Is Out There

In the X-Files episode entitled "Kaddish," FBI agents Scully and Mulder find a copy of the Sepher Yetzirah , the Jewish book of mysticism, under a corpse that has been desecrated. That corpse belongs to Isaac Luria, a Hasidic Jewish victim of a hate crime, who had been rumored to have risen from his grave to exact revenge on the young racists who killed him in the name of white supremacy. Mulder comments on how redundant the act of desecration is just before the book bursts into flames. Later, when questioning a Hebrew scholar on the book, Scully and Mulder are told that the Sepher Yetzirah is "a book on mysticism, not mysticism itself." The scholar then adds, "But I suspect someone is trying to play a trick on you." The entire episode plays on a complex dialectic of magical action (tricks) and speech-act theory, in which the hate speech encouraged by a paranoid propagandist who publishes and disseminates anti-Semitic pamphlets leads to murderous acts. When the propagandist berates the teenage boy who murders Luria, the boy retorts that unlike the propagandist, who hides behind words, he takes action. He then adds, "Do you think they killed my friends with words?" Ironically, words are exactly what bring about the creation of a golem, an abomination born out of language, given life to seek revenge.

The Hebrew letters aleph , mem , and teth , written on the golem's hand, spell the word emet (truth), bringing the golem into existence. To destroy the golem, one must erase the first letter, aleph, transforming emet into met (dead). The golem, then, is the truth that becomes a way to fight back, based on what the Hebrew scholar describes as "the power of the word to create as well as destroy." The golem-maker's father further proves this by emphatically asserting that he has given Mulder the truth after being questioned about the deaths of the racist boys. In fact, he has literally given Mulder the "truth," but in the physical form of the golem. All of these connections tie in nicely with the show's overall theme of the search for truth, demonstrated by the show's opening tag line, "The Truth Is Out There."

Howard Gordon, the episode's writer, has chosen the golem as a particularly fantastic example of how the Hebrew mystical philosophy and practice of Kabbalah utilizes words that, in an Austinian performative sense, "do something." The Kabbalistic principles central to "Kaddish" are caught up in the corpse and the redundancy of the golem, the body without a soul (or organs), the form without content, the cipher without meaning brought to life by truth. For my purposes, The X-Files becomes a fitting example of a highly disseminated media golem, illustrating how occult knowledge becomes produced and broadcast for both adept and uninitiated audiences. However, The X-Files is not only a popularization of the "occult" in terms of its content, but the program, with its cult status and highly...