“The Kabbalists usually built golems to imitate God’s action of creation. They saw themselves as being created in God’s image and therefore, so they believed, they had God’s creational powers.” – Mechanical Bodies, Computational Minds By Güven Güzeldere
The Marvelous Land Of Oz is the fascinating follow-up to L. Frank Baum’s famous novel The Wizard Of Oz. In order to more completely explore the many ideas and themes of the book without rushing through things this will be in multiple parts.
The story begins with a young boy named Tip fashioning something resembling a man with a pumpkin head. His plan is to use it to scare his caretaker, the heartless sorceress Mombi.
By the time he’s done, he’s become so engrossed that he has clothed his “man” and even given him a name, Jack Pumpkinhead.
To Tip’s disappointment, Mombi is not frightened by Jack. Instead she decides to test the “Powder of Life” she had swindled from a wizard.
She sprinkles the powder over Jack and says the three magic words, “Weaugh”, “Teaugh”, and “Peaugh”, each with their own specific hand gestures. Much later on in the book these words are referred to as “cabalistic”.
When looking for an explanation of the three words I was surprised no one else brought up Baum specifically labeling them as cabalistic. Cabala is another spelling of Kabbalah which is Jewish mysticism.
Using this term, especially in relation to their ability to bring something to life, suggests they are stand-ins for the three Hebrew letters, aleph, mem, and tav, forming the word emet or truth, that bring a golem to life in some Jewish stories.
After instilling Jack with consciousness Mombi decides that she can have Jack do chores for her rather than Tip. She is tired of how Tip misbehaves and surmises Jack would be a better worker. Since she won’t require anything else of Tip her plan is to change him into a statue for her garden.
Needless to say, Tip is not okay with that. He takes Jack and they escape Mombi. Soon after Tip informs Jack that he made him. Jack calls the boy, “Father.”
It is curious that Baum uses three words, creator, parent, and finally father, when one would have sufficed.
The first, creator, calls to mind divinity, both it and the second term, parent, are gender neutral, and only the last word choice, father, is specifically male.
Baum may have threw the word creator in there to emphasize that by creating Jack Pumpkinhead, a sort of golem, Tip was emulating God.
“The ability to create a golem was considered a demonstration that the mystic had mastered the Work of Creation. Now, like God, he was able to harness esoteric wisdom and divine power to create life itself…. For some mystics, like Isaac the Blind, creation of a golem could only be accomplished by a person who already had achieved devekut. In this view, mystical intimacy with God was a prerequisite for the practice of creative magic.” – Kabbalah: An Introduction To Jewish Mysticism By Byron L. Sherwin
In Tarot terminology, Tip goes from “The Fool” to “The Magician” early on in the story. After his part in Jack’s coming into being, he remembers Mombi’s movements and cabalistic words, summons the divine spark into the Sawhorse, and much later on uses this magic again to do the same for the Gump.
It should be noted that the head of the Gump was from a deceased animal that remembered it’s past life.
“Baum found spiritual comfort in the belief that all religions are attempts to achieve spiritual perfection; that the world we see is part of many we do not see; that life on Earth is just one step in our spiritual progression; and that the good (or evil) we do during one’s time on Earth influences one’s next stage of return, or reincarnation.”
“Indeed, Frank and Maud Baum were convinced that they had met in earlier reincarnations, and they often attended seances in the hope of finding proof that spirits and the afterlife truly existed.” – L. Frank Baum By Dennis Abrams
(L. Frank Baum and his wife Maud Baum in Egypt, 1906)
Let’s take the story back a bit and consider an Egyptian myth involving Isis and the deity Ra which may help provide more context. In the tale Isis wants to bring something to life, a new kind of snake, the Uraeus, but she cannot do so without Ra. To accomplish her task she collects Ra’s dribble, his spit, that fell out of his mouth onto the ground. She takes this without his awareness or permission. Mombi correspondingly tricked a wizard into getting his “Powder of Life”.
“Why, here is a good chance to try my new powder!” said she, eagerly. “And then I can tell whether that crooked wizard has fairly traded secrets, or whether he has fooled me as wickedly as I fooled him.”
Ra’s spit represents the masculine sexual energy, the semen. Just as it takes a man and woman to make a child, Isis couldn’t bring the Uraeus to life without the male generative power, nor could Mombi do the same with Jack absent the wizard’s “powder.”
“That is the moment when the saliva of Ra falls to the earth, saliva that is the image of creative sperm.” – Jungian Psychiatry By Heinrich Karl Fierz
“For the Egyptians, Atum (Amen-Ra) the sun god created the first pair Shu and Tefnut from either his spittle or his sperm…” – The Tribal Imagination By Robin Fox
The theft of his “powder” is only alluded to, not recounted in significant detail, yet here we have an image of the encounter featuring a snake behind the wizard. What a strange synchronicity that the picture provides another link to the Isis narrative through the snake despite the snake not being mentioned in the book.
With all three golems, or inanimate objects brought to life, the male energy, emblematized by the powder, is present each time. Mombi animates Jack and Tip helped by forming it. The second, the Sawhorse, Tip discovered already made and spelled it into being. The final golem-like creature, the makeshift flying Gump, Tip had assistance in putting together from his male companions but he did the magic that gave it consciousness.
Tip is then taking on the female role almost from the beginning of the book. He plays the part Mombi did in creating Jack when he creates the Sawhorse then does it again with the Gump.
We eventually learn that Tip is really Ozma, a female. Tip appearing as a guy is a magical illusion. For that reason some view the character of Tip/Ozma as a transgender analogy.
In the next segment I’ll be going over more of the story, its exploration of gender, and Baum’s feminism.
“The Theosophists, in fact, are the dissatisfied of the world, the dissenters from all creeds.” – L. Frank Baum
The Marvelous Land Of Oz Part 2: Gender War And Feminism In Oz
The Marvelous Land Of Oz Part 3: LGBT And The Future Humanity
The Modern Mysteries 