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Vandoom (Monsterbus p.465)

Here we have Kirby the Prophet at his purest: a second story about a golem. After numerous stories about the dangers of creating technology we do not understand, this (and the scarecrow story) return the warning to its original, purest form.

Vandoom and Von Doom

Note the eastern European location, the castle, the obsession with honouring his father, and the creation of robots. Kirby later developed these ideas further with Victor Von Doom, a cross between Victor Frankenstein and Vandoom, a mad scientist who uses magic and science in his castle to create life and control the world.

Jewish Golem stories

The golem is a creature that is given shape by man (in these examples a scarecrow and a wax model). It is then mystically given life It has no free will or higher reasoning ability, and can be a force for either good or bad. Frankenstein and every robot story are examples of golems.

The Jewish and gentile golems are different. The gentile golems (Frankenstein, robots, etc) are about powerful people (gentile industrialists and scientists) going too far. They have the science, they know what they are doing, but they can't stop. But the Jewish version is of weak people with no science who just create the empty illusion of power (clay, straw, wax, etc) and then by magic it gains that power. IT may then protect its weak creators, or it might run amok.

More details.

The highest form of science

Previous Kirby golem stories were about strong people and science: they were gentile golems. These two stories are about weak people and magic: they are Jewish golems. Superficially, magic stories are nonsense: scarecrows and wax models do not become alive just by battering them with energy! But look at the bigger picture.

The physical world is strong, but the mental world is stronger: the mental controls the physical. A person's ideas control their body. A nation's ideas control the nation. The platonic (Plato's cave of ideal forms) and metaphysical (theoretical physics) defines and creates the physical. Religious ideasl, though based on imaginary beings, continually defeat more advanced science based enemies (usually through the religious side suffering more). The classic example of the golem in real life is the Jewish nation itself. A powerless people, without a land, continually imagined having a land. And power. Now they have that land, and (per capita for such a small nation) a disproportionate influence on the world. Perhaps rightly so, to make up for being powerless and victimised for so many centuries. The Golem was real.

Kirby the prophet

So much for the past. But prophecy is about eternal themes, particularly those that apply in the near future. As I have often discussed, the Internet and corporations are our modern golems. They are largely formless, they are ideas more than physical realities, yet they have tremendous physical effects. We create them to serve us, and they might do. But they can also destroy us. We need a prophet like Kirby to remind us of these principles.

tl;dr: ideas can become magically real. Be careful!

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