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The first part of this paper deals with the Messiah. It is largely deveoted to showing the significance of sacrificial anointing as a symbol of receiving the spiritual power of the God, king or father who has been killed. For this purpose it draws its facts and arguments from such varied sources as Robertson Smith, Spencer and Gillen, Frazer, Róheim and Freud in his Totem und Tabu. It also shows that the Messiah stands for three things: the hero who kills his father, king or God; the person who suffers for the guilt of that act; and the slain God, king or father who has come to life again.
The second part of the paper is concerned with the Golem. He, also, is in some sense a 'Saviour'. But he is an incomplete being, made by a man at the behest of God to protect the Jews from their persecutors. The main legend dates from the seventeenth century, at a time when the Jews in Central Europe were being hard pressed, and concerns the Golem of Prague, who was created out of clay by the Rabbi Löw. This legend has earlier prototypes and many later elaborations, and, of course, many parallels in non-Jewish stories and myths. The Golem was partly a 'good' figure, who helped his creator against his enemies, and partly a 'bad' one—a sinister, dumb, soulless creature who was apt to run amok and work destruction with his terrific strength, and who had, in the end, to be destroyed himself.
Some attempts at a non-analytic interpretation of the Golem have been made, but they do not as a rule go deeper than the conscious view of him as symbolizing God's help to the Jews against their enemy in time of trouble. An analytic interpretation would stress the importance of the rôle played by the creator of the Golem, the Rabbi Löw himself. This act of creation represents man's