Manitou, according to Coyote (yes, that Coyote), are the bits of the spirit of the earth. The whole earth has an enormous manitou, it can stir as one spirit, but it is too large to be concerned with minor things. Mostly the earth’s manitou sleeps, and all of us should thank our lucky stars that is true.

Each dandelion or pebble has a bit of that manitou, a bit that is fully independent of the whole. But the manitou of a dandelion is very small and does not have much power to affect things around it. The mountains and lakes also have manitou; theirs are powerful and tend, like Mother Earth’s greater manitou, to be dangerous when roused. Mostly, that doesn’t happen a lot.

As he explained it, Coyote and his fellow avatars are very closely related to manitou—like a horse and a jackass. He’d flashed me a wicked grin as I lay in a hospital bed—put there by Guayota, who was, again according to Coyote, the manitou of a great volcano.

I might not be an expert on kabbalistic magic, but I was pretty sure that Rabbi Loew, who had created the golem, had found a manitou from something in between a mountain and a pebble. It had been strong enough to become the golem but small enough to be controlled by a man who worked kabbalistic magic. It had probably not been the manitou of the Vltava, which would be huge and powerful. Maybe it was from some long-buried stream or hill or something native to the earth of Josefov.

To me, such an act would have been evil. He had enslaved a living spirit. I doubted that a man European-born and -bred would have thought of the spirit as living. He would have considered it magical energy, maybe. That a manitou spirit was naturally territorial would only have helped the rabbi’s magic along.

The rabbi was a good man in all the stories I ever heard. If he’d known what he’d done, I was sure he’d have been appalled. But most Judeo-Christian churches do not believe in manitou. He had, as I had previously, thought of the golem as a robot, an object without feelings or true life.

When the rabbi had, to go with the robot analogy, turned the golem off, he’d locked the manitou in an artificial and uncomfortable existence. Dead but not dead. Partially, I thought, by the way the off switch had worked.

Depending upon the story—probably because there were several ways to power a golem—Rabbi Loew had carved into the golem’s forehead the word “emet,” which is the Hebrew word for truth. When the rabbi deactivated the golem, he removed a letter and left the word “met,” which is dead.

The problem with this, as I saw it, was that a manitou cannot die. It just is, like the sun and the rain. It can be changed or hidden, but it cannot be killed. But the rabbi’s magic imbued the death command too strongly for the golem to ignore, so it could not live, either.