golem

In Jewish thought, anything that has a potential which has not yet been achieved. Adam is sometimes described as golem when he had been created from the Earth but God had not yet put breath in him.

In late medieval and particularly post-17th-century Jewish stories, certain holy rabbis were credited with the ability to make clay people who came alive as mechanical servants - golems - when certain letters forming one of the names of God were placed in their mouths or on their foreheads.