Aryeh Kaplan in his Sefer Yetzirah posits making a golem is basically constructing an astral body using Hebrew letters that I think is meant to be linked with Merkavah/hekhalot style transcendence (or is it descent?). I'm about to get back into that stuff once I get my "complete" copy of the Zohar (God willing!), as I am tempting blithering confusion towards my confrontation (conjunction) with Metatron (unless I am him, or becoming him, and not the Messiah, which would be a relief since I am not Jewish, and despite the patrilineage Enoch "existed" before there were Jews).
But really, you can ensoul anything by a variety of methods, and even give it license to go forth and influence, etc. But creating a hulk of mud with magic powers is beyond my grasp (for now), though I think in modern terms it would be more efficient (even bad ass) to build an AI powered robot and seal it with a shem.