The animating force for a golem is a spirit from the Elemental Plane of Earth. The process of creating the golem binds the unwilling spirit to the artificial body and subjects it to the will of the golem’s creator.
If you are trying to go for the inanimate body - golem like - and you remain a wizard, then you can attain that outer shell of awesome with the following:
Get a scroll of "Haunt Shift (necro. spell from LM)" - but have the spell on your spell list.
Buy an X amount of Unholy/Holy items and keep them on you while casting the spells (to make your level/HD drop, because haunt shift only works on creatures with less than 8 HD)
and lastly buy a huge lump of some material you want your body made of. Glass? Adamantine? weapons-grade plutonium? ooh yeah.. :P
Order of business:
Cast Fabricate enough times to have your "body" skulpted (and use skill "craft: skulpting" for this).
Cast Kiss of the vampire (necro spell from SpC)
Equip the holy/unholy items
Cast haunt shift from the scroll you bought on yourself (because you count as an undead now because of Kiss of the Vampire)
Now you posses the statue, making it act like it was an animated object, and giving you all the benefits from being an object. Hardness ect. .. oooh yeah!! (spoken with deep "yellow"-ish voice) ;) - do a youtube search if you don't know what I'm talking about. Yellow - oh yeah.
- still normal golems are tougher, but not as easy to become (unless your lvl 10 savant does the job, in which case all my wizard chars will suddenly become golems!!) :D
For the PrC, at level 10, the character becomes an elemental. That's why I ask the question.
Use the thought bottle from complete arcane to avoid the xp lose.
page 6 of LM gives the details for this effect.