Skip to main content

Academia.edu

Log InSign Up

pdf

LILITH: FROM POWERFUL GODDESS TO EVIL QUEEN

CMaria Fernandes

CMaria Fernandes

or download with email

Academia.edu

LILITH: FROM POWERFUL GODDESS TO EVIL QUEEN

Download

733

LILITH: FROM POWERFUL GODDESS TO EVIL QUEEN

Maria Fernandes

And God created man to his own image: to the image of God he created him: male and female he
created them. And God blessed them, saying: increase and multiply, and fill the earth, and subdue it,
and rule over the fishes of the sea, and the fowls of the air, and all living creatures that move upon the
earth. (Gen 27-28)

The figure of Lilith has been object of innumerous representations since at least the second millennium
..., but mostly since the early Middle Ages. After be-ing depicted in Jewish Medieval literature as the
queen of Hell, wife of Samael, she was used by both Jews and Christians to represent the incarnation of
evil. For Christians, she became temptation itself and was often represented, in painting and in
sculpture, as the serpent who led Eve into sin. XIXth century Romantics also picked Lilith as a motive, in
their paintings and poems, and the XXth and XXIst centuries have revived her myths through occult-ists,
writers, movie producers and musicians. She even gave the name to the first Jewish feminist journal,
founded in 1976,

Lilith Magazine

.The unending fascination she seems to provide, even nowadays, in our secu-lar, rational world, appears
to be rather curious, hence I propose to revisit and question her role and functions as the first woman
ever created on earth and the first human being who dared to overdo the purpose of her creation.Lilith
is first accounted for in Sumerian literature, where she was called

Dim-me

. Several authors see a brief mention of her in the epic of Gilgamesh, in which she was identified with
the demon dwelling inside a willow (Graves and Patai 82). She was later found in ancient Mesopotamia,
as a wind spirit (Lilitu) or as one of Anu’s daughters, called Lamashtu or Lamartu, who was said to be

the most ter-rible of all female demons: she killed children, consumed human flesh and blood,
devastated plants and soiled rivers and streams, sent nightmares, caused miscar-riages, and brought
disease. In Babylonia, a special class of priests, the

Ashipu

, was employed to defeat her harmful effects. This demon has also been said to corre-

* University of Lisbon, Centre for Classical Studies and Centre of History.

734

spond to the

ghul

of pre-Islamic Arabian myths. She was portrayed on amulets as a lion- or bird-headed female figure
kneeling on an ass, holding a double-headed serpent in each hand and suckling dogs or pigs at her
breasts (Ginzberg V.88). In old incantation

formulae

, reference is made to Lilith in the plural, as wind spirits or demons, rather than to one specific demon,
one of the ways to overcome their witchcraft being to grasp them by their tresses or their plaits. Some
authors see in the Lilith mentioned in the Bible (Is 34:14) the she-demon matched in Jewish literature to
Samael. However, this position has been criticized under the argu-ment that

lilith

in Isaiah refers to a kind of birds, dwelling in the deserts of Egypt and Palestine, perhaps goat-suckers or
similar, which probably justifies the later traditions claiming that Lilith was a vampire (Hoffeld 430-
440).One of the treatises of the

Mishnah

seems to have borrowed the image of the ancient dark goddess, portraying her as a wind evil spirit, a
night spirit or a demon with long hair, wings and a human face, of whom women must beware. Like the
terrible screech-owl of Is 34:14, Lilith dwelt in the ruins or lurked in the deserts, waiting to lure and
doom young men who travelled alone (

Ber

. 3a,

Shab

. 151b,

Er

. 100b,

Nid

. 24b;

Zohar

I, XVI 34b)

.In the Middle Ages, an anonymous writing dated of the Xth century (Le Zo-har 667), known as the
Alphabet of Ben Sira

, gave a story of Lilith, whose myth entered the Jewish folklore, probably explaining the widespread
custom of using amulets in babies’ cradles for protection against her powers.The story goes as follows:
Lilith was Adam’s first wife, created from the earth at the same time as him (Gn 1:27-28). They came to
fight about the manner of their intercourse, because Adam refused to lie beneath her, saying that she
was only fit to be in the bottom position, for he was to be the superior one. Lilith did not accept such
statement and reminded him that they both had been created at the same time, from the same
material, and none was to be superior to the other. However, her husband would not listen and insisted
upon his superiority over her. Lilith was extremely angry; in her rage, she pronounced the Ineffable
Name and flew off into the air. Adam turned to God complaining of her behaviour and asked him to get
her back to him, and the Lord complied, sending three angels after her.

Ghuls

(from which comes the modern word “ghoul”) were supernatural beings who were cannibals. The
female

ghul

opposed to travel and often appeared to men in the desert and occasionally prostituted herself to them
(Sykes 84).2 Hebrew compilation containing the Sages’ oral traditions about the Pentateuch’s normative
rules, dated about 200 ..3 The works cited are treatises of the

Mishnah

Berakhot

(1

st

division),

Shabbat

and

Erubin

(2

nd

division) and

Niddah

(6
th

divison). They may be found on-line in the Reformatted Soncino Talmud version (<http://halakhah.com/
indexrst.html>). The

Zohar

is a cabbalistic writing that became known in the late XIII

th

century, attributed to Moses de Leon and considered by G. Scholem as one of the most notable produc-
tions of Jewish mystical literature (

Les Grands Courants de la Mystique Juive

219-220). I used the edition by Mopsik (1981). A version may be found online at <http://www.sacred-
texts.com/jud/zdm/index.htm>.4 The Alphabet of Sirach

.[

n.p.], [n.d.]: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alphabet_of_Sirach> (accessed April, 2002).

735

They caught up with her in Egypt, in the Red Sea, an abode of demons, and urged her to return. She
refused to go back and the angels threatened her that if she did not return, they would drown her. Even
so, she stubbornly stuck to her decision, and declared that she would rather have that punishment than
go back to Adam, and that she had been created to harm new-born infants. However, she made an oath
in the Lord’s name, that whenever she saw the image or the names of those three angels in an amulet,
she would lose her power over the infant. So the angels returned to God empty-handed, and God had to
create another woman for Adam, but this time he made her from one of the man’s ribs, certainly to
avoid more misunderstandings or disputes, thus indulging with his sentiments of su-premacy over his
wife.In most authors who recount this tale, unlike the Alphabet’s text publicly available, the angels
threaten to kill one hundred of the demon children Lilith bore every day. This could be explained by the
existence of later revisions of that work, which were known in Europe in the eleventh century and
included a de-scription of a sexual relationship between Lilith and a “great demon”, which was later
identified as Samael (Dan 17-40).Graves (82) suggests that this legend bears traces that Lilith was a
former fertility goddess, and Ginzberg (V.65-68) comments that the Lilith of Ben Sira merges with the
earlier accounts of her as an ancient demon, who killed infants and endangered women in childbirth,
this later version of the myth having many parallels in Christian literature from Byzantine and later
periods.Developments of this legend are found in cabbalistic writings, namely in the

Treatise on the Left Emanation, by R. Isacc ha-Kohen, and in

 the Zohar, where Lilith became the wife of Samael, the angel of death, hence the Queen of Darkness,
mother to winds and demons. It is interesting to observe that, after her flight from Paradise, cabbalistic
Judaism has turned Lilith into a powerful demon, with some curious features that place her very close to
God. Considering God’s two sides, rigor and mercy, and the balance there has to exist between them,
cabbalists hy-postatized the Lord’s presence, calling it the

Shekinah

, God’s feminine trait. Lilith is conceived as the counter-image of the

Shekinah

; while the latter is mother to Metatron, the greatest power in the angelic world, Lilith is the mother of
Samael’s demons. Sometimes, because of Israel’s sins, the

Shekinah

falls to the Lord’s “other side” (his dark side, in which rigor prevails over mercy), and whenever that
hap-pens, Lilith receives an influx of life in her stead (Scholem

163-169).Since this myth was devised to underline the patriarch’s authority in Jewish culture, I would
now look briefly into the relations between men and women in biblical times. It is known, as Kawashima
(1-22) remarks (though underlining the complex different pictures given in the Bible of the status of
women in the Isra-elite family), that in the biblical legal system women possessed almost no rights and,
as far as sexual relationships are concerned, those were lawful only under the blessing of marriage,
whereas the power of consent resided in their father and, once married, in their husband. Marriages
were usually arranged between

Related Papers

Lilith’s Evolution: How Did Adam’s first wife Metamorphize from a Demon…

By Amy Drake

How was the myth of Lilith transformed by the Pre-Raphaelites in the period 186…

By Vica Germanova

WOODS AND ARCHETYPES

By joshua bodhinetra

Nephilim: The Children of Lilith. The Place of Man in the Ontological and Cosmologic…

By Marcel Poorthuis şi Frank Bosman

Nephilim: The Children of Lilith: The Place of Man in the Ontological and Cosmologic…

By Marcel Poorthuis

READ PAPER

AboutPressBlogPeoplePapersJob BoardAdvertise

We're Hiring!

Help Center

Find new research papers in:PhysicsChemistryBiologyHealth SciencesEcologyEarth SciencesCognitive

ScienceMathematicsComputer Science

TermsPrivacyCopyrightAcademia ©2020