Lilith

Read Janet Howe Gaines’s article “Lilith” as it originally appeared in Bible Review, October —Ed. According to medieval Jewish tradition, Lilith was Adam’s first wife, before Eve. When Adam insisted she play a subservient role, Lilith grew wings and flew away from.
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Lilith fucks whoever she wants, whenever she wants, and is completely unapologetic about it. She is an advocate for her own pleasure.

And there are some tales that mention that once upon a time she and Samael shared the same body, making them both male and female. She also seems to be just as sadistic, dominant, and passionate as I am. She called on the most sacred name of God and struck out on her own. She created her own world , loved who she wanted to, and did what made her happy.

She sacrificed nothing of herself to gain her joy. She maintained her wholeness, her vulnerability , and rid herself of the poison the world threw on her. She took nothing for granted , forged an entirely new path down unexplored avenues, and knew her worth. Though she was pressured by goddes and men to conform she never took the well-travelled, obvious path.

She avoided a lot of the pitfalls because she dared to look further and to investigate. But it also goes deeper than that.

I sleep light and even now my brain is still working even as I dream. I am always on.

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I learned to put that to good use by learning to be aware of everything. My hypervigilance and anxiety became tools I used to learn, grow, and pay attention to what mattered.

Lilith is a creature of the night. All things dark are her domain. And a lot of those things have been awful. Lilith was blamed for infant deaths, for nocturnal emissions, for the creation of all demonic creatures; not to mention one of her partners a lefty like me is the one accused of tempting Eve in the Garden. She was outcast, pariah, queer. I know what that feels like. I have been Othered in the worst of ways, regardless of the truth. Discovering her tale when I started my own research at age 12 was one very important and fortuitous event.

It saved my life because I saw my possibility model out in the world. Even though she was hated.

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Even though she was blamed for everything wrong with the world. The Kabbalah further enhanced her demonic character by making her the partner of Samael i. Satan and queen of the realm of the forces of evil. In this guise, she appears as the antagonistic negative counterpart of the Shekhinah "Divine Presence" , the mother of the House of Israel.

The Zohar repeatedly contrasts Lilith the unholy whorish woman with the Shekhinah as the holy, noble, and capable woman. In much the same way, Eve the disobedient, lustful sinner is contrasted with the obedient and holy Virgin Mary in Christian literature. Through her couplings with the devil or with Adam, as his succubus , Lilith gave birth to one hundred demonic children a day the one hundred children threatened with death by the three angels.

In this way, Lilith was held responsible for populating the world with evil. If you ask how Lilith herself, the first wife of Adam, became evil, the answer lies in her insubordination to her husband Adam. It is her independence from Adam, her position beyond the control of a male, that makes her "evil. Lilith is represented as a powerfully sexual woman against whom men and babies felt they had few defenses and, except for a few amulets, little protection.

Much more so than Eve, Lilith is the personification female sexuality. Her legend serves to demonstrate how, when unchecked, female sexuality is disruptive and destructive. Lilith highlights how women, beginning with Eve, use their sexuality to seduce men. She provides thereby a necessary sexual dimension, which is otherwise lacking, to the Genesis story which, when read in literal terms, portrays Eve not as some wicked femme fatale but as a naive and largely sexless fool.

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Only as a Lilith-like character could Eve be seen as a calculating, evil, seductress. Lilith is referred to only once in the Old Testament. In the Darby translation of Isaiah In her demonized form, Lilith is a frightening and threatening creature. Much more so than Eve, she personifies the real sexual power women exercise over men. She represents the deeper, darker fear men have of women and female sexuality.

Inasmuch as female sexuality, as a result of this fear, has been repressed and subjected to the severest controls in Western patriarchal society, so too has the figure of Lilith been kept hidden. However, she lurks as a powerful unidentified presence, an unspoken name, in the minds of biblical commentators for whom Eve and Lilith become inextricably intertwined and blended into one person.

In the Apocryphal Testament of Reuben one of the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs, ostensibly the twelve sons of Jacob , for example, it is explained that: Women are evil, my children: V, , 5 References to Lilith in the Talmud describe her as a night demon with long hair B. Erubin b and as having a human likeness but with wings B.

In Rabbi Isaac ben Jacob ha-Kohen's "Treatise on the Emanations on the Left," written in Spain in the 13th century, she is described as having the form of a beautiful woman from her head to her waist, and "burning fire" from her waist down. Elsewhere, Rabbi Isaac equates her with the primordial serpent Leviathan.

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Crudely drawn images of Lilith can be seen on amulets see Magical or Prophylactic images of Lilith in incantation bowls and on amulets. Babylonian terra-cotta relief, c. The relief shows a nude woman with wings and a bird's taloned feet. She wears a hat composed of four pairs of horns and holds in each upraised hand a combined ring and rod similar to an Egyptian shen ring amulet.

She stands on two reclining lions and is flanked by owls. Despite the fact that she is not officially recognized in the Christian tradition, in the Late Middle Ages she is occasionally identified with the serpent in Genesis 3 and shown accordingly with a woman's head and torso. Adam, Lilith, and Eve relief sculpture, c.