Lilith, Dark Feminist Goddess of the Age

Lilith is possibly the most recognizable demonic figure in the Judeo-Christian-influenced world besides Lucifer and the antichrist themselves. She can be found in all types of media from books, to movies, television, video games, and music (particularly metal). Not even anime and manga are immune. Popular modern portrayals include her roles in True Blood, Supernatural, The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina, Hazbin Hotel, and the episode, “Pure,” of the anthology Into the Dark. These all maintain her demonic status, but they don’t all hold this as a bad thing. “Pure,” for example, sees Lilith demonically possessing a teenage girl at a purity retreat which allows her to lead the other girls in throwing off the shackles of the Christian patriarchal ideas of chastity to the peril of said patriarchs. This depiction is emblematic of the modern view of Lilith as the feminist liberator of women. Even the episode director, Hannah McPherson, says, in reference to Lilith in the show, “one man’s demon is another woman’s angel.”

 First, we should establish who Lilith is or is at least said to be. The earliest text mentioning Lilith (briefly) comes from the Sumerian story Gilgamesh and the Huluppu Tree, some 4,000-plus years ago, where Gilgamesh is tasked with clearing the demoness Lilith, a nested Zu-bird, and a dragon (or snake) from the titular tree in the goddess Innana’s garden. When Gilgamesh slays the dragon, the Zu-bird flees with its young, and a terror-stricken Lilith tears down her house and escapes to the desert. The ancient Babylonians (who succeeded the Sumerians) and Assyrians had the lilitu, which were female city-dwelling demons that seduced or raped men, particularly in their sleep, and targeted unborn and newborn babies for death. Both of these would seem to have been very influential on the Jewish myth of Lilith as I’ll show later. 

The only place in the Bible we actually see a clear reference to Lilith is Isaiah 34:14 which reads:

“The wild-cat shall meet with the jackals

And the satyr shall cry to his fellow,

Yea, Lilith shall repose there

And find her a place of rest.”

Here Lilith is shown as a demon roaming the wilderness that the land of Edom is condemned to become. Jews, for over a millennium, have inferred Lilith somewhere else in the Bible: Creation. This story is familiar to most. Some believe there to be a discrepancy between the creation of man and woman in Genesis chapters one and two. Genesis 1:27 says:

“So God created mankind in His Own image;

In the image of God He created him:

Male and female He created them.”

Genesis 2:20-22 reads: 

“...But for Adam no suitable helper was found.

So the Lord God caused the man to fall into a deep sleep, and while he slept, He took one of the man’s ribs and closed up the area with flesh.

And from the rib that the Lord God had taken from the man, He made a woman and brought her to him.” 

The idea is that in the first chapter, man and woman were created together at the same time, whereas chapter two shows Adam being created first and even interacting with creation before Eve was made from his side. I, personally, don't believe this as I see the chapter two passage as a detailed expansion of 1:27, but I can certainly see where ancient Jews would have gotten the idea.

When we get to Jewish myths and texts concerning Lilith, things get a lot more uncertain. Midrash, or legends, speak of a “first Eve” that God “returned to the earth” before creating the Eve we know because Adam was disgusted by seeing her made of blood and sinew. This story does not explicitly call her Lilith, but seems to be influential in later texts. The Babylonian Talmud mentions Lilith only four times and never in conjunction with the creation story or Adam. Lilith is described as an evil succubus spirit (Shabbat 151b) having long hair (Eruvin 100b), a human face, and wings (Niddah 24b). These depictions, sparse though they may be, are likely inspired by the Isaiah 34 passage and the Babylonian demon, lilitu, described earlier. 

The most well-known story of Lilith comes from The Alphabet of Ben Sira. The Alphabet was written anonymously sometime between 700 and 1000 AD as an often-vulgar satire of the reputable Second Temple period Wisdom of Ben Sira, also called the Book of Sirach and Ecclesiasticus in the Catholic Deuterocanon. This version of the creation of the “first” woman, much like the biblical version, starts with Adam realizing he is alone, which defeats the Genesis 1&2 discrepancy argument, but each article I’ve read seems to ignore that. Instead, the focus is on the fact that the first woman, Lilith, was created from the earth just as Adam was. Immediately, the two began arguing, Adam demanded Lilith lie beneath him, she refused and instead demanded the same of him citing that they were equal due to both being created of the same earth. When she realized neither of them would listen to the other, Lilith spoke the divine Name of God and flew into the wilderness. At Adam’s plea, God sent three angels to persuade her to come back, saying  if she refused, 100 of her children would die every day. The angels found Lilith at the Red Sea, she indeed refused, saying she had been created only to cause illness to infants, but as a concession she would not harm any child that had an amulet with the names or likeness of the angels and would allow 100 of her demonic children to be killed every day. 

It should be noted that Jewish scholars don’t consider the Alphabet of Ben Sira to be an authoritative text. The book is full of obscene parables, sometimes featuring biblical characters. In fact, the story right after Lilith’s is that of a king begging Ben Sira to heal his daughter who farts too much. I’m not sure why the Lilith story seems to have gained so much traction, but it was clearly well known and respected enough among the Jewish people to have persisted in their cultural stories nearly a millennium later when second wave feminism came around in the 1960s.

 

This idea of Lilith as the symbol of female liberation is fairly new. It starts where most bad feminist things start: second wave feminism. Where the first wave of feminism was led by white Protestant(ish) women, the second wave had a heavy Jewish influence. Many of the biggest names of the movement were Jewish, by ethnicity if not religion, including Gloria Steinem, Betty Friedan, and Andrea Dworkin. You might notice that those women’s ideals aren’t exactly the picture of faithful Judaism but, naturally, their cultural worldview–and the rejection of it, in this case–largely affected their movement. Much like first wave feminists carried a false Protestant Christian banner, second wave feminists twisted their Jewish backgrounds and texts to fit their more progressive ideas. The articles and books coming out of this time about Lilith are a prime example. It’s not unlike how modern leftists look back at the American ideals of the founding and call them backwards and oppressive. And in the same way that those leftists don’t reflect the views of the vast majority of Americans concerning the founding, the Jewish feminists of the 60s and 70s (or nowadays for that matter) don’t reflect the values of Judaism or the vast majority of faithful Jews. 

One of the popular feminist magazines, Ms., co-founded by Steinem (with CIA money), was launched in December 1971 with half of the editorial staff being Jewish. At the end of its first year of publication, another big Jewish name in Second Wave feminism, Lilly Rivlin, wrote an article titled “Lilith” for Ms. magazine. The article is clearly intended to paint Lilith as the premier Jewish female role model, greater than any other, but especially Eve. The author starts the article off with a feminist rewrite of the passage from the Alphabet of Ben Sira which she directly quotes later. Within the first two paragraphs of the article body, she expresses feeling a disconnection from and revulsion to the idea of a submissive blonde Eve, so naive that she was easily tricked into eating the fruit. There is a strange yet clear disdain that she was so guileless that she hadn’t taken the agency for herself, anger that this act was called a sin. Rivlin viewed the eating of the fruit as a “sensual and courageous act, an adventure of the spirit and a desire for experience.” Any faithful Jew or Christian would see this as a protest against the very foundation of the Bible, the reason that we even need the Bible. If eating the fruit hadn’t been punished as the sin it was, there would be no need for anything that follows in the Bible, the entire narrative depends on that moment. Rivlin further asserts that misogynistic priests over the centuries inverted the natural matriarchal social order and biblical narrative for an oppressive patriarchy. She then finishes the article, that really must be read to be believed, with a rewrite of the Genesis creation tale. 

In Rivlin’s creation, God finds “the Throbbing Spirit” in the swirling Chaos and Emptiness, a feminine co-creator. Where God saw this spark of Energy at their meeting and called it Order, the Throbbing Spirit called it Love and they created the world together, all the way down to the creation of Adam and Lilith, the latter of whom she associates with a wind spirit via the ancient Assyrian myth. Apparently, while Adam was created by God with every element but wind, Lilith was created by the Throbbing Spirit with all four elements, and thus Lilith recognized the spark of Energy that was Love, where Adam did not. We’re intended to draw from this that this is why Adam, from Rivlin’s perspective, couldn’t tolerate the independent and unabashedly sexual spirit of Lilith. 

Another explicitly Jewish feminist magazine was founded in 1976 called Lilith. The inaugural issue featured an article by one of the co-founders, Aviva Cantor Zuckoff, entitled “The Lilith Question” intending to address why they’d chosen to name their magazine after what was ostensibly a villain in Jewish legend. The short answer is that Zuckoff, like Rivlin, believes Lilith is the greatest female role model for Jewish women. She praises Lilith as a “powerful female” because she is assertive and “refuses to cooperate in her own victimization.” Lilith is also called a knower of secret knowledge due to her uttering the Ineffable Name of God when she flees the Garden. 

What Zuckoff neglects or diminishes is Lilith’s crimes. It seems completely lost on her that Lilith sinned when she spoke God’s sacred Name and shirked her duty as wife. Even worse, Zuckoff shrugs off the accusations of Lillith murdering pregnant/birthing women and newborn infants and of her sexually assaulting sleeping men, these accusations having a historical basis much more ancient than the story she derives her Lilith from. She claims these atrocities can be excused because they’re really just a response to the tyranny of Adam demanding her submission to him. It seems the worst crime these feminists can fathom is inequality. Of course, Zuckoff asserts we can’t even trust the things Lilith is accused of because “we know” men destroy, diminish, or pervert any kind of historical accomplishment or story from women. She supposes that the story of Lilith as a rebellious freedom fighter was passed down from mother to daughter through generations until being published in the Alphabet of Ben Sira with a contaminating male bias. The problem with that idea is that Jewish scholars don’t consider the Alphabet an authoritative text. 

Nevertheless, yet again, this feminist author compares Lilith to Eve and finds humanity’s mother lacking. Lilith, Zuckoff asserts, is the shadow archetype of Eve. Eve is submissive, enabling, and called the mother of all living (Genesis 3:20); Lilith is independent, assertive, a destroyer of lives and the mother of monsters. Zuckoff tells us this archetype/shadow type analogy is a warning to women from men that if she follows Lilith’s example “she’ll end up a frigid nymphomaniac childless witch.” Again, it’s all the evil men’s fault. 

 Oh, but the comparisons don’t end there. Zuckoff goes on to make the case that Lilith is really just like King David. Both committed sins but David’s sins, she claims, are discounted because, in the minds of the faithful, they weren’t actually indicative of his character. Lilith is allegedly not given this benefit, no doubt because she’s a woman. While I understand her idea, and admire her effort to endear us to the premier she-demon, there is a problem. After Lilith supposedly lost her fight with Adam for equality, she has spent the entirety of her existence in self-imposed separation from her alleged original purpose as wife and from her Creator. Indeed she has made it her purpose to destroy God’s creation. King David, though he committed many serious sins (violating nine out of the Ten Commandments), is viewed in an overall positive light because he always came back to God and declared his love for Him many times. The Psalms are a testament to his struggles with himself and God. David repented for his sins over and over again and dealt with the consequences of his actions. For example, God told David (the fact that God was still in communion with David is indicative of the difference between him and Lilith) that he was not allowed to build the first temple as he desired because he had shed innocent blood. Instead of defying God’s will in favor of his own, he drafted the plans with God’s guidance so that his son, Solomon, could build it. 

Of course, Zuckoff discounts the more negative accusations against Lilith anyway! They’re creations of fearful men and contradictory ones at that. How can Lilith be both frigid and a seductress, both a baby killer and mother of monsters? But then is it not possible for a woman to shun the appropriate attention of her husband while seeking out inappropriate extramarital attention when it serves her? Is it inconceivable for a woman to wish to procreate her own offspring to overcome that of her enemy while indeed destroying her enemy’s children? While this article is slightly less unhinged than Rivlin’s, they both present the same overall message: Be a Lilith, not an Eve, for Eve is weak and subservient, but Lilith is strong and independent, never mind her violent streak. 

This mindset has carried over to modern feminism. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen signs, stickers, t-shirts, etc. with some variation of the slogan “Be a Lilith, Not an Eve” or “Kill your Eve, Free your Lilith.” In this spirit, many feminists have been forced to acknowledge that their ideology is incompatible with the Abrahamic religions. As such, feminists desiring a spiritual connection have reached for witchcraft. In fact, New Age and Paganism are among the fastest growing religions in America. This is not new by any means. Feminism has always emerged from and alongside occultic movements such as Paganism, Spiritualism, and Theosophy. For an in-depth read on this, I would suggest the book Occult Feminism by Rachel Wilson. 

 It should be no surprise that a feminist figure like Lilith has become incredibly prominent in and translated to witchcraft practices in modern times. You can find Lilith worship on any social media app with a witch subculture (and they all have one). She has shed her humanity and become a dark moon goddess. You’ll see young women invoking Lilith to help them manifest assertiveness, pursue knowledge, confidence, independence, and a divine sexuality (read: free love and sex magic). At first, this all seems like silly feminist horse-pucky, but it really is more insidious. Of course, there’s the worship of a literal demon and magic, but there’s also the glorification of the darker aspects. In much the same way Rivlin and Zuckoff said feminists should embrace the dark side of Lilith, modern feminists have as well. Lilith is acknowledged as a dark mother embodying destructive, feminine rage, reclaiming feminine power to tear down patriarchal structures. And that’s really the crux of it, isn’t it? By usurping men from their proper place, wives and children lose their spiritual covering, becoming easy targets for the demonic.

I don’t actually believe Lilith was created as Adam’s first wife, by all accounts that seems the least plausible origin, but the story has made a huge impact and I think whoever Lilith really is, she wanted to be Adam’s wife. In a different story, Lilith was around as an evil spirit when Adam was created from the earth. She hovered around him and clung to his side, but fled when God made Eve and wed her to Adam, which would explain why she hates Eve so much. God said there was no suitable mate found for Adam in the garden (Genesis 2:20), which would include Lilith. Lilith is the jealous, scorned woman who comes to hate not only the man who rejected her but also the woman he did actually want. Her eternal hatred spreads to the offspring of the couple, all of humanity. She seeks to destroy in subtler ways than perhaps she did in ancient times. By promoting promiscuity and disdain of family life, abortion proliferates and marriage and birth rates drop, thus her enemies’ children die or never come to exist at all. Not so dissimilar to the picture of her as the ancient night hag, is it? So, Lilith, the liar and enticer, repaints her rejection as independence, her sinful defiance as a fight with a tyrant for equality, and her destructive nature as woman’s inherent nature, and in all this, makes women want to emulate her.

(Lilitu The Night Hag)

In contrast to Lilith’s alleged creation, Eve was created from Adam’s rib. While some see this as a symbol of subservience, it is actually to show her intimately close relationship with her husband, under his arm as a symbol of his duty to care for and protect her, from his side to be close to his heart. Eve was not created from Adam’s foot to be trod over as the feminist portrayal of Eve would imply. There’s never any biblical indication that Adam sought to lord over his wife, in fact, it has been argued Adam’s initial sin was essentially a lack of assertiveness in protecting his wife when the Serpent came calling. 

If Eve is the opposite counterpart of Lilith, we can see her as the helpmeet, the faithful and loving wife, a creator and protector of life. In this world, the gentleness of women is so often overlooked in favor of the values of Lilith. We become hardened either through circumstances or because society scoffs at our softness and tells us it is weakness. I think it’s well past time that we reject the traps of Lilith, who hates us for existing, and reclaim the kindness, gentleness, and faithfulness that makes femininity so beautiful.