by Maren Bradley Anderson

God then formed Lilith, the first woman, just as He had formed Adam …Adam and Lilith never found peace together; for when he wished to lie with her, she took offense at the recumbent posture he demanded. “Why must I lie beneath you?” she asked. “I was also made from dust, and am therefore your equal.” Because Adam tried to compel her obedience by force, Lilith, in a rage, uttered the magic name of God, rose into the air and left him.” [Alphabet, as quoted in The Book of Genesis, by Robert Graves and Raphael Patai.]

Introduction

Lilith is, by many accounts, the first woman, the first witch and the first feminist. She probably began life as a pre-Sumerian fertility goddess in a pre-literate culture. Since then, she has been a goddess, the first wife of Adam, a witch, a temptress, a femme fatale and a feminist. She has been forced to change often because she has been the target of suppression by patriarchal monotheistic cultures which found her threatening. Now Lilith, once the definition of a pariah, has now found a following within the feminist movement because of a re-examination of her original myth in the 1970’s. In this paper, I explore many of Lilith’s manifestations and her eventual embracement by the feminist movement.

Beginnings

Lilith probably began life as a fertility goddess who appeared sometime before the Sumerians, more than 4,000 years ago. She was the dark girl, representing those aspects of femininity which might challenge patriarchal societies. For instance, this religion may have celebrated both a woman’s menstrual cycle (which was closely associated with the moon) and her ability to create life. As a fertility goddess, Lilith would have been on of many deities populating the mystical world of her followers; she was probably a benevolent mother-goddess.

However, by the time Lilith appears in the Inanna myth around 2000 BC, she has already changed into a creature of strange power and nasty disposition. In the myth of Inanna, Lilith is depicted as a beautiful young woman with cape-like wings and clawed feet. She is a strange creature who inhabits Inanna’s Huluppu tree. Inanna cultivated a tree so she could make a bed and a throne out of it, symbols of her adult womanhood and divinity. An Anzu-bird moved into the crown of the tree, a snake or dragon dug a hole in the roots while Lilith, like her symbol the owl, lived inside the tree itself. These three had to be removed, so Inanna asked her brother, Gilgamesh for help. When he forces her out of the tree, Lilith smashes her own house out of spite.

Wolkstein tells us that this “powerful Lilith of Inanna’s adolescent days had to be sent away so Inanna’s life exploring talents could be developed” (160). Instead of a mother-goddess, this myth changes Lilith into a representation of the undesirable qualities a girl must avoid while growing up. Even though the Sumerians were polytheistic and less patriarchal than we are today, we see how this culture has already banished her to the outskirts of society” she even became a symbol of the obstacles to civilized life.

In Jewish myth, Lilith was Adam’s first wife. She and Adam were created at the same time, of the same dust. She was as independent and intelligent as Adam and demanded to be treated equally. Rivlin reports when Adam wanted her to take the recumbent position during sex, she refused, asking “Why must I lie beneath you? ...I was also made from dust, and am therefore your equal” (“Overview” 7). When he tried to force her, Lilith spoke the magic name of God (which she knew and Adam did not) and flew away from him and Eden. According to Graves and Patai, she took up residence by the shores of the Red Sea and spent her time having sex with centaurs and satyrs. She gave birth to many Lillum, which is the generic name given to all her demon-children. Adam, suddenly alone, went to God and asked him to get Lilith back for him. God sent three angels—Sensoy, Sensenoy and Sengangelof—t----o her home and asked her to return to Eden. She refused to return to her repressive husband, preferring her new life of freedom. “Lilith asked: How can I return to Adam and life like an honest housewife, after my stay beside the Red Sea?” (Graves and Patai 66). The angels then threatened to kill 100 of her children at a time and drown her if she did not return. Lilith again refused, noting she was immortal, and counter-threatened: she told them she would kill man’s children to replace her own and sometimes kill mothers in childbirth. She offered to spare the ones who had amulets with their names hanging over their cribs. It is interesting to note that Lilith “escaped the curse of death which overtook Adam, since they had parted long before the Fall” (Graves 66). Even though Lilith was not a particularly pleasant creature, she retained her immortality because she did not commit the Original Sin of Adam and his new wife, Eve.

The Middle Lilith

By the middle ages, the beautiful young goddess had again transformed, this time into the child-eating witch of fairytales, the old hag casting spells, malevolent to all. All we have to do to find Lilith in the middle ages is to look for her marks and signs: she appears as an owl, a witch, and moon-goddesses. One European myth tells of a female character who betrays a male character; she is then transmogrified into an owl. Robert Graves writes, “She has been an owl thousands of years before Gwydion was born—the same owl that occurs on coins as the symbol of Athena, the Goddess of Wisdom, the same owl that gave its name to Adam’s first wife, Lilith and as Annis the Blue Hag who sucks the blood of children in primitive British folk-lore ” (Graves 315).

In the nineteenth century, Lilith became a sexual creature again, as the Europeans conquered and tried to occupy the world outside of Europe and marveled at the beautiful savagery of the rest of the creation. She appears in poems as the sexually appealing and dangerous first wife or jilted lover: Dante Gabriel Rosetti’s poems and paintings are examples. As the Victorian notion of sexual purity grew, so did the threatening image of sexual Lilith.

In the mid-20^th century, Lilith became a movie star. She appeared often in the new genre of film noir, where she was aptly cast as the femme fatale. A femme fatale is the beautiful, dangerous woman who uses her oozing sexuality to seduce the hero and get her way. Many femme fatales end up in a bad way by the end of the movie: married and therefore rehabilitated, or alone and outcast, or just as often, dead. The fact that film noir acknowledges, and even celebrates the strong woman is a step in the right direction, but the strong women of film noir are always put back into their places by the end of the picture. This is the tradition shown previous displayed by writers like Shakespeare, whose comic heroines are usually not only the smartest characters in the play, but also the characters who move the plot most effectively; however, they are always married at the end of the play in order to re-instate the status quo of the patriarchy.  They are no more than shadows to be conquered.

Lilith is also the modern Bad Girl, beautiful, sexual and isolated: Rizzo in Grease is a good example. Another modern incarnation of Lilith is the Bitch. The bitch rejects the feminine characteristics of compassion and submission in favor of the male characteristics of aggression and determination: Nell on Ally McBeal is an effective recent bitch. If the bitch or bad girl does not actually fall or become rehabilitated, she is seen as having failed because she is alone and isolated because of her behavior.

Oral vs. Written Traditions

The previous section of this paper outlined the frequency that Lilith-type characters have appeared in western literary tradition, but the majority of people who are familiar with the above “types,” are not familiar with Lilith herself. Lilith’s obscurity can be linked to the loss of oral, female traditions of the ancient world. Scholars think that Lilith originated in an oral fertility cult because there is no written record of Lilith before she appears the one time in Inanna’s myth. Because of her limited appearance in Sumer’s myths, it is tempting to dismiss her as a minor character which only warrants mention in one story, but this is contradicted by the many representations found of Lilith in Sumerian clay tablets. From some of them, it seems that Lilith was a creature who could even travel between the realm of the dead below, and our world above. She is obviously powerful character, strong enough to earn many pictorial depictions in the Sumerian record, even though only one of her stories survives in text. This pictorial presence points to her importance in the previous cult. Lilith was such a strong figure in her original community that her influence bled into the new Sumerian culture.

Lilith’s obscurity today can be linked to the decline of oral, female traditions in the ancient world. Because female traditions tend to be oral traditions, even to the present to some extent. This is mostly due to the fact that most women were illiterate until very recently. Most cultures in the world saw little reason to teach women to read, and so, all the knowledge women had needed to be conveyed in non-literate way. A modern example of this is called an “old wives’ tale:” a story or bit of conventional knowledge that is purported to be true, but has little grounding in more than intuition and practice.

Beyond simply keeping women ignorant, some culture actively kept women from learning to read, which kept them from becoming active members of the political and religious community. The United States only passed women’s suffrage in 1920; similarly, Jewish women for centuries were forbidden from engaging in the Talmudic tradition of reading and then commenting on the Torah. In this way, a positive female tradition such as Lilith’s would be overlooked and/or dismissed without much trouble. The oral traditions of women were of little interest to a patriarchal society, which had total control of the written, and therefore permanent, record of the culture. This may also explain why there are more statues of Lilith in Sumer than there are stories of her.

However, Lilith was more than a victim of an illiterate following: Lilith was actively suppressed by patriarchal societies that encountered her, beginning with Sumer. The Sumerians were a much more matriarchal society than we are today, or than the Ancient Hebrews. However, they recognized in fertility-goddess Lilith a threat to their new religion.  [MBA1] Graves says that new cultures take the gods of previous and/or conquered cultures and transform them into demons in order to reinforce the new way of worshipping. We think this is why a beautiful, young fertility goddess was demonized into the spiteful creature who represented the childish impulses Inanna needed to overcome.

However much of a threat Lilith was to the polytheistic Sumerians, she seemed doubly so to the monotheistic Hebrews. Rivlin points out that “earlier creation myths sough to embody the relationship between man/woman as a mirror of nature; that is, the universe created by a union of Father Sky and Mother Earth” (“Overview” 12).  In the Hebrew, Muslin and Christian religions, however, there is one God who created everything by Himself, and who then created two of every animal but only one man, for whom he later had to create a (weaker, more submissive) mate. It has been theorized by Graves?? that the Hebrews moved into or conquered Sumerian lands and some of the Hebrew women formed a cult to worship Lilith who remained part of the religious geography. Lilith worship might have been tolerable, had not one way to worship a fertility goddess been to engage in sexually promiscuous behavior. So, in part to squelch this distasteful (to them) cult and partly to re-assert the validity of their own minority monotheistic religion, the powers that be in the Hebrew religion demonized Lilith and banished her to the outskirts of society. The replacement woman, Eve, was far more appealing to the patriarchal ideal.  Masculine religious leaders would have seen a strong female fertility-goddess leftover like Lilith as a threat to the very idea of monotheism and would have tried to prevent a return to the worship of her type of strong female deities. They did this by demonizing Lilith and making Eve out of a very small piece of Adam. Her revised myth was of a strong woman who, because she resisted her husband’s wishes, was cast out of society and her children killed. It served as a warning to uppity women to behave, lest they share Lilith’s punishment.  However, upon close examination of the story, one will note that Lilith leaves of her own accord. Lilith’s life outside Eden is by her own choice. She finds it preferable to living in paradise with repressive Adam.

Another reason for Lilith’s obscurity stems from the lack of primary sources available for study. We are limited to a few Sumerian clay tablets and Hebrew texts. No texts exist from the pre-literate fertility cult that gave rise to Lilith, and she does not appear in any Sumerian texts besides Inanna and only once in the Bible (Isaiah 34). This forces scholars to search for Lilith in secondary sources. To further complicate matters, most of the secondary sources Lilith appears in are scholarly studies of mythology written by men before 1960, and only mention her in passing.

Lilith and Feminists

However obscure Lilith has been to most people, she keeps showing up in modern times, notably as a character in the television show Frasier, as his chilly ex-wife, and in the female-oriented music festival of recent years Lilith Fair. She also appears under different names in pop icons like Madonna, and in fictional characters like the abused and on-the-run wife in Sleeping with the Enemy. The fact that Lilith is making her way back into our collective consciousness demonstrates the shift in cultural attitudes toward women in the last part of the 20^th century, when the civil rights movement, and within that the feminist movement, was moving under a full head of steam. Every movement needs a figurehead, an icon under which to gather, and the feminist search found Lilith. She first re-appeared in 1972 in Ms. Magazine, a feminist publication that was just getting underway at the time. Since then, there have been numerous articles, stories and poems based on her character.

Judith Plaskow describes the early feminist search for an icon. She wondered “whether we could find in the feminist movement a process, event or experience that somehow expresses the essence of the movement and that might function as a central integrating symbol for a theology of liberation…” (181). But why did Plaskow, and many other feminists, choose Lilith, an admittedly dark character, if not a demon, to put on her flag? What about Lilith is appealing to modern feminists?

To answer that question, we can re-examine the original myths of Lilith. If you take out the words with negative connotations, you end up with a story very appealing to feminists. It is the story of a strong woman who refused to submit to an oppressive relationship and an oppressive society. Lilith not only sees herself as equal, she is equal. She leaves the abusive relationship and sets up house by herself. She is also a super-woman, ultra-feminine because she is marvelously fertile. Lilith is also such a powerful figure that she can and does take revenge on humanity and God himself. This is a tribute to her divinity, and the divinity man might have enjoyed had Adam’s second wife, Eve, not eaten the apple and Adam had not shared it with her.

Another reason Lilith is so attractive to feminists is the fact that she is Eve’s antithesis.  Compared to Lilith, Eve is submissive, dependent, undemanding, pliant and beneath Adam in many ways; in the tradition of Genesis, Eve was made from Adam’s rib. Whereas Lilith is strong-minded and strong-willed, Eve is neither, and is easily swayed by the snake’s logic into disobeying God and eating the apple. The representation of Eve as the originator of original sin has damaged the image of all women, and has been a bone in the craw of feminists for years.

Finally, women seem to identify with Lilith because she is so archetypal. Lilith “relates to many other male legends of dangerous women. She is another manifestation of the White Goddess, La Belle Dame Sans Merci, who appears in many guises in differing cultures,” (Goodman 192). Most women can relate to at least one of Lilith’s personifications, whether it is as a femme fatale, a slut, a bitch, the fertile mother, the abused lover, or the woman scorned.

Conclusion

Lilith is enjoying a renaissance now not because of her negative behaviors, but because of her original positive qualities. Modern women have realized that Lilith’s reputation was the victim of a patriarchal re-definition, and that her actions, taken alone, seem reasonable if not worthy of praise. Feminists want women to see that the traditional roles of women are only that, tradition, and that behavior such as Lilith’s is actually an option.

Regardless of her actions, Lilith’s personality is worthy of praise. Her self-confidence is the root of her power. Lilith doesn’t need to prove her equality, she is simply equal. She does not put up with being treated badly; nor does she do anything against her wishes. She is the archetypal willful wild woman with whom modern women can identify. These qualities make Lilith attractive to those who long for an icon of feminine power and equality. Lilith is a modern woman in one other respect as well: she has been held down longer than any of us, and she is now fighting back.

To end, I want to quote Barbara Black Koltuv’s Book of Lilith, where she quotes Monique Wittig’s Les Guerillères: “There was a time when you were not a slave, remember that. You walked alone, full of laughter, you bathed bare-bellied…You say, it does not exist. But remember. Make an effort to remember, or, failing that, invent” (325).

Bibliography

Goodman, Naomi. “Lilith and Eve: Secret Sisters and Successive Wives.” Which Lilith? Feminist Writers Re-create the World’s First Woman. Ed. Enid Dame, Lilly Rivlin, Henny Wenkart. Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson, Inc. 1998.

Graves, Robert. The White Goddess: A Historical Grammar of Poetic Myth. NY: Farnar, Straus and Giroux. 1948

Graves, Robert, and Raphael Patai. Hebrew Myths: The Book of Genesis. Garden City, NJ: Doubleday and Co. Inc. 1964.

Koltov, Barbara Black. “The Book of Lilith: A Summary.” Which Lilith? Feminist Writers Re-create the World’s First Woman. Ed. Enid Dame, Lilly Rivlin, Henny Wenkart. Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson, Inc. 1998.

Plaskow, Judith. “The Coming of Lilith (excerpt).” Which Lilith? Feminist Writers Re-create the World’s First Woman. Ed. Enid Dame, Lilly Rivlin, Henny Wenkart. Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson, Inc. 1998.

Rivlin, Lily. “Afterward: Lilith Lives.” Which Lilith? Feminist Writers Re-create the World’s First Woman. Ed. Enid Dame, Lilly Rivlin, Henny Wenkart. Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson, Inc. 1998.

Rivlin, Lily. “Overview.” Which Lilith? Feminist Writers Re-create the World’s First Woman. Ed. Enid Dame, Lilly Rivlin, Henny Wenkart. Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson, Inc. 1998.

Wolkstein, Diane. Inanna: Queen of Heaven and Earth, Her Stories and Hymns from Sumer. New York: Harper and Row. 1983.