Lilith

Lilith, in ancient Jewish and Kabbalistic traditions, is considered the first woman created from the same earth as Adam, making her his equal partner in creation. She refused to submit to him in intercourse, demanding equality, and pronounced the Greatest Name of God, which granted her supernatural power to fly away from the Garden of Eden toward the Red Sea of Demons. There, in dark caves, she joined demons and fallen angels, becoming a symbol of female rebellion and independence from patriarchal male authority, as recounted in the Alphabet of Ben Sira from the 8th century.

The ancient texts say far less about her than modern imagery takes for granted. The Talmud gives her long hair (Eruvin 100b) and wings (Niddah 24b), and warns against sleeping alone in a house for fear of her (Shabbat 151b); in Bava Batra 73a a demon appears who is called the son of Lilith. The incantation bowls of Nippur, between the fifth and seventh centuries, draw her frontally, naked and with bound feet, ringed by the formula that expels her. The Zohar pairs her with Samael and places her among the qelipot, the shells that enclose the divine spark.

The rest is recent and worth dating. The bat wings and cloven feet come from Christian iconography of the devil and from the Romantic print of the nineteenth century; the inverted pentagram was popularised by Éliphas Lévi in 1855; the owl comes from so translating the lilit of Isaiah 34:14 and from the Burney Relief, whose identification with her was discarded decades ago. None of that is in Ben Sira, in the Talmud, or in the Zohar.

Lilith is the mother of the lilim, the host of demons that attacks newborns and men who sleep alone. Against her, Ashkenazi folklore hung beside the cradle amulets bearing the names of the three angels the Alphabet of Ben Sira sends after her, Senoy, Sansenoy and Semangelof; the Mesopotamian bowls had served the same purpose centuries earlier. In Lurianic Kabbalah she stands on the side of the qelipot, the shells that imprison the divine spark, paired with Samael.

Her rereading as a figure of liberation belongs to the twentieth century and can be dated. Judith Plaskow's essay «The Coming of Lilith» (1972) rewrites her as Eve's ally, and in 1976 the Jewish feminist magazine Lilith took her name; from there she passed into neopaganism and popular culture. That reception should not be mistaken for an ancient cult: in the Jewish sources no one venerates her, she is conjured away.