Lilitu

Lilitu belongs to the class of the lilû, spirits of the nocturnal wind of ancient Mesopotamia, and already appears in Sumerian and Akkadian spells from the second millennium before our era. Her name has traditionally been linked to lil, the wind or the air, although current Assyriologists discuss that etymology. She is not a goddess nor has a cult: she is a threat that is conjured. The texts place her in the wastelands and the ruins, far from the city and from order, and describe her as the one who has neither husband nor house, the one who cannot give birth and therefore stalks what others engender. The series of spells Maqlû names her among the presences that are combated with fire and word.

She is imagined winged, with raptor claws and loose hair, capable of entering through the cracks like a current of air. Her attack is nocturnal and silent: she lies with sleeping men to steal their seed and strength from them, and she haunts parturient women and newborns, to whom their sudden death was attributed. Against her amulets, clay figurines and conjuring bowls with spiral inscriptions were used, which were buried under the threshold of the house to trap her. It is advisable to dispel a very widespread misunderstanding: the so-called Burney Relief, the famous Babylonian plaque of the winged woman with claws and owls, was identified with Lilitu in 1937, but current scholarship has discarded that reading and sees in it Ishtar or Ereshkigal.

The importance of Lilitu is not in its myths, which barely exist, but in its cultural descent. From the lilû class proceeds the name and a good part of the traits of Lilith, the figure that the Jewish tradition would develop centuries later until converting her into Adam's first wife. That transit places her in the documented origin of a chain that crosses the Near East, medieval demonology and the European vampire. Recent scholarship nuances the link and warns against the readings that take for granted a straight line between the Babylonian conjuration and Hebrew folklore, but even with that caution Lilitu continues to be the oldest point to which the fear of the woman who visits at night and takes life can be traced.