Naamah

Naamah's only biblical trace fits in five words. Genesis 4:22 closes the genealogy of Cain by saying that Zillah bore Tubal-cain, forger of every implement of bronze and iron, «and the sister of Tubal-cain was Naamah». Not a line more: not what she did, not with whom, not why the text bothers to name her while it withholds the names of so many other women on that same list. That silence is exactly the gap through which demonology later entered.

Rabbinic tradition noticed it at once. Bereshit Rabbah 23:3 preserves two opposed readings of the same verse. Rabbi Abba bar Kahana holds that Naamah was Noah's wife, and that she was so called because her deeds were pleasing (neimim). The Sages answer that Naamah was someone else, and that she was so called because she played the tambourine pleasantly (manemet) for the worship of idols. In a single line of midrash the same name is divided between the matriarch who saves humanity from the flood and the music that drags it into idolatry. Castilian Kabbalah of the thirteenth century took the second reading and carried it to its end.

In the Zohar, Naamah is no longer a woman of Cain's line: she is the mother of demons, issued from the Side of Cain, and her office is to visit men while they sleep. The text is precise and cold about the mechanism. She does not conceive through union: she carries off the desire of the sleeping man, and out of that desire, and nothing else, spirits are born. Every lost emission is, on that reading, a child of hers, and from there comes her title as mother of a whole class of creatures rather than mother of a particular lineage.

The same body of texts credits her with a greater feat: together with Lilith she corrupted Uzza and Azael, the watcher angels who came down to earth, and from that encounter came a progeny that was neither angelic nor human. This has to be said carefully: the Azael of the Zohar and the Azazel of Leviticus and 1 Enoch are figures that late Kabbalah confuses freely, but they were not born the same, and this entry does not identify them.

Rabbi Shimon also places her beside Lilith in charge of childhood diphtheria, and there the one sharp boundary between the two appears. Lilith kills children. Naamah does not: Naamah seduces and conceives. It is a difference of office and not of degree, and it explains why folklore guards cradles from one and guards the marriage bed from the other.

Kabbalah organises the world of evil as a mirror of the world of holiness, and where above there is one bride, below there are four. Naamah is one of the four consorts of Samael, the accusing angel turned prince of the Other Side, and she shares that place with Lilith, with Agrat bat Mahlat and with a fourth whose name changes from text to text: some lists say Mahalath, others Eisheth Zenunim. Each governs her tequfah, her season of the year, and commands hosts and classes of spirits of her own.

That the lists disagree is not a copyists' oversight: they are different schools describing the same structure, and none of them set out to fix a closed canon. What stays constant across all of them is the division of roles. Lilith is the first and the one who disputes the throne. Agrat rides out with her host on appointed nights. Naamah is beauty, and she is the only one who needs no host, because her battlefield is the sleep of a single man.

From that motherhood also comes the link most repeated in later kabbalistic literature: Asmodeus, king of the demons, is counted as her son. The attribution is not unanimous, since there are traditions that award him to Agrat bat Mahlat, but it is the most widespread, and it is what gives Naamah a place at the infernal summit and not only in the bedrooms of men.

The Naamah of the treatises came down into daily life by an unexpected road: books of household conduct. The Kav haYashar, published in Frankfurt in 1705 by Tzvi Hirsch Kaidanover, names her bluntly as «the demoness called Naamah» and places her in the marital bedroom, warning of what happens when a man thinks of another woman during union and citing the Zohar to explain that the image which had appeared to him was her. A manual of piety, not a grimoire, is what carried her name into thousands of Ashkenazi homes.

From there come the practices that surround her, all defensive and none invocatory. But they need sorting properly, because Ashkenazi folklore divides them between two figures and not one. The cradle repertoire (the written amulet hung above the new mother's bed, the vigil on the night before the circumcision, the names of Senoy, Sansenoy and Semangelof) is aimed at Lilith, and the amulets say so themselves, since they name her and not Naamah. Naamah's province is the other room: the marital bedroom of the Kav haYashar, where the remedy is not an object hung up but a warning about whom one is thinking of. Jewish folklore asks nothing of her; it only sees to it that she does not come in. There are no offerings, no pacts, no formulas for calling her, and that absence is itself a fact about how she was understood.

Her emblem, by contrast, comes not from magic but from midrash: the timbrel she played «pleasingly», the instrument with which, according to the Sages, she drew people to the worship of idols. She is a demoness whose symbol is a musical instrument.

The name נעמה is a common one, and the biblical roll shares it out among at least three different people. Centuries of confusion follow from that, and they are worth undoing.

The first is this one: the sister of Tubal-cain in Genesis 4:22, the only one the Kabbalah turned into a demoness.

The second is Naamah the Ammonite, wife of King Solomon and mother of Rehoboam (1 Kings 14:21). She is a historical queen of the house of David, has no connection whatever with demonology, and the coincidence of names is only that, a coincidence.

The third appears in the Enochic literature as a daughter of Enoch, and has nothing to do with the other two either.

To those three is added a fourth and more modern misunderstanding: the English- and Spanish-speaking esoteric tradition sometimes calls her Nahemah or Nahema, a form that comes from late kabbalistic vocalisation. It is not another figure or another demoness: whoever meets that name has met this same one, written otherwise.