Transcription
Today I will be doing my second book review of gyarchy themed books with Lilith by Nikki Marmmory.
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The figure of Lilith has been called a demon and references to her extend back into the ancient myths of the Sumerians and even earlier as a dark feminine force. She is an important figure in Jewish mythology, described as the first wife of Yahweh's first son, Adam. She refuses to accept Adam's authority and lie beneath him. Instead, she takes off on her own.
The story of Lilith has always been told by men who follow a strictly patriarchal deity. But what if we could read the story from Lilith's perspective? That's exactly what Nikki Marie allows us to do in her 2023 book, Lilith. And today, I'm going to talk about what I love about this retelling.
First, I appreciated this book so much that I have made it the official version of the Abrahamic myth to be told within the Debid Dasa sacred garchy. I now declare it a canon religious text because it covers so much ground from the garden of Eden to the great flood to the characters of Jezebel and Mary Magdalene. It is clear from scriptures that the God of the Bible used to have a wife. Marmar sets out to discover through Lilith what happened to her and why the Abrahamic religions systematically attempted to erase her, and she shows how women have carried the memory of her forward throughout the ages.
The book starts with a quote from Genesis wherein God says, "Behold, the man has become like one of us to know good and evil." "One of us" implies there's more than one God, which if you are an astute Bible reader is confirmed when we learn that the God of the Bible was given his allotment of specific people and not all of the human race. Deuteronomy 32:9 reads, "For the Lord's portion is his people, Jacob and his allotted inheritance." So Yahweh is only in charge of Jacob's lineage, the Israelites, while the rest of the world is ruled over by other gods.
The garden was only one paradise on earth among many. Long before Eve, the goddess and mother of all, created the tree of knowledge for Lilith to eat of its fruits. So, if you ever wondered why God would have created the tree only to forbid Adam and Eve from eating from it, he didn't create it. It makes much more sense that it was the work of the goddess designed to allow her children to have an understanding of life akin to her own.
Lilith cherishes the knowledge given to her as a gift from her mother. God Yahweh gives Adam the gift of naming things. "Naming is not creation. Naming is to man what birthing is to woman," Lilith muses in the book. "They can name things all they like. It does not change the truth. Life comes from a mother." Yahweh tells Adam that naming things gives them life. But Lilith has already eaten the fruit and knows better. She says he cannot fool me as he has deceived Adam.
Lilith loves Adam at first, but Adam quickly grows arrogant. He names things and thinks that it means that he rules them. He creates a sword and becomes more demanding and violent. Eventually, he rapes her. She calls for her mother goddess Asher for comfort and gets no response. Something has happened and the goddess has not been seen or heard from in some time.
Lilith flees the garden south to the ocean. Three biblically accurate and frightening angels come to retrieve her and threaten her that death will come to her if she refuses to return. She laughs at them and tells them, "So be it."
Lilith grows wings and travels around the earth where she discovers lots of other people with different languages and different gods. She finds lands that are equal in beauty, if not more serene and lush than her original garden. She returns to check in on Adam, who is alone and depressed. Sometime later, she meets Eve, who runs away from her in her winged humanlike form. Lilith then flies away again and finds a fisherman whom she notes is infinitely more attractive than Adam.
The repeated realizations that Yahweh lied to them about being the only people and that Adam was the first and only man continue to reveal the deceptive nature of her so-called father. In the fisherman's arms, Lilith discovers that she can shapeshift into a snake, and that the man is not surprised or put off by it. As they make passionate love, this new trick comes in handy as she approaches Eve again. Eve has already been warned by Adam not to eat the fruit of the tree of knowledge, but Lilith explains that she ate it and she did not die. Eve is convinced and we all know where the story goes from there.
Lilith tries to make her understand that the wisdom is for women and not for Adam. But Eve out of loyalty wants him to be enlightened like herself. She taunts his ego saying that she will always know more than him. So he eats. And instead of accepting the knowledge the fruit unlocks in him, he denies it and lies and repeats back what Yahweh had promised him that he would have dominion over all, including women, if he obeyed his God's laws. Whereas Asher, the mother, wanted her children to become gods themselves, Yahweh had hoped to keep them ignorant and subservient to him. He feared they would one day replace him. For men, this deal of obeying God's laws came with a good amount of power. For women, it meant secondass status. There really are no benefits for the female sex in being devoted to God the Father, especially when the wisdom gifted by the fruit left by our mother to enlighten us reveals that he is not our creator, but instead a force trying to prevent our spiritual growth and obscure the truth.
Adam and Eve are punished and driven from the garden. Lilith, feeling she has failed, lies around depressed. That is until the archangel Samuel approaches and reveals that he's always watched and adored her in the garden. The two become lovers. It is through Samuel that we learn that Yahweh and Asher were not the first gods. Samuel came from a much more ancient darkness and he was pissed off that his god had given Adam more power than both the angels and Lilith. And we discover that Yahweh had Asher captured by the angels and taken to her sister's realm in the underworld.
In Shaw, ruled by the ancient goddess Arshagal, we see the origins of the concept of hell. Yahweh arranged Asher's disappearance so that she would never give the fruit to their children and allow them to evolve into gods. Lilith embarks on a journey to retrieve her mother from the underworld. And what follows is a trip through some of the most wellressearched landscapes of historical cities where the goddess is known by many different names. Lilith pieces together the clues like shards of artifacts from archaeological digs. One can feel the author connecting the dots through cultures and thousands upon thousands of years. This is the book's brilliance. It puts Abrahamic tales in context, placing them within the rich tapestry of history and coexisting mythologies. Nikki Marmurray is a scholar tracing the goddess's footsteps through the ages and doing so with such rich sensory detail that we can imagine ourselves living in a different time.
The epic scale of this book includes Lilith hitching a ride on Noah's ark and meeting his wife Noria who sees prophecies while both supporting and mocking her drunkarded husband. Sleeping among the animals on the ark, Lilith gives birth to the child conceived with Samuel and names him as Modi. In a particularly poignant scene, Noah's wife Noria tells Lilith that a dove has come back with the budding stem of an olive tree in its beak. "So there's land." Noria clicked her tongue. "Open your eyes, Lilith. It means there was always land elsewhere. Can a tree survive months submerged [snorts] in the briney sea? His god," she rolled her eyes, "told him that the whole world was flooded. Lies. It was only the land of Shinar." It is through small revelatory moments like this that Marmarie pulls apart the lies of the patriarchal god over and over again with simple critical thinking. She makes fools of anyone who believes the infallibility of the Bible's tales and mocks its authors with an earthy common sense that is inherently feminine.
When the ark has reached land and a new settlement is established, Lilith leads the wives and daughters of Noah's sons into the woods to learn the ways of the goddess so that she will not be forgotten. 12-year-old Sarah pays close attention. This plays out later in the book when we meet the Canaanite priestesses of the goddess who have made a religion of those very same teachings. Lilith's son eventually conceives a human child with Noah and Noria's granddaughter which leads to his death at the hands of her uncle whom she is forced to marry.
Lilith seeks out the generations of her bloodline over the coming millennia and looks in on them with delight as history moves forward. When mothers catch her peeking at her descendants in their cradles, they are fearful and make sigils to ward her off as a demon who steals infants. [snorts] The book presents us with the delicious possibility that many of us are her descendants rather than merely those of Adam and Eve.
During the ensuing adventures, we make a stop in Deli to consult the Pytha, who tells Lilith how she will find the goddess's prophet, creating a delightful crossover between the pagan religions of Greece and Christianity. Turns out Mary Magdalene is a prophet of the mother goddess. Mary has the knowledge of all the generations of women before her, all the way back to Lilith in the garden. But being a woman, Mary is disregarded and the teachings of her partner Jesus, which were originally centered on Sophia, the wisdom of the goddess, as Marmarie pulls heavily from the Gnostic Gospels here, were adjusted to suit the tastes of his male followers. His preaching was altered to fit the Yahweh centered narrative. We listen through Lilith as Mary recites her own gospels with fervor and even gains a small following of women.
Throughout the book, the author shows us the biblical stories alongside the historical details of the coexisting faiths that the Abrahamic religion tries to wipe out and blot from memory. The truth shines through the lies as easily as opening one's eyes.
One of my favorite characters in the book is Queen Jezebel. During her search for the prophet of the goddess, Lilith discovers that the very same teachings of Asher that she passed on to Sarah after the flood were carried forward with the Canaanites, named after Sarah's brother, Canaan. Through Lilith, we get to witness the detailed rituals of the so-called doves, the priestesses of Elot, the goddess. Jezebel is their high priestess and fiercely devout. She is heavily adorned and flamboyant, a skilled huntress and fearless. She is insulted by the Israelite Obadiah, who refuses to enter her temple, but Lilith convinces her to seduce King Ahab to become the queen of Israel and erect the queen of heaven's golden temple there. Though his father worshiped Yahweh, King Ahab's mother had been a devote of Isis, and he was keen to keep peaceful relationships between people of different faiths. Lilith urges Jezebel to win him over with love and rule with him in order to spread the wisdom of Asher. And so they leave the lush Venetian lands for desert.
400 doves serve in the goddess's temple in Samaria. At first they have comfort, security, power, and respect. They want for nothing. They are content for 16 wonderful years until a fight breaks out over the ownership of a vineyard and then a drought befalls the land. We meet the hairy and irate Elijah calling out King Ahab for allowing the worship of false gods and condemning Jezebel. Wanting to stamp out the worship of gods other than Yahweh, he proposes a contest to determine whose god is greatest. Ahab is foolish enough to agree. Elijah proposes the challenge. Each side would prepare a sacrifice and the god that responded by sending fire to light the altar would be declared the real god. The prophets of Bal perform their rituals and pray and nothing happens. And here's where Marmarie offers her own clever explanation regarding the details of this fabled event. Under Lilith's instruction, Jezebel is waiting at a distance with a flaming arrow to set the sacrifice to Baal al light. But the three angels, Lilith's lifelong enemies, intervene, sending the arrow onto Elijah's altar. Her plan backfires. The priests of Bal are slaughtered and the doves of the goddess enslaved. Jezebel rejects her husband Ahab, who then dies in battle. And she has her revenge on the prophet Elijah. But she goes mad when both of her sons are slain and jumps from her window in one last defiant act. The flamboyant, fierce Jezebel, comes to her untimely end. Still, the Jezebel genes continue on through her daughter Athalia, the queen of Judah. Every king of Jerusalem was descended from Jezebel.
I've been accused a few times of having a Jezebel spirit, and through the author's descriptions, that feels appropriate and even delightful. She was a dedicated priestess and stood defiantly, never converting nor succumbing to the pressure to make herself smaller or less powerful than she really was in the face of a patriarchal god. I am cut from the same cloth and my hope like hers is to revel in the beauty and sensuality of the divine feminine and remind others of the mother.
Lilith is an epic tale of finding and recovering ancient wisdom. The fight is always between the love of life and the heavy drive of authoritarian patriarchal oppression. But throughout every story, no matter how heart-wrenching, life finds a way to creep through the cracks. And the memory of the mother of all can never be erased for as long as women exist and create new life. And that's a very good thing because if ever it were, our planet would lose the animating force that allows it to continue on. If ever she, the divine feminine, were to be truly annihilated, life itself would wither, dry up, and blow away.
Nikki Marmurray leaves us with a message of hope at the end of the book, and it is the message we need to wake up from the unnatural patriarchal nightmare of the last 6,000 years or so. We need to recognize and appreciate the preciousness of the gift of our temporary existence and our amazing ability to perpetuate it indefinitely. Not through stagnation in an eternal life after death, but through the act of creation and regeneration. Like Mary Magdalene preaches, we are the culmination of all those who came before us and we contain all that will come.
From page 251, "I am the first thought and the last. She who exists before all. I dwell in those who came before and those who are yet to be. I am numberless, immeasurable, ineffable. Through me comes wisdom, the wisdom of everlasting things. I am the first thought, and I will be the last."
Lilith is somehow both biblically accurate and historically aligned, which in itself is quite a feat, but it's also spiritually truthful. And it is filled with enough necessary emotional depth and lush sensory detail to allow us to travel through time with a figure that has been misunderstood and unfairly maligned. Women in this era can and will give our own retelling of myths and keep these stories alive, peeling back the layers to reveal new meaning. This is the nature of myth itself, to flourish as a living text. And that is why I declare this book canon religious scripture for the garchy.
[music] [music] [music] [music] A [music] [music and singing] mother returns. Our mother returns. He [music] could never destroy her. She rises now. She rises [music] now like a flame. Heat. [music] [music] Heat. >> [music]