Transcription
Abrahamic mythology represents one of the longest continually developing religious traditions in the world. From its origins in ancient Canaan to post-modern theology and mysticism, Yahweh, various angels such as Michael and Gabriel, the of course the demonic forces led by Satan or Belial or Belzebub or somehow, take your pick, have all come to become household names. Not to mention, of course, Jesus, Muhammad, and thousands of pages of religious scripture.
For over 3,000 years, Abrahamic mythology has developed, spread, and flourished on the world stage of religion. But one figure in that mythology finds their origins well before angels and archangels, before messiahs and prophets, before perhaps even Yahweh. The figure of the demoness Lilith reaches back in some form to ancient Sumerian and Babylonian mythology, but came to flourish especially in later Jewish mythology. Indeed, it's arguable that no other figure has undergone such development: from divine being to rebellious first wife of Adam, to an infant-murdering demoness, to a being of primordial evil, a wife of the anti-god Samayaza, then split into younger and older variants, said to have been hewn from the Divine Throne itself, to even becoming the Divine consort in later Kabbalistic speculations, and finally a feminist icon in the 20th and 21st centuries. Lilith, the maiden of the night, is truly one of the most remarkable figures in the entire history of Abrahamic mythology.
In this at least two-part series, I'll be exploring the origins and development of Lilith. In this first episode, I'll be covering Lilith's ancient origins and transformation in rabbinic literature before turning, in the second episode, to her dramatic, even shocking, development in the mystical Kabbalistic literature. If you're interested in magic, hermetic philosophy, alchemy, Kabbalah, or the history of the occult, make sure to subscribe here to Esoterica and check out my numerous other, dozens of other, content on topics and esotericism. And also, if you want to support my work of providing accessible, scholarly, and free content on topics and esotericism here on YouTube for free, I'd hope you consider supporting my work either on my Patreon with a one-time donation, or you can use the Super Thanks option below this video. Your support makes this channel possible, and I assure you, I deeply, deeply appreciate it. But now, let's explore the complex origins and development of Lilith, the night maiden. I'm Dr. Justin Sledge, and welcome to Esoterica, where we explore the arcane in history, philosophy, and religion.
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If one were to travel back in time to the streets of ancient Babylon around 2000 BCE and inquire among the *ashipu* or the *mashmashu*, the ritual experts in that time, about the God Yahweh, the Angel Michael or Raphael, the Watchers, Samyaza, or Satan, they would probably just look back at you in a confused stare. Indeed, those mythological beings were centuries, if not millennia, from being developed in the crucible of apocalyptic Judaism, much, much later. But if one were to inquire of those *ashipu* or the *mashimashu* about the *Lilu* or the *Lilitu* in Akkadian, one might very well see the blood flee from their face and dread, terror. Lilith, in some form and in various numbers, has haunted the imagination of people long before monotheism, dualism, long before any Yahweh or Satan. In fact, Lilith may well be the oldest surviving mythological figure in all of Abrahamic mythology. Though, as we'll see, the origins and development of Lilith is anything but simple.
It appears that the earliest conception of a Lilith wasn't a singular, distinct being or personality, but a class of apparently malevolent sub-gods, or what we might call demons. The *lilu*, along with the *lilitu* and *ardat-lili* at least in Akkadian, or the maiden Lilith, seem to have been largely creatures that dwelled in remote or deserted regions of the earth and were especially dangerous to pregnant women, to babies, and also even to young men. Some *lilu* and *lilitu* (both Akkadian versions of the Sumerian *lil*) may have also been associated with insanity and wind demons, such as their purported leader, Pazuzu. Come back to him in a minute. *Ardat-lili* especially seems to have been a kind of perpetual bride-to-be whose sexual dysfunction causes her to target young men, perhaps the kind of proto-succubus-like figure. However, *alû* or the male *Lil* in Sumerian is taken to have been the father of none less than Gilgamesh, like the Epic of Gilgamesh, who actually goes on to encounter a *kisikil-lilû*, a spirit primarily dwelling in sacred trees, though both the reading of that in Sumerian and the meaning of that expression is still hotly debated. The Burney Relief may depict a *lilitu*. The association with the owls in that image are kind of speaking in that favor, but there's absolutely no agreement among scholars, with arguments that that's actually Ishtar, who ironically seems to have actually had an antagonistic relationship with the *lilitu*. It could be Ishtar's sister and the queen of the underworld, Ereshkigal, to some, otherwise totally unknown figure. Who knows about the Burney Relief? Regardless, the *lilu* and *lilitu* form some complex, though admittedly unclear, aspect of the demonological ecology of ancient Mesopotamian religious life.
However, it seems that an etymological mistake between the isolate Sumerian and Semitic Akkadian languages would eventually allow for a kind of diffusion between the sub-divine beings of the *lilu*/*lilitu* family and the daughter of Anu, a proper goddess, Lamashtu. This can be seen in how the *lilu*/*lilitu* aren't written with the divine determinative like Lamashtu is. What seems to happen is a kind of linguistic assimilation where some of the malevolent activity of the *lilitu* are fused with the explicitly anti-natal evil of Lamashtu, who of course was known to kill unborn children, either by tapping on the mother's stomach seven times, of course, murdering babies through crib death, or even just kidnapping them from a wet nurse. Lamashtu's infamy is actually well-attested in the amulets and spells, the numerous spells and amulets against her, which actually deployed the iconography of the leader of the wind *lilu*, Pazuzu. Of course, Pazuzu gets a super bad rap because *The Exorcist* kind of did him dirty by making him possess that young girl, Regan, but that's actually considerably ironic if you think about the fact that he was invoked precisely as a protector of young children and mothers. So, sorry, Pazuzu.
What appears to have happened is that some of the characteristics and functions of the *lilitu*, especially including *ardat-lili*, seem to have been fused with the more explicitly anti-natal evil of Lamashtu, with a kind of false friend relationship between the etymologically unrelated Sumerian term for those beings, *lil*, and the Semitic Akkadian word for night, *lilûm* or *liliatum*, thus seeming to give rise to a pan-Mesopotamian demoness attested in later Phoenician, Israelite, Jewish, Persian, Mandean, you name it, texts, sources largely responsible for crib death, seducing young men in their sleep, etc. Now, exactly how this process developed isn't totally understood, and it probably won't ever be understood. But it seems possible, likely to me, that through a linguistic mishap and a bit of divine-demonic assimilation, Lilith, as we know her, came into being.
What might be the earliest evidence of this fusion may be a 7th-century BCE amulet found at Arslan Tash in what is now Northern Syria. This amulet is really interesting in several respects. One, it shows Lilith as a demoness, thus leaving her cradle in Mesopotamia (sorry for that cradle joke) and entering into the Levant. Second, the inscription is in Phoenician and not Akkadian, showing cultural diffusion of the Lilith myth. And finally, the amulet may actually be our earliest depiction of Lilith as a kind of sphinx-like being. However, both the reading and the meaning of the inscription are heavily contested by scholars, with that final *t* in *Lilit* being hugely in question. So, is this Lilith? As soon as possible, may be likely, but the jury is out and will likely remain so forever.
The next possible appearance is also contested, but it's also the first and only mention of Lilith in ancient Israelite literature, that is, in the Hebrew Bible or the Christian Old Testament, at Isaiah 34:14. The prophet there is describing the *Yom Yahweh*, or the coming day of divine justice, in which all the nations that oppressed Israel will be divinely destroyed, and devastation will be everywhere. And describes the condition of those nations such that "jackal shall meet hyenas, goat-demons shall greet each other; there too *lilit* shall repose and find her resting place." The problem is that the Hebrew for all those creatures I just mentioned is highly uncertain and remains very poorly understood to this day. In fact, the Great Isaiah Scroll found at Qumran, the most complete ancient Isaiah scroll we have, the term *Lilith* there is actually in the feminine plural, *Lilot*, which better matches the literary flow of the text. Anyhow, what is clear is that these animals are maybe demons, or associated with ruins, or otherwise deserted places, or destroyed places, and that's actually pretty typical of demonic beings in ancient Mesopotamian mythology more generally, and we'll see it's something that's inherited directly into Jewish demonology as well. Again, is this Lilith a class of demonic beings, or a specific demonic being, or a demonic being at all? Indeed, no antenatal violence is invoked here either. Actually, a recent study has argued that none of the beings typically invoked as proto-demons in the Hebrew Bible, like *dever* and *reshf* (these are sickness, plague demons), *shedim*, *sareim* (those are the goat demons), or *lil*/*lilot*, I guess, a recent argument is made that they're not demons at all. Judith Butler has actually made a very cogent argument, at least to my mind, that these are just ritually impure animals, with *lilith* just being a kind of owl or something. Though, think back to the Burney Relief in this regard. It seems like owls kind of got associated with these beings. But again, the Hebrew is so poorly understood, and the cultural context utterly lost, that we're probably never going to understand what those few verses in Isaiah ever meant with any certainty.
And strangely, despite the positive explosion of both angelic and demonic beings during the period that most scholars refer to as Jewish apocalypticism (think of the Book of Enoch and literature like that), Lilith is conspicuously absent in what are otherwise dozens of foundational texts in the genre, many brimming with such supernatural creatures. In fact, one of the sole references to Lilith or a Lilith-like being is likely an exorcistic text in the Dead Sea Scrolls, the Song of the Sage (4Q510 and 11). In this text, Lilith occurs in the singular, and in the exorcistic invocation, which compared to the Great Isaiah Scroll, also recovered from Qumran, which again had it in the plural, again, are we dealing with Lilith or something else here? It's so hard to know.
Further development of the Lilith mythology would occur, interestingly enough, closer to her original homeland, over there in Mesopotamia. In virtually parallel development, the mythology of Lilith began to more fully coalesce in both the Babylonian Talmud and in Mesopotamian incantation bowls, before reaching its mythological maturity just before the time period of what we might think of as the European Middle Ages. But the Talmud, as you might recall, is a commentary on an earlier text of Jewish lore called the Mishnah. To such of these commentaries were produced, there were two Talmuds produced: one over in Palestine and the other in the academies of Babylon during the Sasanian period. While the Mishnah itself contains no Lilith references, she does get about a half a dozen mentions in the Babylonian Talmud. For instance, we learn in Tractate Eruvin that one of the punishments meted out to women because of the sin of Eve is that they have to grow long hair like Lilith, which doesn't seem like a super bad punishment. At 69b, we learn of a treatment for *girah*, this might be a kind of striking or stinging pain in one's body, that involves some kind of stone known as the "arrow of Lilith" (*gerah de-lilita*). There's a pun there between the pain *girah* and the *arogirah* in the Aramaic, and that's probably how the magical idea happens. At Nidah 24b, we learn that if a woman has a stillbirth which resembles Lilith, in that it has wings, that such a fetus is viable, and that that woman is tame or susceptible to the laws around ritual uncleanness following childbirth. At Bava Batra 73a through b, we read a super strange narrative in which a character called Hormiz, this is apparently the son of Lilith, is performing all kinds of acrobatic feats while holding a glass of wine that never spills. Shockingly, by the way, this is probably a reference to the Zoroastrian deity Ahura Mazda, the God of Light and goodness, ironically here made the son of the demoness Lilith. So it's a Talmud, though in some shade at the Zoroastrians for some reason. Don't pick on those Zoroastrians, they have a hard enough time. They are wonderful people. At Chullin 151b, Rava warns us to never sleep in an empty house because, of course, you'll be seized by Lilith, so don't do that. And in a final reference, we find a debate about the fate of Adam and the years after his expulsion from the Garden of Eden. In a very weird narrative at Eruvin 18b, we learn that in those 130 years following the exile from the garden, Adam, probably through nocturnal seminal emissions, begat a whole race of *ruhin*, the *shedim*, and *lilin*. Now, exactly how to translate those terms is not clear because Talmudic demonology is notoriously unsystematic. I've done an episode about that if you want to check it out. But it might mean something like spirits, shade demons, and Lilith demons, but it could just as well be something else. Note there that *lilin* is in the masculine plural and not in the feminine singular or feminine plural. But the whole phrase might mean something like spirits and male and female demons, but it's not terribly clear.
A few final pieces of rabbinical literature will also help us reveal the development of the Lilith myth, and those can be found primarily in later Midrashic or legendary commentaries on the Bible. In Genesis Rabbah, we find a really interesting discussion caused by what is apparently a lacuna in the biblical text. You may remember that before Cain and Abel went out into the field, they were discussing something, but there's a gap in the Hebrew Bible's text there. There should be a discussion of what they were discussing. Well, they go off into a field, and things don't go well for Abel. And so we never learned what they were talking about. So what were they talking about? One of the very topics mentioned in that discussion was they were arguing about the *harishona*, or the first Eve, who returned to the dust. Now, while Lilith isn't explicitly mentioned here, the idea that Adam had a first wife that got away, that's going to matter a whole lot more in just a minute.
In another Midrash, at Midbar 16, where Moses yet again is arguing with Yahweh not to kill everyone, as they always want to do, one of the arguments provided by Moses is that if he does in fact kill all the Israelites, Yahweh will be compared to Lilith, who kills her own children. Not a good look, buddy. Not a good look, Yahweh. Now, this is the first time in the rabbinical literature so far that we have the motif of Lilith as a child killer, though the reference here is to her killing her own children, which is ironic considering that in most of the medieval literature, at the fully developed literature on Lilith, she should be depicted as a rage-filled demoness precisely because of her inability to have her own children. Again, a crucially important part of the development of her legend and how she's integrated into Judaism, where she will survive in the mythology for ages.
However, the threat of Lilith against mothers, babies, and children was also being developed at the same time in the magical technologies of the same cultural and historical milieu as the Babylonian Talmud. In dozens, maybe hundreds, of incantation bowls, Lilith is both described, abjured, and even widely depicted for the first time. Now, these incantation bowls were typically a kind of magical device containing a magical text written often in a circle or a spiral with a depiction of the demonic entity that's being targeted at the center of them, which is typically depicted as being wrapped up in chains. And they were typically buried in ritually important parts of the home, often beneath the lintel of the house. This magical technology is widely observed with the language in the case that it's not pseudo-writing, just squiggles, those probably were sold to illiterate people, sorry. They often indicated the religious or ethnic background of the user, so Hebrew, Aramaic, probably Jews; Mandean, probably Mandeans; Persian, probably Zoroastrians, etc. Lilith is one of the most widely attested demons depicted and exorcised in these bowls over all ethnic groups, with her long, unkempt hair almost always giving her away. In general, the bowls contain two types of invocations: one, which protect women and babies and children from Lilith, and sometimes even male Liliths, so are you still around? And two, those would protect men from her and her more succubus-like form. These are often even combined. In both cases, divine and angelic names are invoked to banish Lilith from the home and protect those inside it.
It's also worth noting that many of the bowls and the incantations actually operate as a kind of *get*, or a bill of divorce, from Lilith. In these cases, there may have been a nocturnal ejaculation taken to have been caused by Lilith as a kind of succubus, which would have effectively married the man of the house with Lilith. Thus, you would require a *get*, or a bill of divorce, to get rid of her. In some cases, there may have even been offerings made to operate as a kind of *ketubah*, or alimony, for Lilith to get her to go away. And yet others, Lilith will be threatened with *herem*, or excommunication, a kind of ban that subjected her to indiscriminate divine wrath. Now, incantation bowls are a huge genre of ancient magical technology, and I'll be coming back to do an entire episode just on incantation bowls at some point. But nevertheless, they are an important early attestation to the nature and the powers of Lilith.
However, it would be in the pseudepigraphic *Alphabet of Ben Sira*, composed sometime around 700 or 1000 of the Common Era, that the myth of Lilith would reach maturity. In that text, Lilith appears for the first time as the first partner of Adam, made from the same clay that he was, and thus equal to him by all rights. Famously, she asserts this equality by insisting on being on top during an act of sexual intercourse, for which Adam refuses, kind of vanilla. And in defiance, Lilith pronounces the ineffable name of God and disappears into the air. Adam, for his part, cries out to God to bring her back, and God, for God's part, sends three angels to do just that: Senoi, Sansenoi, and Samangalaf. The deal would be simple: she just has to come back, and all is forgiven, man. She has to be on the bottom and stay free, but a hundred of her children must die every day. The three angels actually corner her over the Sea of Reeds, where the Pharaonic army would one baby drowned, and they threaten her. But again, defiant Lilith counteroffers: she'll accept the death of a hundred of her brood each day, but she'll be able to stalk the children of humans for eight days after a boy's birth and for 20 days for a girl. However, she'll be forever deterred by the powerful names of those angels, Senoi, Sansenoi, and Samangalaf, such that if she sees their names over a child, she'll relent, and the child will recover.
In this brief tale, thousands of years in the making, these mythological strands fuse into a truly enduring narrative. Lilith, the defiant first partner of Adam, becomes the murderer of infants in her fury, which can only be repulsed through angelic magic. And indeed, it's around the time of the production of the *Alphabet of Ben Sira* that we find the first Aramaic incantation formula appear with the now commonplace incantation: "Adam and Eve out, Lilith!" along with the talismanic angel names Senoi, Sansenoi, and Samangalaf, a formula still reprinted in handbooks of Jewish magic down to today. I have them right there. And more on those amulets, modern amulets for this, in a future episode.
However, in a lesser-known and largely lost text, sadly, which is terrible because it must have been a companion of ancient demonology, the Midrash Obot, this portrays Adam as a kind of saintly figure, unlike the depiction from the Talmud that we mentioned earlier, where he kind of goes on a demoness fornication bender. Sounds good. He's actually aesthetically separated himself from Eve in this story following their sin and the murder of Abel by their son Cain, which introduced both death and murder into the world. Thanks, Adam. However, in this account, Lilith is actually so powerfully attracted to Adam, he sort of gleams like the sun, that she forcibly mates with him, probably when he's asleep, and over the course of 130 years of his isolation, he sires myriads of hosts of demons which go on to plague humankind down to this day. I suspect that she was probably on top in those nightly romps. So Lilith laughs last.
This motif of Lilith as a succubus would also prove influential in the next period of the development of her mythology: the Lilith of the Kabbalah. In this episode, we've covered the development of the Lilith myth spanning millennia, from Bronze Age Mesopotamia to right up to the dawn of the Kabbalah in the 13th century. As we've seen, Lilith is an enduringly powerful myth which captures a range of fears and anxieties, from crib death to female autonomy, a subject that still strikes terror in basic bros everywhere. In the next episode, we'll turn to the fantastically psychedelic and multifaceted development of Lilith within the scope of the mystical revolution inaugurated by the *Sefer Zohar*, or the Book of Radiance, and the rise of the Kabbalah. Within those mythological developments, Lilith will reach new primordial depths of evil. Her evil will be pre-existent to even Yahweh, and she will rise to become nothing less than the very consort, consort of an admittedly unwilling Godhead, before her final destruction, which, unlike virtually all other demons, can only come at the advent of the final Messianic days. In this way, Lilith certainly pre-existed the Abrahamic mythologies and will very likely be with them to the very end, if not beyond. I hope you'll join me for the next episode in this series as we dive into Lilith and the Kabbalah. Until then, I'm Dr. Justin Sledge, and thank you for watching Esoterica, where we explore the arcane in history, philosophy, and religion.