LILITH.
Madonnas--Adam's first wife--Her flight and doom--Creation of
devils--Lilith marries Samaël--Tree of Life--Lilith's part
in the Temptation--Her locks--Lamia--Bodeima--Meschia and
Meschiane--Amazons--Maternity--Rib-theory of Woman--Káli and
Durga--Captivity of Woman.
The attempt of the compilers of the Book of Genesis to amalgamate
the Elohist and Jehovist legends, ignoring the moral abyss that yawns
between them, led to some sufficiently curious results. One of these
it may be well enough to examine here, since, though later in form
than some other legends which remain to be considered, it is closely
connected in spirit with the ancient myth of Eden and illustrative
of it.
The differences between the two creations of man and woman critically
examined in the previous chapter were fully recognised by the ancient
rabbins, and their speculations on the subject laid the basis for
the further legend that the woman created (Gen. i.) at the same time
with Adam, and therefore not possibly the woman formed from his rib,
was a first wife who turned out badly.
To this first wife of Adam it was but natural to assign the name
of one of the many ancient goddesses who had been degraded into
demonesses. For the history of Mariolatry in the North of Europe has
been many times anticipated: the mother's tenderness and self-devotion,
the first smile of love upon social chaos, availed to give every race
its Madonna, whose popularity drew around her the fatal favours of
priestcraft, weighing her down at last to be a type of corruption. Even
the Semitic tribes, with their hard masculine deities, seem to have
once worshipped Alilat, whose name survives in Elohim and Allah. Among
these degraded Madonnas was Lilith, whose name has been found in a
Chaldean inscription, which says, when a country is at peace 'Lilith
(Lilatu) is not before them.' The name is from Assyr. lay'lâ, Hebrew
Lil (night), which already in Accadian meant 'sorcery.' It probably
personified, at first, the darkness that soothed children to slumber;
and though the word Lullaby has, with more ingenuity than accuracy,
been derived from Lilith Abi, the theory may suggest the path by
which the soft Southern night came to mean a nocturnal spectre.
The only place where the name of Lilith occurs in the Bible is
Isa. xxxiv. 14, where the English version renders it 'screech-owl.' In
the Vulgate it is translated 'Lamia,' and in Luther's Bible, 'Kobold;'
Gesenius explains it as 'nocturna, night-spectre, ghost.'
The rabbinical myths concerning Lilith, often passed over as puerile
fancies, appear to me pregnant with significance and beauty. Thus
Abraham Ecchelensis, giving a poor Arabic version of the legend, says,
'This fable has been transmitted to the Arabs from Jewish sources
by some converts of Mahomet from Cabbalism and Rabbinism, who have
transferred all the Jewish fooleries to the Arabs.' [40] But the
rabbinical legend grew very slowly, and relates to principles and facts
of social evolution whose force and meaning are not yet exhausted.
Premising that the legend is here pieced together mainly from
Eisenmenger, [41] who at each mention of the subject gives ample
references to rabbinical authorities, I will relate it without further
references of my own.
Lilith was said to have been created at the same time and in the same
way as Adam; and when the two met they instantly quarrelled about
the headship which both claimed. Adam began the first conversation
by asserting that he was to be her master. Lilith replied that she
had equal right to be chief. Adam insisting, Lilith uttered a certain
spell called Schem-hammphorasch--afterwards confided by a fallen angel
to one of 'the daughters of men' with whom he had an intrigue, and of
famous potency in Jewish folklore--the result of which was that she
obtained wings. Lilith then flew out of Eden and out of sight. [42]
Adam then cried in distress--'Master of the world, the woman whom thou
didst give me has flown away.' The Creator then sent three angels to
find Lilith and persuade her to return to the garden; but she declared
that it could be no paradise to her if she was to be the servant of
man. She remained hovering over the Red Sea, where the angels had
found her, while these returned with her inflexible resolution. And
she would not yield even after the angels had been sent again to
convey to her, as the alternative of not returning, the doom that
she should bear many children but these should all die in infancy.
This penalty was so awful that Lilith was about to commit suicide
by drowning herself in the sea, when the three angels, moved by her
anguish, agreed that she should have the compensation of possessing
full power over all children after birth up to their eighth day; on
which she promised that she would never disturb any babes who were
under their (the angels') protection. Hence the charm (Camea) against
Lilith hung round the necks of Jewish children bore the names of these
three angels--Senói, Sansenói, and Sammangelóf. Lilith has special
power over all children born out of wedlock for whom she watches,
dressed in finest raiment; and she has especial power on the first
day of the month, and on the Sabbath evening. When a little child
laughs in its sleep it was believed that Lilith was with it, and the
babe must be struck on the nose three times, the words being thrice
repeated--'Away, cursed Lilith! thou hast no place here!'
The divorce between Lilith and Adam being complete, the second Eve
(i.e., Mother) was now formed, and this time out of Adam's rib in
order that there might be no question of her dependence, and that the
embarrassing question of woman's rights might never be raised again.
But about this time the Devils were also created. These beings were
the last of the six days' creation, but they were made so late in
the day that there was no daylight by which to fashion bodies for
them. The Creator was just putting them off with a promise that he
would make them bodies next day, when lo! the Sabbath--which was
for a long time personified--came and sat before him, to represent
the many evils which might result from the precedent he would set
by working even a little on the day whose sanctity had already been
promulgated. Under these circumstances the Creator told the Devils
that they must disperse and try to get bodies as they could find
them. On this account they have been compelled ever since to seek
carnal enjoyments by nestling in the hearts of human beings and
availing themselves of human senses and passions.
These Devils as created were ethereal spirits; they had certain
atmospheric forms, but felt that they had been badly treated in not
having been provided with flesh and blood, and they were envious
of the carnal pleasures which human beings could enjoy. So long as
man and woman remained pure, the Devils could not take possession of
their bodies and enjoy such pleasures, and it was therefore of great
importance to them that the first human pair should be corrupted. At
the head of these Devils stood now a fallen angel--Samaël. Of this
archfiend more is said elsewhere; at this point it need only be said
that he had been an ideal flaming Serpent, leader of the Seraphim. He
was already burning with lust and envy, as he witnessed the pleasures
of Adam and Eve in Eden, when he found beautiful Lilith lamenting
her wrongs in loneliness.
She became his wife. The name of Samaël by one interpretation signifies
'the Left'; and we may suppose that Lilith found him radical on
the question of female equality which she had raised in Eden. He
gave her a splendid kingdom where she was attended by 480 troops;
but all this could not compensate her for the loss of Eden,--she
seems never to have regretted parting with Adam,--and for the loss
of her children. She remained the Lady of Sorrow. Her great enemy was
Machalath who presided over 478 troops, and who was for ever dancing,
as Lilith was for ever sighing and weeping. It was long believed that
at certain times the voice of Lilith's grief could be heard in the air.
Samaël found in Lilith a willing conspirator against Jehovah in
his plans for man and woman. The corruption of these two meant, to
the troops of Samaël, bringing their bodies down into a plane where
they might be entered by themselves (the Devils), not to mention at
present the manifold other motives by which they were actuated. It
may be remarked also that in the rabbinical traditions, after their
Aryan impregnation, there are traces of a desire of the Devils to
reach the Tree of Life.
Truly a wondrous Tree! Around it, in its place at the east of
Eden, sang six hundred thousand lovely angels with happy hymns,
and it glorified the vast garden. It possessed five hundred thousand
different flavours and odours, which were wafted to the four sides
of the world by zephyrs from seven lustrous clouds that made its
canopy. Beneath it sat the disciples of Wisdom on resplendent seats,
screened from the blaze of sun, moon, and cloud-veiled from potency
of the stars (there was no night); and within were the joys referred
to in the verse (Prov. viii. 21), 'That I may cause those that love
me to inherit substance; and I will fill their treasures.'
Had there been an order of female rabbins the story of Lilith might
have borne obvious modifications, and she might have appeared as
a heroine anxious to rescue her sex from slavery to man. As it is
the immemorial prerogative of man to lay all blame upon woman, that
being part of the hereditary following of Adam, it is not wonderful
that Lilith was in due time made responsible for the temptation of
Eve. She was supposed to have beguiled the Serpent on guard at the
gate of Eden to lend her his form for a time, after which theory the
curse on the serpent might mean the binding of Lilith for ever in
that form. This would appear to have originated the notion mentioned
in Comestor (Hist. Schol., 12th cent.), that while the serpent was
yet erect it had a virgin's head. The accompanying example is from a
very early missal in the possession of Sir Joseph Hooker, of which I
could not discover the date or history, but the theory is traceable
in the eighth century. In this picture we have an early example of
those which have since become familiar in old Bibles. Pietro d'Orvieto
painted this serpent-woman in his finest fresco, at Pisa. Perhaps in
no other picture has the genius of Michæl Angelo been more felicitous
than in that on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, in which Lilith is
portrayed. In this picture (Fig. 2) the marvellous beauty of his first
wife appears to have awakened the enthusiasm of Adam; and, indeed,
it is quite in harmony with the earlier myth that Lilith should be
of greater beauty than Eve.
An artist and poet of our own time (Rossetti) has by both of his arts
celebrated the fatal beauty of Lilith. His Lilith, bringing 'soft
sleep,' antedates, as I think, the fair devil of the Rabbins, but is
also the mediæval witch against whose beautiful locks Mephistopheles
warns Faust when she appears at the Walpurgis-night orgie.
The rose and poppy are her flowers; for where
Is he not found, O Lilith, whom shed scent
And soft-shed kisses and soft sleep shall snare?
Lo! as that youth's eyes burned at thine, so went
Thy spell through him, and left his straight neck bent,
And round his heart one strangling golden hair.
The potency of Lilith's tresses has probably its origin in the hairy
nature ascribed by the Rabbins to all demons (shedim), and found
fully represented in Esau. Perhaps the serpent-locks of Medusa had a
similar origin. Nay, there is a suggestion in Dante that these tresses
of Medusa may have once represented fascinating rather than horrible
serpents. As she approaches, Virgil is alarmed for his brother-poet:
'Turn thyself back, and keep thy vision hid;
For, if the Gorgon show, and then behold,
'Twould all be o'er with e'er returning up.'
So did the master say; and he himself
Turned me, and to my own hands trusted not,
But that with his too he should cover me.
O you that have a sane intelligence,
Look ye unto the doctrine which herein
Conceals itself 'neath the strange verses' veil. [43]
If this means that the security against evil is to veil the eyes from
it, Virgil's warning would be against a beautiful seducer, similar to
the warning given by Mephistopheles to Faust against the fatal charms
of Lilith. Since, however, even in the time of Homer, the Gorgon was
a popular symbol of terrors, the possibility of a survival in Dante's
mind of any more primitive association with Medusa is questionable. The
Pauline doctrine, that the glory of a woman is her hair, no doubt had
important antecedents: such glory might easily be degraded, and every
hair turn to a fatal 'binder,' like the one golden thread of Lilith
round the heart of her victim; or it might ensnare its owner. In
Treves Cathedral there is a curious old picture of a woman carried
to hell by her beautiful hair; one devil draws her by it, another is
seated on her back and drives her by locks of it as a bridle.
In the later developments of the myth of Lilith she was, among
the Arabs, transformed to a Ghoul, but in rabbinical legend she
appears to have been influenced by the story of Lamia, whose name is
substituted for Lilith in the Vulgate. Like Lilith, Lamia was robbed
of her children, and was driven by despair to avenge herself on all
children. [44] The name of Lamia was long used to frighten Italian
children, as that of Lilith was by Hebrew nurses.
It is possible that the part assigned to Lilith in the temptation
of Eve may have been suggested by ancient Egyptian sculptures,
which represent the Tree of Life in Amenti (Paradise) guarded by the
Serpent-goddess Nu. One of these in the British Museum represents
the Osirian on his journey to heaven, and his soul in form of a
human-headed bird, drinking the water of Life as poured out to them
from a jar by the goddess who coils around the sacred sycamore, her
woman's bust and face appearing amid the branches much like Lilith
in our old pictures.
The Singhalese also have a kind of Lilith or Lamia whom they call
Bodrima, though she is not so much dreaded for the sake of children as
for her vindictive feelings towards men. She is the ghost of a woman
who died in childbirth and in great agony. She may be heard wailing
in the night, it is said, and if she meets any man will choke him
to death. When her wailing is heard men are careful to stay within
doors, but the women go forth with brooms in their hands and abuse
Bodrima with epithets. She fears women, especially when they carry
brooms. But the women have also some compassion for this poor ghost,
and often leave a lamp and some betel leaves where she may get some
warmth and comfort from them. If Bodrima be fired at, there may be
found, perhaps, a dead lizard near the spot in the morning.
As protomartyr of female independence, Lilith suffered a fate not
unlike that of her sisters and successors in our own time who have
appealed from the legendary decision made in Eden: she became the
prototype of the 'strong-minded' and 'cold-hearted' woman, and
personification of the fatal fascination of the passionless. Her
special relation to children was gradually expanded, and she was
regarded as the perilous seducer of young men, each of her victims
perishing of unrequited passion. She was ever young, and always dressed
with great beauty. It would seem that the curse upon her for forsaking
Adam--that her children should die in infancy--was escaped in the
case of the children she had by Samaël. She was almost as prolific as
Echidna. Through all the latter rabbinical lore it is repeated, 'Samaël
is the fiery serpent, Lilith the crooked serpent,' and from their
union came Leviathan, Asmodeus, and indeed most of the famous devils.
There is an ancient Persian legend of the first man and woman, Meschia
and Meschiane, that they for a long time lived happily together:
they hunted together, and discovered fire, and made an axe, and with
it built them a hut. But no sooner had they thus set up housekeeping
than they fought terribly, and, after wounding each other, parted. It
is not said which remained ruler of the hut, but we learn that after
fifty years of divorce they were reunited.
These legends show the question of equality of the sexes to have
been a very serious one in early times. The story of Meschia and
Meschiane fairly represents primitive man living by the hunt; that
of Eden shows man entering on the work of agriculture. In neither
of these occupations would there be any reason why woman should be
so unequal as to set in motion the forces which have diminished her
physical stature and degraded her position. Women can still hunt and
fish, and they are quite man's equal in tilling the soil. [45]
In all sex-mythology there are intimations that women were taken
captive. The proclamation of female subordination is made not only in
the legend of Eve's creation out of the man's rib, but in the emphasis
with which her name is declared to have been given her because she
was the Mother of all living. In the variously significant legends
of the Amazons they are said to have burned away their breasts that
they might use the bow: in the history of contemporary Amazons--such
as the female Areoi of Polynesia--the legend is interpreted in the
systematic slaughter of their children. In the hunt, Meschia might be
aided by Meschiane in many ways; in dressing the garden Adam might find
Lilith or Eve a 'help meet' for the work; but in the brutal régime of
war the child disables woman, and the affections of maternity render
her man's inferior in the work of butchery. Herakles wins great glory
by slaying Hyppolite; but the legends of her later reappearances--as
Libussa at Prague, &c.,--follow the less mythological story of the
Amazons given by Herodotus (IV. 112), who represents the Scythians
as gradually disarming them by sending out their youths to meet them
with dalliance instead of with weapons. The youths went off with
their captured captors, and from their union sprang the Sauromatæ,
among whom the men and women dressed alike, and fought and hunted
together. But of the real outcome of that truce and union Tennyson
can tell us more than Herodotus: in his Princess we see the woman
whom maternity and war have combined to produce, her independence
betrayed by the tenderness of her nature. The surrender, once secured,
was made permanent for ages by the sentiments and sympathies born of
the child's appeal for compassion.
In primitive ages the child must in many cases have been a burthen
even to man in the struggle for existence; the population question
could hardly have failed to press its importance upon men, as it does
even upon certain animals; and it would be an especial interest to a
man not to have his hut overrun with offspring not his own,--turning
his fair labour into drudgery for their support, and so cursing the
earth for him. Thus, while Polyandry was giving rise to the obvious
complications under which it must ultimately disappear, it would be
natural that devils of lust should be invented to restrain the maternal
instinct. But as time went on the daughters of Eve would have taken
the story of her fall and hardships too much to heart. The pangs and
perils of childbirth were ever-present monitors whose warnings might
be followed too closely. The early Jewish laws bear distinct traces
of the necessity which had arrived for insisting on the command to
increase and multiply. Under these changed circumstances it would
be natural that the story of a recusant and passionless Eve should
arise and suffer the penalties undergone by Lilith,--the necessity
of bearing, as captive, a vast progeny against her will only to lose
them again, and to long for human children she did not bring forth
and could not cherish. The too passionate and the passionless woman
are successively warned in the origin and outcome of the myth. [46]
It is a suggestive fact that the descendants of Adam should trace their
fall not to the independent Lilith, who asserted her equality at cost
of becoming the Devil's bride, but to the apparently submissive Eve
who stayed inside the garden. The serpent found out the guarded and
restrained woman as well as the free and defiant, and with much more
formidable results. For craft is the only weapon of the weak against
the strong. The submissiveness of the captive woman must have been
for a long time outward only. When Adam found himself among thorns
and briars he might have questioned whether much had been gained
by calling Eve his rib, when after all she really was a woman, and
prepared to take her intellectual rights from the Serpent if denied
her in legitimate ways. The question is, indeed, hardly out of date
yet when the genius of woman is compelled to act with subtlety and
reduced to exert its influence too often by intrigue.
It is remarkable that we find something like a similar development to
the two wives of Adam in Hindu mythology also. Káli and Dúrga have the
same origin: the former is represented dancing on the prostrate form
of her 'lord and master,' and she becomes the demoness of violence,
the mother of the diabolical 'Calas' of Singhalese demonolatry. Dúrga
sacrificed herself for her husband's honour, and is now adored. The
counterpart of Dúrga-worship is the Zenana system. In countries where
the Zenana system has not survived, but some freedom has been gained
for woman, it is probable that Káli will presently not be thought of
as necessarily trampling on man, and Lilith not be regarded as the
Devil's wife because she will not submit to be the slave of man. When
man can make him a home and garden which shall not be a prison, and in
which knowledge is unforbidden fruit, Lilith will not have to seek her
liberty by revolution against his society, nor Eve hers by intrigue;
unfitness for co-operation with the ferocities of nature will leave
her a help meet for the rearing of children, and for the recovery
and culture of every garden, whether within or without the man who
now asserts over woman a lordship unnatural and unjust.