Who is Lilith - First Wife of Adam - Ancient Origins and Development of the Myth of the Demon Queen

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 Jensen 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 demon s 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 demones to a being of primordial evil a wife of the anti-god samayal then split into younger and older variants said to have been hewn from the Divine Throne itself to even becoming the Divine consort and 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 and 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 as a terrorism and also if you want to support my work of providing accessible scholarly and free content on topics and other terrorism 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 [Music] [Music] 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 Lily or the Lily too in Acadian 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 are 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 Lily 2 and r.lily at least in Acadian 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 Lily these are both Acadian 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 r.lily 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 a or the male Lil and Sumerian is taken to have been the father of none less than Gilgamesh like Epic of Gilgamesh who actually goes on to encounter a kisiko lilac a spirit primarily dwelling in sacred trees though both the reading of that and Sumerian and the meaning of that expression is still hotly debated the Bernie relief May depict May depict a lily 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 Lily it could be ishtar's sister and the queen of the underworld arish kagal to some otherwise totally unknown figure who knows about the burning relief regardless the lilu and Lily 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 Acadian languages would eventually allow for a kind diffusion between the subdivine beings of the lilu Lili family and the daughter of Anu and a proper goddess lamash2 this can be seen in how the lilu Lily 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 Lily are fused with the explicitly anti-naval evil of La Machu 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 lamash2'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 Reagan 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 Lily especially including ardot Lily seem to have been fused with the more explicitly anti-natal evil of La Mach 2 with a kind of false friend relationship between the etymologically unrelated Sumerian term for those beings Lil and the Semitic Acadian word for night lilum or liliatum thus seeming to give rise to a pan Mesopotamian demonness 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 BC amulet found at arceland Tosh in what is now Northern Syria this amulet is really interesting in several respects one it shows Lilith as a demon s thus leaving her cradle in Mesopotamia sorry for that cradle joke and entering into the Levant second the inscription is in Phoenician and not Acadian showing cultural diffusion of the Lilith myth and finally The Amulet may actually be our earliest depiction of Lilith as a kind of sinks-like being however both the reading and the meaning of the inscription are heavily contested by Scholars with that final T 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 they're 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 Lil yacht 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 like or a demonic being at all indeed no there's no antenatal violence invoked here either actually a recent study has argued that none of the beings typically invoked as proto-demons in the Hebrew Bible like devair and reshaf these are sickness plague demons shadim sarahim those are the goat demons are Elite liliote I guess a recent argument is made that they're not demons at all Judith Bellaire has actually made a very cogent argument at least to to my mind but these are just ritually impure animals with Lily just being a kind of owl or something though think back to the Bernie relief in this regard it seems like Isles kind of got associated with these beings but again the Hebrew is so poorly understood in 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 lilith-like being is likely an exorcistic text in the Dead Sea Scrolls the song of the sage it's 4q 5 10 and 11. in this text Lilith occurs in the singular and the exorcistic invocation which compared to the great Isaiah scroll also recover 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 incur interestingly enough closer to her original Homeland over there and 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 talmud as you might recall is a commentary on an earlier text of Jewish lore called the mishina 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 erovine 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 getting 69b we learn of a treatment for Gira 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 Girard de lilita there's a pond there between the pain Gira and the aerogira and the Aramaic and that's probably how the magical idea happens at need.24b we learned that if a woman has a stillbirth which resembles Lilith and that it has wings that such a fetus is viable and that that woman is tame or susceptible to the laws around richly uncleanness following childbirth at Bava batra 73 a through b we read a super strange narrative in which a character called hormine This is apparently the son of Lilith is performing all kinds of acrobatic Feats why while holding a glass of wine that never spills shockingly by the way this is probably a reference to the zoroastrian deity or a Mazda the God of Light and goodness ironically here made the son of the demon s Lilith so it's a talmouth though in some shade at the zoroastrians for some reason don't pick on those zoroastrians they are hard enough time they're wonderful people a chipot 151 B Granite Mendoza Mendoza 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 aravine 18b we learned that in those 130 years following the Exile from the garden Adam probably through nocturnal seminal emissions beget a whole race of roheen the shadin verleen 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 Lilian 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 rabba 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 so 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 uh got away that's going to matter a whole lot more in just a minute in another midrash at the midbar 16 where Moses yet again 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 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 richly 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 mandate probably mandeans Persians probably zoroastrians Etc Lilith is one of the most widely attested demons depicted and exercised 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's also worth noting that many of the bowls in 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 calls 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 katuba or alimony for Lilith to get her to go away and yet others Lilith will be threatened with karate or excommunication a kind of band 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 pseudopographic Isle of bet of Bin Syrah composed sometime around 700 or a thousand 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 IES out to God to bring her back and God for God's part sends Three Angels to do just that senoi sansanoi 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 threatened her but again defiant Lilith counteroffers she'll accept the death of 100 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 sansanoi 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 Angel magic and indeed it's around the time of the production of the alephed of Bin Sirah that we find the first aromatic incantation formula up here with the now commonplace incantation Adam and Eve out Lilith along with the talismanic angel names senoi sansanoi 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 and the midrash obkier 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 and 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 prawns 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 a scope of the mystical Revolution inaugurated by the safer Zohar or the book of Radiance and the rise of the Kabbalah been 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 and 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

Channel: ESOTERICA

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Length: 28min 22sec (1702 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 18 2022