Lilith: the misunderstood tale of Feminism

Publié le 3 mai 2010 par osqvar

Lilith: the misunderstood tale of Feminism

“You may have heard about Lilith, Adam’s first woman in Paradise. God created her from Earth, just as Adam, and she refused to submit to Adam’s will. For this reason she was expelled from paradise and sentenced to copulate with demons 100 times a day. It’s in the Bible. Lilith is Nabokov’s Lolita. Lilith is the vampire woman. Lilith embodies the refusal to male domination in a male-dominated society."

Or at least, that’s what I heard from a girl I met last night while we wandered through the alleys of Paris:

After 2 AM, thrown out from La Feline, with most bars closed, I was in my way home when I was delightedly surprised by what seemed a quasi-lesbian scene between three girls in the hallway. These three girls in their twenties with too much make up and alcohol on them didn’t hesitate much to accept to join to dance to an open bar. The leader was the kind of perfect blond girl I can’t stand anymore; the light-brown mousey one was too drunk to talk, and the little gothic girl with a dark-haired fringe, my fantasy of the night. A coloured cobra tattoo came out from her tiny breast, and the name Lilith was tattooed in gothic calligraphy in her neck. She told me the story of Lilith in a beautifully broken English.

But if you leave aside the sexual fascination of this scene, and you look in the Bible, you will only find two quotations of Lilith, often translated as a synonym of demon:

Job 18:14

"He is torn from the security of his tent, and they march him before the king of terrors.”

Isaiah 34:14

“Wildcats shall meet with hyenas, goat-demons shall call to each other; there too Lilith shall repose, and find a place to rest.”

Lilith is actually the name of an Assyrian demon, which a Jewish scholar associates with woman's claim for equality with man.

There is an old Jewish tradition according to which children sickness is caused by the demon Lilith. To avoid sickness, children were hung an amulet bearing the names of the three angels of medicine: Senoy, Sansenoy and Semangelof.

Ben-Sira, in its Alphabetum Siracidis, (Venice, 1544) traces back the origin of this legend to the Genesis:

“While God created Adam, who was alone, He said, 'It is not good for man to be alone' (Genesis 2:18). He also created a woman, from the earth, as He had created Adam himself, and called her Lilith.”

And then Ben-Sira tells more or less the story that the gothic girl told me. At the end, the text says that God sent the three angels of medecin to take her back, but she refused. The demons would then drown her in the Nile, but Lilith, who “was created to cause sickness to infants”, promised not to touch any child bearing an amulet with their names.

This underground version of the story was widely spread from the Middle Ages to the 16^th century, and Lilith, recovering her demon status, has often been associated to Satan, as it has been represented by several artists. One example of this can be seen in the relief of paradise at the feet of the Virgin in Notre Dame de Paris’ west façade. A more famous one is Michelangelo’s temptation in the Sixtine Chapel. Michelangelo was quite underground indeed, as were the romantics, which popularised Lilith even more, and then arrived the feminists and took her as a model…

But you don’t need to be an expert in exegesis to realise that Ben-Sira’s account is not a serious attempt to claim equality between sexes, but a mere attack to the Judaic tradition. If the linking between the Genesis and the story of the demon of child sickness is not bad enough for you, a quick look to Ben-Sira’s original text will suffice to convince you that a medieval Jewish text dealing with masturbation, incest and flatulence is not to be taken seriously. In the original work, the discussion between Adam and Lilith has an unambiguous double meaning which parallels sex position and domination position. It seems that femdom was not cool in the Middle Ages:

“Adam and Lilith immediately began to fight. She said, 'I will not lie below,' and he said, 'I will not lie beneath you, but only on top. For you are fit only to be in the bottom position, while I am to be the superior one.'”

But I’m sure that neither the sculptor of Notre Dame’s west façade, nor Michelangelo, nor the Romantics, nor the Feminists, nor that gothic girl in Belleville had read the original text of Ben-Sira. It doesn’t matter, though. The icon issued from this misunderstanding incarnates their own rebel dreams of damned female domination: she is bad, and we love it!