Lilith – who found herself in the role of Adam’s first wife – did not want children.
She didn’t kill her children either. That bit was made up. She was simply hiding in a cave to be on her own and summon her strength because she did not wish to be beholden to Adam and she was figuring out what to do next, how to address this conundrum which seemingly wasn’t part of “the plan”. She didn’t wish to be greater either – merely equal. She wanted to be an example to women of how to mother even if you didn’t have children. Of how women make community, of how many hands make light work. She wanted a world of loving women who had the bandwidth to give, who weren’t depleted by what they thought they should do, what they thought their role was within a hierarchy because that’s what they were told was the only thing they were good for. Because she didn’t want her own children, she was demonised (literally; in some versions of her story she is not the first wife of Adam, simply a demoness). The idea that she may be a succubus was ludicrous as her relationship with the Garden of Eden was such that the energy she received was infinite and abundant. Gardens have that power. She did not need to “steal” the seed of Adam for any reason (nor the seed of anything for that matter as all that she touched grew and flourished) and that irked the men who re-wrote her story turning her into a villain. A woman who is happy to exist in her own right if her husband will not see her as his equal? A woman happy to exist in her own right, full stop. Standing in her own power? This could only be a fabrication, a fairy story.
They said that the angels sent by God to find Lilith told her that they would kill 100 of her children every day for her disobedience (What kind of god mandates this? A god who acts upon the wrath of men). And from that sprung the myth that she was a baby killer, responsible for miscarriages and still-borns and cot deaths, avenging her own babies’ deaths at the hands of God’s angels. Someone has to be responsible for these natural yet unfortunate occurrences. Why not a woman? Why not a prototype for a witch. The woman who does not wish to be a mother. The woman who wishes merely to be seen as equal despite the innate superiority of her sex. The woman who loves her garden. Lilith you are outcast and for that you will always be painted as vengeful and murderous, a shadow of all that is good and virtuous and feminine and subservient, when in fact, you are one and the same as Eve, something that men will never understand and therefore, you will forever be punished.
Visiting the Feminine Power The Divine and The Demonic exhibition at The British Museum, I was struck by how much our understanding of mythology across the world is influenced by the archetypes and stories of the bible. Goddesses from other cultures have our templates of the virgin and the whore imposed upon them, simplified, minimised, caricatured. The many myriad ways of being, their reasons for being, eclipsed by a book which is still held up as a book of truth, a book of meaning by those in government in the western world. I found it deeply disturbing and two-dimensional as did other visitors who stopped to talk to my friend and I, my friend having vocalised how frustrating it all was and particularly the Church’s belief that sexual expression was bad. So much so that women needed to be controlled and chaperoned, an idea which is not ancient, one which crept in relatively recently in the history of the world. I wish the exhibition had challenged the ingrained stories that we’re told and examined where they had come from. Even the name of the exhibition promotes a simplified dichotomy with no room for nuance or variation.
I get particularly irked by the story of Lilith, apparently Adam’s first wife. Presumably, Eve was not actually created by “God” but by the minds of men. An idealised female, who still managed to fall, because that’s what women are like if you give them free will. I don’t think I’m the first person to draw attention to the fact that what this fable ultimately tells us is that men’s opinion of women is that they will always be flawed. In astrology, Black Moon Lilith takes on the archetypal traits of the Judeo-Christian version of Lilith. What if she was just a woman? A woman who like any one of us, did not want to follow the expectations of society. It goes without saying that if women who do not follow the narrative are bad, we really need to understand who is writing the narrative and how in fact, this level of judgement is reflective of that writer and nobody else.
I tried to find some representations in art of Lilith which did not portray her as this shadowy, devilish vamp. I didn’t find any but I’ll keep searching. Remedios Varo’s Witch Going To The Sabbath feels like as good a representation as any of a “wilful” and wayward woman.
The Burnley Relief from the Old Babylonian period, was in the British Museum show. Sometimes referred to as the "Queen of the Night relief", it is believed that the figure could be an aspect of the Mesopotamian goddess of sexual love and war, Ishtar. Once again though, the dominant culture projects its beliefs upon another culture’s artefact because some think that her bird-feet and the surrounding owls suggest a connection with Lilitu (called Lilith in the Bible) – “though seemingly not the usual demonic Lilitu.” So it appears that Lilith herself is shape-shifting (or is it perhaps that we do not really know who she is?)
Owls are a symbol of wisdom, representative of Athena or Minerva in Greek and Roman myth. But of course, Athena is the “virgin goddess”. It is the inability to see women capable of standing alone – in their own power and satisfied with life, with themselves – which creates all the stories about them. Virgin, witch, spinster, whore, hag. A woman who is not a wife and a mother is not a woman. We think we’re free but we’re not because men dominate society, particularly white men, and the dominant perception of what the world looks like to those in power is the perception that takes precedence over the world and the way we all see things.
EDIT: Reading this back I can see contradiction and slightly flawed thinking…sometimes I feel trapped by archetypes despite the fact that very similar stories arose in different civilisations independently – these archetypes are inherently human and part of the collective psyche. Owls were not always revered as keepers of wisdom though, they were once feared as harbingers of death, certainly in English folklore. I can only put this down to the owl being seen as some kind of psychopomp who straddles day and night, light and dark, good and bad. Our fundamental understanding of the world is often reduced to the binary rather than wrangling with the uncertainty of multiplicity, which put simply, means we miss the good things that reside in the darkness (and could miss the bad things which stand in plain sight in the light). If we understand Adam and Eve as binary, Eve has to be bad. But to remove this unbecoming aspect, the male gaze – the writers of these stories – create a shadow instead, known as Lilith (where is Adam’s shadow?) But more importantly, Ishtar represents strong feelings – sexual love and war; she is beautiful and yet has talons, she is both sides of passion, she is unbecoming yet irresistible. I had a conversation today that brought up the duality of Pluto – god of the underworld but also “giver of wealth”. We push darkness away so much in modern life that we fail to uncover the treasure that can only come from plumbing the depths and confronting what we find there. It’s how we get to know who we really are. This perceived darkness is bad – and in women, particularly bad. Because it is knowledge.
The anthropologist David Graeber wrote that “The ultimate hidden truth of the world is that it is something that we make, and could just as easily make differently.” There are threads on Reddit that dissect what this means with the chat turning to systems theory and chaos. These (predominantly male) discussions fail to acknowledge what “make” means. To make, to create, is our universal right as human beings, it is what brings us back to ourselves. At its most fundamental, having children is creating. We can’t create though, when we’re trapped in the current psychology of how the world works. We see capitalistic achievement and acquisition as desirable, when the reality is that these dopamine hits don’t usually feed the spirit, they lead to a desire to aim higher, go further, and inevitably, to burn out.
Often, we think we know what we want, but when we get there, it doesn’t feel how we thought it would. And actually all the feelings we had on the journey there were much nicer. Stephen Porges who wrote The Polyvagal Theory talks about how our admiration of celebrities is completely misplaced. A lot of these people are on a journey to find themselves, the journey of individuation, which in some ways, is the journey home. And yet, they’re deeply dysfunctional and dysregulated, trying to escape themselves at the same time as wanting to be themselves (while it’s all playing out in public). They leave friends and family behind and slowly isolate themselves in a big house with big gates when what the human spirit craves is connection, community.
We live in a world that is deeply traumatised, within structures that were created by traumatised people. Concepts like the open-plan office are not conducive to any kind of work whether you’re an introvert or an extrovert. It creates a sense of always being alert, hyper-vigilance in a worse case scenario, and a performative space where people who talk loudly about what they’re doing and appear to be busy are the winners. But this then raises the question of what work is. Do we need work in a post- post-industrial world? What were Adam and Eve doing in the Garden? What did Lilith go on to do?
The world is something we make because we are part of it, as a system, as a field of resonance, whatever you choose to call it. What we envision – whether through painting, novels, poetry, scripts, sculptures – contributes to the picture we all hold in our heads of what the world could be, what we would like it to be. Granted, if your work is publicly available, your ideas are influencing and inspiring a greater section of society. But what we create that touches friends, family, our colleagues and acquaintances is no less important. All great scientists know that we live in a world of possibilities. Even when we say that the data is pointing to a certain result, we can’t guarantee that that will be the result. And the result can be overwhelmingly more positive than predicted.
I started writing this over a week ago in a haze of post-Covid fatigue and had to put it aside. Even though I had tested negative, I lost my sense of smell and that’s when I knew. I first had Covid in early December 2019. I thought it was flu at the time, but it was like no flu I had ever had. I was coughing and hacking through the night and trying to suppress the tickle in my throat in work meetings, attempting to contribute without inducing a coughing fit, failing, and then making my way to the loo, gasping for breath, choking and spluttering. I also lost my sense of smell, which terrified me after I had lost it for about 6 months back in 2011(?) due to a concussion. Luckily, around about that time, a book by Molly Birnbaum called Season to Taste came out which documented her personal research into taste and smell after she lost both senses as the result of being hit by a car while out running. I devoured this while lying in bed, trying not to move my head too much. The only thing the doctor could tell me about whether my sense of smell would come back was that it was “in the hands of the gods”.
Sense of smell is the sense we know least about and though we’ve known for a while that the brain processes smells in the olfactory bulb, it was only last year, in 2021, that we began to understand how exactly. There were theories about scent emitted as a wave, a frequency (like light or sound) and theories about scent as molecules. But if they were molecules, how did the receptor detect what they were? And how did it detect variation? Were molecules literally like jigsaw puzzle pieces differentiated by size and shape that could dock into the receptor? Do each of us smell the same thing when we sniff a rose for example? Or are some of us more adept at picking up certain nuances? Can that discernment be gained through practice? Neither theory was entirely correct; the mechanism is molecular but it’s a “flexible-binding” one – scent receptors work in ways that we’ve not witnessed before. I’ll leave it to the scientists to explain. It’s truly fascinating work from neuroscientist Vanessa Ruta and her team, and as Bob Datta, neurobiologist at Harvard Medical School says, “It feels like the future.”
I can’t express how glad I am that my sense of smell returned after about a week as it really takes the colour out of life. One friend who had also lost his sense of smell described the constant smell of “mouldy lemons” which I was starting to identify and was not pleased about at all. I don’t know if we can coax the receptors back into working but I upped my intake of B vits, vit C, and D with K2, plus DHA & EPA (fish oils) and sniffed away at different kinds of essential oils every day until I started to get a glimmer back.
Being sick offers a detour and it’s taken about three weeks to feel slightly normal again, a week of which was holiday catching up with family in the west country and enjoying fresh air. I had meant for this edition to share some of my fiction writing about my family history, a story which is really about all our histories. When I think about who I am, I often think about my Portuguese and Indian ancestors, but I also think about my ancestors from Yorkshire and their migrations from Northumberland and Leicestershire, in an arc that may have originated in Scandinavia according to my DnA. I think about how they were fooled by the ruling classes into working their whole lives in factories and mechanised farms, fooled into thinking the sugar trade – and so the slave trade – was great, that we were a great country, God’s own country. Somehow we were better than those treated like cattle – less than cattle according to some ship logs – when actually, to those in power, we were just a different class of cattle. And how we have continued to be fooled. Fooled that it was and is just about class when it was and is racism taking root. Because not all these people were poor or working class in their own cultures. Not that it matters. What matters is that they were people. Every one of them.
I want to tell you the names of my grandparents and great grandparents, what I think they were like. It may end up just being a fiction, but I think that actually, we often know who they were deep down, because what are we but a beautiful amalgamation of all of them? Part of me is not sure whether I should be writing a manuscript away from the internet, and part of me feels that actually, this is a format that works for me, that gives me impetus and helps me put things down on the page so that I know where I am with them, what works and what doesn’t work. It’s a deeply vulnerable place to be, but I can’t keep holding back. So with that, I think it’s time to put up a paywall for those exploratory writings while these kinds of instalments will remain free.
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