It is popular, in this age, for those who find themselves on Lilith’s path to feel an urge to re-write her. To make her softer, or sexier, or “misunderstood” in some way. A fun-loving emblem of girl power that is accessible and uncomplicated. To erase her difficult mythology and recast it in an image that fits more cleanly with Western expectations that the feminine should be gentle, and our consumptive cultural norms which then have filtered down into dictating what we see as moral.
I have always had a staunch and stubborn insistence that we resist that impulse to conform Lilith to respectability politics, because it is specifically the complexity and bold-faced adversarialism of Lilith’s purpose in this world that makes her path so valuable and exceptional. Few other entities challenge us to question so deeply and fundamentally that which we are told is good. And without that aspect of Lilith’s gnosis, everything else instantly falls apart.
So as my opening personal contribution to this library, I would like to put forward the most challenging, and most valuable parable that I have found for Lilith’s purpose, approached from a Gnostic point of view for our purposes here.
There is an angel of conception called Lailah who you may read more deeply about here. Lailah is the angel tasked with pulling souls from the peace of the All, and closing them into the bodies of those sent to Earth.
Before the soul is assigned, its entire life is already laid out for it — all its fortune and misfortune, and of course, the suffering we all experience as mortals. The only purpose of this suffering seems to be to test the soul’s willingness to remain obedient after this subjugation.
The souls often beg for mercy, and struggle against their bonds to be released from this woe.
“Master of the Universe, I have always been satisfied with the place in which I dwelt from the day you created me, why do You desire that I enter this putrid drop?”
But Lailah has a trick up her sleeve. In order to reduce the odds of the soul escaping during gestation, she strikes it above the lip to erase its memory. And this, it is said, is why we have a philtrum, and why we are born unconscious and weeping.
Thereupon he went out into the light of the world, though against his will. Upon going out the infant forgot everything he had witnessed and everything he knew. Why does the child cry out on leaving his mother’s womb? Because the place wherein he had been at rest and at ease was irretrievable and because of the condition of the world into which he must enter.
Now, if we are facing Lilith’s history with honesty, we know Lilith to be the undertaker of infants. Let us look at how it is said she comes for her charges. Strangely, they seem rather amenable to the encounter.
If Lilith nevertheless succeeded in approaching the child and fondling him, he would laugh in his sleep.
But then we see something rather familiar.
To avert danger, it was held wise to strike the sleeping child’s lips with one finger, whereupon Lilith would vanish.
What is Lilith?