Looking For Lilith

For many pagan women like myself, the accepted story of the Jewish Goddess Lilith is one that we like to tell again and again. Adam’s first wife, she was cast out of Eden for refusing to be subordinate to him; in the wilderness, she mated with demons and had many children; God sent His angels to murder her children; Lilith then vowed she would extract vengance upon God and His creations for ever more by killing human babies. The ultimate Bitch-Goddess, the ultimate Betrayed Female, the ultimate Cast-off Wife, the ultimate Vengeful Mother, the ultimate Feminist Standing Alone Against the ultimate Patriarch- she ticks a lot of boxes.
As I said, she was a Jewish deity, one of the Goddesses that Judaism got rid of. And when Her story became well-known in the 1970s and 1980s, she became a heroine of the matriarchial movement, which pursued the idea that the earliest human tribes had been woman-centered, peaceful, intuitive, agrarian Goddess-worshippers in tune with Mother Earth; these societies had then been wiped out by an invasion of nasty, aggressive male-led patriarchal tribes, who had slaughtered the preistessess, destroyed the sacred groves, and forced women into child-bearing slavery.
(Personally, I always had my doubts about that idea – just where did that evil patriarchial tribe spring from? – and when I started reading up on history, archeaology and prehistory, my doubts were confirmed. The whole idea anyway reeked of that religious mythology which held that Humanity once resided in an innocent Edenic state, devoid of any knowledge of Evil – then something or other came along and spoiled everything. The dangerous corollory of that concept is that all that is needed to return Humanity to that blessed state is to get rid of something – gays, heretics, Jews, blacks, Americans, vivisection, whatever. It was the product of wishful thinking by 19thC feminists, Romantics and neopagans, and mistakes made by Victorian ethnologists and historians. Goddess Unmasked: The Rise of Neopagan Feminist Spirituality by Philip G. Davis goes into this very thoroughly.)
And now it seems that Lilith may not have been the ancient Jewish Goddess-turned-demon that we thought she was. I’ve just been pointed at this article: Looking For Lillith, which says Lilith, far from being ancient, was probably dreamed up by a 10thC Jewish satirist.

Ah well – that won’t stop the women pagans I know from naming their cats and their daughters after Her. And She was never one of my favourite Goddesses anyway. In fact, I don’t think I have one, unless it some mean-tempered, bent-back old Crone who lives alone and likes frightening the littlies. That’s more my type of Goddess.