The Lilith Temple Society - Reclaiming Lilith Within Us

In the mythical literature there exist three Liliths. They reflect the new, full, and dark lunar phases of the Triple Goddess. Lilith the Younger was Naamah, the maiden and seductress. Lilith as the Consort of God was the mother of the "mixed multitude." And Lilith the Ancient One was the child-killer, hag, and snatcher. In the night skies there also exist three astronomical bodies that all bear the name of Lilith. There is an asteroid named Lilith; a controversial dark moon Lilith (another satellite of the earth); and a black moon Lilith, which is defined as the empty focal point in the moon's orbit around the earth. In mythic-astrology the positions of these bodies in a person's birth chart point to the psychological process that unfolds in a person's life when Lilith is a prominent archetype.

Images of humiliation, diminishment, flight and desolation, followed by fiery rage, and revenge as seductress and child-killer, abound throughout Lilith's mythology. This is her pattern. For both women and men, in our quest to find and redeem Lilith within us, she takes us through a threefold process. In the first phase we must confront all the ways in which we have been repressed and take a stand to uphold our integrity. The second phase of her archetypal journey leads us into exile of despair over our rejection, where our shadow plots and executes its revenge. And in the final phase of her process, Lilith cuts away the layers that obscure and distort her true nature, whereby we are released from captivity and are redeemed.

Rebellion against Subservience
In her earliest days Lilith, as handmaiden to Innana, was a symbol of the temple priestesses. These hold women brought the Goddess's blessings of sexual love and fertility into the lives of humanity and the earth. They also transmitted the blood lineage of divine rulership through their children conceived in sacred rituals. At the beginning of a new spiritual and political era ruled by solar gods, it was this Lilith who came to Adam to offer her wisdom on earth, equal to man and a free spirit.

But Adam rejected her sexually and intellectually, and tried to force her into subservience. She refused subjugation, and, as a wind spirit, flew away and resumed her ancient sexual practices in the Red Sea. Lilith was then envisioned as a jealous avenger who personified the destructive life force. This image arose from Adam's refusal to accept her as an equal, and has become the prototype for men's unwillingness to accept women's equality and instinctive sexuality.

Lilith lives within each man and woman, and she represent our primal, instinctive feminine sexuality. Over the millennia the masculine part of each person both longs for and fears the power of this wild woman. She is free and unrestrained in her animating, pulsating, transforming sexuality that remembers and evokes the original orgiastic aspect of the Great Goddess.

When this Lilith speaks through us, she is the voice who demands absolute equality in whatever situation we find ourselves (relationship, job, family, group, and so on). She will not settle for anything less, and is unwilling to compromise if that means denying her essential values, beliefs, or ideals. Lilith radiates strength, courage, and passion, and she takes a stand for independence and freedom from tyranny. She is that quality in us that refuses to be bound in a relationship, . . . but wants equal freedom to move, change, and be herself. She will not cooperate in her own victimization, and will opt for no relationship as opposed to a bad one. Rather than be dominated and suppressed, Lilith accepts the loss of physical security, loneliness, and exclusion from society. In her voluntary exile from relatedness, she has the capacity to nurture and sustain herself.

With the coming of the patriarchy it became unacceptable for women (and the woman in each man) to experience Lilith's original essence as a sexually vital free spirit who was equal to man. She appears in our daily lives when we find ourselves not valued for our wisdom. We are prevented from acting, moving, choosing, and determining our live circumstances. We may feel forced to obey others against our better judgment, and pressured to suppress the qualities that other find unacceptable and threatening, especially the sexual, independent, and rebellious part of our personality. Experiences of humiliation and denial also contribute to a buildup of smoldering resentment.

The inner pressure that accumulates when any energy is confined and constricted eventually precipitates a violent explosion. In the forceful outburst of our repressed anger, we have the capacity to see and speak our truth. However, this clarity can also destroy the false pretensions that give form to our self-defeating relationships with our partners, parents, bosses, spiritual and academic teachers, or groups. In the face of what has been exposed, we cannot go back to the old patterns of self-denial and resume our relationship as if nothing happened.

Back to Top

Flight into Exile
By standing up for ourselves, we may be denounced and humiliated. Like Lilith, who after her rebellion was forced into exile, the fate of many female rebels is to suffer ostracism, excommunication, or some form of banishment because of their assertive and defiant behavior. We are then filled with a fiery rage, feeling forced to flee and losing our "homes" in order to preserve our integrity. While we are the ones doing the actual leaving, we feel rejected, wounded, and betrayed. In those cases where we may deny and banish Lilith's voice inciting us to action so that we can survive and go on. But we know that the shadow in exile, whether its flight into the desolate wilderness occurs externally or internally, does not meekly resign itself to passively accepting its rejection.

Like a caged and wounded animal fleeing from its captor, desperately trying to find a hiding place in which to heal itself, Lilith flies off into the desert to seek refuge. We may leave our relationship in an actual physical way; or if we cannot escape on an outer level, we may withdraw on an inner level by severing ourselves emotionally and psychologically from our oppressor. In either case the second phase of Lilith's mythical journey is a flight into desolation, which can often be experienced as a period of madness. Feeling alone, betrayed, rejected and wounded, we writhe in the pain of our anguish. In the process of saving ourselves, we have destroyed our connection to another. In addition we are often ostracized by the social group in which our relationship existed. A woman who leaves her relationship, and especially because of a sexual liaison with another, is often deprived of her home, possession, and financial resources from the marriage. She is humiliated, and it is not uncommon for women to have a less secure and lower standard of living after divorce or separation.

To the extent that we have difficulty in moving through our suffering to reclaim our dignity, we may internalize our rage and thus turn it against ourselves. In our rejection we feel lonely and unwanted. We interpret this to mean that there is something about us that in unacceptable and undesirable. Filled with bitterness and blame, we become men who hate women and women who hate ourselves.

In Lilith's mythical drama there comes a time when there are no more tears or futile hopes for acceptance and reconciliation left inside of us. Then another emotion starts to build, that of outrage and desire for revenge against the person or situation that has caused us so much suffering.

While Lilith is off in the desert of her voluntary exile, wounded and suffering, she is attempting to find her inner source of strength and to reclaim her integrity. However, the world she has left punished her for the act of leaving. Her vital female qualities of independence and passion intimidated male dominance. She was slandered as a demoness, seductress, and child-killer, much as many women today leave abusive relationships only to be called bitches and whores or to have their children taken from the. Lilith became a hated, and perhaps secretly envied, female symbol who served as a threat to straying or rebellious women, warning them how society would treat them if they were to leave their husbands or defy male authority. Cabalistically Lilith's name corresponds to the screech owl, the night owl who remains in the shadows. When an aspect of the wholeness of the self is denied, it develops into the shadow.

When we repress Lilith's essence, the rejected shadow self becomes distorted by the pressure of suppression and the anguish of the pain. As the shadow self festers in exile, it releases poisons into our mind stream that distort our perception of reality. With the patriarchal denouncement of feminine sexuality and freedom, we have collectively transformed Lilith into a fatal, seductive demoness who becomes the Bride of the Devil. She became a scapegoat for men and women's fear of their instinctual desires and sexual urges, and she grew to embody men's worst fears concerning their sexual potency and performance. Lilith's mythical imagery carries our dark projections of the feminine shadow who has been banished to the darkest crevices of our psyche. As an emissary of the ancient Bird and Snake Goddess, Lilith is powerful.

Rather than withering away in exile, the Lilith shadow grows and flourishes in the same way that she was prolific in breeding demonic offspring on the shores of the Red Sea. When this aspect of Lilith's shadow is active in our lives, our psyche becomes overwhelmed with images of revenge and retaliation. When the shadow inevitably erupts and violently breaks through our boundaries of constraint, she unleashes the terror of her vengeance.

Lilith's mythos contains the patriarchy's associations of the rebellious woman with that of the she-devil. When women step outside the boundaries of acceptable submissive feminine behavior and actualize their ability to say no, they trigger men's fears and fantasies that their rebellion will lead to an out-of-control, unstoppable rampage, like that of mythical Lilith.

Lilith, by being true to herself, actively threatened the survival of Adam's patriarchal dominion. In her shadow aspect as the jealous avenger, humanity projected onto her the image of the Dark Goddess who destroys life. Desirable and dangerous, she became the embodiment of men's sexual longing and their fear of woman's sexual power over them. Try as they might, they could not totally eradicate her alluring, forbidden beauty, which evoked her original orgiastic nature. She became the symbol of fatal enchantment, deadly in her seduction. She had the power to destroy men by exciting and coupling with them at night against their will. She undermined their vitality by sucking their blood, and drained their potency by causing the nocturnal emission in order to breed demons who would multiply her revenge. Succubus and vampire, Lilith was shunned by those who feared, and thus negated, all erotic experiences except those that led to the conception of children.

When shadow Lilith is active in a man's life, and he is projecting his own inner demonic images of Lilith onto women, he will be intrigued and irresistibly drawn to the dark, enchanting, forbidden female, whom he then attempts to ravish and destroy because of his fear of her deadly sexual power over him. He experiences a woman's passion as a voracious and demanding sexuality that causes his manhood and erection to diminish. He blames Lilith woman for making him feel impotent and maligns her as a castrating ball-buster. Lilith's rejection of Adam and her flight to the sensual Red Sea also triggers men's fears of abandonment and the loss of woman's companionship and emotional support. Women like Lilith, who refuse to nurture men, threaten their sense of survival.

When shadow Lilith is active in a woman's life, hatred of her own sexuality can lead to barrenness, frigidity, emotional coldness, and excessive detachment. Lilith women cannot have their needs met in relationships that restrict and devalue them. Trapped in this kind of abuse, in covert retaliation, they use their sexuality like a weapon with which to control, manipulate, and punish others. Taken to extremes this kind of indiscriminate, destructive sexual activity can backfire, making one vulnerable to contracting sexually transmitted diseases. Even if a woman is still a child or an innocent, she may unconsciously magnetize society's images onto her as the vamp, whore, or nymphomaniac "who is asking for it" and there "deserves what she gets." Lilith's shadow material is often an underlying theme in a woman's predisposition to repeat pattern of sexual abuse.

Women who deny Lilith - suppress their instinctive sexuality and instead fulfill patriarchal expectations for male approval - will know her in their hatred and secret jealousy of attractive, independent females who might seduce their own mates. These threatening projections challenge their own decision to accept obedience and submission for the security of marriage and societal acceptance. Lilith is feared as the "other woman," divorcee, prostitute, office wife, and vamp.

Shadow Lilith claims not only the lives of men, but as child-killer she takes her revenge on their offspring and threatens the survival of the race of Adam's children by other women. Her crimes included killing or harming pregnant and birthing women and new-born infants. When shadow Lilith in us is operative, she may emerge as the murderous rage we sometime feel toward our children when we feel tied down and restricted by our responsibilities to them and have no time and space for ourselves. She appears in those individuals who hate children and who harm them through sexual or physical abuse. Distorted images of Lilith in our unconscious can contribute to miscarriage, patterns of repeated abortions, births of deformed children, and crib deaths. For all of us who carry the pain of our wounded child whose infantile needs were strangled, Lilith is present.

The deeper significance of Lilith as child-killer lies in her relationship to the ebb and flow of a woman's menstrual cycle. Mythical Lilith was seen as the child-killing witch of the menstrual period, when the womb fills with blood instead of offspring, which denies men their heirs. The menstrual period is also a time when women instinctively want to flee from the demands of others and withdraw into themselves. If they are not allowed to do so, Lilith protests as the PMS witch, the raging bitch. In her menstrual aspect, Lilith was hated for refusing to service men or conceive their children.

From the perspective of women's mysteries, Lilith, who engaged in unbridled promiscuity on the shores of the Red Sea, the ocean of red blood, is a goddess of woman's menstrual blood. Menstruation is the source of a woman's psychic power, and it was used as a time to engage in ritual tantric sexual practices. It was Lilith who persuaded Eve to have intercourse with Adam during her bleeding time and initiate him into the mysteries of the garden. Because the sexuality of menstruation does not lead to conception in a physical sense, it "is the gateway to magic and extrasensory perception." The Cabbala states that Lilith is the ladder on which one can ascend to the rungs of prophecy. The patriarchy rejected Lilith's menstrual sexuality because it did not result in the birth of children.

They also feared the psychic power of a woman's red time. In defaming Lilith, menstruation was simultaneously tabooed to prevent women from discovering the power of their wise blood. In this second stage of Lilith's exile, we are caught in the grip of the shadow. As the Lilith archetype continues to repressed over generations, the ways in which she operates in us become ever more distorted and perverted. These hidden images of Lilith as seductress and child-killer lie buried in our unconscious psyche. They incite and sustain the war between the sexes. The original wound comes from our conditioned fear of woman's instinctive sexuality and its power over men. The more this aspect of the self is rejected and unintegrated, the more we are predisposed to experience sexuality as a destructive act of violence. And in our silent rage of being denied our experience of sexuality as a blessing of the creative life principle, Lilith's shadow passes her time in exile by plotting our revenge and executing our retaliation. We then become trapped in the web of patriarchy's distorted projections, and in fact actualize their worst fears of the demonic feminine furiously trying to claim her due. However, the seeds of these thoughts and actions yield a crop whereby we continue to create new patterns of suppression and rejection in our future.

Release and Redemption
When Lilith is active in our lives, we may find ourselves caught in the dilemma of maintaining our integrity, the right to express and act upon our truth, at the cost of separation from relatedness and exclusion from society. The secret of Lilith's alchemical transformation lies in the darkness of the final stage of her threefold process. This Dark Goddess who shares a name with the astronomical black moon is related to the Black Mother of Eastern mythological traditions. Many old amulets for protection against Lilith are in the form of knives, which represent Lilith's quality to instinctively cut to the essential nature of things. The Hebrew Lilith, the "Flame of the Revolving Sword," is an ally of the Hindu Kali and the Tibetan Black Dakini, the destroyer aspect of the Triple Goddess. Emanating fiery sparks, she brandishes her curved knife in one hand and in the other holds up a severed head. This symbolizes cutting the attachments in the ego's belief in a separate self.

The spiritual practice of the Black Mother cuts away at the ways in which we perpetuate our mistaken beliefs concerning our true nature. In the process she leads us to an awareness of the fundamental unity of all life. We come to understand that all life is an ever changing, undifferentiated, universally connected matrix of living energy that is not separated by its containment in physical forms and mental concepts.

With her curved knife she severs all our false images and pretensions that have accumulated in our individual and collective repressed past. She does not tolerate any attempt to falsify ourselves from either a good or bad motivation; when we try to do so it ends in disaster. She ruthlessly destroys all that is not our true individuality or appropriate life path. She will not lead us to our goal by revealing what is but rather by eliminating everything that it is not. The black aspect of Lilith closes all the wrong doors that face us.

The enforced clarity of black Lilith enables us to penetrate the delusion of our false needs, which force us into roles not in accordance with our true individuality. Her compassionate wrath allows us to see who we really are and forces us to be true to ourselves. The black Lilith in us will accept nothing less than our true individuality, not in the sense of its separateness, but in the sense of who we intrinsically are. When we are secure in acknowledging and expressing our true self, we do not falsify ourselves in order to be accepted by others. We are then not as vulnerable to becoming entrapped in situations that deny and disempower us, which is where Lilith's self-destructive cycle begins.

For many, however, Lilith presents a dilemma of how to be true to our integrity when the patriarchal value system that permeates our society continues to reject this aspect of the feminine nature. The issue is compounded by our conditioned Lilith reaction to flee from problematical confrontations. When we are caught in Lilith's shadow, we do not stay around long enough to develop the necessary tools for resolving conflict. This pattern reinforces the alienation, bitterness, and separation from relationship and family that is often found in the Lilith experience.

To the extent that we inhabit a dualistic reality where there exists a strong demarcation between oppressor and victim, our Lilith's anguished cry of hurt and rage cannot be healed. Throughout lifetimes we will alternate between these two roles, giving and receiving power ultimatums that insist on the exclusion of the other view. This stance moves us ever farther away from the state of wholeness.

Many philosophic traditions eventually come to the realization that it is through the reconciliation of opposites that the path opens toward balance, integration, and wholeness. Lilith seeks reconciliation between the male and female sexes, between individuals who are violently opposed to one another, and between the various warning aspects within our own psyche. In Lilith's realm consensus is one skill that we can learn to heal our separation from the wholeness of ourselves and from the rest of life.

The view of consensus encompasses the qualities of integration and synthesis. It is the creative third solution that is the resolution to any problem that is being seen in a black/white or either/or alternative. Consensus does not require the kind of compromise that pressures us to give up our essential values while mediating with another person. If we believe that such a solution theoretically exists, then Lilith's process is the willingness to search for this solution. If one possibility does not work out, to let it go and not reject or belittle the other person; and try another one until we can experientially arrive at a solution that we believe exists.

By practising consensus we can begin to move out of a dualistic reality whose inherent nature is polarization, separation, and struggle for power, with one side inevitably losing and being rejected - in this case the qualities of the feminine nature as represented by Lilith. Consensus in Lilith's realm can lead us to the state of grace, called "oneness" by the ancients, whose qualities are inclusion and acceptance. In this way we can heal the rift that perpetuates our experiences of being cast out and fleeing into the exile of our separations.

After going to the root and cutting away all of the hidden and distorted aspects of Lilith's shadow self, who perpetuates the cycle of conflict and separation, the black Lilith places all of our ego attachments (ego in the sense of belief in a separately existing self) into her cauldron of transformation. She then transmutes the poisonous accumulations into the wisdom nectar of lucid perception and conscious participation in unification. The peacock is viewed as a bird of doom and associated with moonlight, owls, and infectious disease, all related to Lilith's mythical imagery. However, the peacock can eat poisonous plants; and instead of dying it is able to transmute the deadly poison into the brilliant colours of its plumage.

The Jerusalem Bible states that Lilith return evermore as seduction tress and child-killer and will continue to do so until the Messiah comes and drives the unclean spirits from the land (Zech. 13:2). From the perspective of black Lilith this verse can be interpreted as the healing qualities of the Dark Goddess, who will continue to destroy and cleanse her distorted images from our mind stream. We can then reclaim the pure form of these rejected parts of ourselves. Healing entails moving towards a state of wholeness within ourselves, and this awareness precipitates a realization of our connection with all of life. As we accept Lilith within our psyche, the quality of our life will move from a state of alienation in exile to conscious expression of our individuality and purpose within the large whole.

In Lilith's archetypal threefold process, she first shows us how and where we experience the themes of suppression, resentment, explosive anger, taking a stand for our dignity, only to be rejected and forced to flee. In the second phase she brings us to the exile of desolation where we feel our anguish, alienation, fear, and hared of our sexuality. She exacts revenge by fulfilling the patriarchy's worst fears and enacting their monstrous shadow projections. In the final phase we can discover her transmuting and healing activities, as she cuts away our pretensions, false roles, and delusions and helps us fully to actualize our true, essential selves. Maxine Harris says that only recently have feminist writers championed the cause of Lilith, and proclaimed her to be the first liberated woman, a woman who was unwilling to accept a position of subservience to her husband.

Taken from the book, Mysteries of the Dark Moon, Demetra George.

This page was last updated: November 06, 2008

Website comments? Contact our Webwizard.