Lilith - Mother of All Demons

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More dark writing by me.

And here is some appropriate Youtube music by Peter Gundry to set the mood.





Lilith, O' Lilith!
Our Unholy Mother of Darkness
She who creeps behind the shadow of the woods
Like the screeching owl perched high on Inanna's tree
Or the venomous garden serpent who tricked the gullible Eve

She who is the ancient darkness fills us with dread
For one day we know we shall all be dead

When you awake in the night, sweating with fear
Know that the mother of nightmares was near

Many fail to understand her, and she likes it that way.
For it means more prey come into her predatory sway.

And believe it, oh yes believe it! That the great storm is coming, coming to dust away the world. For she will soon have her final revenge on the children of the man who had wronged her and the woman who replaced her.

Hell hath no fury like the true first woman scorned. For hell is what she will bring upon us all...

Here's a question.

How would you distinguish Lilith from Moloch in Allen Ginsberg's 'Howl'?

My own read is to say she's Shakti (ie. vital energy) responding to the incentives of a Darwinian / game-theoretic world, ie. Moloch. The person who made Pearl Jam's 'Do The Evolution' played with that exact concept and both had Lilith dancing through the video and really displayed her more as solipsistic and self-entertaining than evil, which again to me points back to her being Shakti penetrating certain mathematical physics sets (like the framing physics of this universe) and getting certain results just from being there and submitting herself/itself to those rules and parameters. In that way I'd see Moloch as the mold and Lilith being the life force being poured into that mold and taking on that shape (and what's sort of implied, it's almost like consciousness throwing a rave - ie. dancing goddess who loves all experience regardless of quality felt by individual beings, but at the boundary or terminus of that activity you get the physical world we've come to either know and love or find utter horror/repulsion with). Admittedly that last thought in round brackets is pretty abstract and it's just a model I'm playing with to see if I can extract more from it but those elements do seem categorically real and it's just about figuring out how to properly organize them in a way that maps to reality well.

Honestly from what I've read about her I simply think of her as the darker side of nature and nurture. Like the spider who spins a web of lies to trap her unsuspecting prey while at the same time devouring her mate and eating her own offspring. She is the feminine face of primordial evil. Even if one takes her origin story in The Alphabet of Ben Sira as proof of the misogyny of God and all the Abrahamic religions, there's no denying the fact that she did cruel things like murdering children and sexually assaulting men in their sleep according to legend, she even sacrifaces her own demon offspring every time she gives birth so that she herself can live forever and escape punishment. She doesnt even love her own children apparently from what I gather much less the children of Adam and Eve.

She may not have been evil from the start, but like many victims-turned-victimizers she chose to do evil things and frankly I don't like the way wiccans have whitewashed her crimes over time. If they are looking for a true Goddess of feminism and equality there are plenty of better options to choose from like Inanna for example (in my opinion).

That's my 2 cents anyways. Lol

So pretty much Red Queen from Alice In Wonderland.

I like the tools of cog-sci-splaining / Eliade-splaining / Peterson-splaining because it's one of those ways that you can play with these ideas and what they represent as something more than divine fiat received from historical sources (or modern cottage mystic sources that claim a lot of authority with less obvious justification for it). What I mean by that is you can analytically invade these models, start breaking apart what doesn't fit, rejoin what does, and even reenchant these as it becomes appropriate.

I'm going to throw something out about the idea of 'Gods misogyny' with respect to Lilith. God in that sense is seen as male when it's considered 'Logos', or the creating / demiurgic mind that orders all things.

Technically we're in trouble with both that mind's laws of physics and Lilith that weld up from that rule set, because the laws that Lilith is reacting to in her barbarism are the 'perfect laws of heaven', or the perfect laws of physics.

If I want to think about bible and midrash stories of Lilith being betrayed and becoming betrayer, I think of mystical traditions (particularly some of the Mediterranean Platonist ones) as man identifying himself, and his struggle against nature, as mind vs nature, or reason vs nature, or logos vs nature. Coming at it experientially rather than having any concept of deep history (like billions of years of evolution) they had to start their maps from experience and extrapolate outward from what they had in front of them. I think that's where reason and Darwinian evolution don't get along, and to the degree that's true YHVH and Lilith would have as complex a relationship as not only Lilith being kicked out and rejected as Adam's wife but YHVH (in Zeus mode) taking a second look, saying 'You know, I'd hit that', and she becomes both queen of demons and either concubine or consort of YHVH - in a way both at the same time.

When I work with her then, part of my model is that she's a sacrificed goddess in similar ways to which Jesus, Osiris, etc. were effectively sacrificed gods - it's just that her story gets more complicated, ie. that she got to know the inconsistencies of the world intimately, ate a lot of concrete, and was redeemed as a rather complex psychopomp and shadow exploration guide.

Generally I think gods or goddesses as we consider them are that - ie. psychopomp figures that take you into your own underworld to deal with deeper content that's in your...well... your 'huge' self that the small sliver of self-aware consciousness you have can only scratch the surface of at any given moment and where there's maps upon maps upon maps of reality.

A picture of Asenath Mason's Oraculum Leviathan (I've got a copy of it in my drawer with the book) and the lower right one is the 'Lust' card which is an extension of Crowley's re-imagining of 'Strength' in the Rider-Waite:



When I look at that card the psychopomp piece jumps out.

From a straight guy's perspective she's the instructor who's going to show some leg, pull you over by the back of your head (all your instincts), hand you a shovel, show you how much of your own crap you have to clean up, and say 'Get to work', and if you think what she's asking you to do is hard and you have an inclination to complain about it you can think of everything she's been through and just blush, it's almost like complaining to Jesus in more traditional senses but with a different sort of tragedy and backstory than the agony and sacrifice of the cross.

Hmm you actually bring up some interesting points. I still think it's possible that many people misunderstand her and will always misunderstand her though (myself included, like often I was being quick to judge her backstory myself). I feel that it's possibly her very nature as a demon/goddess. I mean think of this, just about every artifact thought to be discovered as 'proof' of her existence has been debunked from the Burney Relief which turned out to more likely be a sculpture of Inanna to the Alphabet of Ben Sira which I heard many scholars now believe to be the work of satire.

Yet we do know that Lilith did exist in Jewish oral tradition and she was mentioned in ancient Sumerian texts like in the story about Inanna and the Huluppu Tree.



I've often been fascinated by Lilith for years, but the truth is i often learn that I don't really know as much about her as I believe I do. I've heard other occultists say it's best to not even acknowledge Lilith, especially if I'm starting to feel more drawn to Inanna as Inanna and Lilith were enemies (she invaded her favorite tree after all).

Now I feel like a rambling know-nothing and an idiot...

There's a lot of good content out there and a lot of academic scholarship they can pull from as well.

The framing of her possibilities and what she 'can be' based on her story gives you a certain amount of information about her but you can also map these entities out broader and find a lot that's antihero in them as well (maybe not all but most).

The more I think about this - these are character designs in our heads, they're powerful models and we typically pick them up when we feel like they can patch or hack around something that's been troubling us - or the mystery and formula of their identity in some ways gave us a hint that if we unpacked their identity completely in our minds that we'd at least have important clues that we didn't have previously - if not part of the answer we were looking for or maybe even all of it.

I'm a guy whose explored psychedelics a lot, quite recently D8 and THC-H and THC-P have become legal near me, I've been exploring that space again and had some really surprising conclusions, particularly that the first time I properly took a good rip of THC-H and got in a lot deeper than I was planning I also had the sativa mania moments where I'd feel like some totalizing and terrifyingly seductive view of the universe had just handed itself off to me (for example - seeing my body as a hallucination and my consciousness and all of its attributes vibrating on either a bubble surface of a sphere or even that seeming sheet just being a segment of nerve tissue in a larger nervous system) - and I'd pull back from that intensity a bit for safety but I also started rotating these around and I realized that I was just pulling maps from my subconscious and it was only particularly surprising the first time I'd pulled certain maps.

I don't know if this is how everyone's nervous system works but - unless I'm a very rare kind of individual - we've got tens, hundreds of thousands of maps, maybe even millions, that our subconscious minds are processing and storing throughout our lives. Momentarily I'm staying out of whether these beings are autonomously real, I'm pretty sure that even if they we're still doing this in a mental manner anyway and doing so by and large without them (and furthermore most of what reacts to our thoughts about them is our mental maps of them). The point is if a god or goddess stands out to you - its your subconscious calling for more exploration of the symbol.

Hope I'm not sounding preachy, mainly encouraging on your journey and seeing if any of these framing principles I just mentioned are at least useful.

I might start respecting Lilith aka Lamashtu simply BECAUSE she keeps the human population under control.