John Collier Painting
Who is Lilith, really? She is often named as Adam’s first wife, cohabiting with him until he was given a soul. Then she flew off and began to cause trouble, first appearing as a serpent and tempting Eve with the forbidden fruit, then proceeding to terrorize humanity in her volatile, fiery ways. She is that aspect of woman who will not be suppressed, who devours children, has great sexual appetite and goes into rages.
And yet she is also the animating, instinctual level of being, “the soul of all the beasts of the field and every living creature that creepth” and as such, knows the language of the natural world. She offers a hope of relatedness that Adam could not provide in his interpretation of his mandate of dominion over which has resulted in the environmental, social mess we are in. If it is true that she participated in an evolutionary paradigm shift, she may be an important resource now. We have been separated from union with the divine through eating of the fruit of the tree of knowledge of the opposites, and now, in order to take the next step, in order to again experience wholeness, perhaps we must re-incorporate Lilith.
In alchemy there is an operation called spagyrics in which a substance is taken apart, the parts then purified by taking them down to their essence in a way that does not destroy the connection to the living spirit behind the substances, and then these purified parts “married” back together, the substance (elixir or healing agent) now being of a higher frequency, an octave higher, perhaps. In the next blogs I will explore various aspects of Lilith.
For you, what is the purified version of Lilith? What are the toxins, the impurities, that contaminate the living substance of her? How do we as women—and men—suffer when she remains loose in unconscious realms? I would love your ideas.