Lilith for beginners: history, symbols and honest practice

How to read the labels Historical what the old sources say. Later tradition what later writers added. Modern modern practice and my own notes.

Maybe you met Lilith on a screen first: a quote card, a tarot deck, a birth chart. Lilith is everywhere in contemporary culture. A Jewish feminist magazine has carried her name since 1976. A touring festival of women musicians, Lilith Fair, took her name in the late 1990s. She appears in television series, comics, role-playing games, and video games, sometimes as a villain, sometimes as a queen of hell, sometimes as a misunderstood heroine. Astrologers place her in birth charts. On social media she is a patron of women who say no, a “dark goddess,” and a symbol of sexual freedom. On this page I sort the many Liliths by layer, history first, and end with a gentle, respectful way to begin.

Meeting Lilith

It helps to see the main versions side by side. On this page I treat them as layers that grew over time, not as one figure with one true face.

Historical The night spirit. In Mesopotamia, a class of spirits called lilû (male) and lilītu (female), along with the ardat-lilî (“maiden of the lilû”), troubled people at night. Many scholars connect them with the ghosts of young people who died before marriage. They are not goddesses, and they are not individuals with a life story.

The creature in the ruins. In Isaiah 34:14, a single Hebrew word, lilit, names something that rests among the ruins of Edom, alongside wild animals. Translators have rendered it as a screech owl, a night monster, a night hag, or Lilith.

The demon against whom people prayed. In the Dead Sea Scrolls, liliths are dangerous spirits. In the Aramaic incantation bowls of late antiquity they appear far more often, threatening households, especially women in childbirth and newborn children. People buried bowls under their floors to keep them away.

The first wife. In the medieval Alphabet of Ben Sira, Lilith is created from the earth like Adam, refuses to lie beneath him, speaks the divine name, and flies away. Three angels pursue her. She agrees to spare infants protected by their names.

Later tradition The queen of the other side. In medieval Kabbalah, especially the Zohar, Lilith becomes the partner of Samael and a central figure on the “left side,” the realm of impurity and judgment.

Modern The femme fatale. In the nineteenth century, Goethe, Rossetti, and others turned her into a beautiful, dangerous woman, closer to art than to demonology.

The feminist icon. From the 1970s, Jewish and other feminist writers retold her story as one of equality and self-determination.

The astrological point. Black Moon Lilith, used in modern astrology, is a calculated point on the Moon’s orbit that borrowed her name.

The modern goddess or spirit. Many contemporary witches, pagans, and occultists honor Lilith as a goddess, a spirit, or an archetype. This is a modern practice built on all the layers above.

Mesopotamian roots

Historical The Mesopotamian lilû, lilītu and ardat-lilî appear mainly in incantations and medical-magical texts, lists of the many forces that could make a person ill or troubled. Their Sumerian counterparts use the element líl, which can mean “wind,” “air,” or “breath,” and by extension a ghostly or spirit-like quality. Whether the later Hebrew lilit comes from these words, or from the Semitic word for “night” (Hebrew laylah), or from both through confusion, is debated. Many scholars think the Hebrew word was at least shaped by the Mesopotamian spirits. Others argue the connection is weaker than older books assumed.

What did these spirits do? The surviving texts are fragmentary, but a few patterns recur. The lilû group is associated with young people who died before they could marry or have children. Their ghosts were thought to roam restlessly and to trouble the living of their own age, often in sexual ways: the ardat-lilî might seek a young man, the lilû a young woman. In this sense they resemble what later European folklore called incubi and succubi. They were also linked with illness, especially conditions that baffled healers.

The Burney Relief

Historical The image most often printed as “ancient Lilith” is the so-called Burney Relief, also called the Queen of the Night, a fired clay plaque now in the British Museum, about 50 cm (19.5 inches) tall. It shows a nude female figure with wings and the talons of a bird of prey. She wears a horned headdress, holds a rod and ring in each raised hand, and stands on two lions, flanked by two owls. Traces of red and black paint survive.

The museum dates it to about 1800 to 1750 BCE, in the Old Babylonian period, and thinks it most likely came from southern Iraq, possibly from the area of ancient Girsu (modern Tello). The link to Lilith was first proposed in 1937. Today most specialists think she is a goddess, perhaps Inanna (Ishtar) or Ereshkigal, because horned crowns mark gods in Mesopotamian art. I do not show the plaque here because I have no photo of it that I am free to reuse.

What we can fairly claim about the Mesopotamian roots:

• Mesopotamian texts describe night spirits called lilû, lilītu, and ardat-lilî, associated with restless young dead, sexual disturbance, and illness. (Ancient evidence.)
• A Sumerian poem features a “phantom maid” (ki-sikil-lil-la) living in Inanna’s tree, who flees when Gilgamesh cuts it. (Ancient evidence; the identification with Lilith is disputed.)
• The child-threatening demon Lamashtu shares the role later given to Lilith. (Ancient evidence; the connection is a scholarly proposal.)
• The Hebrew lilit may be connected with the lilû-spirits, though scholars debate how. (Scholarly debate.)

The Hebrew Bible and the Dead Sea Scrolls

Isaiah 34

Historical Isaiah 34 is a prophecy of judgment against Edom, a neighboring kingdom to the southeast of Judah. The chapter describes Edom’s land turned to desolation: its streams turned to pitch, its fortresses overgrown with thorns, and its ruins taken over by wild creatures. Scholars debate when this part of Isaiah was written. Many date it to the sixth or fifth century BCE, later than the prophet Isaiah of the eighth century.

In the middle of a list of animals that will inhabit the ruins, verse 14 says that a lilit will rest there and find a place of repose. The King James Version of 1611 calls the creature a “screech owl.” Translations have varied widely:

• The Septuagint, the ancient Greek translation, has no separate word for lilit here. It uses onokentauros, a “donkey-centaur,” for the creatures in this verse.
• The Vulgate, Jerome’s Latin translation made around 390 to 405 CE, chose lamia, the name of a child-devouring monster from Greek and Roman lore. That choice linked the verse with a female child-killer centuries before the Ben Sira story.
• Older English Bibles that followed the Latin, such as the Wycliffe and Douay-Rheims versions, kept “lamia.”
• The Geneva Bible and the King James Version chose “screech owl.”
• The Jewish Publication Society’s 1917 translation, also in the public domain, has “the night-monster shall repose there.”
• Twentieth-century versions spread out widely. The Revised Standard Version (1952) has “night hag.” The New Revised Standard Version (1989) and the Jerusalem Bible (1966) print “Lilith.” Many recent versions, such as the New International Version and the English Standard Version, return to “night creature” or “night bird.”

The Dead Sea Scrolls

Historical The Dead Sea Scrolls are manuscripts found from 1947 onward in caves near Qumran, by the Dead Sea. They date roughly from the third century BCE to the first century CE. Many scholars connect them with a Jewish community, often identified with the Essenes, that lived at or near Qumran. This is ancient evidence.

Among the scrolls are two fragmentary copies of a work now called the Songs of the Sage (sometimes Songs of the Maskil, “the instructor”), catalogued as 4Q510 and 4Q511. They are dated by handwriting to around the late first century BCE. In them, a teacher proclaims the splendor and majesty of God in order to frighten and terrify evil spirits.

The opening fragment of 4Q510 lists those spirits. In paraphrase, the speaker declares God’s glory to frighten off a list of hostile spirits. The list includes destroying angels, the spirits of the “bastards” (a term connected with the offspring of fallen angels in Jewish tradition), demons, Lilith (the Hebrew word is singular), howlers or owls, and desert creatures. It ends with spirits that strike people suddenly and lead them astray. Modern English translations by Geza Vermes, Florentino García Martínez, and others are under copyright, so I paraphrase them here.

Was Lilith cut from the Bible?

Later tradition You will often read that Lilith was cut from Genesis. She was not. Genesis contains two accounts of the creation of humans. In Genesis 1:27, God creates humankind “male and female.” In Genesis 2, God forms the man from dust, then later builds the woman from his side or rib while he sleeps. Ancient and medieval people noticed the difference. Was the woman of chapter 1 the same as the woman of chapter 2?

Rabbinic interpreters offered several answers. Some said the first human was created with two faces, male and female, and later divided. Others imagined a woman before Eve.

Why does this matter? Because the phrase “Lilith was cut from the Bible” suggests a cover-up. There is no evidence of one. The biblical writers did not tell this story. Later interpreters did. Knowing that helps you read the first-wife story as what it is: a creative medieval answer to an old puzzle.

Incantation bowls and amulets

Historical The incantation bowls are ordinary earthenware bowls, about the size of a soup bowl, with a spell written in ink on the inside, usually in a spiral from the center to the rim. This is ancient evidence. Most come from Mesopotamia during the Sasanian period (the Persian empire of the third to seventh centuries CE), and many date to roughly the fifth to seventh centuries. They are written in several Aramaic dialects and scripts: Jewish Babylonian Aramaic, Syriac, and Mandaic, as well as some in Middle Persian or in imitation script.

What the bowls say about liliths:

• Liliths come in both genders. The bowls often address “male liliths and female liliths” (lilin and liliyata). There is also, in some texts, an individual Lilith, sometimes called by a fuller name or title.
• They threaten the household. Clients ask protection for themselves, their spouses, children, houses, and possessions.
• They threaten women and children especially. Many spells ask that liliths not harm a pregnant woman, cause miscarriage, or kill or strike a newborn. This continues the role of Lamashtu in Mesopotamian lore.
• They have a sexual dimension. Some texts describe liliths appearing to men or women at night, in dreams, or in the form of a spouse.

Later tradition Amulets with the names of three angels, Sanvi, Sansanvi and Semangelof, became widespread in Jewish communities in the medieval and early modern periods. They were written on paper or parchment and hung in the room of a woman giving birth, or placed near a newborn’s cradle. Many include the words “Adam and Eve, out Lilith,” or variations, along with the angels’ names, verses, and drawings of the three angels. A printed version appears in Sefer Raziel ha-Malakh, a Hebrew magical-mystical book first printed in Amsterdam in 1701, which helped spread a standard design.

The Alphabet of Ben Sira

The Alphabet of Ben Sira is a Hebrew and Aramaic work, anonymous and of uncertain origin. This is later tradition. Scholars usually date it between the eighth and tenth centuries CE, and many place it in the Islamic world, perhaps in Iraq or Persia. Its title refers to Ben Sira, a real Jewish sage of the second century BCE, whose book of wisdom (also called Sirach or Ecclesiasticus) is in the Catholic and Orthodox Bibles. The medieval work has nothing to do with the historical sage except his name.

After God created Adam, God saw that it was not good for the man to be alone, and created a woman for him, from the earth, just as Adam had been made. Her name was Lilith. The two quarreled at once. Lilith would not lie beneath Adam during sex, and Adam insisted that she must, because he was meant to be above. Lilith answered that they were equal, since both were made from the earth. Neither would listen to the other. When Lilith saw how things stood, she pronounced the divine name and flew away into the air.

The first-wife story is now told as if it were ancient sacred myth. In many online spaces, it is “the original story the church hid.” Read in its context, it is something else: a medieval tale, in a work many scholars read as satirical, that explains a protective amulet against a child-harming demon.

Kabbalah and the Zohar

Later tradition Kabbalah (Hebrew for “receiving” or “tradition”) is the name for a family of Jewish mystical teachings that took shape in Provence and Spain in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, building on earlier Jewish mystical literature. This is later tradition. Kabbalists described God’s inner life through ten sefirot, divine attributes or emanations, and explored how evil and impurity arise in a world created by a good God.

The Zohar (“Radiance”) is the central work of medieval Kabbalah. It is written mostly in Aramaic as a commentary on the Torah, presented as the teachings of the second-century sage Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai. Most scholars, following Gershom Scholem, attribute its core to Moses de León, a Castilian Kabbalist, around the 1280s, possibly with a circle of collaborators. Many traditional Jews regard it as ancient and holy. That difference in view is itself something to respect.

Samael is a figure in Jewish tradition sometimes called the angel of death or the chief of the accusing angels. He has a long history of his own, in rabbinic and other sources, and is sometimes connected with the serpent in Eden. In thirteenth-century Kabbalah, Samael and Lilith become a pair: the king and queen of the other side, a dark mirror of the holy union of the divine masculine and feminine.

Lilith transformed: art, literature, feminism

Modern The image of Lilith most reproduced today may be Lady Lilith by the English painter and poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti, a founder of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. Rossetti painted it from 1866 to 1868, then reworked the face in 1872 to 1873. The painting is in the Delaware Art Museum. A watercolor replica of 1867, made with his studio assistant Henry Treffry Dunn, is in the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Modern In 1972, the Jewish theologian Judith Plaskow helped create a short retelling called “The Coming of Lilith.” It was written at a conference called Women Exploring Theology at Grailville, an ecumenical center in Ohio. The piece grew out of a group exercise with other women theologians. In it, Lilith, the outcast rebel, and Eve, who stayed in the Garden, meet across the wall Adam has built. They talk, discover how much they share, and begin to rebuild the Garden together. Plaskow’s piece was first published in the conference proceedings in 1972, then reprinted in Rosemary Radford Ruether’s anthology Religion and Sexism (1974), in Carol P. Christ and Judith Plaskow’s Womanspirit Rising (1979), and many times since. Plaskow later gathered her essays in The Coming of Lilith (2005).

Ethics, safety and respect for Jewish roots

Lilith has Jewish roots. Most of what we know about her comes from Jewish texts, and Jewish communities today still read those texts and have their own views on her. Respect is the first rule. My deity ethics page covers consent, discernment and mental health in more depth.

Do not present your practice as Jewish unless it is. If you are not Jewish, your Lilith practice is a modern pagan, witchcraft, or personal practice drawing on Jewish history. Say so, to yourself and others.

Do not use Jewish sacred material in your rites. That includes Hebrew divine names, Torah or psalm verses used as spells, the three angels’ names as a protective formula, and copies of Jewish amulets. These belong to a living tradition with its own rules and meanings.

Do not cast Judaism as the villain. You can say that Lilith was feared in Jewish sources without suggesting that Jews, rabbis, or Jewish law are the enemy of women or of your practice. Many of the people who reimagined Lilith as a heroine were Jewish women.

Sexuality is yours. Some modern writers present Lilith work as a path to sexual liberation. If that resonates, explore it privately and safely, in ways that involve only consenting adults. Nothing in a spiritual practice should pressure you into sexual activity you do not want, with anyone, including a teacher or group. If you are under 18, leave this part of Lilith’s modern meaning for later; everything else here works without it. If sexual violence or abuse is part of your story, please reach out to a doctor, counselor or a sexual assault helpline in your country. If you are struggling right now, call your local emergency number (112 in Europe, 911 in the US and Canada) or a crisis line in your country.

A beginner’s practice

Modern An altar in modern witchcraft is a small, dedicated space for practice. It can be a shelf, a corner of a dresser, a tray, or a box you open and close. For Lilith, I suggest calling it a reflective altar: a place to sit, think, and write, rather than a place to worship in any fixed way. You need a candle or LED, a cup of water, a journal and, if you like, a small mirror. Then try this first evening rite:

1. Wash your hands. Sit before your altar. Take three slow breaths.
2. Light your candle or switch on your LED, saying: “I light this in the dark, for clear sight.”
3. Pour fresh water into your cup, saying: “Lilith, I offer you this water, in respect.”
4. Look into your mirror for a moment, if you use one. Notice your face without judging it. Keep the room lit enough to see clearly; staring into a mirror in dim light can make a face seem to shift, which is a normal trick of the eyes.
5. Say a short prayer in your own words, or this one, which I wrote. It is modern, not a traditional text: “Lilith, who in the old story would not take the lower place, teach me to know my own mind, to speak it plainly, and to respect the freedom of others.”
6. Sit in silence for two or three minutes.
7. Write a line or two in your journal.
8. Say “Thank you.” Put out the flame.

Where to go next

For every source in order, read my history of Lilith, source by source. Then see how she fits with the other figures on my deities page.