Lilith transformed: art, poetry, feminism and the stars

Your goal in this lesson: to see how Lilith turned from a feared demon into a muse, a heroine and a point in the birth chart, and how recent that change is.

Poets and painters

Modern In Goethe’s Faust, Part One (1808), Faust glimpses Lilith at the witches’ Walpurgis Night, and Mephistopheles warns him about her beautiful hair. That brief scene brought her into European literature.

The English painter and poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti, a founder of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, painted Lady Lilith from 1866 to 1868 and reworked the face in 1872 to 1873. It shows a woman combing her long hair before a mirror, surrounded by flowers. It is now in the Delaware Art Museum. His sonnet for it, later called “Body’s Beauty”, makes her Adam’s first wife whose hair can trap a young man’s heart. I describe the painting in words here; you can find it on the museum’s website. Read more about the circle in my page on the Pre-Raphaelites.

Others followed: Robert Browning’s poem “Adam, Lilith, and Eve” (1883), John Collier’s painting Lilith (1887) with a great serpent, and George MacDonald’s fantasy novel Lilith (1895). In the nineteenth century, Lilith became the dangerous, fascinating woman of art.

A feminist heroine

Modern In 1972, at a conference called Women Exploring Theology at Grailville in Ohio, the Jewish theologian Judith Plaskow and other women wrote a short retelling, “The Coming of Lilith”. In it, Lilith and Eve meet across the wall Adam has built, discover how much they share and begin to rebuild the Garden together. The piece was reprinted in Religion and Sexism (1974), in Womanspirit Rising (1979) and many times since.

In 1976 the Jewish feminist magazine Lilith was founded, and in 1997 to 1999 the music festival Lilith Fair toured North America. Many of the people who reimagined Lilith as a heroine were Jewish women, working with and against their own tradition.

Black Moon Lilith

Modern In 1898 the German astronomer Georg Waldemath reported a second moon of the Earth. It was never confirmed. Early in the twentieth century the astrologer Sepharial gave the name Lilith to this supposed “dark moon”. Today most astrologers who use Black Moon Lilith calculate it as the lunar apogee, the point of the Moon’s orbit farthest from the Earth. There is also an asteroid, 1181 Lilith, discovered in 1927 and named after the French composer Lili Boulanger. All of this is about a century old.

In witchcraft today

Modern Since the late twentieth century, Lilith has become a widespread figure in witchcraft, astrology, tarot and popular culture, often as a goddess of independence and the night. That is a modern practice drawing on ancient and medieval sources, and honest about it, it can be a rich one.

Try this

Today’s exercise: take out your list from lesson 1. Label each of your five claims again: ancient, medieval or modern. How many guesses were right? Write one line about the biggest surprise.

Quick recap

• Goethe, Rossetti, Browning, Collier and MacDonald made Lilith a muse of art.
• Plaskow’s 1972 retelling made her a feminist heroine.
• Black Moon Lilith in astrology is about a century old.
• Modern Lilith practice is modern, and can be honest about it.

Keep going

Press “Mark as done” and continue with the last lesson, A respectful beginner’s practice. For more images of witches and night figures, see witches in art.

Need a refresher? Go back to Kabbalah and the Zohar or see the whole course.

Sources

• Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust, Part One (1808), Walpurgis Night scene.
• Delaware Art Museum, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Lady Lilith (1866 to 1868, altered 1872 to 1873), collection record.
• George MacDonald, Lilith (London, 1895).
• Judith Plaskow, The Coming of Lilith: Essays on Feminism, Judaism, and Sexual Ethics, 1972 to 2003 (Boston: Beacon Press, 2005).

Go deeper: the Lilith pages on this site

Mark as done