Article by Rodica Purniche, Romania

LILITH – a myth that needs reinterpreting

Something called, a short “history”

Lebon, Dassier and Lariviere seemed to have remarked in March 1864 a new heavenly body. Two months later the astronomical observatory in Toulouse declared it the second Moon of the Earth for which the period, the orbit and the perigee were very soon calculated. Petit, the head of the observatory was very much interested in the existence of a second Moon and, after 15 years of research, stated that it is possible for a smaller Moon to exist. It could generate a series of unexplained movements or disturbances of our Moon. Jules Verne picked those men’s brains and wrote the novel From Earth to Moon. Very soon the astronomers became very much interested too in that mysterious object. The German ones were the most perseverant in discovering it entirely and they called it Kleinchen (The Little One).

Lilith does not seem to be an altogether illegitimate presence in astrology. It is symbolically justified in the language of the Sky for the human being.

Etymology

Lilith is the name given to any mystery or aspect of life which brings something magical upon us or which fascinates us so much that we become unable to stand up to it. The origins and the meanings of this name are lost in time. The first ancient form which we can refer to, and in a rather uncertain manner, appears in the Epic of Ghilgamesh from Sumer (the III centuryB.C..): “Lìllá” or “Lilĩtu”. The nature of this character could be seen from two elements that are essential for her psychological and mythological features.

In the language of Sumer “Lìllá” designates the Great Priest or the Great Priestess, while “Lilĩtu” indicates the animals of the desert or of the storms. Symbolical, “Lilĩtu” seems to represent the dangers which could exist at the level of our latent instincts or of our pitch dark subconscious. These dangers remain passive until a violent or sudden event in our life activates them, generating our unpredictable or unexplained behavior.

In the mythology of Sumer Lilith was the demon of the storm and she was associated with the wind bringing disease and death. The first information about her are around the 4000 BC and it says that she was very dangerous for the children and women. “Lyl” means “night” but at the same time “female nocturnal demon/creature”, although the cuneiform inscriptions containing “Lìllá” or “Lilĩtu” refer to the bad winds (the foul air after the wars ended with a lot of victims, whose decaying bodies infested the air).

Another etymology for “Lilith” could come from the noun “Lajil” used by the Semitic tribes for “night”. At the same time there was another parallel word, “Laylah”, the name of a female nocturnal demon which generated erotic nightmares for the people. In the writings of ancient Jews too we find the word Layla, which means “the angel of the night”, and “Layil”, “night”, very close in its meaning to the Arabic words “Lilak” (“obscure”, “tenebrous”) and “Lãilat” (“night” or, generally, “mysterious and perverse woman”). The Arabic “Làila” seems to correspond to the Italian word “Leila”, a female name, advanced by those who searched for the oldest roots for “Lilith”.

There are a lot of speculations concerning a presumed connection between Lillith and “Lenith”, a deity without face belonging to the Etrurians, who was waiting at the gate of the Other World together Hecate and Persephone to receive the souls of the dead.

This entire onomastic chain seems to be offered generally by the space of the Eastern Mediteranean civilizations, among which those of Sumer and Israel tend to be on the first place. The most frequently cited sources could be the sacred books of the Jews – The Bible, Sepher-ha-Zoar, Haggadah, Midrash, where the name of “Lilĩt” appears for the first time, naming the Adam’s wife.

Mythology and Spirituality

In the culture of Sumer, Lilith represented the goddess of fertility and agriculture. In time, popular traditions transformed her into a demon.

Kaballah tells us that God created Adam and Lilith from earth (the Earth Element or Prithivi Tattva, which – as the Kashmir-Shavism claims – contains all the 5 Elements necessary for the Creation the subtle energy corresponding to the Earth being the end of the Manifestation in its most concrete aspect). Although they say that the first reference to Lilith is in the Bible, The Book of Genesis, the mentioned chapters (I and II) do not contain this name at all:

“1:27. And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.

So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.

1:28.And God blessed them, and God said unto them: Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.”

Eve (which means “woman”) is mentioned just in Genesis 2:22:

„2:20. And Adam gave names to all cattle, and to the fowl of the air, and to every beast of the field; but for Adam there was not found an help meet for him.

2:21.And the LORD God caused a deep sleep to fall upon Adam, and he slept: and he took one of his ribs, and closed up the flesh instead thereof;

2:22.And the rib, which the LORD God had taken from man, made he a woman, and brought her unto the man.

2:23.And Adam said, This is now bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh: she shall be called Woman, because she was taken out of Man.” (http://www.htmHYPERLINK “http://www.htmlbible.com/”lHYPERLINK “http://www.htmlbible.com/”bible.com – King James Reference Bible)

The androgynous creation of Adam (“in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them”) is a step never commented upon by the Christian doctrine and the blind faith passes over it without seeing it and without questioning it . This undifferentiated sexual state of the primal human being is, in fact, our real, angelic and spiritually accomplished state. Of course, the biblical text is incomplete and some information was left out of it, since we have no indication as to how Adam and Lilith (his inner woman) came to have a power struggle: Adam wanted to impose, at any price, his own will upon the woman, and Lilith showed her complete independence in her relationship to him. This personal freedom seemed to have culminated with Lilith’s leaving Eden (or, in other variants, with Lilith’s being banished from Paradise after she called Him on His secret name); after which she remained in the world of the demons. If some information is missing from the biblical text, indeed, then we have every right to become more suspicious and to wonder whether Lilith was not somehow consciously transformed into a sinister, rebellious and satanic character, or whether the texts containing the spiritual truths were not somehow forbidden or hidden deliberately.

Until the divine truth on this subject is cleared up, we promote the idea that the possible power struggle between Adam and Lilith was a rather important spiritual event for Adam – let’s say a sudden rise of Kundalini energy which he was unable to control very well so that it remained at the level of the first 3 chakras. In those circumstances, his second woman, Eve (which means at the same time “life”) could represent God’s divine help, who interferes with Adam’s sexual awakening, harmonizing his Kundalini. At that stage in the Creation of man the division of the sexes and the passing of the human being from the androgynous to the differentiated state may have already taken place. Eve does not belong to the stage when “God created man in his own image” but to the stage when she is “torn off” from Adam’s body while he is sleeping. We are the witnesses of the first act of transmutation and sublimation of Kundalini energy – but it is an external one and achieved through Divine intervention, which has a concrete result: the birth of Eve. We wonder if this biblical episode does not somehow represent, in spite of all the missing passages from the Holy Bible, the very clear proof of what we can achieve, as soon as we get real control upon the fundamental energy of life (of “Eve”) which is the sexual energy. At the same time, this stage of the Adamic Creation may have been the last one before the God’s blessing of the tree of of the knowledge of good and evil which He intended to do but which didn’t take place, because the temptation of Eve and Adam by the snake (the Kundalini energy) gave another direction to the Edenic screenplay: Eve and Adam were banished from Heaven (in fact, Man fell down in duality).

When God gave the obedient and chaste Eve to Adam, that could be considered the origin of both the Yin-Yang polarity and the Eternal Feminine, which nature is obviously heavenly. By this token, the perfection is obtained when each of us discovers, assumes and transcends his/her own contraries.

On a terracotta basrelief dating from 2000 BC we see Lilith in a mysterious form. At the bottom, there is the outline of a lion whose half-turned head looks somehow outside the frame, towards us and beyond us. On either side of the lion there is an owl – a symbol of the myth and of wisdom. Behind the lion and the left-hand owl there is the head of a second lion. On the back of the first lion stands Lilith, her wings lowered, her long loose hair covered by a helmet. Her arms are bent and in both her hands, at shoulder level, she holds two rather indefinable objects. Her legs, with anklets around the ankles, end in three claws each, instead of feet and toes, this characteristic being suggestive of her demonic nature. According to a popular belief, demons can take any shape but they cannot hide their claws since they have no soles. Astral symbols are quite evident: soles are governed by and related to the sign of Pisces – the sign of infinite compassion, of deep faith and of humbleness, the very features that are not part of a demon’s nature. That is why it is said that a demon can imitate any state, even love, except humbleness. This Lilith’s legs can be interpreted in two ways:

a) she is either a demon who controls all forces at her disposal (the two lions), especially the base, lower forces
b) she is the one who shows that the Kundalini energy, if left uncontrolled and in a latent state, can attract, at any moment, the demons into our lives; when this energy is, conversely, transmuted and sublimated on higher levels it represents our inner alchemy, the guarantee of our erotic elevation and the acquisition of spiritual traits (wisdom and true faith, which is ”the force behind the force).

Her lowered wings, in harmony, also show Lilith’s tendency towards occult. Taking into account the etymology of her name makes us add another interpretation, too: Lilith, the Grand Priestess, also stands for the beneficial occult power of spiritual initiation, the very power that speeds up evolution and helps the disciple, aspiring to perfection, to overcome the obstacles that he/she encounters along the path of his/her spiritual journey. Since she is the one who knows God’s secret name, we may consider that she also stands for the secret force in man, the particular ingredient that could become the fundamental reason of man’s existence. On one condition: that this should not be evilly perverted into pride and thirst for power. If this metamorphosis does not happen, then this spiritual force will finally lead to the ultimate liberation and to communion with God.

Astronomy

Lilith is the name given in 1918 by Sepharial (the pseudonym of the astrologer Walter Gornold) to the second hypotethical Moon of the Earth, a heavenly body of aproximatively the same weight as the Moon. He took this name from the medieval Jewish legends, which, as we have seen above, are amply referring to this subject. Sepharial stated that Lilith is the same second Moon of the Earth which the scientist Georg Waltemath said he had discovered at the end of the XIX-th century. Georg Waltemath also said that he had seen it but that it is too dark for visual detection and that it could be identified during its intersection with the Sun.

Indeed, in 1898 Georg Waltemath announced that he located the second Moon of the Earth inside a system of two moons which revolves around Terra. Even if the idea was not accepted by the scientific world, the supposed heavenly body was included in the Ephemeris tables and accepted under the name of “Lilith”. It is not a body proper but a point in the space which our Moon revolves around. The French astrologers seemed to have used that point for around 100 years, since it attracted the attention of astronomers and astrologers.

In modern astrology, Lilith means that point in a chart which represents the direction of the actual apogee of the Moon and which has no connection with the second Moon. From such a point of view, Lilith could mean the second focus of the ellipse described by the Moon, the Earth being the other focus. Lilith passes through the whole Zodiac in 8 years and 10 months and a zodiacal Sign in approximately 9 months. It has only direct motion.

Lilith is not to be mistaken for the asteroid Lilith (the asteroid number 1181), discovered on 11.02.1927 by Benjamin Jekhowsky, having the number 1927CQ for a while, and belonging to the asteroids’ belt inside the orbit of Mars. This asteroid 1181 has no connection with Lilith in astrology, named “The Black Moon” too, in order to avoid confusion between them.

Astrology

Although, from the astronomical point of view, Lilith was very soon forgotten due to its physical nonexistence, it won a stable enough position in astrology. Named “The Black Moon” too and associated with the Jewish myths and legends, it is somehow opposed to the Moon, which stands for maternity and femininity in a positive sense. The modern astrologers consider that Lilith stands for our subconscious, our hidden nature or that part of our being which we prefer to ignore. Due to an unknown reason or probably due to the ignorance regarding the original myth, its feminine power and wish for freedom are hardly explored.

Generally speaking, Lilith represents the part which we run away from or that part of ourselves which we do our best – consciously or not – to deny. It is the engine of our need for absolute freedom, of our inner courage to accept finally our failed relations, our egotistic fears, our obsessions or our erotic fantasies, our non-conformism, the fascination (even unconscious) which we exert upon the others, and the confrontation with our own sexuality.

In the natal chart of a woman the Black Moon represents the innate but unused creativity, her strong qualities, all her shadows which could be: the instinctual power of maternity, the sacrifice ready to be made at a moment for a certain man (from the “virginal sacrifice” to foolishly risking her life for his sake), the power of seduction consciously expressed for subduing at any price the man who has provoked her or who has already become the target of her social, financial or sexual interest. There is no man on this planet able to withstand such an armory or who could oppose something of the same level.

In the natal chart of a man Lilith indicates the woman whom he feels attracted to, often in a distructive manner, for whom he is ready to deny or to abandon his family, to cancel or to go beyond all social conventions, for whom he is ready to risk or to destroy everything, even his own life. Lilith is, in fact, the woman who challenges him, who attracts him sexually, who drives him crazy, because she shows him his own complexes, hopes, overwhelming whishes and irrational fears. Whatever this woman does or makes, he follows her blindly, he believes her, he worships her and he cannot part with her even when he becomes aware of her real human quality and her ephemeral role in his life. Contrary to the “saintly” or “obedient” women, the Lilith-women belong to the category of the street girls, whom men (and society too) need and want but, at the same time, whom they are afraid of, tending to annihilate. Such a dual attitude comes from the Middle Ages when the Lilith-women were the sorceresses, the magicians, the wise beings of the Middle Ages who were castaway, killed or murdered through Satanic procedures by the Inquisitorial Church. They had high spiritual information and were initiated in contraception, midwifery and the energetic medicine. Their powers, intuitions, prophetic perceptions, therapeutical skills, the knowledge of the remedial plants, their capacity of exorcism set all religious people against them. What would human society have looked like if the Inquisition had not existed?

The writer Antonia Langsdorf describes Lilith wonderfully: “…I think that Lilith represents one of the three parts which compose the Trinity of the woman. Beside Eve, the symbol of the wife, and Mary, the symbol of the mother, Lilith reflects everything that man cannot domesticate and that he chooses to repress and to demonize.”

We take the liberty to add: “All what the man cannot accept and he chooses to…” The Inquisitorial Church could not accept the inner power of the woman. The Inquisition remains the moment when man, in his profound ignorance and demonization, triggers off a violent aggression against the Eternal Feminine and, through it, against God in His feminine manifestation in our world. Inquisition remains man’s moment of sterility, of maximum spiritual impotency, which justifies from many points of view the present tragic situation of mankind and human civilization, when one of the social functions of the woman was nearly totally wiped out.

This social function means the deep occult dimension of Lilith, that of The Grand Priestess, a major spiritual role in the archaic traditional societies which later developed the agricultural civilizations and the worship of the Great Goddess which is the Mother Goddess, the Holy Ground. It is the worship of the Almighty Divinity of the fertile land, but at the same time of the dark unknown earth, in which the life force is not a dual but a very complex one: from its depth, the Great Mother Goddess brings out both the richness, permanent fertility, and the annihilation, seclusion and total withdrawal of the Alive.

The occultation and the epiphany are the tasks of the Earth Element, as the expression of the continuous and huge alchemical factory which exists in its unaspected depth. Not the mystery of life and death, but the mystery of life and love, because there is no life where there is no love. The fertility, the increase, the multiplication are the natural consequences of the erotic gesture. The erotic gesture has, in its turn, a cosmic and divine nature, due to whom the opposite, and at the same time, the complementary forces Yin and Yang merge. Their energy generates suddenly both a phenomenon of condensation at the level of Manifestation and an energetic “copy” which keeps the information in the Akasha-ic memory. If these forces do not act together or do not meet each other, or if only one of them is present, something stands still or develops excessively, needing the intervention of an adjustment factor.

In this way, the major function of Lilith in its spiritual lineage is to keep the sacred secret of life-and-perfection giving sexuality. Lilith helps us to understand that the sexual energy is not the fruit of sin, not something to be ashamed of or the fettering pleasure, but the formidable energy able to lead the human being either to perdition or, on the contrary, to divine worlds. If we know this energy in its fundamental meaning and use it positively, this energy will save us from any form of slavery. Everything that happened during the Middle Ages – the chastity belt, the monastic orders which instituted the celibacy – led to the degrading witch hunt, to the abnormal sexual behavior of the human being, to the idea of original sin and of man being “born from sin”. Most of these ideas are the “fruits” of the Inquisition, the black, shameful stain on the Church’s cheek. Since the moment of our conception is a divine secret, our last departure from the physical world (through the so called “death”) is a divine secret, the origin of the human being is a divine one, HOW can we have been “born from sin”?

The erotic fusion itself is divine, as a result, the conception, is sacred. In the traditional civilizations the human couples made love all at the same time, at very carefully chosen cosmic moments, correlated with the fundamental moments of human life on this planet. The agrarian rituals, the important magical ceremonies were manifestations which amplified the phenomena of secret occult resonance between Macrocosmos and the planet Earth.

For example, the erotic fusion of the spiritualized human couples at the moment of the Spring equinox, had a sacred meaning and they were realized with the sexual continence. The power of sublimation as a result of the human erotic action brought on the Earth much more cosmic energies and stimulated the germinating power of the seeds disseminated in Autumn and prepared during the Winter for the whole vegetal cycle. During such sacred and magical rituals of fertilization and worshipping the planet and and its creatures, a few couples with a very elevated spiritual frequency were designated to procreate. It was they who were prepared to bring into Manifestation spiritual entities with a major impact upon the people’s evolution.

The spiritual decay of mankind led, inevitably, to the decay of the human being and of civilisation, to the desacralisation of life, to the loss of the magical significance of the existence and to the complete vitiation of the spiritual component of the sexuality. Man was corrupted through power, possessiveness, attachment to life’s pleasures and immorality. The Inquisition amplified all these bad attitudes and its acts justify the name of “The Dark Middle Ages” given to its period. The monopoly upon the spiritual knowledge and the hiding of it from the society, the creating of the spiritual travesties, the splitting of the Christian Church (1045 – the Great Schism), the religious disrupting of the world, the spiritual wars and the encouraging of the dogmas have brought mankind to what it is today – an ignorant mass continuously poisoned, assassinated, starved, very easily manipulated through mass-media, attacked by severe illnesses and exposed to the satanic horrors such as eugenics and birth control.

Lilith tends to manifest herself strongly exactly in such difficult moments of our existence on the cutting edge. Part of God Himself like Adam, Lilith is the uncurbed, irrepressible, unhidden force that keeps the secret of life and death. The more we want to avoid, to deny or to repress it, the more terrible she becomes. She is the demon inside us, not because this demon lives there, but because our alchemic powers are wrongly used or misused. IT IS US WHO MAKE LILITH A DEMON. We do not like to accept her, we do not like to look straight into her eyes, we do not accept her whenever she manifests herself and look for different strange origins.

Lilith represents our inner resonance, WHAT WE HAVE CHOSEN TO BE: IGNORANT BEINGS OR INITIATED BEINGS. Whatever we choose, we will be, with the same force. Whenever and wherever Lilith appears and manifests herself in our life, we could experience a moment of Divine Grace through which God supports an act of total and profound self-knowing. In such a way God opens His Heavens for us to accede to a very special initiation: the total erotic awakening. God brings to light our hidden and dark parts where the stagnating erotic energy already has a very low vibrating frequency (attachment, possessiveness, frustration, denial, demoniac possessiveness, etc) and it attracts through the same resonance the major difficulties of life.

Under such circumstances Lilith is called upon. We can never know our real face without her. Without her, we can never bring forth forces ready to lead us in a very wrong direction or our huge latent energies which generate nightmares, depressions, panic attacks, narrow-mindedness, all sorts of fanaticism, absurdity. Only after Lilith’s challenge, only after we express ourselves through Lilith we become aware of our unknown parts and accede to the second stage of the self-knowing process: the stage of accepting or of denying that we could be in that way too.

The refusal will throw us back into the ignorance which Lilith has just taken us out of; and we will confront her again, exactly in the same manner. On the contrary, the acceptance will promote us to the next level, where we can become aware of all our energetic focuses. We begin to use them in a superior manner in order to transcend the inferior tendencies which Lilith has just saved us from. From this level on the great initiations appear. What an initiated person applies becomes a huge force as secret occult resonance with the divine attribute of God’s Omnipotence.

About Author: Teacher, TV journalist and astrologer. From July 2009, member of ISAR (International Society of Astrological Research). She published 6 astrological books, wrote numberless astrological articles and took part as an astrologer in TV talk-shows. She discovered astrology when she was only 10 years old. Her life became the aspiration of learning and practicing astrology for understanding human life and helping people to understand the Dharma. She put her life in the unconditional service of astrology. She believes that astrology is a divine science and a true path of spiritual evolution which could help in attaining Moksha. She is a yoga student since 1998. Yoga enabled her to discover Jyotish. Today she is the student of Dirah International Academy of Vedic Astrology and prepares herself to learn and to study deeply this spiritual and scientific tradition of mankind, which could show solutions for the harmony between human beings and Universe.

A Conjunction Which Makes us Reflect – Part 1 by Rodica Purniche