One of the keepers recently showed the rest of us a diagram she had found online. It showed a wheel with Lilith at the hub and a dozen names along the spokes: Hecate, Kali, Ishtar, Ereshkigal, Persephone, and several more. The caption said that these were all faces of one being, the Dark Goddess, known by different names in different lands.
I understand why the picture appeals. It promises that a seeker who has found one of these figures has found them all, and that behind the confusion of the world's mythologies stands a single presence who has been waiting to be recognized. I would like to explain why the House does not accept it.
What gets lost
Take two names from the wheel. Hecate, in the oldest Greek sources, is among other things a guardian of the young and a nurse of children. Lilith, in the sources that preserve her, is the particular enemy of newborns. Whatever else may be said about these two, they stand on opposite sides of the cradle. A scheme that calls them the same goddess has to discard the best-attested fact about each.
The same holds along every spoke. Kali belongs to a living religion with hundreds of millions of adherents, a vast literature, and temples where she is worshipped today. Ishtar had cities, priesthoods, and royal hymns. Lilith had none of these things. She was never the object of a cult. To place her on a wheel of goddesses misdescribes her, and it misdescribes them.
What the wheel offers in place of all this detail is a mood: nocturnal, powerful, female, somewhat dangerous. A mood is not a mythology.
Who pays for the merger
My objection is not only that the flattened goddess is inaccurate. It is that the flattening is paid for by other people.
Each of these figures has a home. When they are peeled away from the cultures that shaped them and pasted onto a single wheel, the people of those cultures are told, in effect, that they have misunderstood their own traditions and that an outsider with a diagram has seen the truth. This is said to devotees of living goddesses. It is said to the community whose scriptures and folklore are the only reason anyone remembers Lilith's name.
Our Charter's fourth article commits us to naming our debts. One cannot name a debt while insisting that the creditor never really owned the thing.
A figure who can be anyone is no one. The first thing an archetype needs is edges.
In defense of edges
There is a further cost, and it falls on the seeker. An archetype does its work by being specific. Lilith is useful in shadow-work because she carries certain things and not others: refusal, departure, exile, the unwanted child, the unruled woman. Someone who sits with her meets those themes.
Blend her with a goddess of the crossroads, a goddess of time and death, and a goddess of love and war, and the result is a figure who stands for everything a person finds impressive. She will reflect back whatever is brought to her. That is pleasant, and it is the opposite of a mirror.
It is also, I notice, a way of avoiding her. The details of Lilith's legend that are hardest to bear are the ones that vanish first in the merger. The flattened goddess has no dead infants in her story. She has only power.
What we do instead
The House works with one figure and tries to know her well. When another tradition's goddess seems to resemble her, we take that as a reason to learn about the other tradition on its own terms, from its own people, and not as proof of identity. Resemblance between two things is interesting exactly because they are two.
None of this is a rule for anyone else. Readers who honor several powers are free to do so, and many do it with great care. All I ask is that each be allowed her own face, her own country, and her own story. Lilith, of all figures, should not be told who she is by someone else.
For the evidence about what Lilith was and was not, see Origins and Sources and Ten Common Misconceptions.