If you ask ten people who have heard of Lilith what happened to her, nine will tell you that she was thrown out of Eden. She refused to obey, and so she was banished. It is a tidy story, and it has the shape we expect: a rule, a transgression, a punishment.
It is also not what the text says. I have been reading the Ben Sira passage for fifteen years, and I still find the actual sequence startling. Adam tells her to lie beneath him. She answers that they are equal. They quarrel, and neither gives way. Then the text says that when Lilith saw how things stood, she pronounced the Ineffable Name and flew away into the air.
No one sends her. No sentence is passed. God is not even present in the scene until Adam goes to complain. She looks at the situation, concludes that it will not change, and removes herself from it using something she already knows.
Why we misremember it
I think we change the story because expulsion is easier to bear than departure. If she was cast out, then she is a victim, and victims are simple to sympathize with. If she left, she is responsible for what followed, including the parts that are hard to admire. She chose the wilderness. She chose it again when the angels offered her a way back.
The expulsion version is also more comfortable for whoever is doing the telling. A Lilith who is thrown out confirms that the garden has the power to throw people out. A Lilith who walks out raises a more troubling possibility, which is that anyone might.
To be cast out is something that is done to you. To leave is something you do. An archetype of sovereignty cannot be built on the first.
What leaving requires
When I first gathered the reading circle that became this House, I had recently left a religious community I had belonged to since childhood. For a long time I told the story as an expulsion. They had made it impossible for me to stay, I said, and that was true as far as it went. It took me some years to say the other true thing, which was that I had decided to go, on a particular afternoon, for reasons I could name.
The two accounts felt completely different to carry. The first left me waiting for an apology that was never going to come. The second gave me nothing to wait for. It was heavier at first, and then much lighter.
The text is exact about what leaving takes. It takes a clear statement of one's position: we are equal. It takes the recognition that the other party will not move. And it takes a resource of one's own, which in the story is the Name. She does not leave on borrowed strength, and she does not leave in order to be followed.
The second refusal
People tend to stop reading at the flight, but the scene at the sea matters as much. Three angels overtake her and demand that she return. They threaten her. She still declines, and she bargains: she accepts a terrible price and makes one promise, to spare the children who are protected by the angels' names.
I do not find this part of the story comfortable, and I distrust readings that make it so. What I take from it is that the first refusal is the easy one. It is made in anger, with the wind under you. The second is made later, in cold blood, when the cost has been spelled out and someone is offering you the way home. That is the one that tells you whether you left or merely stormed out.
For practice
The House's first article says that no one is admitted and no one is expelled. We wrote it that way with this passage open on the table. An institution that reserves the power to cast people out has already told its members where they lie.
If you keep a night journal, try this at the next dark moon. Take one thing in your life that you describe as having been done to you, an ending or an exclusion, and write the account again as something you did. Not because the first account is false. Because the second may also be true, and only one of them can be carried out of the garden.