From Lilitu to Lilith: Origins and Sources

This is the longest page in the library, because it is the one everything else depends on. It follows the name from its first appearance to the present and marks, at each step, what is well attested, what is disputed, and what is modern. Where scholars disagree we say so. Where a popular claim has no support we say that too.

1. Before Lilith: the wind spirits of Mesopotamia

The oldest layer is not a person at all. In Akkadian incantation texts from the second and first millennia BCE there is a family of spirits whose names share one root: the lilu (male), the lilitu (female), and the ardat lili, often translated "maiden of the wind." The root goes back to the Sumerian word lil, which means wind, air, or breath, and by extension a ghost or phantom.

These beings are described as restless and unfulfilled. The ardat lili in particular is pictured as a young woman who died without marrying or bearing children and who haunts the living out of that lack. They slip into houses through windows, trouble sleepers, and are blamed for illness. Rituals exist to send them away. No ritual exists to worship them.

2. Two disputed witnesses

Two famous pieces of evidence are regularly offered as early portraits of Lilith. Both are doubtful, and a serious student should know why.

The spirit in the tree

A Sumerian poem about Gilgamesh tells how the goddess Inanna plants a tree, hoping to make a throne and a bed from its wood. Three squatters move in: a serpent at the roots, a great bird in the branches, and in the trunk a being called ki-sikil-lil-la-ke. An influential translation from the 1930s rendered this name as "Lilith," and the passage has been quoted that way ever since. Many specialists now consider the identification uncertain. The phrase may mean something like "the maiden of the phantom wind," which places her among the lilu spirits, but it does not make her the Lilith of later tradition.

The winged woman on the relief

An Old Babylonian terracotta plaque, made around 1800 BCE, shows a nude winged woman with the feet of a bird of prey, standing on two lions and flanked by owls. It was identified as Lilith shortly after it surfaced in the 1930s, and the image is now reproduced wherever her name appears. Most scholars today reject that reading. The figure wears the horned crown and holds the rod-and-ring emblems reserved for deities, which points to a goddess such as Ishtar or her sister Ereshkigal, not to a demon that households tried to expel.

The House uses owl and wing imagery as modern symbols and says so. We do not present the relief as her portrait. See Symbols of Lilith.

3. One verse in the Hebrew Bible

Lilith is named exactly once in the Hebrew Bible. Isaiah 34 describes the land of Edom laid waste and given over to wild things. Verse 14 lists the creatures that will settle in the ruins, and among them is lilit, who "shall rest there, and find for herself a place of rest."

Translators have never agreed on what to do with the word. Older English Bibles give "screech owl." Others give "night creature," "night hag," or simply "Lilith." The verse tells no story about her. It does establish two things that never leave her afterward: her home is the wilderness, outside the ordered world, and she is found where human rule has ended.

4. Scrolls, sages, and the household

By the last centuries BCE the name is established in Jewish demonology. A hymn collection among the Dead Sea Scrolls, known as the Songs of the Sage, has a teacher declare the glory of God in order to frighten away a list of harmful spirits, and Lilith is on the list.

The Babylonian Talmud, compiled over the following centuries, mentions her only a handful of times, but the details became permanent parts of her image. She has long hair. She has wings. She is a danger to anyone who sleeps alone in a house. These are passing remarks, not a narrative, and they treat her as a known fact of the world in the way one might mention a disease.

5. Bowls and amulets

The richest evidence for what ordinary people believed comes from the ground. In Mesopotamia between roughly the fifth and eighth centuries CE, households of several faiths buried pottery bowls, usually upside down, beneath their floors and thresholds. Spiraling around the inside of each bowl is an incantation in Aramaic meant to trap or expel hostile spirits. Lilith, often in the plural as "the liliths," is among the spirits most frequently named.

Some of these texts use the language of law. They serve Lilith with a writ of divorce, the same instrument that ends a human marriage, formally dismissing her from the house and from the bed of the people who live there. The image is worth holding onto: here she is the unwanted spouse, the one who must be legally sent away.

Later amulets for childbirth, in use across many Jewish communities into the modern period, call on three angels to guard mother and infant against her. We will meet those angels in the next section.

6. The first wife: the Alphabet of Ben Sira

The story that made Lilith famous appears in an anonymous Hebrew and Aramaic work called the Alphabet of Ben Sira, written somewhere between the eighth and tenth centuries CE. The book is irreverent, and many scholars read parts of it as satire. In one episode the hero is asked to heal a king's infant son, writes an amulet with three angelic names on it, and explains where the custom comes from.

His explanation runs as follows. When God made Adam, he also made a woman from the earth, as Adam had been made, and called her Lilith. The two quarreled at once. Adam insisted that she lie beneath him. She refused, saying that they were equal, since both had been made from the earth. When neither would give way, Lilith pronounced the Ineffable Name of God and flew off into the air.

Adam complained, and three angels were sent after her: Senoy, Sansenoy, and Semangelof. They found her at the sea and demanded that she return. She would not. She told them her nature was to bring sickness to infants, and a bargain was struck. She accepted that a hundred of her own offspring would die each day, and she swore that wherever she saw the names or images of the three angels on an amulet, she would do the child no harm.

The tale almost certainly gathers up older motifs. Amulets bearing the three angels' names are older than the text. But as a connected narrative with a speaking, reasoning Lilith, this is where the archetype begins.

7. The mystics: Lilith and the Other Side

In thirteenth-century Castile, Jewish mystics gave Lilith a place in the structure of the cosmos. A treatise on the "left emanation" pairs her with the angel Samael as rulers of a realm of impurity that mirrors the holy one, so that the divine couple above has a dark reflection below. The Zohar, the central work of medieval Kabbalah, develops her at length as seductress, strangler of children, and feminine face of the sitra achra, the "Other Side."

From this literature comes the vocabulary that later Western occultists borrowed: the qliphoth, the "shells" or "husks" that are left when divine light is withdrawn. In several occult arrangements of the shells, Lilith is the name of the lowest one, the shadow of the material world itself. That placement is the direct ancestor of her role in modern left-hand path practice.

8. The Romantic turn

For most of this history Lilith was scarcely known outside Jewish communities and the Christian scholars who studied them. That changed in the nineteenth century. In 1808 Goethe placed her in the Walpurgis Night scene of Faust, where she is pointed out as Adam's first wife and the hero is warned about her beautiful and dangerous hair. In the 1860s Dante Gabriel Rossetti painted her as a languid modern beauty combing that hair before a mirror, and wrote a sonnet to accompany the picture.

Of Adam's first wife, Lilith, it is told
(The witch he loved before the gift of Eve,)
That, ere the snake's, her sweet tongue could deceive,
And her enchanted hair was the first gold.

Dante Gabriel Rossetti, "Body's Beauty"

This Lilith is no longer a threat to infants. She is a threat to men, and a fascination to them. The change matters, because much of what is now called her "dark feminine" character was invented here, by male artists, as a fantasy about dangerous women. The House reads this layer with interest and with suspicion. See The Hair and the Mirror.

9. The twentieth century: shadow, moon, and midrash

Three developments in the last century produced the Lilith that seekers meet today.

• Depth psychology. Carl Jung's account of the shadow, the part of the personality that the conscious self refuses to own, gave readers a new way to understand a figure who had always personified what a community pushed outside its walls. Later writers in that tradition treated Lilith as an image of instinct and autonomy split off from the acceptable feminine.
• Astrology. Twentieth-century astrologers attached her name to the lunar apogee, the point in the Moon's orbit farthest from the Earth, and called it the Black Moon. In a birth chart it is read as the place of what a person will not compromise.
• Feminist retelling. In the early 1970s Jewish feminist writers returned to the Ben Sira story on purpose. One well-known retelling from 1972 ends with Lilith and Eve meeting at the garden wall, comparing what each has been told about the other, and becoming allies. From then on Lilith was available as a symbol of equality claimed.

Modern witchcraft and left-hand path currents drew on all three, added the qliphothic vocabulary of the mystics, and arrived at the figure many now call a dark goddess. The internet did the rest, usually by stripping away the dates.

10. What the House concludes

We draw four conclusions from the record, and the rest of this library is built on them.

1. The archetype is modern and its materials are ancient. Both halves of that sentence are true, and dropping either one produces nonsense.
2. The sources have owners. They belong first to the traditions that produced and still study them. We are guests in that material, and we behave like guests.
3. The fear was not foolish. A practice that sneers at the amulet-makers has understood nothing about what she meant.
4. The reclamation is legitimate when it is honest. People are entitled to find meaning in an old story. They are not entitled to invent an old history to justify it.

For the same material in compressed form, see the timeline. For the texts themselves, see the annotated source list.