Lilith Adam’s first wife, cast out for…

Lilith

Adam’s first wife, cast out for being rebellious and independent.
Lilith, mother of demons, beautiful in flesh and light; Lilith, the witch, dignity, the lover, the black moon.
The Quay is her place, not her prison: Lilith comes and goes as she pleases, yet she lies at the heart of so many of our choices.
In her original conception, the image of Lilith represents an aspect of the Great Goddess. Protector of women in labour and newborns, she embodied the divine essence of life and the beginning of all life.
Ousted by patriarchal deities and the powerful archetypes of monotheistic religions, Lilith moves elsewhere.
She goes to dwell with demons, vampires and the spirits of the night.
Her name derives from the Hebrew root ‘lil’, meaning darkness or twilight, or, according to other theories, from the Assyrian-Babylonian word ‘Lilitu’, a Mesopotamian deity associated with air and storms.
Lil-itu, spirit of the wind, demon of the storm…
Lilith is cast out of the Garden of Eden because she rebels against the divine will, against the condition of a woman in the service of man: she chooses independence even at the cost of immense suffering and, as a free woman, prefers the company of demons rather than the idyll of paradise as a slave woman.
From there, it is but a short step to becoming a witch, the embodiment of female sins to be burnt at the stake… for in the stories favoured by those in power, anyone who rebels always becomes the villain.
An archetype of the dark feminine, Lilith is, in modern astrology, the name given to the Black Moon, which represents the repressed (and therefore dark and hidden) part of every woman: that intuitive, seductive and wild part, brimming with energy, unpredictable and beyond the control of men.

I am the first and the last.
I am the honoured and the hated.
I am the whore and the saint.
I am knowledge and ignorance.
I am strength, and I am fear…
I am the silence that is incomprehensible
(Nag Hammadi Codices, VI.2)

She is the Goddess of contrasts, the mother-lover and the woman-man. She is the night because she is the day, the right side because she is the left, the South because she is the North.
She is the spirit of the wind, beauty and madness.