Her Name was Lilith

Her name was Lilith, and early Jewish folklore tells us that she was the first wife of Adam. This weaving together of folklore, legend and scripture became a way to explain the curious fact that in just the first two chapters of the Book of Genesis there are two separate versions of the creation of the first man and woman. Chapter Two relates the familiar version of Eve being formed from one of Adam’s ribs, but in Chapter One we are told that the man and the woman were created at the same time, and therefore independently of each other. This first couple remain unnamed, which is where folklore steps in and names the woman as Lilith.

Unlike Eve, who is something of a ‘second-generation’ product, from the very moment of her creation Lilith is an independent being, with equally independent thoughts and aspirations. As such she is clearly Adam’s equal, so it is unsurprising that when Adam expects his new partner to have a subservient role then Lilith is having none of it! She protests mightily both to Adam and to God himself that she is better than that, better than someone who must keep a respectful distance and walk behind her ‘master’, better than a mere servant who apparently is intended to keep Eden nicely cleaned and dusted while Adam lords it over her and busies himself with more important tasks like inventing names for all the animals.

We might imagine that both God and Adam were rather taken aback by this unexpected show of rebellion (as they saw it) on the part of the woman, and two bruised male egos must therefore have watched in dismay as Lilith stormed off into the night to begin her own independent existence. So unlike Eve who would come after her, Lilith was not expelled from Paradise, but kept the power to herself and left of her own accord. And so a new partner for Adam was created, this time out of Adam’s own flesh, and both God and Adam would make very sure that the second time around the woman would indeed be subservient to the man.

This is where the original folklore ends. So what happened to Lilith after she left Eden? What happened is that new folklore emerged, new tales were shaped, and a new Lilith was created out of them. But this was no longer the Lilith who was the strong and resourceful female. Lilith’s terrible (and as it turns out, bitterly unjust) punishment for doing nothing more than assert her equal gender rights was to be transformed by subsequent folklore from a strong, empowered and independent woman into a predatory and dangerous creature of the darkness, and there to be – quite literally –  demonized.

We now picture Lilith as a dangerous and predatory demon of the night, and, quite literally, give her horns and even fangs to the extent that she resembles a sort of female version of Satan. But this Lilith is essentially a male fantasy, an invention which almost seems deliberately calculated to put the upstart Lilith in her place once and for all. Such a pity, because it is clear that the original version of who Lilith actually was and what she really was like is a Lilith who is needed now more than ever. Perhaps this is the task of our own age: to redeem Lilith, to restore her in all her original empowered femininity, so that a measure of balance also might be restored to our own troubled times.

The Two Gardens

In chapter twenty of John’s gospel we learn that Mary Magdalene, having encountered two angels in the empty sepulchre where Jesus had lain, turns around and sees a figure whom she presumes to be the gardener. From these brief details of scripture we can picture the entire setting: We are told that Mary does not actually enter the sepulchre but merely looks through the entranceway from which the great stone has now been rolled aside. And we also are told that the figure is a gardener: the sepulchre must be set in its own garden, which is what we would expect of a tomb owned by someone as wealthy as Joseph of Arimathea.

The ‘gardener’, as Mary realizes, is the risen Jesus. “Touch me not” Jesus cautions her, for he is in a state between realms, halfway between the physical world and the realm of the spirit. These few brief verses give us no indication as to Mary’s emotions. We are merely told in that moment of recognition that she addresses Jesus as ‘Rabboni’ or Master. But we readily can imagine how Mary must have been overwhelmed with astonished joy!

So here is Mary, poised at the entrance of the tomb, poised between the world of material life and the world of the spirit, and here is Jesus, also poised between those two same realms. They are both in a state of awakening. Through her life’s contact with her spiritual master, this is Mary’s moment: the essential transition between the teachings of the way of the spirit and the actuality of the spirit’s presence and the conquest of death itself. And this also is Jesus’ moment: his farewell appearance both to Mary and a little later to his disciples in his material form before he becomes Spirit forever.

But why would Jesus choose the form of a gardener? Great happenings tend to move in great cycles, and this is visualised by the image of the Ouroboros – the serpent holding its own tail in its mouth. So let us follow that image back to another serpent – or perhaps it is merely the same serpent in another guise.

We are in Eden. Adam the gardener tends his garden: we even refer to this place as the Garden of Eden. And at the centre of this garden is the Tree of the knowledge of Good and Evil, which we know is really the tree of mortality, of the death of the physical body, should its fruit be eaten. Adam and Eve inevitably eat of the fruit and so lose their immortality, and must incarnate into the material world, with death waiting at the end in the hard world beyond the garden’s walls. But the second gardener in the book of John is the mirror of these events in the book of Genesis. Adam the gardener of Eden was in transition from the spiritual to the physical. Jesus the ‘Gardener’ is in transition from the physical to the spiritual.

What now lies before Mary is a task in the world, of living out the ultimate lesson of the spirit which she now has witnessed and learned in that far-off garden by the sepulchre. Her master awaits an even more profound awakening in the realm of the spirit, but for Mary it is the message of the joy of life that conquers death which lies on her lips now.

Stained Glass of Jesus and the Magdalene designed by Edward Burne-Jones