Nikki Marmery explores the ancient stories that made her ask: where is the mother in the creation myth? This question inspired her to write Lilith, an allegory of the demise of female divinity and equality in prehistory – in other words, the Fall of Woman.
The legend of Lilith, Adam’s first wife in the Garden of Eden, dates from an early medieval satirical Hebrew text, The Alphabet of Ben Sira, which explains that Adam and Lilith – unlike Adam and Eve – were created equal.
But when Adam decided his wife should lie beneath him, she refused. Uttering the ineffable name of God, Lilith sprouted wings and flew away to embark on a new career as a demoness who preyed upon pregnant women and children and seduced unsuspecting men in their sleep.
Genesis takes up the story from here – and we all know what happens next. God creates a second, more submissive wife for Adam. But she, too, transgresses! When Eve, tempted by a snake, commits the heinous sin of reaching for wisdom, she – and all her daughters to come – are cursed by God to give birth in agony.
To compound her misery and punish her for leading her husband astray, God re-asserts Man’s dominion over her: He shall rule over you! He thunders.
Notably, God also gives Man control over the natural world. Adam is tasked with naming the animals, to signify his power over them. The final being he names is Woman.
These two intertwining myths are the inspiration for my new novel, Lilith. Like many before me, I felt drawn to retell an ancient androcentric tale from a woman’s point of view – and none, in my opinion, is more in need of the female gaze than this one.
For there is no myth that has wielded more malign power over real women’s lives than the biblical account of creation. “Do you not know that you [women] are [each] an Eve?” Tertullian wrote in the second century AD. “You are the devil’s gateway. You are she who persuaded him whom the devil did not dare attack.”
The message it gives is the ultimate misogynist’s fantasy: that women are untrustworthy, gullible, duplicitous, unfit to lead – and above all, inferior. The god it describes is explicitly male and prioritises male interests. He punishes women in a peculiarly sex-specific way, which – by pure coincidence! – works entirely to men’s advantage in the real world: women are now condemned to bring forth his offspring in great agony, with no power to refuse.
The entire Western world was built in the pattern of this myth, which asserts Woman, and all of nature, is Man’s to subdue and control.
So how might a woman retell this story?
She might well start with the elephant in the room. Address the absurd, glaring omission, and ask: Why is there a Father, but no Mother?
For all rests on Her absence. Had Lilith and Eve a divine Mother to assert their rights, just as the Father asserted Adam’s, would they have been punished for their terrible crimes – of claiming equality; of seeking wisdom? Would women in those parts of the world that interpreted the Bible as holy law have paid the price for Eve’s ‘sin’ with their subjugation for the next 2,500 years?
“I permit no woman to teach or to have authority over a man,” writes Paul the Apostle in 1 Timothy. “She is to keep silent. For Adam was formed first, then Eve, and Adam was not deceived, but the woman was deceived and became a transgressor.” Would patriarchal power have proved as successful, as enduring, had men not claimed heavenly sanction for their rule, and the image of their authority modelled by their sole, male god?
A female mythographer might go on to point out there once was a Mother in this story. In fact, She’s still there, if you know where to look. The Fruit and the Tree in the Garden of Eden are Her symbols, representing Her fertility and regenerative powers. Wisdom is her sphere. The Serpent, associated with female foresight across the region – Her intermediary.
For thousands of years, this Mother reigned supreme across Western Asia, and the Eastern Mediterranean, known by different names in different places. She was the Queen of Heaven, Mistress of the Animals, Lady of the Sea: a goddess incarnate in and protectress of the natural world.
In late Bronze and early Iron Age Israel, She was Asherah, worshipped alongside Yahweh in King Solomon’s Jerusalem, but erased from the Israelites’ religion as it became increasingly monolatrous over the course of the first millennium BCE.
This is the story of how this novel came to be. It started with a question: Where is the Mother? – and ended as a 6,000-year ride through history to explore the consequences of Her loss.
It is an allegory of the demise of female divinity and equality in prehistory – the Fall, not of Man, but of Woman. It is about the repeated and continuous efforts ever since to erase and diminish female authority and power, and the ways in which biblical myth has serviced that aim.
In my book, the wisdom that God outlaws when he forbids eating from the Tree of Knowledge is the Mother’s wisdom, rooted in the natural world. She cannot protect Her daughters because She has been banished, leaving the Father to rule alone.
Lilith – the first woman, the equal woman – is my heroine. For me, she is no demoness, the succubus of patriarchal myth, seducing men in their sleep, and devouring infants.
She represents woman as she was before the advent of patriarchy: equal, powerful, divine. The real sin at the heart of Genesis is not the hubris of humankind’s quest for knowledge (for what is wrong with that?!) but the theft from women of their goddess, and the loss of their equality.
My Lilith – immortal, exiled, outraged! – would overturn this great injustice. She would have her revenge on the unloving Father who ousted her, who usurped her Mother.
This novel is not so much a retelling as a new creation myth, an alternative fable which calls for a new world order. An order that looks very much like what came before the rise to pre-eminence of a sole male god, who sanctions and enforces the hierarchies of male over female, and mankind over nature.
My Lilith has journeyed from the dawn of time with an urgent message from a forgotten female deity: that balance is better than hierarchy; partnership is better than domination; and that our place is as part of the natural world, not in dominion over it.
As the stakes for humankind rise every higher in the face of unending wars for possession of land, and impending environmental collapse, perhaps our only hope of survival is to return to what we once all knew.
Lilith by Nikki Marmery was published on 9 October, 2023.
See more about her book.
She’s also the author of On Wilder Seas, and has written two features about the background to this novel: Maria: the African woman who sailed with Drake on the Golden Hind and Reassessing Francis Drake: what research for my novel revealed about his role in the slave trade.
Nikki is one of four panellists at the next Historia Live author event, held on Friday, 19 January, 2024. Nikki, Elodie Harper, Jennifer Saint and Costanza Casati are talking about myth, legend and female rage in conversation with Elizabeth Fremantle.
Lilith also appears in James Burge‘s review of Feminine power: the divine to the demonic.
If you’re interested in ancient myths, you may enjoy these Historia features:
Motives of a Bronze Age murderess by Susan C Wilson
Jason, the Argonauts – and a Woman? and
Amazon Warrior Women: The Truth Behind the Myth, both by Emily Hauser
The Trojan Wars: Men or Myths? and
The triumph of Greek myths and the destruction of a civilisation, both by Hilary Green
Unboxing Pandora’s myth – in Georgian London by Susan Stokes-Chapman
Brávellir: the greatest battle… that never was by Angus Donald
The history of werewolves by Theodore Brun
History, historicity, historiography and Arthurian legend by Nicola Griffith
Who was King Arthur? And did he exist? by Fil Reid
Images:
- The Downfall of Adam and Eve and their Expulsion from the Garden of Eden by Michelangelo, Sistine Chapel: Sebastian Bergmann for Wikimedia (CC BY-SA 2.0)
- The Rebuke of Adam and Eve by Domenichino, 1626: National Gallery of Art, Washington (public domain)
- The Expulsion from the Garden of Eden by Masaccio, 1426–28 (detail), Santa Maria del Carmine: Wikimedia (public domain)
- Judean pillar figurine, sometimes identified as Asherah: The Reuben and Edith Hecht Museum, Israel, via Hanay for Wikimedia (CC BY-SA 3.0)
- Lady Lilith by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, 1866: Delaware Art Museum via Wikimedia (public domain)
