Lilith: from medieval demonology to feminist archetype

The figure of Lilith enters the documentary record in the Alphabet of Ben Sira, an anonymous text of the eighth to tenth century, in which she is identified as Adam's first wife. Created from the same clay as Adam and equal to him, she refuses the position of sexual submission he demands, invokes the divine name, and flies from Eden to the wilderness. In the demonological literature that developed from this base — the medieval Kabbalistic Zohar, the amuletic-and-incantation literature that survived into the early modern period — Lilith becomes a queen of demons, killer of infants, seducer of men: the general feminine figure of adversary refusal.

The 1972 feminist reclamation of Lilith is unusually well documented. Judith Plaskow, then a doctoral student at Yale, composed the midrash "The Coming of Lilith" for a religious conference in 1972; the text was later published in Rita Gross and Rosemary Radford Ruether's Womanspirit Rising (Harper & Row, 1979) and became the canonical piece of feminist theology on the Lilith archetype. Plaskow's midrash imagines Lilith and Eve meeting, recognising each other, and together deciding to rebuild the world outside patriarchal terms.

Lilly Rivlin's essay "Lilith" was published in the December 1972 issue of Ms. magazine — the same year as Plaskow's midrash — and carried the same thesis to the mass women's-movement audience: Lilith was the first woman, the one who refused, the archetype to reclaim. Lilith magazine was founded in 1976 by Susan Weidman Schneider. Its choice of name was explicit and public: the medieval demonological figure of a woman who refused subordination was adopted as the archetype of women's liberation, and the magazine has framed the reclamation in those terms consistently since.

Barbara Black Koltuv's The Book of Lilith (Nicolas-Hays, 1986) took the reclamation into Jungian archetypal psychology and extended it further into the Goddess-movement and feminist-spiritual literature of the late 1980s and 1990s.

In parallel with the 1970s feminist reclamation, Lilith was invoked in the Dianic and broader neopagan Goddess-movement literature. Z. Budapest's ritual writing includes Lilith invocations from the Coven's earliest years. The Church of Satan under Anton LaVey adopted Lilith into its ritual literature; the Temple of Set treats her within its broader demonological and Egyptian corpus; and the Satanic Temple, since 2013, has referenced Lilith in some of its public materials on female autonomy, addressed in the next sub-page.

The same demon-figure of a woman who refuses subordination has thus been publicly claimed, in the same fifty-year window, by 1970s feminist theologians, 1970s neopagan Goddess-movement writers, the 1966-founding-onward Church of Satan, and the current Satanic Temple. The primary-source record of the reclamation, on each of these four independent tracks, is contemporaneous, in print, and unambiguous.