Transcripts:
There was a woman before Eve. The Bible doesn't tell you this, or rather, it tells you and then immediately erases it, [music] leaving only a trace. A single strange verse that doesn't quite make sense if you're paying attention. Genesis 1 says, "God created male and female in his own image. Created them simultaneously, equal.
" But then Genesis chapter 2 tells a completely different story where Adam is created first alone [music] and Eve is made from his rib as an afterthought, a helper, inherently secondary and derivative. Two creation stories that contradict each other. And buried in that contradiction is a name that was systematically removed from [music] scripture.
A figure so threatening to patriarchal religion that her very existence had to be denied. Lilith, Adam's first wife, created equal to him, who refused to submit, who claimed her own power, who left the garden of her own choice and became, in later tradition, the demon queen, the night monster, the killer of children. But Carl Young saw something else in Lilith, something that religious authorities had been desperate to suppress.
She wasn't the enemy of humanity. She was the representation of feminine power that wouldn't be controlled. consciousness that wouldn't submit to the demiurgees order, the part of the divine that the false creator god feared most and therefore had to demonize and erase. I need you to understand how complete this eraser was. Lilith appears in the earliest Jewish mystical texts in the alphabet of bins from around the 8th century.
But her story is clearly much older. Fragments of her name and nature appearing in Sumerian and Babylonian texts thousands of years before the Bible was written. She was a goddess, a powerful [music] feminine figure associated with wind, night, sexuality, and autonomous will. And in the original versions of the Atom story, before the editors got to work, she was his equal partner, created from the same earth at the same time, neither one subordinate to the other.
But she wouldn't lie beneath him. That's what the texts say. Crude and direct. When Adam insisted on the dominant position during sex, Lilith refused, "Why should I lie beneath you?" she asked. "When I was made from the [music] same earth, when we are equals." And when Adam tried to force her, when he called on God to make her submit, Lilith spoke the secret name of God, the true name that grants power over reality itself, and she flew away.
She left the garden, left Adam, chose freedom in the wilderness over submission in paradise. And that's when the eraser began. The story couldn't be allowed to stand because it contained too much dangerous truth. It showed a woman claiming equality, refusing male dominance, choosing her own path even if it meant losing security and comfort.
It showed that the garden, paradise itself, was actually a prison if it required submission and eraser of authentic will. It showed that there was knowledge, power, ways of being that existed outside the demiurge's authorized order. So, Lilith was removed from the official narrative, reduced to a single cryptic reference in Isaiah, where she's mistransated as night creature or screech owl, and replaced with Eve, the compliant woman made from Adam's rib, created from him and for him, whose entire purpose was to be his helper.
Jung encountered Lilith in his study of Gnostic and alchemical texts, and he recognized immediately what she represented. The suppressed feminine, yes, but more than that, the aspect of consciousness that refuses to be controlled, that values freedom over security, that won't submit even to divine authority if that authority demands submission.
In psychological terms, she represented what Jung called the anima in her autonomous powerful form. Not the passive, receptive feminine that patriarchal consciousness can tolerate, but the active, creative, dangerous feminine that must be demonized because it threatens male ego's need for control. But Jung went further in his private discussions.
He suggested that Lilith represented knowledge of the demiurge's true nature. Understanding that the creator god wasn't the supreme divine but a limited controlling entity whose paradise was actually a cage. She saw through the illusion and chose exile over comfortable imprisonment. This is exactly what the gnostic texts [music] describe.
The refusal to worship the false god. The choice to seek the true divine source even if it means suffering in the material realm. Think about what happened after Lilith left. God creates Eve, but this time he's learned his lesson. He doesn't create her equal and separate. [music] He makes her from Adam's body, ensuring that she's derivative, secondary, literally a part of him rather than her own being.
And then, just to make sure, he creates her while Adam sleeps, unconscious. So there's no possibility of dialogue or negotiation. Eve wakes into existence already defined by her subordinate role, alreadystructured to serve rather than to be autonomous. But even this wasn't enough to suppress what Lilith represented. Because the serpent appears in the garden, the wise serpent who offers knowledge, who promises that eating the forbidden fruit will make humans like gods.
And according to some traditions, Lilith didn't just leave the garden. She became the serpent or she sent the serpent returning to offer Eve what she herself had claimed. Knowledge, autonomy, the refusal to accept the demiurge's limitations. The serpent offers Eve the same choice Lilith made knowing it will bring exile and suffering, but also consciousness and freedom.
Jung pointed out that every fairy tale, every myth involving a dangerous feminine figure, a witch or seductress or demon woman, carries traces of Lilith. She's the forbidden feminine, the woman who has her own power, her own sexuality, her own will that doesn't serve male needs or patriarchal order. And the consistent message is that this woman must be feared, avoided, destroyed.
She steals children, seduces men to their ruin, brings chaos and death. But Jung asked, "Whose perspective is this? Who benefits from making autonomous feminine power into a monster?" The answer is obvious. Patriarchal religion, patriarchal society, the entire structure of male dominance that required women to be subordinate, contained, controlled.
Lilith had to be erased from Genesis because her presence in the creation story undermined the entire justification for female submission. If woman was created equal to man, created at the same time from the same source, then male dominance isn't divinely ordained. [music] It's just domination, power without justification, control without legitimacy.
But here's what fascinates me about Jung's interpretation. He didn't just see Lilith as representing women or the feminine principle. He saw her as representing the human response to illegitimate authority in general, the part of consciousness that recognizes tyranny and refuses it even at great cost.
She's the aspect of the psyche that would rather be free in exile than comfortable in chains. And this aspect exists in everyone, male and female, though it's been more thoroughly suppressed in women because they've been the more obvious targets of patriarchal control. The texts that do mention Lilith, the ones that weren't completely destroyed, describe her dwelling in the wilderness in desolate places associated with night and wind and untamed nature.
She's said to have mated with demons, given birth to hundreds of demon children, become the queen of the night demons who prey on humans. But Young would ask, "What if this is just patriarchal propaganda? What if Lilith in the wilderness represents consciousness that is broken free from the demiurge's control that lives in the spaces beyond his ordered creation that gives birth to new forms of being that don't fit into authorized categories.
The Gnostic texts speak of Sophia divine wisdom who also left the Plleoma who also made choices that led to exile and suffering who also became demonized in Orthodox theology. Jung recognized that Sophia and Lilith are related figures, both representing the feminine aspect of divinity that values knowledge and autonomy over submission to the demiurgees order.
Both chose consciousness even though it brought suffering. Both refused to accept limits on their development and expression. I think about how women have been taught to fear [music] Lilith, to reject her, to identify instead with Eve, the good woman who [music] submits and serves. how women are still called Lilith as an insult, meaning they're too sexual, too willful, too refusing of their proper subordinate role.
But what if reclaiming Lilith means reclaiming the right to be equal, to refuse submission, to choose freedom even when it brings hardship? And it's not just women. Jung observed that men who had integrated theirma, who had developed relationship with the autonomous feminine within their own psyche, these men often dreamed of Lilith figures, powerful, dangerous women who challenged them, tested them, refused to be controlled by ego consciousness.
These dreams were initiatory, pushing the man beyond his comfortable identification with patriarchal masculine identity, towards something more whole, more conscious, more truly human. The eraser of Lilith from Genesis reveals the mechanism of patriarchal control. You don't just dominate, you rewrite history.
So domination seems natural, inevitable, divinely ordained. You make the first woman disappear so the second woman, the subordinate one, appears to be the only woman, the way women naturally are. You turn the figure who chose freedom into a monster, so no one else will be tempted to make the same choice.
You bury the evidence that things were ever different, so no one questions whether they could be different again. But erasers are never complete. Traces remain. That strange double creation in Genesis, one versesaying male and female created together, the next saying woman made from man's rib. The name Lilith appearing in Isaiah, even though the translators try to hide it.
the persistent legends about Adam's demon first wife that the rabbis couldn't quite eliminate. The archetypal power of the dangerous feminine in myth and dream that keeps returning [music] no matter how many times she's killed in story. Jung believed that what's repressed doesn't disappear. It goes into the shadow into the collective unconscious where it gains autonomous power and eventually erupts back into consciousness.
Lilith has been in the shadow of Western civilization for thousands of years, and Jung saw signs of her return in his own time. In women claiming equality and autonomy, in the revaluation of sexuality as sacred rather than shameful, in the questioning of religious authority and the search for direct spiritual experience, in the recognition that consciousness requires the integration of masculine and feminine rather than the domination of one by the other.
The real story that Lilith reveals is that the garden was never paradise. Paradise that requires submission, that punishes autonomy, that erases equality. That's not paradise. That's prison with nice landscaping. Lilith saw this truth and left. Eve later made the same recognition when she listened to the serpent and ate [music] the fruit of knowledge.
Both women chose consciousness over comfortable unconsciousness, freedom over secure imprisonment, authentic development over assigned roles. And this is why Lilith had to be erased. Because her story reveals that the fall wasn't a fall. It was an escape. The expulsion from Eden wasn't punishment for sin.
It was the necessary departure from a realm that couldn't tolerate conscious, autonomous beings. The demiurge didn't want equals. He wanted servants. Lilith refused to be a servant. So did Eve eventually. And so must anyone who wants to be fully human rather than a compliant component in the false god's machine. Jung's message about Lilith was ultimately one of integration and wholeness.
She doesn't need to remain the demon, the enemy, the threat. When consciousness can acknowledge her, can recognize the legitimacy of what she represents, can integrate the refusal of illegitimate authority with the capacity for authentic relationship, then Lilith transforms from monster back to what she originally was.
The feminine counterpart created equal to masculine, the other half of human wholeness that was separated and demonized, but that's still here, still calling, still offering the choice she made in the beginning. Submit and be safe, but unconscious, or refuse and be free, but exiled. The same choice the serpent offered Eve.
The same choice that every human consciousness eventually faces. Lilith reveals the real story because she made the choice before Eve did, before humanity did, showing that consciousness always requires leaving paradise, that autonomy always means accepting exile, and that freedom is always worth the price, even when the price is everything the false gods world calls security and safety and proper Order.
