Reviewer Michelle Anne Schingler Interviews Nikki Marmery, Author of Lilith
Misogyny. Alas, it didn’t have to play out that way.
In this week’s interview, Nikki Marmery talks about a crucial period starting about 4000 BCE when patriarchy crept into the Eastern Mediterranean and Western Asia: “wherever it reared its head, mother goddesses were demoted and erased, as women lost status and power.”
Before that, she says, we can look to “Lilith, the first woman, the equal woman, [who] represents … a historical reality. She is Woman as she was before the dawn of patriarchy: equal, powerful, and divine.”
Armed with a fierce protagonist and feminist indignation, Nikki penned Lilith, “a ferocious, heterodox mythic novel that upends notions of divinity, femininity versus masculinity, and human beings’ responsibility toward one another and the earth,” in the words of our chief editor, Michelle Schingler in her recent review for Foreword Reviews.
If you’re looking to restore some lost feminine power, this is the interview for you.
When did you first learn the extrabiblical story of Lilith, and what initial impression did she leave upon you?
My introduction to Lilith was through the sitcom Cheers, in which her name is shared by the ice-queen wife of Frasier Crane. The reclamation of the Jewish demoness Lilith by feminists was well underway by the mid-1980s, so the association with the character played (so brilliantly) by Bebe Neuwirth was widely assumed. I’ve since read an interview in which the writer says there was originally no intentional connection—but by the time she turned up in the later spin-off Frasier, the association is clearly signposted. “I usually get some sign when Lilith is in town,” says her brother-in-law Niles. “Dogs forming into packs, blood weeping down the wall.”
So that is how I learned about the demoness in the Jewish tradition and her backstory as Adam’s first wife. I’ve been fascinated by her ever since. Even then, I could see the joke rests on the uncomfortable foundations of (sitcom) Lilith’s transgression of femininity. She is unemotional, overly analytical, has little softness or charm. Why should she be denigrated for these traits, which are never considered quasi-demonic in men?
From Lilith Fair to Lilith the magazine, feminists (in the latter case, religious feminists) have often gravitated to Lilith’s story—which, as you mention in your book, was not necessarily first shared with the intention of women’s liberation. Why is she so ripe for reclamation?
The story of Lilith is irresistible to women to reclaim. For thousands of years, patriarchal cultures have demonised (literally, in Lilith’s case) or othered women who stepped outside the boundaries of “acceptable” womanhood—that is, who were not as men wished them to be: submissive, chaste, obedient, and above all silent. I have no doubt that women in earlier centuries were just as irritated by this as we are today. But it’s only in the past few decades that women have had the freedom and opportunity to fight back.
From a woman’s point of view, what’s not to like? Lilith is the first woman, created equal to man (as opposed to Eve, who is made from his rib—an insulting reversal of what we all know to be true: that every man who ever lived was born from a woman’s body). When her husband starts throwing his weight around, she leaves the only home she has ever known, defying his authority, and God’s, to take her path into the unknown. She chooses freedom and uncertainty over subjection and safety. She flees the confines of domesticity and wifehood because she refuses to be subjugated.
So, while the men who controlled the narrative in the past represented her as a threat to the patriarchal order, a danger to family life; when women tell her story, she is a beacon of hope, a role model.
Her significance to feminist theologians is immense: how many other examples are there of biblical or extra-biblical women who defy male authority—and get away with it?
Even in the patriarchal versions of Lilith’s story she is barely punished. She remains immortal, while Eve is not. She has wings, which give her freedom. She avoids the curse God places on all other women: to give birth in agony and be subject to her husband. She has sex with whoever she wants, and no one—not even God!—tells her what to do.
We have Jewish feminists of the 1970s to thank for Lilith’s reclamation, notably Judith Plaskow who published her midrash The Coming of Lilith in 1972. Plaskow stresses Lilith’s sisterhood with Eve and God’s discomfort with Adam’s pre-eminence over his wives. In this way, she sought to reintroduce Jewish women’s perspectives to male-dominated theology. Similarly, Aviva Cantor, in the first issue of the magazine Lilith in 1976 writes: “Lilith is a powerful female. She radiates strength, assertiveness; she refuses to cooperate in her own victimization.”
Lilith is also ripe for reclamation by gay and bisexual women. The appeal here is obvious: Lilith leaves her husband and her home in order to be true to herself. Many modern interpretations portray her in a sexual relationship with Eve, succinctly summed up in the adage: “It’s Lilith and Eve, not Lilith and Steve,”—the perfect response to the homophobic “Adam and Steve” jibe, which has been around since the 1970s.
You take Lilith out of a strictly Jewish context; in your book, she interacts with Mary Magdalene and women of earth-based spiritual practices, too. Why was it important for you to widen her story this way?
Lilith, the first woman, the equal woman, represents for me a historical reality. She is Woman as she was before the dawn of patriarchy: equal, powerful, and divine. I wanted to explore the loss of female equality—inextricably connected to the demise of female divinity—in the Western world. I was interested in the specific ways in which the stories of the Bible justified and enforced male supremacy for two and a half thousand years (ever since the Book of Genesis was finalised in its current form). I wanted to write about something that is so ingrained in our culture that we rarely question it: why do we have a divine Father but no Mother?
So this story starts in the Jewish world—but it is not solely a Jewish story. Patriarchy emerged in every culture of Western Asia and the Eastern Mediterranean, starting around 4000 BCE, and wherever it reared its head, mother goddesses were demoted and erased, as women lost status and power.
Lilith’s quest in my book is to restore this lost power. It was crucial to me that this encompassed Christianity because it was overwhelmingly the Christian world that leveraged the biblical creation myth to limit women’s freedom, their voice, their very humanity. This is evident from the earliest Christian leaders, such as Paul the Apostle, who said: “I do not permit a woman to teach or to have authority over a man; 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.” (1 Timothy 2, 10-11)
This view was reinforced by the Church time and time again and fuelled the wildest extremes of medieval misogyny. By the 15th century CE, Eve’s “sin” and supposed susceptibility to temptation became used to explain why women were more likely to be witches—a significant factor in the persecution and execution of countless women across Europe (and its colonies) for the next 300 years.
“For it is true that in the Old Testament the Scriptures have much that is evil to say about women, and this is because of the first temptress, Eve … And it should be noted that there was a defect in the formation of the first woman, since she was formed from a bent rib, that is, a rib of the breast, which is bent as it were in a contrary direction to a man. And since through this defect she is an imperfect animal, she always deceives.”
Malleus Maleficarum, “Hammer of Witches,” 1487
It was Christian European powers that colonised more than 80 percent of the world and brought their particular reading of Genesis to bear on other cultures. Wherever they encountered indigenous religious practices in which women had power and authority they were denounced as heretical or Satanic and were ruthlessly crushed.
So that is the primary reason that this story jumps out of a Jewish context. But the secondary reason is that Lilith herself is cross-cultural. She is perhaps the oldest continuous female archetype in world myth, starting life in Ancient Sumer (modern-day Iraq) more than four thousand years ago. Here, the lilitu were a species of night demon, the ghosts of dead virgins who preyed on sleeping men. She appears in one of the oldest texts in human history, Inanna and the Huluppu Tree, dating from at least 2000 BCE, in which the “dark maid Lilith” has set up home in Inanna’s holy tree. Over time, she merged with the goddess Lamashtu, who, like the later Hebrew Lilith, was evicted from Heaven by the Father God Anu, for malevolence and disobedience, and terrorised pregnant women and children. By the first millennium BCE, Lilith had spread to the Hebrew world, appearing as a demon in the 8th century BCE Book of Isaiah, and to the Greek world as Lamia, where she was established by the time Aristophanes and Crates wrote about her from the 5th century BCE.
In the 5th–8th centuries CE in what is now Iraq, people of Jewish, Christian, Zoroastrian, and Gnostic faiths warded Lilith away in incantation bowls buried beneath their houses—bowls written in different languages have been found in neighbouring houses, reflecting the close proximity of different cultures who believed in Lilith.
The first written reference to Lilith as Adam’s first wife is in the satirical Hebrew text The Alphabet of Ben Sira (c700–1000 CE), which undoubtedly refers to an existing oral tradition, perhaps developed from the Babylonian Talmud (completed around 500 CE) in which Adam fathers demons with an un-named demoness during his separation from Eve. This was also current in the Christian world: in the 5th–6th century CE Eritrean work The Book of Adam and Eve, a beautiful demon calling herself Eve’s sister attempts to seduce Adam, saying that God had promised her in marriage to him.
Mythology rarely exists monoculturally—especially in the ancient Levant and Mesopotamia, where different peoples lived side by side, interacted and traded with each other. Myths evolved as they travelled from one culture to another. I wanted to reflect this broad cross-cultural exchange, which not only influenced the myth of Lilith, but many of the other biblical stories I revisit in my book, too.
Can you talk a bit about Lilith’s final turn in the novel—toward ecological rebirth?
In the Book of Genesis God gives Man control not only over Woman, but over the whole natural world. Adam is tasked with naming the animals, signifying his dominion over them. God repeats Man’s ownership of land and nature to Noah (Genesis 9:2) and to Abraham (Genesis 17:8). This is a secondary focus of my book: the catastrophic consequences of the worldview that emerged alongside patriarchy: that man is not part of the natural world; he rules over it, just as he rules over women.
This signifies a departure from earlier ways of imagining our relationship with the natural world. In the goddess-worshipping prehistoric Eastern Mediterranean, the earth itself was divine: the very body of the Mother. Divinity was manifest in birds, animals, trees, and rivers. I think that is a loss we are still grappling with. Perhaps we might have been more respectful of this planet, the only home we will ever know, had we continued to think of it as holy, the source of all life and sustenance (as many indigenous cultures still do today). Perhaps we might have treated the creatures we live alongside with more care.
In my book, the Wisdom that the Mother wanted to give Her children in the Fruit of the Tree of Knowledge, was a nature-based Wisdom that we would do well to understand today: that we are born of this earth and are part of it; we must cherish and protect it as well as the animals we live among; that death is a part of life and we should not seek to live forever: regeneration is how we live on, just as a tree lives on in its fruit. I think this is a healthier message than the patriarchal notion that nature is something to possess, control, subdue, and overcome.
What sources would you recommend for those who want to learn more about your heroine? Which, from your research, stuck with you the most?
Woman’s Lore, by Sarah Clegg, is a fantastic, scholarly and witty exploration of the archetype of Lilith in all her various incarnations from Ancient Sumer to the modern world—from her I learned the astonishing fact that the Starbucks logo is one of her alter-egos from medieval European folklore, Melusine! For the specific significance of Lilith to Jewish women, The Coming of Lilith, the 2005 collection of Judith Plaskow’s essays on feminism, Judaism, and sexual ethics, is indispensable, and contains her 1972 midrash. Anyone interested in the history of goddess worship in Judaism should start with Raphael Patai’s groundbreaking The Hebrew Goddess. Elaine Pagels’ The Gnostic Gospels is a superb account of the early Christian scriptures that would be denounced as heretical in the 2nd century CE; her book Adam, Eve and the Serpent is an excellent introduction to the significance of the Fall in early Christianity.
What are you working on next?
There is something I’m itching to get started on, but I’m taking a break for six months. Lilith was a difficult book to write. It was about big questions that matter to me, and I was very aware of its potential to offend. I wrote it throughout the covid lockdowns, which were very strict here in the UK, and this intensified the experience; it consumed me utterly. I need to decompress (or perhaps write an incantation bowl to ward Lilith away?!)
But when I’m ready, I’m going to dive back into the ancient world because that is what fascinates me. The story I want to write is historical, though there are mythical elements, and its focus is women and power. I don’t want to say too much about it, as the joy of writing for me is in following my curiosity. I don’t know what I’ll discover yet, and the project will likely change a thousand times before it’s finished!
Michelle Anne Schingler
