In a recent issue of The London Review of Books (22 September 2022), Mary Wellesley describes the changing faces of Lilith over the centuries. Lilith is the poster image for the British Museum’s current Feminine Power Exhibition. Lilith, she explains, is a figure from Mesopotamian and Jewish demonology.

In early sources she was thought to kill babies, and to seduce and murder adults. In some traditions she was responsible for miscarriage, infertility and illegitimate births. One incantation, spiralling around a ceramic bowl on display reads: ‘evil Lilith who leads astray the heart of humans beings’ and appears in ‘a dream of the night … slaying boys and girls [and] sucklings, male and female ’ to be ‘subdued and sealed, [away] from the house’.  Jewish tradition, from around the late first millennium understood Lilith to be the first wife of Adam, created by God from the same clay, unlike  Eve who was created later from a spare rib. ‘Adam insisted’ she writes, ‘that Lilith lie beneath him during sexual intercourse as an admission of her inferiority. She refused and fled Paradise.’ Following Adam’s complaints, God sent three angels to fetch her back. She refused, and according to mediaeval tradition, made her home in the Red Sea, where she gave birth to demons and was believed to be a threat to pregnant women.

Lilith’s reputation as a witch and sorceress, a raider demoness, has followed her through the centuries. A 13^thcentury Spanish treatise describes her as the wife of the demon archangel Samuel, the pair forming a demonic counterpart to Adam and Eve. In the 19^th century she appears in Goethe’s Faust as a temptress, with Mephistopheles encouraging Faust to dance with her.  The Pre-Raphaelites transformed her to an auburn-headed beauty, the witch Adam loved before the gift of Eve, the tantalising ‘other woman’. In the 1970s, with the rise of the Women’s Liberation Movement, Lilith was adopted as a feminist icon, the strong female presence that refuses to be subjugated to the demands of men.

‘This complex, changing image,’ writes Mary Wellesley, ranges ‘from Mesopotamian and Jewish demon, bringer of miscarriage and sterility, to rebellious wife of Adam, to Victorian hottie and feminist icon.’ 

Such transmogrifications.  Yet through it all one thing prevails – Lilith, the female figure who defies subjugation to men, remains, always, a threat, a threat to the power of men, to the stability of the patriarchy.

Adam didn’t have much luck with his second choice of helpmate given him by God either. Submissive she may have been, willing to lie beneath him in the paradisiacal Garden of Eden, but it was the beautiful Eve who enticed her partner to partake with her of the forbidden fruit in spite of God’s warning, which led to expulsion from the Garden and the loss of innocence for mankind. The concept of original sin was born, all due to woman. More bad press for womankind, even the submissive variety, with their clever, wily ways. Still a threat to the power of men. 

As I sit here, in my eighth decade on this earth, and ponder on the changes that have been made in the lives of women in liberal democracies like Australia – and they have been considerable – I am also very aware that the idea of women as a threat, the echoes of the mythological Lilith, and the disobedient Eve, are with us still. 

How else to explain the vicious and degrading attacks on Australia’s first female prime minister, Julia Gillard, from prominent media personalities and the then leader of the opposition? A woman daring to challenge all the stereotypes of the ideal woman to serve the patriarchy.

How else to explain the sense of male entitlement we have witnessed recently in the halls of Australia’s Federal Parliament? Or the current struggle of Iranian women to walk freely in the streets of their country dressed as they choose? Or the countless women suffering domestic violence when they fail to meet the expectations of their male counterparts? 

Sexism, like racism, is so deeply rooted in the human mythology and psyche. It seeps in unwanted when least expected, it infects our relationships often without us being aware of it. The older I get the more complicated everything becomes it seems.