Sabbats Almanac: Samhain to Mabon - Kristoffer Hughes 2018
The Old Ways: The Dark Moon by Linda Raedisch
Ostara
THE DEEP THROBBING OF the priests’ drums at the dark of the moon would have been a familiar sound to all those living on the fertile plain between the rivers Idiglat and Buranum. The beating of the drums marked one of the smaller but no less important feasts of the Sumerians as well as the Assyrians and Babylonians who came after them. Idiglat and Buranum are the names by which the Sumerians knew the Tigris and Euphrates, the rivers having been christened by the even earlier marsh dwellers.
When darkness fell on the night of the new moon, the priests beat their drums to warn away unwanted spirits and to remind everyone to prepare their homes to be visited by the ghosts of the ancestors. This monthly Sumerian Halloween was called ki-si-ga, “that which is placed on the earth.” It was a feast of the dead, held on one of the black nights at the end of the Sumerian month, an occasion for the living members of the family to fulfill their responsibilities to the departed—and not just the recent dead but also the distant ancestors along with whatever neglected spirits happened to be wandering by. Every wandering spirit was once clothed in flesh and was surely still wanted somewhere.
The atmosphere on the night of the ki-si-ga was probably not unlike that of the Jewish Sabbath: the gathering of the family, the flurry of activity before darkness fell, then, as the first star appeared, the lighting of the wicks in the little dishes of sesame oil. Cedar bark and seeds of wild rue were probably thrown on the brazier as the bread, water and pottage were passed round. Everyone would be wearing clean clothes: the men in sheepskin kilts from which they had brushed the dust and sand and picked the worst of the brambles, the women in woolen tunics freshly laundered in a lather of soapwort stalks. The Sumerians referred to themselves as “the black-headed people.” On this night, the women would have combed and oiled their dark hair and braided it round their heads while the girls, having just come in from the pastures, might crown their black curls with chaplets of quivering aspen leaves and frothy pink tamarisk flowers.
But let’s not forget the dead! It was for them that the barley cakes and a few spoonfuls of stewed meat and onions were placed upon the ground. The Sumerians must have realized how easy it was to forget the dead and how dangerous the dead could become if neglected.
One of the most troublesome demons to come out of this region began her life as an ordinary girl. Who knows what went wrong? Perhaps her husband spurned her shortly after the wedding night and she had no family to return to. Perhaps she died alone in the dry foothills without a grave or offerings to help her find her way to the Great Below. Whatever the reason, she’s still wandering around, stirring up trouble. She has gone by many names. In the Kabala, she is “princess of screeching,” in the Zohar “that Certain Woman” who seduces men by “the diminishing of the moon.”
But she derives her more familiar name from a cameo appearance she makes in the Old Testament, in Isaiah 34:14, as “Lilit,” which can be translated as “screech owl.” Lilit doesn’t do much in Isaiah; she is listed as one of the many wild creatures who will haunt the fallen-down palaces of the Edomites. Her presence there, along with satyrs, jackals and scavenging birds, is evidence of the complete devastation that will be visited upon the kingdom of Edom, of the irreversible wilderness that will overtake its streets and houses.
If you have heard only one thing about Lilith, as her name is now more commonly spelled, it’s probably that she was Adam’s first wife, exiled from the Garden of Eden because she refused to assume the missionary position. She had nothing against the position itself; she simply wanted to be the one on top. Having been shaped from the same slick, wet clay as Adam, Lilith saw herself as his equal and therefore entitled to straddle him whenever the mood took her. This was acceptable to neither Adam nor God whose secret name she shrieked aloud as she flew out the gates and into the wilderness. She was pursued by three angels who cornered her in a cave by the sea and pressured her to return. But Lilith never went back to Eden, never remarried, never had living children of her own. Instead, she preys on other women’s children, stealing their spirits out of the womb or cradle and seducing the women’s husbands in their dreams.
You can rifle through the pages of Genesis all you want but you won’t find Lilith’s story there. The account of Adam’s first, failed marriage appears in the Midrash, a voluminous literature including many legends that had circulated in the Jewish community for generations before scholars started writing them down in the early centuries CE. There are actually several cautionary tales about Lilith in the apocryphal writings of the Jews. Some of these stories are at least as old as Genesis 2, while others may predate it by hundreds if not thousands of years.
The Eden out of which Lilith fled was probably in southern Iraq. The name “Eden” passed into Hebrew via Akkadian, another Semitic language that had replaced Sumerian for everyday use by 2000 BCE. The word eden, which originally meant an alluvial plain, probably came from Ubaidian, the language of those original marsh-dwellers, which had been replaced by Sumerian by 3500 BCE. We don’t know by what names the Ubaidians called their own ghosts, but a Sumerian ghost was a gidim. When the Akkadian speaking Assyrians swept into the area, they introduced the term lil, which could mean “ghost,” or more vaguely, “spirit.”
The line between ghosts and demons was a fine one, easily and frequently crossed by the shades of the restless dead. Lilith must once have belonged to a close-knit family of ghost-like demons, the head of which was the lilu, a male spirit who embodied the southwest wind and preyed upon babies both in and out of the womb. The female was the lilitu. Unlike the lilu, who kept to the desert sands, the lilitu could enter a house through the window. These creatures were probably inspired by dust devils: small, whirling vortices of sand and the fine, dry sediments left behind when the rivers flooded. I’ve only ever seen a dust devil up close once on a New Mexico college campus. Everyone stopped and stared, even the kids who were used to seeing that sort of thing. Had we come from an older civilization, I’m sure we would have been terrified.
The third member of the family was the ardat-lili. In Akkadian, an ardatû is a “nubile young girl,” so the ardat-lili is a “maiden-lili.” She is the most anthropomorphic of the three, behaving very much like a bride left at the altar. She accosted young men and struck women barren. And she carried with her the askance-looking that the Sumerians had reserved for the ghosts of individuals who had died before their time and continued to roam the earth instead of lying quiet in their graves.
So whether you feast for the dead once a year, eight times, or at each new moon, be sure to leave a light and a little dish of food out for the spirit of the jilted bride Lilith. Because she’s still out there...
Resources
Patai, Raphael. Gates to the Old City: A Book of Jewish Legends. Northvale, New Jersey: Jason Aronson Inc., 1988.
van der Toorn, Karel, Bob Becking, and Pieter W. van der Horst, eds. Dictionary of Deities and Demons in the Bible. Second Edition. Grand Rapids, Michigan: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing, 1996.