So does 'Lilith'.
Yet Lilith is cast as the 'evil' one, the 'fallen' one.
But - why, then, does she retain the name of purity?
Hm. Maybe the story *means* to convey that she was *once* pure, and to point up the - besmirchment? of her 'good name'.
From http://lilithproject.blogspot.com/
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In the spirit of 'know thy enemy', looooong quote from http://meta-religion.com/World_Religions/Ancient_religions/Mesopotamia/lilith_unveiled.htm:
While Lilith has origins within the Kabbalah, the Talmud, and loose associations with the Bible, she undoubtedly makes her initial appearance as the Sumerian goddess of dark winds, Lil, and the Babylonian demoness Lilitu. The Lilitu was a handmaiden to the savior goddess Inana, known to stand at the gateway of Inana’s temple and invite worshipers to enter the inner sanctum for blessings and sexual delights. (Temple prostitution was common-place in ancient Mesopotamia and Egypt, as well as to the Hindus.)Huh. Same ol' same ol, same as it ever was. It's all about power and domination.
Eventually, in her role as handmaiden, Lilitu becomes obsessed with abducting infant children and drinking their blood in order to steal away their precious life force. It was believed that by the Jewish practice of circumcision, Lilith would not harm infants in their crib. In this role she is mentioned as a negative entity in the Sumerian ‘Epic of Gilgamesh’. In the ancient tale of Gilgamesh and the Huluppu Tree, Lilith takes up residence in the sacred tree of Inana on the banks of the Euphrates. The hero Gilgamesh sees this deception and makes her retreat into the desert wastelands.
Lilah is also the Hebrew word for ‘night’, her name related to lilim, literally meaning ‘demon’. Lilit is the Hebrew word designated for a nocturnal screech owl. In the Canaanite rituals she was also known as Baalat, or the ‘divine lady,’ who was a female version to the Egyptian/Babylonian Baal, Bel, Apis, and Osiris. Another role is that of the god Ashtoreth, who could take on the duel position of being both male and female entities depending on the time period and region of worship.
Lilith is still worshiped in the modern era in the form of Beltane/Mayday rituals which take place from May 1st-5th. The midnight hour on April 30th starts the ‘pagan’ festivities known as ‘Lilith’s Eve’, in dedication to this demoness. There is a Greek version of Lilith as the goddess Lamia, who bore children to Zeus; after which, the children were murdered by Hera in a fit of jealousy. To exact revenge, Lamia becomes a mass murderer of children and joins forces with the demon daughters of Hecate known as the Empusae. These beings were known to tempt men with erotic dreams during sleep and steal away their life force, not only through metaphysical means, but also by stealing their semen during orgasm.
In the Zohar, the principle text of the mystical Kabbalah, it suggests that Lilith’s powers are at their peak during the waning of the moon. She is often depicted as a dark, yet radiant vixen of the night, with luxuriously flowing black hair, a milky and fair complexion, and eyes which shine as the moon doth shine. Another Hebrew name of Lilith is that of Agrat bat Mahalat, who was said to be the governess over 180,000 different races of demons.
She would often tempt Talmudic scholars with erotic dreams, driving them insane and stealing their souls. Lilith, while being a goddess of fertility and sexuality, was also connected with being the bringer of bareness and desert wastelands. Her sacred flowers were that of the rose, and the poppy, used for making opium. In classic occult tradition the red rose represents female sexuality, while the white rose is the metaphor of the pure, or virgin goddess. In this relation it should be noted that in the ancient Canaanite ritual sacrifices to Ashtoreth and Baal, red rose petals were sprinkled on the consecrated altar before blood was shed. After the sacrifice had taken place, white petals were scattered in order to represent the new found purity believed to have been born from human or animal sacrifice.
When Lilith was banished from Eden, she was reported to have fled into a hidden cave along the banks of the Red Sea, after which she breeds a multitude of demonic races and curses upon the earth. In fact, Lilith is known as the mother of all shape-shifting creatures and forms of demonic entity, including Vampires, Fairies, Elves, Trolls, Ogres, and a vast variety of other blood-drinking beasts and supernatural forms throughout mythology. Tradition even holds that once Cain was cast from the Garden for sacrificing his brother, Abel, to the supreme god Yahweh, he met Lilith in her cave, and thus according to some researchers, Cain is the father of all Vampire races.
While Lilith was known for having sexual exploits with a variety of demons to create her ‘Satanic’ offspring (in Muslim legend Lilith is even said to have mated with Satan in order to produce the mysterious race of Djinn, or ‘Genies’ of the magic lamp), she was also believed to have the ability to give birth to one-hundred beastly children each day with her main consort, the demon-god Samael, or alternatively, Asmodeus. In the folklore of witchcraft Lilith is one of the figures associated with ‘drawing down the moon’, and she was said to meet with other witches and succubi at the “Mountains of Darkness.” Astute researcher of witchcraft, Rosemary Ellen Guiley, states in her book ‘Encyclopedia of Witches and Witchcraft’:
“In addition to Jewish folklore, the Lilith demon appears in Iranian, Babylonian, Mexican, Greek, Arab, English, German, Oriental and north American Indian legends. She is sometimes associated with other characters in legend and myth, including the Queen of Sheba and Helen of Troy. In medieval Europe she was often portrayed as the wife, concubine or grandmother of Satan. In the late 17th Century she was described as a screech owl, blind by day, who sucked the breasts or navels of young children or the dugs of goats.”
In Hebrew the name Asmodeus literally means ‘evil spirit’. He was the king of demons noted for having three heads that faced in three different directions, and in this sense he is a physical form of the Luciferian Trinity. One head is depicted as a bull, one as a ram, and the third head was that of a hideous ogre. His legs and feet were that of a rooster, and he often rode on a fire breathing lion.
The feet of the cock represents ritual sacrifice and signifies high stature for demonic entities. Asmodeus is primarily the god of unsatiable lust, but is also associated with wrath and revenge. He usually appears as a apparitional spirit in bedrooms, almost always materializing in hybrid form. He is also said to be, in actuality, the fallen angel Samael. There are many tales in which this demon king is recognized as one of the main enemies of King Solomon.
In one instance, Solomon and Asmodeus are having a philosophical discussion about the nature of good and evil, when Asmodeus tricks the usually wise Solomon into removing his magical ring. The demon king laughs in triumph and throws the magical ring into the sea, after which Solomon immediately finds himself in another life as a lowly beggar. One night, while Solomon is preparing dinner for his new king, he cuts into a fish and out pops the magical ring from the fish’s stomach. Once Solomon puts the ring back on, he resumes his previous life as the King of the Israelites, awakening in his bed to find it had all only been a dream. Despite the fact that Asmodeus sought to destroy Solomon, the Hebrew king learned a valuable lesson from the demon lord in this instance.
Just as Asmodeus is often interchangeable with Satan himself in some traditions, and is a representative of the deadly sin of lust, so too are the other entities of the seven deadly sins sometimes interconnected with the being known as ‘Satan’. The seven deadly sins were first classified by St. Gregory in the 6th Century. Aside from Asmodeus, the deadly sins are as follows: Pride-Lucifer, Avarice-Mammon, Envy-Leviathan, Gluttony-Beelzelbub, Anger-Satan, and Sloth-Belphegor. Opposing these negative characteristics are Pride-Humility, Avarice-Sufficiency, Lust-Chastity, Envy-Charity, Gluttony-Sobriety, Anger-Patience, and Sloth-Diligence. It is apparent that many of these demons are merely different names for Lucifer, and Beelzebub, lord of the flies, and Belphegor, are variations of the Babylonian sun god Bel. Beelzebub comes from the Semitic Zebub which means “a fly”, and the figure of Baal-Sebul became the “Lord of the Flies”.
Lilith too is a noted adversary of King Solomon, as she appears to him one night in order to tempt him while he is studying the holy texts. She appears in a voluptuous sexual form to try and persuade Solomon to lay with her, but upon Solomon dragging the demoness before a mirror, she cast no reflection and quickly retreated at the realization that she had no form. As punishment for her unnatural crimes against humanity, the children of Lilith were scattered across all the planes of space and time; some even bound to their own dimension in order to keep them from dwelling in the earthly realms. A quick note about the Hebrew Solomon- the root of Sol equates with the meaning of the word ‘Sun’, as does the holy capital city of Sion. In this sense we have the ‘wisdom’ and light of the sun which scatters out the forces of ‘darkness’ represented by Lilith and her demonic husband Asmodeus.
As already mentioned, along with Lilith there is a long line of females and figures that take on a very Lilithinian role in their respective cultures and religions. The Hebrew-Babylonian Ashtoreth is one example, as are the Greek Gorgon-Medusa, Venus, Aphrodite and Artemis. They all take on specific characteristics of Lilith, and vice-verse. Medusa, an opposing composite of the goddess Athena, and possibly the most well known of the Lilithinian counterparts, was said to have the horrible face of a gorgon, long flowing hair made of serpents, and could turn men to stone if they gazed upon her hideous features.
However, Medusa was not always a hideous demon, but was once a beautiful woman who claimed to be even more gorgeous than the goddess Athena herself. One day, at the temple of Athena, Medusa was raped by the god Neptune. Out of bitter anger at this defilement of her sacred altar, Athena cursed Medusa to be a disgusting beast with hair made from a serpent’s nest. Medusa became a feared and powerful enemy to many of the lesser Greek gods, but was eventually defeated by Perseus when he battled her with a mirrored shield (created by the Olympian god of the black-smiths, Hephaistos), in which Medusa saw her own reflection and was turned to stone. This ties in heavily with the myth of Solomon besting Lilith with a mirror that made her flee his presence. While some goddesses such as Inana, Isis, Artemis, Semiramis, Aphrodite, Diana and Venus might be more fluently recognized and worshiped through a mass variety of cults in ancient cultures, it is Lilith who holds the distinct classification of being the mother of all demons.
The ancient Semitic goddess Astarte, or Ashtoreth, is another figure connected with the rituals to Lilith and the burning of effigies on the full moon, and the birth of spring time. Ashtoreth is the goddess of fertility, war, love, and the keeper of ancient secrets and is typically shown as wearing a horned headdress. She was the Babylonian counterpart to Ishtar; Solomon even built a temple in honor of her near Jerusalem.
To the Amorites, and Phoenicians, this figure was known as the mother goddess Aserah, or ‘Lady Aserah of the sea’; much as Isis and the Virgin Mary are known as the ‘Star of the Sea’. Her name literally translates as ‘grove’. She is directly related to the god Baal (The Lord), and even puts one of her own offspring on the throne of this god as his representative (similar to the Isis/Osiris/Horus triad in Egyptian mythology). Aserah is the prime Canaanite and Phoenician goddess of fertility, ritual, and human sacrifice. Enormous horned, wooden statues were erected in her honor. She is seen as the main competition, along with Baal worship, to the monotheistic Hebrew god Yahweh.
Baal, or Bel, himself is the earth bound offspring of the supreme god El, or Chronos to the Greeks, and Saturn to the Romans. Other titles attributed to this god are Dagon and Molech. His name meant “Time”, and to many different cultures he represented the superior deity of worship. Much as the Egyptian Amon-Re, the Indian Brahma, or Hebrew Yahweh were the epitome of the GOD of ‘Light’ and solar energies, the figure of Molech (worshiped in the modern era by the Elite Bohemian Grove society out of Sonoma County, California) would seem to be a marriage between the lunar elements of Ashtoreth (Lilith), and the solar aspects of Baal/El (the ‘negative’ or lunar characteristics connected with the Owl, and the solar elements being related to the Bull).
The horns were depicted upon both male and female gods dating back into Egypt and Sumeria and are seen as very sacred icons, at least symbolically, as they represent not only the annual regeneration, but also the phases of the moon and celestial cycles. Like Athena, Artemis, and Lilith, the sacred animal of Ashtoreth is that of the owl. This would make sense in the fact that lilit is the Hebrew word designated for a nocturnal screech owl. In many ways, the rituals dedicated to Ashtoreth are similar to those held in the honor of Ishtar, Aphrodite, or even the early worship of the Virgin Mary. We can also witness the parallels between the ‘fall’ of Lilith, and Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. Guiley describes her in ‘The Encyclopedia of Witches and Witchcraft’ as:
“....One of the oldest Middle Eastern aspects of the Goddess, dating to the Neolithic and Bronze ages. Tammuz is identified as her son/consort, as he is with Ishtar. According to myth, Astarte descended to earth as a fiery star, landing near Byblos in a lake at Alphaca, the site where the original Tammuz was said to have died.”
One of the first known temples of worship to the name of Astarte comes from 1478BC. She is intimately connected with child sacrifice rituals, much in the way Lilith is noted as being akin to the “old hag” who steals children away from their parents, or smothers them to death in their cribs.
The demonic entity known as Belial (Bel/Baal), was one of the most powerful and important Generals in Satan’s army. He controlled 80 legions of demons consisting of 6,666 demons per legion. Belial was especially important to the priests and magicians of Turkey who would set up burnt offerings to this entity. Similar to Asmodeus, he is responsible for creating pain and suffering in the hearts of humanity through lust, sexual perversion, and guilt. Though, unlike Asmodeus who was generally hideous in appearance, Belial was said to have been a beautiful angel with a soft and trust-worthy voice. Belial’s name is often used as a synonym for the Antichrist, Satan, or the ‘Sons of Belial’.
How did 'love' = 'desire' devolve into - something horrible? something bad, to be *ashamed* of? Fix this. NOW. It's BROKEN and DOES NOT WORK.
Stupid. Human beings are STUPID.
Like putting !@#%$#@ing *square* wheels on your car and still expecting the damn thing to *drive* smoothly - morons.
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