Notes about Sexuality and Religion

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Cultural and anthropological studies of the past have argued that at some point in time in various cultures the male (Sky) god gained power over the female (Earth) goddess as more patriarchal-structured cultures replaced the partnership cultures where men and women ruled and were worshiped equally. The male god of Hebrew, Christian and Islamic tradition is most often characterized as a political entity, one of imperialistic authority, a powerful ruler, a “king, judge, warrior”¹ who not only creates and orders the world out of chaos, but also reorders it whenever chaos threatens. As a numinous figure He is an agent of power, and through humanity’s subjection to Him, He is an agent of plenitude. Under a patriarchal structure control equals plenitude; under the matriarchal system fertility, an aspect characteristic of the feminine, equals plenitude. If one looks at early confrontations between the female, goddess-based cultures and those of the invading, or ever-expanding male, god-based cultures, one might argue that the male dominated society, in confrontation with one where the females were of equal stature, might feel threatened by the numinous representation of the female deity. The solution to this confrontation then for many male-oriented religious power structures would be to lose control or take control. Assimilation, destruction, or conquest? Since the assimilation or destruction of their own system would not be acceptable to the invading culture, the female power structure would have to be the one assimilated or destroyed.

In The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion noted religious scholar Mircea Eliade posits that possession of an uninhabited or previously inhabited place is brought about through the consecration, or making sacred, of that place by the culture taking possession. This act of sacred imperialism is characterized by the struggle for power and

1 Walter Brueggemann, “Symmetry and Extremity in Images of YHWH,” The Blackwell Companion to the Hebrew Bible, eds. Leo G. Perdue (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, Ltd., 2001; 2005: 241–257), 241.

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authority over the numinous as it is figured in the culture being so consecrated.² In The Idea of the Holy, religious historian and scholar Rudolf Otto, having coined the word numinous from numen, defines it as an awareness of the divine or sacred and describes it as “the feeling which remains where the concept fails.”³ As a subjective experience, the sacred can only be comprehended on emotional and psychological levels and, therefore, is inexpressible through language. However, Otto attempts to express the numinous experience through its qualities of mystery, dread, and fascination.⁴ The attribute of mystery requires that the numinous be perceived as a real presence in the world and yet at the same time as “something inherently ‘wholly other’ ”.⁵ The awe and puzzlement felt by the subject of the encounter with otherness are enhanced through the second quality, dread, as a reaction to the sense of powerlessness the subject feels in reference to the absolute power and energy emanating from the numinous presence. For Otto, the play of power against powerlessness, energy or will against enervation, “implies . . . a category of valuation”⁶ that Otto calls “ ‘creature-consciousness’ ”,⁷ an awareness that the numinous presence has the ability to annihilate the subject. However, even while the subject of the numinous encounter is overwhelmed by fear, the final attribute fascination also exerts pressure by awakening the imagination and human curiosity. Through the quality of fascination, the numinous entices the subject toward full understanding, the achievement of which means annihilation of the subject’s will; the numinous may, according to Otto, “burst in sudden eruption up from the depths of the soul with spasms and convulsions, or lead to the strangest excitements, to intoxicated frenzy, to transport, and to ecstasy”.⁸ In other words, the numinous, with its elements of mystery,

2 Mircea Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion, trans. Willard R. Trask (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1959; 1987).

3 Rudolf Otto, Foreword by the Author to First Edition, The Idea of the Holy: An Inquiry into the Non-rational Factor in the Idea of the Divine and its Relation to the Rational, trans. John W. Harvey (New York: Oxford University Press, 1958), n.p.

4 Readers of this essay may find the introductory chapter and index to my book, The Vampire as Numinous Experience: Spiritual Journeys with the Undead in British and American Literature (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, 2004), of interest for a more in depth explanation of the concept of the numinous.

5 Otto, The Idea of the Holy, 28.

6 Ibid., 15.

7 Ibid., 10.

8 Ibid., 12.

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dread, and fascination, is a dangerous presence; and interaction with it leads to loss of control, to assimilation or destruction. For Otto, the numinous also may be experienced negatively, as a figure, such as a ghost, demon or vampire, in which the daemonic aspects of the experience are fore-grounded. In the negatively numinous, the dread changes from awe to “horror and shuddering”⁹ as the subject‘s perception of possible harm increases. To articulate the negatively numinous, Otto posited that the relationship between humankind and the divine began with a primal experience of good and evil potential as balanced in an “Indifferent“ being.¹⁰ The numinous, therefore, has the potential for both goodness and wrathfulness, but the negatively numinous is more aligned with the potential for evil, based on the subject’s perception not only of the ability, but also of the seeming intent, of the numinous to do harm. Fear of subjugation or annihilation of the self in identification with the numen as female might have fueled the need of cultures which held males to be superior to recast the relationship of human and divine inherent in the vanquished culture. In the struggle for sacred power and authority, a figure like Lilith as representative of feminine divinity would have to be assimilated or transformed from the more positive numinous object as goddess into the more negatively numinous realm of demon and vampire in order for her divine power to be compromised or negated completely. Although the numinous as a quality of spiritual experience cannot be conceptualized, the transformation of the Lilith figure from goddess to demon to vampire takes place on both verbal and visual levels as her name, her characteristics and her symbols are manipulated toward a more negatively numinous potential in order to gain power over her divinity. As a goddess, or a figure connected with the goddess, Lilith represents the possibility of both good and evil balanced in an Indifferent divine figure which must be propitiated. Her name is linked to the Terra Mater, or Great Mother, figures of several cultures, including the Canaanite Balaat, the Sumero-Babylonian Belit-ili or Belili, the Assyrian/Babylonian Lilitu, Al Lat and Al Uzza, and the Babylonian Ishtar or Inanna.¹¹ In the Babylonian cult of Inanna/Ishtar, Lilith is

9 Ibid., 13.

10 Ibid., 106.

11 Barbara G. Walker, The Woman’s Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1983), 541; Merlin Stone, Ancient Mirrors of Womanhood:

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characterized as a handmaiden of Inanna¹² and, as such, may have been a temple harlot responsible for promoting the land’s fertility through sacred sexual intercourse.¹³ As a negatively numinous figure Lilith is identified in Hebrew, Christian, and Islamic literatures with demons, vampires, and djinns. In Hebrew tradition, particularly, Lilith is considered to be the first wife of Adam, who becomes a demon of the night by refusing to lie beneath him in the sexual position of submission to male superiority. In many artistic renditions, including Michelangelo’s artistic vision in the Sistine Chapel and the carving of Adam, Eve, and Lilith which is part of the façade of the Cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris, she is figured as half woman and half snake with the wings of a bird. These images may indicate her lineage through such figures as Lamashtu and the Greek lamia or serpent goddess and may also implicate her as the serpent that tempted Eve; however, the serpent also is a symbol of energy, force and regenerative powers, powers that an invading male culture may have found unacceptable when figured in a female form. Some scholars see her refusal to submit to Adam as the Great Mother’s refusal of “patriarchal marriage”¹⁴ or as an early attempt to assimilate the Sumero-Babylonian goddess figure into Jewish mythology.¹⁵ If so, characterizing Lilith as a demon specter of femininity transforms her from a figure of veneration to one of loathing. This Lilith was not to be appeased or propitiated; nor was an understanding of her divine mystery to be sought. Instead, Jewish tradition called for amulets of protection against her evil. In Mesopotamian/Arabic culture, the end of goddess worship would come through the rise of Islam in the seventh century with the prophet Mohammed and the establishment of the Qurʾan as a holy text. As Islamic religion gained momentum, goddesses like Al Lat and Al Uzza were replaced with the worship of Allah.¹⁶ This change in Lilith’s status is tied to a change in her numinous potential as it is verbally and visually imagined. The ambiguity of

A Treasury of Goddess and Heroine Lore from Around the World (Boston: Beacon Press, 1984), 127; Merlin Stone, ^{When God Was a Woman} (New York: Harvest/Harcourt Brace, 1976), 195. 12 Stone, Ancient Mirrors of Womanhood, 127; Stone, When God Was a Woman, 158.

13 Stone, When God was a Woman, 158.

14 Erich Neumann, The Great Mother: An Analysis of the Archetype, trans. Ralph Manheim (Bollingen Series XLVII. Princeton: Princeton/Bollingen, 1974), 277.

15 Walker, Woman’s Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets, 541.

16 Stone, When God was a Woman, 195.

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word meanings connected with the Lilith figure seems to allow the most movement from positive to negative numinous potential. Sacred imperialism has much to do with how the divine is articulated in the world. To take away power, you take away identity or name or cloud the connotations of the name, so future generations have no clear understanding of its meaning. In his translation of Gilgamesh Tablet XII, researcher Samuel Noah Kramer interpreted the phrase ki-sikil-lil-la-ke as a reference to Lilith being a demon who has taken up residence in a tree sacred to the goddess Inanna.¹⁷ However, since, in the Sumerian language, Ki denotes place or location and Sikil is translated as clean, fresh, or virginal, taken together the syllables Ki-sikil might translate as “untouched ground”¹⁸ or virginal, pure place, which seems to signify some type of temple or spiritual location. Lil is most often translated as wind or spirit, and coupled with the connotation of Ki-sikil could be interpreted as the divine wind or spirit, which again would have its abode in a temple or other spiritual place. The syllable combination Lil-la-ke also can be translated as the spirit of water, seminal fluid, or flood, all of which seem to relate to the figure of the Mother Goddess in her aspect of fertility and abundance.¹⁹ Moreover, the meaning of parts of the phrase Lil-a-ke may be translated differently. Lil may also mean infection, which coupled with the wind connotation might indicate the simoom (from the Arabic samm; to poison), often characterized as a poison wind that sweeps across the Asian and African deserts in the spring and summer carrying infection and pestilence.²⁰ In Hebrew tradition, furthermore, Lilith is said to be the wife/consort of Samael (variously spelled Samiel) a prominent demon, whose name also may come from samm (poison) and yel (wind), the appellation for the simoom.²¹ In addition, in the syllable La one can see again the possibility that translation could well have allowed the consecrating culture to redefine the goddess. La is translated from the Sumerian as abundance, desire,

17 Diane Wolkstein and Samuel Noah Kramer, Inanna: Queen of Heaven and Earth (New York: Harper and Row, 1983), 5–9.

18 John A. Halloran, Sumerian Lexicon: A Dictionary Guide to the Ancient Sumerian Language (Oxford, UK: Logogram Pub./Oxbow Books, 2006).

19 Ibid.

20 Webster’s New Twentieth Century Dictionary (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1983).

21 Ibid.

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or bliss, but can also mean “to force or penetrate,”²² which might be how Lilith came to be characterized as a demon and vampire. A simple change in interpretation and the abundance of the goddess becomes the force of the demon and the penetration of the vampire’s fangs. Finally, Lilitu, one of the names by which Lilith often is known, is translated in one context as a moon spirit and as month, and also might be derived from Assyrian lilitu meaning “demon of the night air”,²³ connecting her directly to the moon aspect of the Mother Goddess and to the monthly cycles of female fertility. Although this also was the name of a demon in ancient Assyrian myths, if the women of Ishtar (the temple harlots) are referred to as Ishtaritu,²⁴ might not Lilitu mean the women of Lil or women of the spirit/goddess of the air/wind. As such, Lilith is also linked to Ninlil “Lady of Air,” a Sumerian mother goddess.²⁵ The demon Lilith is accused of encouraging illegitimate births and causing barrenness and miscarriages.²⁶ As a vampire figure she is said to suck the blood of children and then strangle them.²⁷ In these images, the maternal aspects of the goddess now are concentrated in the Vengeful or Terrible Mother image;²⁸ and the shift to the negative numinous is from fear and awe to shuddering horror as the sense of helplessness encompasses real time, male fears of control over birth, death, and sexual encounters. Additionally, in the Talmud, Lilith is no longer discussed in the singular and, therefore, is no longer considered “the One” but one of many. In her plurality she is characterized as “female night demons.”²⁹ If the sacred represents order in the world, Lilith as demon represents chaos and danger to the beliefs of the inhabiting culture. Furthermore, Lilith is only mentioned once in the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament in Isaiah 34:14.³⁰ There she is consigned a resting place in a desert described as the habitation of owls, ravens, jackals, hyenas, satyrs, snakes, vultures, and wild cats. Lilith’s name is

22 Halloran, Sumerian Lexicon.

23 Stone, Ancient Mirrors of Womanhood, 127.

24 Stone, When God was a Woman, 159.

25 Stone, Ancient Mirrors of Womanhood, 127.

26 J. Gordon Melton, The Vampire Book: The Encyclopedia of the Undead (Detroit: Visible Ink Press, 1999), 422.

27 Ibid., 421.

28 J.E. Cirlot, A Dictionary of Symbols, 2nd eds., trans. Jack Sage (New York: Dorset Press, 1971), 188.

29 Barbara Black Koltuv, Preface, The Book of Lilith (Berwick, Maine: Nicolas-Hays, Inc., 1986), n.p.

30 The New Jerusalem Bible, Standard ed. (New York: Doubleday, 1998)

translated in various versions of the Bible as night-monster, night hag, night jar, and screech owl. Obviously, from the company of wild things Lilith is numbered among, she is considered a wild thing herself; and the company she is thrust among has possession of the night when the mystery and dread of the numinous are the greatest.

Subject to the possible assimilation or destruction of their own divine figures, the invading culture would fear the feminine sacred as a representative of evil and would seek to characterize her as such. Described as a wild haired, winged spirit of the wind by the Assyrians and as a screech owl in Hebrew, Lilith becomes a figure of horror who entices humanity into desolate and deserted places in order to harm them. As a succubus, her owl feet now indicate nocturnal life and monstrousness. Her virginal aspects are now transformed to sexual promiscuity, and male fears of illegitimate heritage come to the forefront. In Hebrew, Christian and Islamic tradition demons such as Lilith has become represent sexual fears, fears of the loss of male power, of possession, conquest, and loss of control. The conquest of the male by an evil female seductress, or succubus, turns on forbidden sexuality, sexual pleasure; and the inexhaustible fecundity of Lilith as goddess now produces a plenitude of demons and illegitimate children who ultimately will challenge the father for inheritance and power. Fascination with the numen becomes the enticement and temptation connected with illicit sexual contact, and satisfaction is now relegated to the unsanctioned sexuality of night emissions and wasted seed. In the translation of the Vulgate Bible Lilith’s transformation is taken a step further; there she becomes the vampire figure, the Greek lamia.

As goddess becomes demon a shift takes place in the mystery attribute of the numinous. No longer is the divine feminine an Indifferent balance of good and evil; now she is characterized as wholly evil. In his treatise on the sublime, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, Edmund Burke tells us that an unknown quantity is always more feared than a known one, simply because we cannot encompass with our minds what we cannot see or understand as a whole entity; not being able to understand what is, we cannot control our fear of what might be.³¹ It is the mystery of the

31 Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, eds. James T. Boulton (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1968; Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1958), 58.

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unknown that has the power to frighten and control, so take away the mystery and the power shifts from object to subject of the encounter. In the power shift that redefines Lilith, the element of fascination becomes less spiritual and the loss of self is only temporary as the male succumbs to sexual hunger. Where once desire was figured as sacred sexual contact ensuring fertility for the land and people, with the demon Lilith desire is illicit and productive of an undesired abundance of illegitimate children, a concern characteristic of masculine human nature in most cultures of the world.³²

In this shift of power from goddess to demon and vampire, the symbols connected with the goddess figure also have been transformed through time. Although there is some disagreement about the identification, the image most often identified as Lilith, in the Burney Plaque, shows a winged goddess figure in relief. She wears a crown or headdress composed of four sets of horns signifying “strength and power” as well as the “glory” of divinity. Horns also are indicative of both the masculine and feminine aspects of the divine—the feminine horn symbol being a receptacle like the horn of plenty, a symbol of plenitude and fertility; the masculine image, one of penetration.³³ The figure in the plaque holds in each upraised hand the symbols of ring and rod which signify not only power, but also totality, eternity and the goddess’s dual role as creator and destroyer of life.³⁴ She stands on the back of two lions, grasping them with her taloned feet and is flanked by two owls. The lions are symbolic of the masculine solar principle, particularly young lions which are representative of the sun rising, while the goddess’s feminine principle is represented by the moon or night; so in the carving she rests upon and is connected to the masculine principle, just as the moon relies upon the sun for its light. Lions also are considered the guardian of the Great Mother, serve as her mounts, and are symbolic of birth and death.³⁵ Women’s societies are most often connected with birth and fertility, with child-bearing and the mysteries surrounding it; and death is always linked with birth as the moon is most often the symbol of the goddess and related directly to the cycles of womanhood controlling fertility. The symbolic death and rebirth of the moon as seen

32 David P. Barash and Nanelle R. Barash, Madame Bovary’s Ovaries: A Darwinian Look at Literature (New York: Delacorte/Random House, 2005), 20.

33 Cirlot, A Dictionary of Symbols, 151.

34 Ibid., 274.

35 Ibid., 189–90.

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in its cycles are connected to fertility of the land and people, abundance, power, and the feminine principle. The fecundity of the goddess means the fertility of the land and people. The owls represent the death aspect of the goddess, being night creatures connected with the moon and the dead or setting sun as opposed to the rising sun of the lions.³⁶ In Hebrew symbolism, associated with Lilith, the owl represents “forbidden wisdom.”³⁷ Together these images, encompassing as they do both the masculine and feminine aspects of the divine, underscore the goddess as representative of eternity or totality.

However, as the goddess was transformed into demon and vampire, Lilith’s characteristics and symbols changed, also. The horns symbolic of her divine power become the devil’s or demon’s horns and eventually the fangs of the vampire. The fecundity of the goddess representing abundance for her people is now signified by the great number of demon children born to her each day. As a vampire, Lilith represents more a lack of abundance and lack even of sexual satisfaction; as a vampire she represents eternal hunger and like her counterpart the demon Lilith, the vampire Lilith has a taste for blood. The womb of the goddess, signifying her powers of fertility and plenitude, becomes for the demon Lilith an inexhaustible source of demons; and with the vampire, the womb takes on the image of mouth or throat as an enclosed dark chamber of horrors, with teeth now, a gaping vagina dentata threatening male sexual power. Here the issues of unsanctioned sexuality and of demonic possession that caused dread with Lilith as a demon are overshadowed by conquest issues that exist on a more spiritual level. The fascination felt by the subject of the encounter is now seen in the hypnotic effects of the vampire and is harder to resist than the demon’s nightmare visits. Coupled with irresistible fascination is fear for the mortal soul which brings with it a horrifying realization that one might be forever caught on the edge of spiritual transcendence. The political aspect of the conquest of Goddess/Woman by God/Man involves a transfer and transformation of the power structure. The making or unmaking of a powerful image through the act of speech involves the transformation of meaning of the symbols and characteristics of the original image in a way that will negate the power of the original.

36 Ibid., 247.

37 Rowena Shepherd and Rupert Shepherd, 1000 Symbols: What Shapes Mean in Art and Myth (London: Thames and Hudson, Ltd., 2002), 197.

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While as a negatively numinous figure Lilith keeps some of her divine power, she is still relegated to the negative and horrifying side of the spiritual. The act of sacred imperialism is a struggle for power; in that struggle Lilith was transformed from goddess to demon to vampire. When Lilith was figured as a demon or vampire, her divinity was overshadowed by a sense of horror, by sexual fascination and frenzied loss of control. In the process of her transformation, then, she lost some of her numinous mystery, awe and fascination as they are represented in her potential for both good and evil and in her image as a source of plenitude, satisfaction, and ecstatic spiritual power. Having been transformed into the negatively numinous object of fear and loathing, a warning to all women who overstep their bounds and to all men who let them, she came to represent not only a loss of control, but also a loss of spirituality.