Living Myth: Lilith’s Flight

by Tom Jacobs

Intro
I recently gave a Lilith workshop in Los Angeles, and walked the attendees through the nine stages of the archetype. I remarked that rage is only one stage of the archetypal journey (#5), yet we’ve been imprinted culturally to believe that it’s the end of Lilith’s journey – it’s where Lilith always lands, has to land. As a result, our understanding of what it means to live her story is limited, leading to an anemic ability to imagine and understand what she means to us.

I’m focused on Lilith these days, and my work with her is geared to reframe the dialogue on this archetype of the natural, wild feminine. Each time I work with a client and each time one of them reads the natal true Black Moon Lilith report I offer, it’s reflected that I’m re-imaging Lilith for them. Re-imagining her, but perhaps more accurately, showing them how they can re-imagine their lives-as-Lilith in ways that honor who they really are, that show them it’s okay to love themselves for being who they are…even if others haven’t. We have been taught to fear the wild feminine, and to hate ourselves if it shows up in and as us. I’ve decided that it’s time to dip into some historical revision, if history is the story of what happened as told by the people who won the battles.

In this second installment of Lilith’s myth as we live it, our focus is on Lilith’s departure from home in order to maintain her autonomy.

The Story
Back to Genesis and commentaries on it from the Hebrew tradition: God creates Adam male and female. After a while, Adam realizes and tells God that he’s lonely – every other animal has a mate but him. God splits Adam into two, male and female – Adam and Lilith. Adam’s happy because he has someone to play with, right? Right. Well, right…sort of. Okay, right, except that she won’t do what he says. She insists on being treated as an equal, since they were made at the same time of the same stuff. When it’s clear that Adam will have none of this equality business, she splits. She heads off to the edge of the Red Sea and plays with the spirits who congregate there, enjoying herself, enjoying her (pro-)creativity.

Can You Put Up With Inequality?
A better question is, Do you choose to put up with it? Not everyone living Lilith stories splits. Not everyone heads out the door for some splendid, imagined future. It involves stepping out into the great unknown, and either trusting life and the universe that you’re taken care of or, perhaps more often, trusting that your instincts will get you by. And then still others of us don’t trust anything, we just head out because anything’s better than de facto slavery.

Leaving Home Stinks
For those of us who do leave, I can’t emphasize enough the importance of processing the feelings engendered by leaving the place you know you belong…in, or maybe to. Lilith’s natural other half is Adam, and leaving the situation is extremely difficult. It’s her home. It’s where she belongs, where she knows she belongs. It’s not that Adam’s her home, but that the place they create together and share is.

The tension that arises in a person facing the prospect of being dominated or flinging the self out into the great unknown needs resolution. There are of course times when leaving is the only answer. They’re when we’re threatened with violence, when power plays develop as others attempt to control us, to make us into some kind of manageable version of human that is, in fact, a little less than human.

When I tell Lilith’s story, I make her destination sound great. She’s free!, I say, free to do as she pleases! She’s left the dull-witted would-be oppressor and creates freedom for herself, finds great and appropriate outlets for expressing her true nature, and an authentic connection to her sexual nature! And then I remind people how difficult it is to leave the place you know you belong in, and to. It’s not to play a trick, far from it. I do this because when in bad Lilith-related situations, we glorify freedom, and we can’t imagine how hard it will actually be to leave what we’ve known as our true home. Honest work with your Lilith chart configuration & history needs to acknowledge that there are times when both options can cause us pain – we have to know what we’re getting into if we’re going to make such a major change. Stepping into these situations with our eyes less than fully open is what gets us caches of unresolved emotional debris, the processing and release of which is the point of my work with Lilith, with you-as-Lilith.

But wait a minute – do we really have to leave? In all sorts of relationships we face moments that seem forks in the road. A trick is to learn to distinguish between what are and what are not threats to our autonomy, attempts to in some way lord over or enslave us. Those of us with histories of living Lilith’s stories, or certain brands of negative Aries, Virgo, Libra, Scorpio, or Pisces stories for that matter, might exhibit knee-jerk reactions against anything that even remotely appears to fence us in.

Whether we leave or stay, in any given situation in our lives that resonates with Lilith’s departure from Adam, there might be stuff left over to process.

If We Left
We might carry pain from choosing to cut ourselves off from home, where we know we belong. Even when it stinks, is painful, brings us to know abuse and violence, home can still be comforting. We tend to stick to what’s familiar, and removing from our lives a giant chunk of it called “home,” stepping out into the proverbial wilderness of the world, can be difficult. If we left, we might carry a rootlessness, a restlessness because what we felt was home is no longer an option for us, no longer welcomes us.

What feels like home will change. Perhaps it’s a family of origin home we chose to leave, perhaps the home we made with a first love. Whatever the home it was, the necessity of our departure automatically contributes to a revision of what an appropriate home is. Home will never be home again, while at the same time we learn new ways of and reasons for creating a home. I suspect that many people living Lilith stories learn how to make their home wherever they happen to be, as their relationship with self can be strengthened incalculably by honoring self enough to step out of a bad situation to make a better one somewhere else, even if no particulars can be imagined at the time of departure.

If We Stayed
Perhaps we realized that we weren’t in truth as threatened as we at first felt. Perhaps our mates, partners and parents opened to listen to us, and to honor our need for autonomy after all. Or, perhaps we stepped back from the great unknown of the proverbial wilderness of the world (please tell me if I’m not using enough clichés this month), weren’t ready to step into the unknown. Or maybe we chose not to stand up for ourselves after all. If this is the case (and I can tell you that at some point in the life of those of us living Lilith stories we did this), the work is in (if you’re not in immediate danger now) forgiving yourself for stepping back from the edge, for choosing not to venture out into the great unknown.

There is nothing more damaging than self-hate. The hate of others in no way compares – and we open the door for them to hate us if we hate ourselves. We can no longer afford to cycle through the Piscean Age control-based political, philosophical and religious doctrines that were devised to keep us from knowing and loving ourselves. To keep us from being able to see the wonderful being each of us is. If you didn’t leave, and you in some way regret it, or wonder what it would have been like if you’d left, accept that it was what you were ready for at that time. It fit your journey, you needed to see more of the situation, you needed to choose one more time to stay where it wasn’t good, but it was at least familiar…

And now you know more than you did then. If you encounter the power plays again, you’ll know better what to do. I like to invite people to see how to make choices from a place of self-love, to ask themselves which option makes their hearts expand and which makes them contract. Which potential result brings them more alive, and which seems to take life out of them? When phrased that way, it makes everything seem so simple, doesn’t it? The reality is that choosing new behaviors and breaking habits isn’t easy, especially when we’re talking the protection rackets we’ve manufactured in our psyches to make sure we avoid repeating the kind of deep emotional pain Lilith-as-us can carry. And yet we all have choice in each moment, and we are all exploring just what it is to be incarnated on earth, spirit having a human experience, one relationship, experience and choice at a time.

Stay tuned next month for a third segment exploring Lilith, “Lilith and Seduction,” looking at this major aspect of the shadow side of this archetype from the inside out, taking it apart to see what’s really going on.

Resources
· This month I’m offering Cosmic Path readers 20% off a 60- or 90-minute consultation – explore how Lilith is active in your life and learn to re-write your own history.
· The new true Black Moon Lilith natal report is a tour through the myth, archetype and astrology of Lilith as she is configured in your personal birth chart – your house, sign, aspects and upcoming important transits and progressions. Mention that you found me via the Cosmic Path and get it for $23, $4 off.
· The recording of my recent “Lilith: Healing the Wild” workshop is available as an MP3 via secure download. It explores the myth and the archetype, and puts Lilith in context with the patriarchal war on nature while including 5 attendees’ charts as examples. Get $2 off when you mention the Cosmic Path, making the cost $14.
Details for each are on my website, www.tdjacobs.com.