Dreaming The Dark: Illuminating The Corruption And Destruction of 'Lilith' (Part 1)

Art Credit: The Bone Collector/Cailleach Spiritweaver medicine doll, by The heART of Ritual

The year tips toward Samhain, when the old light gutters and the first whispers of winter stir in the hills. Mists lean low over the land, the fires burn a little longer at night, and the Cailleach begins to make her presence felt. It is a season of endings and beginnings, a time when the hidden world comes close. In such a turning, I find myself returning to an enquiry I first shared some years ago – circling shadow psychology, feminine consciousness, and the figures who carry those threads in myth – the enchantress of Autumn’s water and the elder-wise of Winter’s earth.

Back in the winter of 2016, I had what you might call a sudden stirring – a thought that had been gnawing at me quietly, waiting for its moment. I let it out into the world, more as a question than a conclusion. I wanted to ask: what has become of the shadow feminine, the part of consciousness most twisted, feared, and vilified? For the sake of this piece, I called that energy ‘Lilith’.

Lilith appears in many guises across the world’s earliest stories. In some strands she is demon, in others deity. Her roots reach back to the Epic of Gilgamesh. She slips into the Bible and the Talmud. In Jewish tradition she is feared as the first and fiercest of demons. Elsewhere she is remembered as the first woman, created alongside Adam – but where he was shaped from dust, she was fashioned from dust mixed with residue, filth, and the raw matter of night. From the beginning she was tied to the unseen, to what is both fertile and feared. Her name translates as “the night”, and she has long been linked to sensuality, freedom, terror, and the untamed threshold between creation and destruction.

And yet, here in Ireland, we too have our night women – the Cailleach, the bean sí, the shadowy keepers of thresholds who walk the liminal times of year. The resonance is not exact, but the flavour is familiar. Where other cultures name Lilith, we might hear the echo of the sovereignty goddess who will not bend, or the Cailleach who carries winter in her apron and makes no apology for it.

Truth told, I don’t tend to “do” deities as humanoid figures. I meet energies as flavours, tones, textures, archetypal signatures – more akin to plant or stone than person. If I were to place Lilith on the tongue, she would taste like dark raw chocolate laced with oak-smoked chilli, sharpened with wild mushroom, rooted in earth-red spice, chased with the shimmer of sacral-stone elixirs. Chocolate for the mingling of pleasure and bitterness, mushroom for underworld wisdom, chilli for danger’s heat, crystal essences for the shimmer of the unseen. A velvet flame that melts in the mouth, playful and dangerous, leaving an afterglow that lingers long after she has gone.

Metaphors aside, names do help us find our way into story. Yet what troubles me is how Lilith has been turned into a brand – a logo for movements, a buzzword for “sisterhoods" and "wild women”. In popular culture she is tamed, stripped down, sexualised, painted into a pallid cartoon. Scroll through the modern imagery and you will find her posed as a glossy temptress, all pouting lips and red dress, sold back to us as a Disney rebel emptied of her marrow (Ariel, yes!). It is like walking into a bakery and being handed a photocopy of a cake – it looks the part, but when you bite down, there’s nothing there.

So, let us slip beneath the surface. Samhain draws near, the threshold where the old year dies and the seed of the new one takes root. Winter follows, with its call to hibernate, to enter the realm of the elder, the wise one, the Cailleach. What better moment to ask what lies in the shadow and what wisdom we might glean from it?

For myself, I lean less into the name “Lilith”, because it comes to us already shaped by the machinery of religion – the very systems that demonised women, earth, and body. In the Catholic tradition especially, she became the demon woman blamed for the fall of man from grace – a mighty accusation for any one being to carry. Pre-Christian Ireland told a different story: women held equal standing in law and community. The Brehon Laws recognised women’s right to property, to divorce, to leadership.

Sovereignty goddesses tested and chose kings. The Cailleach herself was honoured not as demon, but as the very force that shaped land and season. These older stories carry the weight of truth I recognise.

That said, Lilith is a name rising again in women’s mouths across the world. Is this because her essence is felt, or because she serves as a convenient symbol of rebellion against patriarchal religion? Does the reverence draw from her actual energetic current, or is it more the allure of shaking a fist at the old order?

Depending on who tells it, Lilith is either the scorned woman cursed to bring plague, or the primal well of feminine wisdom – oracle, seer, untamed knowing. She is painted as chaos-bringer, blood-soaked warrior, the one who carries vendetta and death – and at the same time, remembered as the all-seeing oracle, the dark well of knowledge. These are not so far from the realities of women through history – blood, silencing, survival, resistance.

So yes, I recognise the teachings of Lilith, but when it comes to naming, I prefer to look through other windows – to the names carried in indigenous cultures, and for me, to the Cailleach of my own land. And so, just for the sheer devilment of it, let us turn the prism and examine how this figure has appeared across different traditions. In the next chapter of this four part series, we will look to the other names she has worn – and perhaps see what glimmers of her we still hold in our own stories.

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For those of you interested, here is a great list of her various indigenous names:

Ala (Nigerian) - The spirits of the dead find peace in her womb.

Ama No Uzumi (Japanese) - A Shinto ancestral Goddess of longevity, protection and psychic abilities.

Asase Yaa (West African) - She represents the womb of the earth from whom we are all birthed and will return to at our death.

Annis (Celtic) - Depicted as a frightening old woman, keeper of wisdom and old ways.

Badb (Irish) - The shape shifting warrior Goddess who symbolises the cycles of life and death, wisdom and inspiration.

Baubo (Greek) - This Bawdy Goddess uses female sexuality and laughter to raise a smile from Demeter,

Baba Yaga (Russian) - In Slavic mythology she is the wild old woman; the witch; and mistress of magic.

Cerridwen (Celtic) - The Keeper of the Cauldron. She represents the wisdom of old age.

Cailleach (Celtic) - Hag and destroyer Goddess who ruled over disease, death, wisdom, seasonal rites and weather magic.

Elli (Nordic) - Goddess of old age, she reminds us that we can remain strong in our years as she defeated the mighty Thor.

Grandmother Spiderwoman (Native American) - An old wise woman who gave man the sun and fire.

Ereshkigal (Sumerian) - As Goddess of the Underworld she is linked with death.

Estsanatlehi (Native American) - Goddess of life, death and immortality.

Hekate (Greek) - Goddess of the underworld and magic.

Hella (Nordic) - Ruler of Helheim, the land of the dead.

Inari (Japanese) - She guides and protects the spirits of the dead.

Kali (Indian) - Goddess of destruction and rebirth.

Kalma (Finnish) - Underworld Goddess of death and decay.

Lara (Roman) - Mother of the dead.

Libitina (Roman) - Goddess of funerals and pyres.

Lilith (Hebrew) - Adams first wife and guardian of women's mysteries.

Macha (Irish) - The wild woman who battles against injustice to woman and children.

Mórrígan (Celtic) - Crow Goddess who understands the nature of death.

Mother Holle (German) - The Wise Queen of Winter.

Nicneven (Celtic) - Goddess of Magic and winter.

Nephthys (Egyptian) - A funerary Goddess associated with death, magic and reincarnation.

Sedna (Inuit) - Mistress of life and death.

XochiQuetzal (Mexican) - Goddess of the cycles of life celebrated on the Day Of the Dead.

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