FALLEN FROM THE SKY: the return of Lilith and her children (1)

"You must have fallen from the sky
You must have shattered on the wrong way
You brought so many to the light
And now you're by yourself"(Glen Hansard)

versione italiana al link Caduta dal cielo

A few months ago, seventeen years after it was written, I published my university final essay, which consists of the translation and commentary of an unknown German poem, "The Children of Lilith" by Isolde Kurz. This German writer, who lived between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, does not stand out in the Olympus of German literature and is mostly known for her novels set in the Florentine Renaissance.

Fallen from the sky 

The work "The Children of Lilith" literally fell onto my head as I wandered confused and a bit discouraged in the meanders of the municipal library of Bonn, trying to understand why my initial project of an essay on Novalis was not proceeding as I had hoped. Evidently I had to come across Isolde and her little epos because, once I decided to devote myself to "The Children of Lilith", the work flowed smoothly and brought me maximum academic results.

Lilith the Black

The innovative scope of Isolde's poem consists above all in its original reinterpretation of the myth of the black Lilith, the container par excellence of all the dark sides of the Feminine. According to the myth, Lilith is the first woman of Adam, created with him and not later by his rib. Refusing to submit to the man, she stands as a symbol of the female rebellion and, in some versions of the myth, even comes to oppose God himself. 

Consequently, in a fundamentally masculine and patriarchal culture, she could only become a bloodthirsty and disturbing demon, repressed in the underworld of the collective unconscious. Even women are somehow afraid of her, because she represents the powerful, seductive and intimately revolutionary side that they are not able either to contact or even less to develop harmoniously in their personality.

Eve and Lucifer 

Isolde, while maintaining the strength and the eros of this figure, overturns completely its traditional meaning: from an inferior tempting demon Lilith becomes a bridge between man and divinity, a sort of spur for human evolution destined to take place at ever higher levels. On the other hand, in this epos, Eve is the creature of Lucifer, as an empty projection of the lowest male desires for lust and omnipotence. Adam, as we know, is not exactly a champion of integrity or willpower, so Eve has an easy time and Lilith can do anything but return to God's embrace.

We already know the rest of the story, although it is now clear that the original sin for Adam was not so much eating that terrible apple as rejecting his own divine origin and mission symbolized by his first love Lilith. The children of Eve and Adam are therefore a degraded race, a humanity that follows in the footsteps of their parents: slaves of sensuality, greedy and attached only to material goods, blind in hatred and lies.

Per prenotare  un colloquio  di Counseling contattatemi attraverso il mio sito  Le Vie per l'Armonia.