That’s a good point Xofer...

I've been searching and it just seems like there’s no way around this myth being the Dark side of the Moon. (pictures in tribe photos)

The only way for me is to call on my hero Jung… So instead of war of the roses, we place Adam and Lilith in each man and woman.

Persephone, if you find something please share

www.dharma6.com/html/the_myth.html (from the article below with pictures.)

lilith.abroadplanet.com/Modern.php (here’s another site)


Lilith

According to the myth, God’s first attempt at creating humanity resulted in an androgynous being that was both male and female, joined as one. Could this be a symbol of the integrated personality of Jung, where the male Animus and the female Anima are joined in full cooperation? In the story, however, God thought twice about this model and eventually split the two halves, creating one in the shape of a man, (Adam) and another as a woman (Lilith). Both were said to have been formed from the dust of the earth, and should have been considered equals, but Adam chose to deny the equality of Lilith and strove instead to dominate her. It is here that the rift begins that has wounded both men and women through the ages.

As Jeffrey Smith analyzes it: “In psychological terms, he (Adam) identified with his own ego, and not with his full self; confronted with his Shadow/Deeper Self, he rejected it, or at least tried to subject it to the demands of his ego. Lilith's response was to fly away…(Adam, after all, lost one half of his own self.)”

When Lilith refuses Adam’s domination, she calls on the ineffable name of God and leaves him. One should note that the inverse was also true, for in leaving Adam Lilith also loses one half of her self. To my thinking, this separation is wonderfully reflected in Carl Jung’s psychology, where the personality has several aspects: The male side or Animus, the female side or Anima and the dark repressed side or Shadow. The work of “integration” according to Jung is to heal the separation between these aspects of the self and become a fully actuated person where each aspect is accorded equality. The story of Lilith is a perfect illustration of Jung’s “archetypal symbols” reflecting this basic human truth.

To continue with the myth, when Lilith flees Adam the Hebrew version of the story casts her in a dark light and shows her fleeing to a cave to mate with serpents and spawn a hundred demons each day. In Jungian terms I see this as the rejected Anima consorting instead with the Shadow, the repository of repressed, negative and undesired traits in the psyche. When God then fashions Eve from Adam’s rib, Lilith, in her agony, returns to prey upon the children of their union. Smith continues to assert: “If we return to our image of Adam as the ego and Lilith as the Deeper Self, then we find that the ego represses and drives into the Deeper Self what it cannot accept, and what it deems as illegitimate. And what is repressed rebounds on the ego in the form of the demonic, destroying what is acceptable and "legitimate" (symbolized by the offspring of Eve).” -- Jeffrey Smith: www.lilitu.com/lilith/lilit.htm

To my mind the myth of Lilith appears to be an amalgam of the Anima and Shadow, and may be a powerful archetype for a man who has failed, by other means, to re-integrate his Anima into the self. It is as if the Anima then flees him, as in the traditional telling of the tale, and consorts instead with the Shadow. The resulting union creates a powerful figure that returns to force itself upon him in his sleep, charged with the power and psychic energy of a sexually dominant being. This being, in its alliance with the Shadow, is now fully capable of subduing his Animus, or male egocentric self, rendering it powerless and paralyzed, while the union is forced upon him.

I certainly don't want to discredit Jung here at all...his archetypical androgynous psychology is an essential key to integrating all of the myths into the psyche, and it is a huge part of the whole. I think Jung was a genius!

But, for a moment, I'd like to step back to support some of my previous posts and claims about the patriarchal religions and cultures who tried to suppress or destroy the Goddess's (under many names and guises) culture, civilization, myths, artifacts, and almost all remnants of Her, but thanks to clever archaeologist's like Marija Gimbutas PhD., they were not thorough enough. And I've found a few bits to share with you that can hopefully support the alternative and suppressed myths from pre-patriarchal times... run it through your own truth filter and see if it works for you...The main myth here I'm focussing on for now is the myth surrounding Lilith, Adam and Eve...

I will quote some intriguing info below, which was taken from an article called Isis, Lilith, Gello: Three ladies of Darkness, by Alejandro Arturo Gonza'lez Terriza:

ccat.sas.upenn.edu/~humm/To...Gylu.html

There is information in this article that I don't support or agree with, some of it is biased and he does compare some of the orthodox scriptures to his own beliefs about them...they are 'His' opinions. Plus, the main reason for the article is to compare the three Goddess's magickal ability, opposition and disobedience of divine law over a monotheistic and all powerful God. Good topic, but not exactly what I was looking for, but here's a few quotes that I do ( mostly) agree with, though none of this really should be taken at literal value:

"Adam and Lilith were not a happy couple. When he wished to lie with her, Lilith alleged that the recumbent position he wanted was denigrating to her. «Why must I lay beneath you?» -she asked-, «I also was made from dust, and am therefore your equal». As Adam tried to force her, Lilith, in a rage, uttered the magical name of God, rose into the air and left him. (Theatrical and magnificent fleeing which recalls the end of Euripides' Medea).

Adam complained to God: «I have been deserted by my helpmeet». God made at once a command, formed by angels Senoy, Sansenoy and Semangeloph, and sent them with the order of bringing Lilith back. The angels toured the orb, and found her at last beside the Red Sea, a region plentiful of lascivious demons: Lilith matched them happily, and gave birth to lilim (children made in her image) at a more than hundred per day ratio. «Come back to Adam without delay» -the angels told her- «or else we'll drown you!». Lilith asked: «How can I come back to Adam and live like an honest housewife after my stay beside the Red Sea»

Lilith story is specially appealing, as it's something like «the Black Book of Genesis», the true story of what happened to first man and woman in the beginning. While Eve admits that she's inferior to man and submit her fate to him, Lilith considers herself superior, and distances herself from his authority, fleeing from Paradise, and getting so free also of the terrible curse of Fall. While Adams gets mortal and perish, Lilith remains immortal for ever; and, opposite Eve, who obeys the double male authority of her husband and her Father, and which has been made secondarily from male flesh, Lilith, which is as ancient (or more) than Adam, refuses to accept machismo (or phalocratism, as they say in Greek) in any way: not only the missionary position that her husband applies for, but even the commands of God through his angels. In spite of the boasts of these, she stands still, and, though with statutory restraints, keeps on with her temptation job.

Anyway, leaving aside the feminine and even feminist value of this indomitable woman, the most fascinating trait of this story is, as far as I can see, just what it doesn't say: the secret that allows Lilith flee from Paradise and, later on, to even disobey the divine commands. The question is: how did Lilith know the hidden name of God, that name which God didn't want to reveal to Moses, shielding himself with paraphrases (Ex. 3, 14), and which is so important in Kabbalah: the name of infinite power which was written in Solomon's Seal, according to the Talmud, and which gave him power above all the demons? "

***Another important side note to this myth is the importance of language differences of the past and the current use of the word 'demon', which was once spelled 'daemon' and did not have the evil or malevolent associations that is implied in the use of the word today.

The below information is quoted from a book that I would highly recommend called:
The Myth of the Goddess -- Evolution of an Image, by Anne Baring and Jules Cashford.

"The Genesis myth is unique in that it takes the life-affirming images of all the myths before it - the garden, the four rivers, the Tree of Life, the serpent and the world parents - and makes of them an occasion not of joy and wonder, but of fear, guilt, punishment and blame. And what or whom is blamed but precisely the woman and the serpent, incarnations, previously, of the goddess and her power, bestowers then not of death but of life eternal.
As we have seen in the mythologies of Mesopotamia, Egypt and Greece, the tree, with the serpent beside or entwined around it, was the Tree of Life of the great Mother Goddess, and the serpent was her manifest form in time, ever dying and ever renewed like the moon, which slips from its shadow as the serpent slips from its skin.

If Eve was charged with bringing death, sin and sorrow into the world, Lilith was demonic from the moment of her creation. Lilith arose out of an attempt to make sense of the difference between the two creation myths in Genesis, since in the first story, in Genesis I, male and female are created equally and together, while in the second story, in Genesis 3, the female is created after the male and out of his body. In the simple logic of legend, Lilith was the first wife, who was worse than the second. Yet the figure chosen to play this role in Judaic legend was originally Sumerian, the bright Queen of Heaven, whose name "Lil" meant 'air' or 'storm'. She was often an ambiguous presence inclined to 'wild, uninhabited places', also associated with Inanna in her dark aspect and her sister, Ereshkigal, Queen of the Underworld.

In both orthodox and apocryphal literature, Lilith's shadow falls on women as far forward in time as the fifteenth century AD, when, [...] thousands were accused of copulating with demons, killing infants and seducing men - of being, in a word, witches."

(Example given from the Apocryphal Book of Ben Sirach):

"Give me any plague, but the plague of the heart:
Any any wickedness, but the wickedness of a woman.

I had rather dwell with a lion and a dragon,
Than to keep house with a wicked woman.

All wickedness is but little to the wickedness of a woman:
Let the portion of a sinner fall upon her.

Of the woman came the beginning of sin,
And through her we all die."
(Sir. 25:13, 16, 19, 24)

**End of book quoted material**
< Just lovely, isn't it? >


Here is the agnostic view of the Adam and Eve story called The Genesis Factor, by Stephan A. Hoeller
www.webcom.com/~gnosis/genesis.html

Quote from the article:

"Nowhere is Eve's superiority and numinous power more evident than in her role as Adam's awakener. Adam is in a deep sleep, from which Eve's liberating call arouses him. While the orthodox version has Eve physically emerge from Adam's body, the Gnostic rendering has the spiritual principle known as Eve emerging from the unconscious depths of the somnolent Adam. Before she thus emerges into liberating consciousness, Eve calls forth to the sleeping Adam in the following manner, as stated by the Gnostic Apocryphon of John:

I entered into the midst of the dungeon which is the prison of the body. And I spoke thus: "He who hears, let him arise from the deep sleep." And then he (Adam) wept and shed tears. After he wiped away his bitter tears he spoke, asking: "Who is it that calls my name, and whence has this hope come unto me, while I am in the chains of this prison?" And I spoke thus: "I am the Pronoia of the pure light; I am the thought of the undefiled spirit. . . .  Arise and remember . . . and follow your root, which is I . . . and beware of the deep sleep."


***Hopefully this information and examples of some excellently researched material is enough to show how false information and a myth which is literally conceived can create a prejudice and become a doctrine that declares itself wrongly to be divinely revealed truth. Like I said, everyone is free to make up their own mind, but I know my choice.