Candle and the flame : poems / by George Sylvester Viereck [electronic text]

QUEEN LILITH

LILITH (or Lailith), "the first wife of Adam," was the sister of Lucifer. She was a goddess among the Phœnicians. The Bible, however, speaks of her only once as the spirit of the night. In the tangled skein of religions she was lost, until rediscovered by Goethe and the English Pre-Raphaelites. But even unresuscitated by the poets, Lilith would have reasserted her fascination. For Lilith, like Lucifer, is immmortal. She lives in the heart of every woman, as Lucifer lives in the heart of every man. The Hebrews speak of Lucifer as "the Other." Lilith is always "the Other Woman." One man's Eve is another man's Lilith…

"Whence springs that hunger beyond the fleshThat only the flesh can appease in me?"

Lilith, like Lucifer, is a rebel. Not vice attracts her, but indomitable intellectual curiosity. She transcends sex even in her sex aberrations. By this sign Lucifer knows her for his kindred; by this sign she acclaims him brother.

"I hunted thee where the Ibis nods,From the Brocken's crag to the Upas Tree…"

We may presume that Lilith took part in strange phallic rites in Egypt; in Germany she was an enchantress paying homage to Lucifer at the Witches' Sabbath; and in

Java, transformed into a tree, she gave monstrous dreams and death to the wayfarer.

"My lonesomeness was as great as God's,When He cast us out from His Holy See."

Lucifer and his sister Lilith alone of all the angels were the peers of God. When He had hurled brother and sister to bottomless perdition, He must have been lonesome indeed, surrounded only by the servile throng of meek submissive angels. Perhaps the reconstructed Roman Catholic heaven, with the addition of the Trinity and Mary, Queen of Angels, was the product of the solitude of the Almighty. Unable to find a companion, He trisected Himself, and, having lost Lilith, borrowed a woman of human birth to reign in His kingdom. This is not theology, but what may be presumed to be Lucifer's interpretation of celestial evolution.

("How art thou fallen, Gabriel! ")

To Lucifer's mind it is not he that is fallen, but the angels, once his mates, who humbly bow to Jehovah. The idea of the Sons of Heaven telling beads and murmuring earth-made prayers in honour of a lowly Jewish maid must seem the climax of humiliation and abasement to this Uranian rebel.