Lilith, or the Black Moon

The effort against the totality is an effort that can lead to the capacity to love—WHITMONT (25)

THE STORY OF LILITH is the story of an incubus: Lilith, the black moon of astrologers, or Lilitu, she-devil, the nightmare of seamen and the spectre in mystical ecstasy.

Obviously, the psyche has other phantoms, but Lilith is the incarnation of woman's spirit. I believe that every woman might have a ‘spectre’, and, without wishing it, might have an internal, fixed, ‘individual’ history in contrast to that which defines her destiny and development.

What rôle, then, will this spectre play inside women? Is it not perhaps the spectre of fear that incites their rage and not always justifiable rebellion?

Lilith's story and her inflicted punishment on the grounds simply that she was a woman made of ‘other substance’, and on the point of growing into a sexual subject, causes me to reflect on the stories of many women. Have we not all, perhaps, more or less, been impeded in our growth and covered with shame through our emerging sexuality? Lilith, initially neither devil nor prostitute (only later did she become that), was punished because she came to the point of acting out all her sexuality, and in this way, according to patriarchal notions, becoming a whore.

The focal point is to consider Lilith's sacrifice and guilt, not so much to redeem her from a negative myth which, up till now, has been her prison, as to attempt to introduce, or prepare, a way to understand her insanity by the integration of her own incubus, that dark and insane goddess, the Black Moon, the great disquieting and mysterious yin.

Since ours is a new age, one of great change, in which a new awareness or knowledge is being born, good or evil as archetypal forces will be able to express themselves in increasingly diverse and individual ways. With Whitmont it can be said that evil might very well be Satanic or Dionysian, just as it might become the rationalisation of law; the good might well either be obedience to th