the midwife Lilith, or when the dragon wind cavorts in chaos

I haven't been writing here in the last month because I am exploring New Orleans, a bohemia that does not reside in cyberspace, rather in the intimate nooks and dirty corners of public squares, cafes, caberets, neighborhood bars, street corners and block parties.

Within the last year, I have felt a deep infinity for Artemis and Hekate. But Lilith hisses like a dragon wind through my life this past week and I suspect  She will right through Aries - if not longer.

On Saturday, I participated in an indie film and in preparation for the part, I invoke the energy of Lilith and Mary Magdalene (one and same to me) to portray the symbolic Great Harlot of Babylon in The Book of Revelations.

I had been told that Lilith was a demon, and so this invocation of her guidance would seem to be fraught with danger. (I've invoked Kuan Yin with miraculuous results before.) Yet I  was starting to sense that the power of Lilith had been subsumed into the false Madonna-whore dichotomy so prevalent today. And that Lilith was simply pure primal power.

Adam's first mate, she would not be subservient to his single-sided demands, so invoking the secret sound of God, she escaped through the wind and lives to this day in the ruins of cities legend says.

"In Greece Lilith is the goddess of the black moon (Artemis is the goddess of the full moon and Hecate is goddess of the crescent moon). In Greece she was also revered as a fertility goddess, helping to conceive children and grow crops. " - The Demonification and Sexuality of Lilith

So the other day, I tell the sculptors from the collective sipping coffee at Flora's, that I'm going by the British pronunciation of my name, or Eve-lyn (stress on Eve) in order to get in touch with the primordial feminine.

Herbie replies: "Well then, that's not Eve. You're Lilith."

Ah, yes, so right. It's New Orleans that's integrating the primal sediment and earthly voodoo of Lilith within my soul.  Thank you!

"Lilith has returned out of the collective consciousness. What is going on now, especially in the male psyche, is the reconcilation with Lilith. The first reponse of Man is to be terrified of her, for he sees her as She, the raw, savage, bitch-goddess, the destroyer of men, the embodiment of entropy. In the old Babylonian creation myth, the Enuma Elish, the great male god, Marduk, tore the Great Mother Goddess, Tiamat, apart to build the great masculine citadel of Babylon. But now as the Goddess draws back the dismembered pieces of her body to regain her ancient life, she is pulling Babylon to pieces. And so men fear the chaos of the feminine and seek always to assert order and control. In the return of Lilith, men fear the end of civilization and the death of all their great cities and industries. The Goddess has come back to take away all their toys of civilization away and dance gleefully in the ruins.

But these terrors of the masculine imagination are very much projections. We need in the wisdom of The Tibetan Book of the Dead to remember that this terrifying Goddess is really only the malevolent aspect of a beneficient diety; but to remember that, we have to follow the rest of the advice of the book to "recall our Buddha-nature," the consciousness that is greater than any personal ego.

...If we let go, then we can see that she returns as midwife to our own rebirth. Everything we think so imprtant, all the monuments of business civilization and technology, must come tumbling down, for they are external pagan idols which prevent us from seeing the even greater divinity locked up inside ourselves. As Lilith dances in the ruins, there is also a joy of remembering what other nature lay waiting inside her when Adam brushed past it to cast her to the ground and mount  her in the roar of a lion." - William Irwin Thompson,  Darkness and Scattered Light