When God Was a Woman Part 2: Lilith — The Untamed First Woman
Once, long before the rise of the patriarchal gods, the world worshipped a Mother. She was the source of life, death, and renewal — the cyclical force of nature itself. She was called by many names: Inanna, Isis, Hathor, Ishtar, Asherah — yet all were faces of the same great Goddess. She embodied creation, sexuality, fertility, wisdom, and destruction — the balance of all things.
In the earliest civilizations, the Divine Feminine was not a passive or secondary principle — she was the principle. Temples were built in her honor, priestesses were her mediators, and sexuality was seen as sacred, not shameful. Divinity was not distant or abstract; it was embodied, relational, and alive within the rhythms of the earth and the body.
Then the patriarchal religions rose — the gods of sky and thunder replaced the goddesses of earth and womb — and something shifted. The feminine was split in two: the pure and the fallen, the virgin and the whore, the mother and the witch. The feminine power that once united nature and spirit was cast out, demonized, and silenced. What could not be controlled was redefined as dangerous. What could not be possessed was renamed sinful.
Yet she never disappeared. She went underground — into myth, into the subconscious, into our dreams. She survived in the shadows, in story and symbol, in the places the official narratives could no longer reach.
Every woman who has ever felt too much, wanted too much, or spoken truth into silence — carries her. Every man who has longed to reconcile power with the heart — feels her absence. This loss is not abstract; it lives in bodies, relationships, grief, and longing.
When we speak of returning to the Goddess, we're not speaking of replacing one hierarchy with another. We're speaking of wholeness — of remembering that creation was once balanced, when the sacred included instinct, desire, grief, and shadow alongside love and light.
To remember Her, we must meet her many faces — those who were banished, distorted, or forgotten. One of the first among them was Lilith, and her story begins not in exile, but in equality.
In the chapters ahead, we will explore the untamed spirit of Lilith — her exile, her chaos, and the grief she carries — and learn how to meet her within ourselves. We will see what it looks like when the shadow of the feminine is denied, and how we can reclaim, integrate, and honor that power in our lives, preparing us to understand the continuing story of Eve in Part 3.
Lilith: The Untamed First Woman
Before Eve there was Lilith.
Adam's first companion, born of the same earth, breathing the same dust. Equal in form, equal in voice. It is said she would not kneel, nor be possessed. When Adam demanded she lie beneath him, she spoke the ineffable Name of God and rose from the garden in a storm of wind and wings. Some say she was exiled. Others say she left. Either way, her refusal became her crime.
But Lilith is not only the story of disobedience.
She carries something far older than the patriarchal imagination that later named her "demon." Her roots reach into humanity's earliest attempts to understand life, death, sexuality, and power.
Long before Eden, in the cradle of Mesopotamia (c. 3000 BCE), the lilītu moved through the desert winds — unseen, unpredictable, sometimes protective, sometimes perilous. They were blamed for infertility, infant death, and men's nocturnal desires. They shared the liminal space with Lamashtu, the lion-headed demoness who haunted childbirth, and with Inanna herself — goddess of love and war, whose power was both creative and destructive.
The ancient world understood what we have forgotten: that feminine power was never purely benevolent or purely evil. It was ambivalent, raw, liminal — the force that both births and devours, heals and destroys. Lilith and her sister spirits embodied this truth until patriarchal imagination could no longer hold the paradox. Then ambivalence became threat. The untamed became demonic. And what was once necessary to life itself was recast as rebellion against it.
Perhaps they were never enemies of the feminine, but her disowned aspects: the parts too raw, too uncontrollable, to integrate within ordinary life. Even before the rise of patriarchal gods, humanity struggled with this dark mirror of the feminine — her hunger, her chaos, her power to both enchant and undo. It was easier to name her a spirit, a witch, a demon, than to recognize that she lived within us.
Lilith isn't merely a reaction to patriarchy; she is a vessel for something older and more existential — the human struggle with the dark feminine itself: the instinctive and ambivalent forces of creation and destruction that pulse through both nature and psyche. The womb that births and the mouth that devours. The wind that brings breath and the storm that tears roofs from homes. She represents what happens when power cannot be neatly divided into good or evil.
As patriarchy solidified, she was repackaged — no longer wind-spirit or night-mother, but the fallen woman, the unhinged one, the cautionary tale.
Her boundary became rebellion; her sovereignty, sin.
Was she exiled? Or did she leave? The stories disagree.
Some say she was cast out. Others say she chose freedom over submission. Either way, her refusal became her crime. Fear followed her across the threshold. Three angels were sent to bring her back; she would not return. The myth says a thousand of her children died each day — punishment for her defiance — and that ever after she would haunt the nights, seeking vengeance for her loss.
But perhaps the real vengeance was this: to make her name mean "demon." To turn the woman who would not kneel into a warning for every woman who might. The spirit once moving through wind and wilderness was recast as danger itself — the devourer of infants, the seductress of men.
Lilith was no longer the one who left. She became the screen for every fear, every desire, every ungoverned force the world refused to hold. She absorbed what society could not metabolize.
Perhaps Lilith was never the villain or the victim, but the mirror that forces us to look at what we fear most: the power to create, to destroy, and to choose freedom even when it costs us belonging.
Lilith in the Room
Her spirit still moves among us, though we may not name her.
She comes through:
The woman whose anger finally cracks the veneer of professionalism — sick and tired of inefficient systems that waste her brilliance
The woman drawn again into the old dance with her ex, lulled by the illusion of safety in returning to what once felt like home
The woman who feels perpetually too much, regulating herself through others' approval, still waiting to be chosen
The mother who pours her grief into caretaking for everyone else before tending to her own emptiness
The daughter whose "behaviours" are corrected before her pain is understood
The stillborn girl whose brief life asks us to honour both love and loss, not as opposites but as teachers
The man who drinks or smokes his rage, ashamed of the tenderness that aches for home
The son who witnesses his mother's quiet resignation and vows never to need anyone that deeply
The lovers who suppress their desire beneath the weight of doctrine and fear
The woman who hesitates to set boundaries, fearing that self-care will make her the great abandoner
These are all faces of Lilith — the denied, the exiled, the unapologetically alive.
She reminds us that every boundary that costs us love, every truth that risks exile, and every shadow that surfaces in the work of healing may not be destruction at all — but a necessary act of remembering what freedom feels like.
Men carry this exile too — taught to suppress their own tenderness, their own need, their own inner softness. When we speak of reclaiming Lilith, we speak to all who have learned to fear their own wholeness.
The Grief of the Feminine
Even as we honor her, we recognize the ache she carries — and the ache she leaves behind.
This grief runs deep because women have been walking this paradox for millennia: navigating autonomy and belonging, love and freedom, creation and destruction. Lilith shows us that choice has always carried a cost, and that cost is borne in the body, in the heart, in the very lineage of the feminine.
That's the heart of Eve's arc (which we will get to more fully in part 3): taken from Adam's rib, created to stay, to anchor the relationship, to bear the consequences of choice and obedience — and yet, in fulfilling that "purpose," she is saddled with shame, blame, and the weight of grief that comes from trying to navigate a world that has already punished Lilith for claiming freedom.
It's almost unbearable if you think about it: Lilith shows us the cost of leaving to preserve selfhood; Eve shows us the cost of staying and trying to love while carrying all the consequences of societal and divine expectation.
This grief is not merely personal. It is generational, structural, deeply internalized — which is why so many women feel that quiet ache of being "never enough," or constantly balancing desire and duty, autonomy and love.
That's why it resonates so deeply where people carry shame for being too much or not enough — where Lilith's refusal and Eve's endurance echo together in the psyche. These are not individual failures, but ancient tensions still seeking resolution.
Lilith's fire is still within us, her wings brushing against our own limits, reminding us that the dark, wild, untamed feminine is not to be feared or silenced — but to be met, understood, and integrated.
To honor Lilith is to stand in right relationship with her — not to tame her, nor to surrender to her entirely. It is to let her teach us where we've betrayed our own nature. To meet her is to remember that sovereignty without compassion becomes isolation, and compassion without sovereignty becomes martyrdom. She is the breath that breaks silence and the silence that restores breath.
Fear her if you must — but fear her wisely.
Fear her in the way you fear the sea before wading in.
Let that fear become reverence rather than avoidance.
For when Lilith rises within us, she does not ask us to destroy — she asks us to remember.
And when the storm quiets, when the fire dims to embers, what remains is the question that will carry us forward:
Meeting Lilith
How do we reclaim her without becoming her exile?
To reclaim Lilith is to bring awareness to the ways we have silenced, denied, or restrained our own chaos, desire, and boundaries. It is not a dramatic rebellion, but a conscious practice of self-acknowledgment and integration.
To integrate Lilith is not to flee into the wilderness, nor to tame her into domesticity. It is to recognize that her chaos lives in us — not as destruction, but as the sacred "no" that makes our "yes" meaningful. Not as abandonment, but as the boundary that allows true intimacy. Not as rage, but as the voice that finally speaks truth after lifetimes of silence.
To reclaim Lilith safely is to learn what she could not: that we can say no and still belong.
It begins small:
The moment you notice resentment building and speak it before it becomes rage
The boundary you set with kindness before you're forced to set it with cruelty
The desire you name aloud instead of burying until it turns to bitterness
The rest you take before your body demands it through collapse
Sometimes reclaiming Lilith means leaving. But more often, it means learning to speak before silence becomes unbearable. To feel before numbness sets in. To claim your truth before resentment makes the choice for you.
Lilith could only choose exile or submission. But you can do what the myth could not: you can integrate her.
Not by taming her chaos, but by giving it a home inside you.
Not by silencing her voice, but by letting it speak through yours.
Not by banishing her wildness, but by weaving it into your daily life.
She doesn't need you to leave. She needs you to stay.
To heal the wound of Lilith is to remember that what was demonized was once divine.
From Demon to Divine: Reclaiming Shadow as Sacred
Having named her presence and traced her influence through our bodies, choices, and relationships, we now turn toward the ways Lilith continues to speak. She communicates through symbol, ritual, rhythm, and daily practice — through the quiet gestures where we choose truth over self-betrayal.
Meeting her in these ways allows us to embody what was once feared, and to hold it with reverence rather than shame.
This reclamation looks like:
Reintegrating anger and desire as holy forces of creation, not destruction
Learning to say "no" as an act of self-respect, not rebellion
Reclaiming the body as temple and oracle, not object or burden
Restoring equality in love — sacred partnership rooted in mutual power, not hierarchy
Shadow integration: meeting exiled aspects of self with compassion, not shame
Returning to cyclical living — honoring moon phases, blood cycles, and natural rhythms instead of linear productivity
In lived experience, Lilith's reclamation sounds like:
"I ended the relationship when my voice was no longer heard."
"I stopped apologizing for taking up space."
"I refused to make myself smaller for love."
"I let myself feel the rage I'd been swallowing for years — and it didn't destroy me."
"I chose myself, even though it cost me approval."
These are not acts of destruction. They are acts of devotion — to the self that was always holy, always whole, always worthy of being fully alive.
Symbols and Sacred Imagery
Lilith speaks through symbol and dream, through body and instinct. These images are not decorative — they are doorways into remembrance.
The Moon — especially the dark moon, representing mystery, intuition, and inner descent. The phase when nothing is visible, yet everything is gestating.
The Owl — wisdom of the night, clear sight in the dark. The ability to see what others cannot or will not.
The Serpent — transformation, kundalini energy, and forbidden knowledge. The power that rises from the root, that sheds what no longer serves.
The Desert — exile and self-discovery. The place where you meet yourself without distraction, without performance.
The Doorway — thresholds between worlds, the power to choose one's own way. Standing at the edge of what was and what could be.
Finding Lilith in the Sky and the Chart
Lilith is not only a myth or symbol — she also lives in the language of astrology.
Where symbols speak to the psyche, astrology shows us where these archetypal forces move within us.
The Moon is Lilith's closest companion.
She governs instinct, memory, emotional truth, the body's rhythms, and what we carry unconsciously. The Moon holds what is felt before it is spoken — and what is often silenced in order to belong.
In astrology, Lilith appears most clearly through the lunar points — especially Black Moon Lilith.
This point marks where we have learned to suppress, exile, or distort our raw truth in order to survive. It shows where desire, anger, sexuality, or autonomy were once punished, shamed, or made dangerous — and where reclamation is now possible.
To find Lilith in your chart is to locate the place where your "no" was once unacceptable — and where your sovereignty now wants to be restored.
You may notice Lilith themes in your life through:
Patterns of being labeled "too much" or "too intense"
Cycles of self-silencing followed by explosive truth
Fear of abandonment when setting boundaries
A deep longing for freedom paired with grief around belonging
Anger that feels ancient, disproportionate, or difficult to contain
Your Moon sign shows how you feel.
Lilith shows where feeling became dangerous.
Together, they map the terrain of emotional exile — and the path home.
Working consciously with lunar cycles — especially the dark moon — allows Lilith's wisdom to surface gently rather than through rupture.
This is not about unleashing chaos, but about listening before the body or psyche is forced to scream.
Lilith does not ask to be worshipped.
She asks to be witnessed.
Rituals of Remembering Lilith
Reclamation requires practice. These rituals are invitations — not prescriptions — to help you remember Lilith, and yourself.
Write a letter from Lilith's voice: Sit quietly and ask: Where am I refusing to play small? What would it feel like to take all the space I need? Let her voice come through your pen without censoring, without softening. She has been silent long enough.
Fire rituals: Write what no longer serves you — the beliefs, the performances, the accommodations that cost you your truth. Burn them safely and watch the smoke carry them away. What you release makes room for what wants to return.
Dance in candlelight: Put on music that makes your body want to move. Turn off the lights, light candles, and let yourself move without choreography, without performance. Return to instinct, sensuality, and the wisdom of the body that has always known.
Moon bathing: Go outside during the dark moon — when she is invisible but present. Sit in her darkness and ask: What am I gestating? What is waiting to be born? Let the silence speak.
Say "no" without apology: Practice this small sovereignty. When someone asks for your time, your energy, your yes — and you don't want to give it — simply say no. No explanation. No justification. Just the clean boundary of your own truth.
Voice reclamation: Sing. Scream into a pillow. Speak the truths you've been holding. Let your voice take up space in the air. Your throat remembers what it means to be free.
Blood rituals or symbolic red offerings: If you menstruate, honor your cycle as sacred. If you don't, use red fabric, red flowers, or red paint as symbolic offering. Honoring the cycles of creation and release, birth and death, the power that flows through all things.
Journal Prompts:
If Lilith could speak through me right now, unfiltered and unafraid, what would she say?
Where have I confused "keeping the peace" with betraying myself?
What would change if I believed my anger was information, not a character flaw?
If my desire could take up all the space it needed, what would it reach for?
What am I still apologizing for that was never mine to apologize for?
The Modern Lilith
Lilith is not in the past. She walks among us now.
She is:
The woman who says no to burnout culture, conformity, and overgiving
The woman who chooses truth over being liked
The woman who channels rage into art, activism, or creation
The woman who redefines love as mutual freedom, not mutual ownership
The therapist who refuses to pathologize a client's anger
The mother who teaches her daughter that her body belongs to her alone
The artist who creates from the raw, unfiltered depths
The witch — the one who remembers the old ways, who trusts her intuition, who refuses to be tamed
All of these are archetypal echoes of Lilith reclaiming her voice.
And when you stand in your truth, when you honor your boundaries, when you speak what needs to be spoken — you are her, and she is you.
If you feel the weight of this lineage — the tension between freedom and belonging, the grief that lives in the body, the anger that never had language — you are not alone, and you are not broken.
These patterns are not personal failures; they are inherited stories seeking integration. Through inner child work, ancestral healing, or one-to-one therapeutic spaces, it is possible to meet these archetypal forces with care rather than fear.
Integration does not mean choosing Lilith over love, or love over sovereignty. It means learning how to hold both — to reclaim your voice, your boundaries, and your wholeness.
Closing Affirmation
My darkness is not dangerous — it's divine.
My anger is not destructive — it's the voice of what matters.
My desire is not shameful — it's the compass pointing home.
My sovereignty is not selfish — it's the foundation of real love.
I am not too much. I have never been too much.
I am Lilith, untamed and unashamed.
And I am free.
Transition to Eve
Having held Lilith, we turn to Eve — the first woman of the Old Testament, written in the first millennium BCE. Where Lilith left to preserve selfhood and freedom, Eve will teach us what it costs to choose belonging.
Neither path is free of grief.
Neither is wrong.
It is the continuation of the feminine story — the long ache of autonomy and belonging pulling against one another across generations.
In Part 3, we will explore:
Eve's story of relational devotion, presence, and endurance
How her experiences reflect the cost of staying and navigating societal and ancestral expectations
What we can reclaim from her story for healing and integration alongside Lilith
Together, Lilith and Eve show us the spectrum of feminine experience — rebellion and endurance, chaos and steadiness, grief and wholeness.
