Lilith the Original Woman: Reclaiming the Wild Instinctual Nature of Woman
In the wild of the jungle there is an intoxicating romance exploding before our very eyes.
It is the dance of life itself, a harmonious orchestration of exquisitely abundant seeds bursting open from their depths, sourcing from the soil, and rising up to meet the warmth of the sun, coloring the world in an infinite variety of fragrances, textures, tastes, and sounds, feeding the bodies and souls of all life on our planet Earth.
There is an innate intelligence in the wild that can never be replicated no matter how many may have tried. It is life unconcerned with opinions, outcomes, projections, judgements, or any of the mental constructs that rule our world today.
Nature is guided by a deep desire, a deep love, a deep yearning to realize its true nature through its expression. The wild is the physical manifestation of freedom itself.
When a woman has remembered and reclaimed this inner wild… you feel it.
You sense it in her aura. She carries a quality of unpredictability, and this wildness stirs both fear and awe. She is guided by a force so deep that it requires plunging into the darkest human fears to access, and there she has discovered the love that obliterates all fear in its truth.
She is the most desired woman on this planet, and yet at once she is also the most demonized. She incites the projections and aversions of our very fear of the wild… of our very fear of life.
In ancient tantric traditions, this feminine essence is called Shakti, Goddess, the power that animates all of existence, and today many feminist storytellers have rewoven our original creation story to help us reclaim Her through an original woman who predates Eve: Lilith.
First appearing in Sumerian legends as a Goddess, and eventually a demon causing chaos, death, and evil in the world, Lilith embodies the darker nature of the feminine. As we as women are beginning to awaken to the power hidden within our dark nature, embracing our inner Lilith is essential on the path of becoming whole.
There are two tales of the creation of woman in Genesis, the first being that man and woman were created together as equals, and the second describing woman as being created by God only after man, plants, and animals, and that she was born out of Adam’s rib.
To reconcile this disparity, Jewish retellings called the first woman Lilith, and the second woman Eve. From this moment we can already recognize the way that a woman’s nature has been split into light and dark, good and evil, holy and demonic, our power separated from our purity.
Womb mystery schools describe these seeming polar energies within a woman as the red river and the white river. Our red river gifts us our passion, our deep pleasure, and our transformational powers. Our white river gifts us our purity, our innocence, and our surrender. We come into our wholeness as women when we equally embrace our white and red rivers, swirling them together into a pool of pink, the color of rose quartz, the feminine, and love.
For women, it is easy to see which river has been praised and which has been demonized, and how our psyches have been in conflict between “the virgin” and “the whore.” But until we allow ourselves the entirety of our human experience, we will never totally love.
We need both the virgin and the whore to be whole.
In a world that has praised the virgin and demonized the whore, it’s no wonder we feel at odds with the wild pulse of life.
Whether we view ourselves as more virginal or more promiscuous, it’s likely that at the root of our imbalance exists a deep need to more fully embrace Lilith. Perhaps we can recognize how our collective aversion to this primal essence that exists within us all keeps each of us imprisoned by reacting to the wild feminine or repressing her altogether.
In repression we may feel smaller, less powerful, less radiant in our womanhood by not allowing ourselves to express the fire of our sexual essence, hiding away in our white river of Eve. We may shrink, hide, quiet ourselves, try to be “agreeable,” and conform ourselves to the other in order to be received.
On the other extreme, perhaps we have acted out our red river, our Lilith energy, that we haven’t known how to embrace more deeply within us, leading with our sexual edge and becoming temptresses to men, hoping that the masculine energy outside of us can somehow validate the deep feminine longing we have not yet embraced within. We may attempt to dominate, control, rebel, and reject the other before they can reject us.
Whether we act out or repress her power, the key is to reclaim. And in reclaiming our own inner Lilith, our own inner “whore,” we must revisit and reframe her story as our own.
According to many Jewish retellings that came after Genesis, legend goes that Adam demands Lilith be subservient to him and lie beneath him during lovemaking. Refusing to be subservient to Adam, and claiming her right as his equal, Lilith is apparently cast out of The Garden and a new woman is born to serve man; Eve.
At a time in our evolution when the Divine Feminine is rising, and we are learning how to bow our minds to our hearts, our egos to our souls, and our human agendas to the wisdom of the Earth, this story can offer us a clue into how we came out of balance, how we as humans began to move outside of nature, how we lost our way.
If we look to the roots of creation itself, we know that everything is born from the void. The void is the space of death, the womb of the cosmic mother, the womb of the Earth mother, and the womb within every woman’s body. This dark void space has long been expressed as the quality of yin, the feminine. Light, the masculine, yang, emerges out of the feminine.
It’s no coincidence then, that the word “whore” actually comes from “hor” which originally meant “cave” or “womb.” When we denied the power of the feminine as the creative source of all life, we also demonized the womb priestess as an unholy unGodly “whore.”
As we as a collective are returning to the roots of The Mother and remembering how we live in harmony with the whole, Lilith offers us a powerful gateway back home to the wild.
Our own arrogance and misunderstanding that we are here to dominate and rape our Earth can be seen through the eyes of Adam demanding he be on top of Lilith. Lilith, knowing that the masculine is here to support the feminine, that the individual is here to serve the whole, that the ego is here to bow to the soul, that man comes from the womb, refuses. When she is “cast out” of The Garden, she is also claiming her independence and her unwillingness to live under this oppression that has taken over our world.
Lilith may leave the shackles of patriarchy and become depicted as a demon, but she also returns to offer her red thread back to Eve.
When Eve arrives in The Garden with Adam, representing the white thread of innocence, she is visited by a serpent. Many mythological tales describe this serpent to be Lilith herself, as the deep feminine has long been associated with the snake. In tantra this snake lives at the base of our spines, dormant, asleep, waiting to be activated through sexual desire so that it may rise up through our energy centers, clearing stagnation, restoring our vital life force, and ultimately reuniting with Shiva, the masculine, at the crown of our heads.
As the red river within a woman became deeply shamed and taboo, Lilith became a separate aspect of our consciousness that we would one day have to reclaim.
While the outer voice of authority, of “God", tells Eve never to eat the forbidden fruit, the snake (the wild, Shakti, Goddess, She Who Is) encourages it. Life cannot flourish without our sexuality, and Eve eating the apple is a “yes” to the wild creative dance of life that demands our primal participation.
The Garden can also be seen here as the wild abundance of the flesh of the body, the forbidden fruit symbolic of the womb, and the snake as the inner voice of primal life tempting Eve to feast on the truth that God is within her, has never left her, and is her very source.
While we have been taught to seek and exploit power externally, embracing our inner Lilith, our inner Shakti, is the only true self empowerment in existence. To truly let the feminine rise, we must dive deep into the source of our authentic power, the wild essence of pure life, and allow Her to empower all that we do.
On my own path of wild feminine awakening, I have directly experienced the feelings of solitude, isolation, and rejection that can accompany a woman’s choice to reclaim her inner Lilith.
Many men and women are not yet ready to receive the feminine in this wild, free, undomesticated way. To many… Lilith is dangerous. Because when a woman knows the voice of truth that lives within her flesh and bones, when a woman bows to her own inner authority above any outside authority, she cannot be controlled. Like the wild, she cannot be tamed and through embodying her full expression, in her presence it is inevitable that aspects of our egos will die.
I have personally felt the wounds of Lilith through being idolized for my freedom in one moment and demonized for it in another. Through being placed on a pedestal by men as a “Goddess” only to be cast out and replaced by women who more appropriately adhered to their safe perceptions of the world. By many times feeling unmet in a collective that hasn’t yet reawakened to the totality of the wild feminine.
And yet… what other choice do we have? If we truly deeply desire to rebirth a wild awakening on this Earth through the pure hearted womb passion of love, we must be willing to at times stand alone.
We must be willing to reside in the truth of who we are and trust that in time those who are meant to meet us in our truth will arrive.
Lilith asks us to choose our self sovereignty even when at times we may be cast out, shamed, demonized, and left to be on our own.
Lilith reminds us that no outer reward is worth sacrificing the voice of the soul within. No man, no God, and no Garden is worth abandoning the very source of life and love within each and every one of us.
Furthermore, we must become the healthy Adams that hold and uplift our re-integrated Liliths and Eves. We must become the devoted presence that holds our fierce passion and our gentle tenderness with equanimity. We must become that, so we can be met in that. We must embody it so that we resonate with it within the cells of our beings and recognize it when it arrives.
Above all else, Lilith asks us to raise the standard.
To demand that we be met by our lovers, by our mothers and fathers, by our sisters and brothers, by our world, by ourselves, by our own minds, with a newfound appreciation for the dynamic spark of life.
Lilith demands that we devote ourselves first and foremost to the very essence within us that has been born from our own dark void. The child, the light of our own inner Christ, the essential seedling that will one day blossom up from the deep soil and offer itself as a melody in the harmony of our exquisitely diverse world.
Ultimately, reclaiming our inner Lilith has far less to do with how we express ourselves sexually in the world, and far more to do with how much we bow our minds to our own inner shakti and trust the wild dance that is our own total, whole, integrated life force.
Lilith whispers that God-dess dwells within us, has never left us, and this truth has the power to revive our whole world back to life. We just need to bow down and let it rise.
Virgin & Whore
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About the Author
Camille is the founder of Earth Daughters and a woman devoted to reviving the ancient wisdom of nature and the wild voice of the feminine.
She has traveled in dozens of countries across the world activating her soul journey through her relationship with land and lived for seven years in primary rainforest in the Costa Rican jungle, communicating with trees, plants, creatures, and exploring many shamanic Earth wisdom traditions.
She is a DANCEmandala facilitator, breathwork facilitator, yoga teacher, and student of many paths of love. She has been guiding transformational women’s retreats in activated locations across the world since 2015.
More on her website camillewillemain.com.