To Lilith, or to Eve

To Lilith, or to Eve, that is the question.

Whether you're a man or a woman, here for insights into human relationships or purely for curiosity's sake, welcome to my spontaneous investigation into an eternal mytho-psycho-drama that plays itself out in everybody's sexual lives, whether you know it or not. From now on, you're Adam, and Lilith and Eve are whatever sex you're attracted to.

OK. Let's set the stage. On your right, Eve! On your left, Lilith! Now choose, as if your life depends on it.

Eve, you should already know. She is the wife of Adam and mother to their many children; most notable of whom were Cain and Abel. Tempted by the serpent to eat of the forbidden fruit of consciousness from the Tree of Good and Evil, she gives some to Adam¹ and together, as punishment, were expelled from paradise.

Eve is a pretty straightforward character. In your life, she symbolizes the real human partner that you can actually have a real relationship with from which you could create a real family. You can read more into her of course, but for the purposes of this article, that's all you need to know. When you choose Eve, you are choosing a real specific person.

Then you have Lilith, the winged demon succubus and incubus combined, the seductive prowler of dreams, the bane of babies, independent consort of the "Great Demon²", and the mother of demon babies produced with stolen seed. Despite all this, in Jewish mythology, she was a primal earth goddess created by God to become Adam's first love and wife; as "First Eve." They then battled for dominance with Lilith declaring her equality to Adam, demanding dominion over newborns³, and leaving him forever after sleeping with the "Great Demon". Yet, Adam's love for her persisted, as do our own.

Like all truly human stories, they are morally ambiguous and care not for societal sensibilities or norms. This is what I love about mythology; our uncensored collective attempt to express those deeply human truths in the most transmittable narrative form. The fact that these stories, instead of countless others, survived and continue to be told should be proof enough for their ability to shine the light of attention on something deeply real and relevant.

When deciding who to choose, the first thing to seriously know about Lilith is that, unlike Eve, she is not real. No, not in the sense that mythologies are stories, but specifically in the fact that within the mythology, she is a demon earth goddess, not a human, and is therefore "unreal." Let me clarify.

Demons are "spirits" in the sense that they do not manifest in reality as any specific living person, but only gains representation in reality through the phenomenon of "possession." For example, you've probably heard of "warrior spirit" before; it's never used to refer to any particular fighter, instead it's a set of behaviours and traits nested within a certain context that shows up in someone. You'll hear people describe someone as "possessing a warrior spirit", whereas it's actually the opposite; the warrior spirit is possessing them.

Being possessed by a primal spirit (like Lilith), means that your ego-personality has given the reigns of consciousness to an ancestral program that runs autonomously within our biology.

The more primal the demon, the "deeper" they are embedded in our biology. If we can temporarily refer to the crude phrase: "Nature versus Nurture"⁴, you can think about the primality of a spirit as a strength indicator of the nature-side of that equation. The more primal, the more it's a spirit of "Nature". The less primal, the more it's a spirit of "Nurture".

Eternal (Nature), versus locally temporal (Nurture).

It can also help to think of a spirit as an embodied story, with a start and a finish. This "spirit program" triggers when certain start conditions are detected or anticipated (some sort of real-life scenario), and it runs its course towards its end (some sort of finale or climax).

So what is the Lilith spirit program?

On the behavioural side, it is a program that values short-term lustful passions over long-term stable monogamous relationships and family. Its strategy consists of a Hail-Mary shotgun-style release of genetic material into your local gene pool. It is a last resort, consequences-be-damned attempt at reproduction, almost always at the cost of the livelihoods of yourself, your partner(s), and your potential kids. This is why Lilith is often represented as an angel of death. It's pretty much an emergency sexy self-destruct program designed to maximize offspring numbers during dangerous periods.⁵

On the experiential side, things look a lot different. Lilith is the object of your eternal lust, the image of the evolving but perfect sexual partner who is capable of inducing for you a level of ecstasy you could only dream of (literally). She is your experience of your first crush from school.⁶ Remember that she wasn't the crush herself, as Lilith isn't real, but your own fantasy projections onto her (a Lilith projection); that is, your obsession of your own beliefs about who your crush was, as opposed to who they actually were in reality.

When you fantasize about your crushes, you are actually fantasizing about Lilith.

Being perfect, Lilith will always be a point of reference for sexually comparing your potential or actual sexual partners to. Every time you sexually compare your partner to Lilith, Lilith will win. This is what it means when Lilith is described as Adam's first love.

To choose Lilith is to choose perfection, albeit an unreal perfection–it is the choice of fantasy over reality.

And boy if this general choice between fantasy and reality isn't everywhere. It's why people don't want to grow up and shoulder responsibilities (like in Peter Pan⁷). It's why they won't sacrifice their infinite but unrealized potential to specialize in a given skill. It's why people have unrealistic standards for others and expect the impossible. For those who are self-aware enough to be willing to consider the morality of this longing for perfection, it can even trigger a tremendous amount of guilt. But remember, Lilith is the image representation of the fantasy choice in the realm of sex and sexual relationship; it is this limited domain that gives her her specific traits.

Now, let's introduce some muddiness. Ask yourself, how many functional families out there started with a Lilith projection? In other words, with Lilith's help. The answer's not zero. By imagining your potential partner as perfect through a Lilith projection, it could just motivate you enough to make those initial necessary leaps of courage that are critical to securing a relationship. The problems only start when you seek a return to Lilith after choosing an Eve; hence Lilith's characterisation as a seducer and home-wrecker. But, as I said, it's not all bad. That's why it can be a tough choice. Otherwise, we would all run away from Lilith and Eve would just win hands-down everytime. What we find instead, is that

the choice is conditional.

Conditional upon what? Upon your unique situation. Sorry, I'm afraid a universal correct answer doesn't exist, otherwise it wouldn't be an eternal mytho-psycho-drama. See, whenever your situation changes, the right answer for you also changes simultaneously.

To give you a sense of what I mean, in coaching I would find people, mostly men, who despite being in a romantic relationship that can be objectively described as good, find themselves longing instead for an impossible perfection (Lilith) that they know would be terrible for them. Frequently, this shows up in the form of a sudden intense obsession with someone they barely know, usually someone with fairy-like features. By fairy-like, I'm talking about real people that resemble characters like Luna Lovegood from Harry Potter, Rei Ayanami from Evangelion⁸, and Ramona Flowers from Scott Pilgrim. It's good to know that people who resemble fairies are particularly vulnerable to become the target of others' Lilith projections because their ambiguousness allows plenty of room for error; since ambiguity functions to mask the discrepancies between fantasy and reality. Anyways, what the Lilith spirit program is telling these people is that conditions have become dangerous for them. Dangerous how? Figure that out, and you can resolve the dilemma.

One person might feel threatened by the increasing responsibilities and expectations of being in a more and more "legit" relationship. Another might feel threatened by their own declining abilities or advancing age. Someone else might be afraid of their own increasingly toxic relationship and wish to seek a fresh start. It depends.

Just like with all negative emotions, these primal programs are not just there to make your life miserable. They're there to do something. Something they think you really need to do given the circumstances. It's up to you to ultimately assess it for what it is and decide whether they are right or mistaken. That's not easy. That's why most people don't even realize it when they're possessed.

Possession is not the problem. The problem is inappropriate possession.

Look, all goals start with a wish. That's what a vision of the future is; an imagination of what you want your life to be like. It's a wish. Nobody sets a goal that they've already accomplished. To have a goal is to have a wish; an unrealized fantasy of "better", whatever that looks like. With that in mind, Lilith, symbolizing the fantasy choice in the realm of sex and sexual relationship, is a program based on a wish; the wish for sexual perfection. Viewed in a positive way, it can be seen as a call to improvement. But it must be balanced by the reality of the specific Eve in your own life.

Everything real, when measured up against perfection, is a compromise.

The question then becomes, "What is acceptable?" and, "What are you looking to achieve?" Then, and only then, should you ask,

To Lilith, or to Eve?

1. You could interpret this as Eve giving Adam the spark of consciousness. I mean, I bet you were pretty self-conscious around your first crush. You could say they had the ability to "raise" your consciousness.

3. Did you know that Lilith was made into a feminist icon in the 1970s? She even has a feminist magazine named after her still in print. Feminists are also the most pro-woman's-choice-to-abort demographics out there. The bane of babies indeed.

5. Here emerges a major sex-difference. Compared to men, women's Lilith spirit program tend to be weaker, and no wonder, because while a man can run around and potentially impregnate many women, a woman running around, no matter how successfully, will still only end up having (most of the time) a single child. Therefore, from an evolutionary risk-reward viewpoint, it results in the program's weaker hold on women. That being said, with the invention of female contraception, women are now sexually more liberal and irresponsible than ever before, and orders of magnitude more capable in amplifying the Lilith program culturally using the internet (e.g., OnlyFans).

6. Or from your first fantasy crush from a movie, show, book, or game. In which case, it would have been a fantasy projection onto a literal fantasy. If you want to see what an extreme version of this looks like, you can check out this search page. All infatuations are thanks to a Lilith projection. This is why it feels so different to a long-term love-relationship. Sometimes I'll get couples who got together older in life feeling a sense of "missing-out" for not experiencing that initial passion-filled infatuation like how the movies and poems describe it. That's because as you get older, Lilith projections are less necessary for the forming of relationships, and so, it doesn't happen as much.

7. In the original book by J. M. Barrie, Peter Pan, the boy who never grows up, ended up choosing fairies (like Tinkerbell) over Wendy. He chose a fantasy creature (Lilith) over a real woman (Eve) who was actually interested in him. Worse yet, when Peter was asked by an elderly Wendy at the end of novel about Tinkerbell, he couldn't even remember her, replying that "there are such a lot of them, I expect she is no more." If you think of Tinkerbell as Peter's porn-fairy, that final statement starts to make a lot of sense.

8. SPOILERS ALERT. Interestingly, Rei's story-arc has been completely rewritten in the new movie tetralogy "Rebuild of Evangelion." In this new edition, Rei, a clone of Shinji's mother (how on-point is that?), after granting him the necessary libido energy to "be a man", learns of the real world before leaving gracefully, allowing Shinji to transform his life and enter into a real relationship with Mari. Guess what Shinji's father, who's obsessed with bringing back his dead wife, is protecting from the onslaught of angels? Lilith. Coincidence? If you read about the director, Hideaki Anno, and his own personal development journey, maybe you'll understand why he remade Evangelion from a tragedy (bad end) into a comedy (good end). Great films. Very psychologically accurate.

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4. I call it crude because in reality, the framing of a "nature" that is opposed to "nurture" is not only outdated, but more importantly, presents a misleading false-dichotomy. Most psychology and biology majors would've probably had to write paper on "Nature versus Nurture" at some point in their courses; I did. It's a bad topic, because it's framed terribly. It misleads before you even get answering. In the real world, nature and nurture works together dynamically, with very, very few exceptions.

2. The “Great Demon” of the Alphabet of Ben Sira was given the name of Samael in the thirteenth-century Treatise on the Left Emanation where he was identified as the angel of death.