Dancing in the Shadows of Love by Judy Croome

Our first reaction to the temptress may be one where we instinctively recoil in distrust and fear.

To paraphrase Paul Tillich (Western theologian), the Fall represented ‘…a fall from the state of dreaming innocence…’ and awakening from potentiality into actuality and that the ‘fall’ was necessary for the development of humankind, a symbol for the human situation, not a story of an event that happened ‘once upon a time’.Ĭan Lilith as serpent be a viewed as a harbinger of change and as symbol for transformation? But for the moment I want to negate that age-old myth of woman’s ‘sinfulness’ and say that Eve was the awakener for Adam, Lilith the awakener for Eve.

I’ll write a later post about Eve and the temptation that was presented to her. We know from the Creation story that Eve and Adam were expelled from Paradise and that women have been blamed ever after for this sinful act of accepting the fruit – the repercussions still felt today, even if unconsciously. In the most mysterious of ways she returns, disguised, as serpent, to beguile Eve to accept the apple and thereby disobey God’s admonition to not eat the fruits of The Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil on pain of death and other dreadful punishments. It was time to end her isolation and return to the Garden of Eden to effect a change on the status quo. She felt her inner strength returning after what seemed an eternity, cleansed by her tears and the salt of the sea she now felt as salve and her forging in the flames. In the previous post we left Lilith brooding in the depths of the Red Sea. Any ongoing dialogue with myths, dreams, stories, fairytales inter alia puts us back in touch with the deeper layers of the psyche, those inner forces that play themselves out on the world stage. Meister Eckhart : The ground of the soul is darkĪ reminder that I treat the myth of Lilith as just that, a myth, a powerful one that resonates today because of its psychological dynamic. Lilith: Serpent and Symbol of Transformation

Dancing in the Shadows of Love by Judy Croome