Desert Notebooks. Ben Ehrenreich
estimate that time was the same as their midrange estimate this time. Yesterday’s panicked fears are today’s sober expectations.
Marija Gimbutas was not the first one to spot the shadow of an older goddess hanging over Athena. In the third volume of his Zeus: A Study in Ancient Religion, the British classicist Arthur Bernard Cook proposed that Athena may in fact have been “a pre-Greek mountain mother of the Anatolian kind,” by which he meant something like the goddess Cybele, whose cult lasted into Roman times. Cook found what he believed to be “a curious confirmation” of this claim in a four-thousand-year-old Babylonian clay tablet, of which he had seen a photograph in the newspaper. This was in 1936. The world was about to explode, but it hadn’t yet, and Cook, who taught at Cambridge, didn’t have to travel far to see the original. A century of imperial looting had its advantages: The tablet was in London, in the private collection of a Mr. Sydney Burney. Nineteen and one-half inches high and “in a state of almost complete preservation,” it depicted a nude, winged goddess flanked by two owls, an apparent forebear of Athena. She had talons for feet and stood atop two crouching lions. The expression in her eyes was knowing, and defiant.
Cook was puzzled. The nudity of the goddess, he conjectured, suggested Aphrodite or perhaps Ishtar, also known as Inanna, the Mesopotamian goddess of eros and war. The lions, though, hinted at Cybele. Cook had received a letter from a colleague, the Assyriologist Sydney Smith, who speculated that the goddess on the tablet was more likely one of the nocturnal spirits associated with storms and wind that the Babylonians called Lilitu and the Hebrews called Lilith. With that latter name she would have been known to any educated Englishman of the era: Lilith had made an appearance in Goethe’s Faust as Adam’s first and disobedient wife, a beautiful deceiver, and was later taken up by Victor Hugo and by Browning and Rossetti. She was the bad girl of nineteenth-century painting and verse, and a very bad girl indeed: longhaired and lovely but a seducer of men, murderer of infants, sower of miscarriage, death, and disease. She would make a brief appearance in Joyce’s Ulysses too, as “patron of abortions.”
By then Lilith would have come to stand in for every conceivable evil that men could think to pin on female sexuality. Dark, irrational, and corrupt, she was the fetid, tangled underside of bright, right-angled, Apollonian modernity. The Assyriologist Smith was troubled: Could such a creature truly be an antecedent of Athena, whom the Greeks, inventors of philosophy, logic, and rationality, had venerated for her wisdom and virtue? “To establish a firm connection between Athene and the goddess of the plaque,” Smith worried, “will it not be necessary to show that the goddess was not originally, as later, representative of Law, Liberty, and Reason, but a local demon who fell upon the transgressor (witting or unwitting)?”
It’s funny, isn’t it, how much we cannot see? By 1936, after one world war and on the cusp of another, and after centuries of imperial slaughter in the colonies, it should not have been difficult to imagine that daylight might be bound to night, that reason, law, and liberty were also forces of great and chthonic violence. Walter Benjamin saw this with a clarity that must have been excruciating when, three and a half years later, just before fleeing Vichy France and taking his own life in desperation, he wrote those twenty short “Theses on the Philosophy of History.” It would be his last completed work. “There is no document of civilization,” he wrote, “which is not at the same time a document of barbarism.” That line is on his tombstone now.
But delusions are often dearly held, and nowhere more than in empires that have not yet fully crumbled. Were not the British, as the Greeks had been—and as Americans have been—the globe’s sole legitimate possessor and exporter of law, liberty, and reason? Could such treasures be inherited from a mere local demon?
Yesterday and the day before it was quiet, but about an hour ago the crinkled yellow leaves from the chinaberry tree outside the house began chasing each other across the ground in angry little circles. Now the wind is screaming and all the creosote bushes are thrashing about, rioting. Sometimes at night it sounds almost human, keening in the dark, drowning out the coyotes and every other noise. It can be unsettling, but hearing it and beginning to understand it—how the wind pushes the sand and carves the rocks and shapes the land over long millennia—has been one of the joys of living here, some awareness of those slow processes, the intimacy of geologic time.
It’s nearly Christmas and it still hasn’t rained. The fires are still burning outside L.A. The big one up in Ventura has spread to 272,000 acres, an area larger than that of Berlin, Bangkok, Madrid, or Seoul. After more than two weeks it’s only 60 percent contained. The winds are picking up there too, the same hot, dry winds that blow through the deserts here.
Perhaps Lilith can help explain how we got here. Or at least give us a better idea of where here is. The first mention of her name appears in the ancient Babylonian Epic of Gilgamesh, the oldest human story preserved in writing that we are able to read. Specifically in the Akkadian language preserved in cuneiform script, pressed with a wedge-tipped stylus into clay tablets that have been dated to the eighteenth century B.C. Lilith’s appearance in the epic is brief. She has made her home, we are told, in the trunk of a Huluppu tree. She is not welcome there. (Huluppu is usually translated as willow, though it is not, presumably, Chilopsis linearis, the fragrant variety that grows in the washes of the Mojave Desert.) The goddess Inanna, also known as Ishtar, wants the tree for its wood, to build herself a throne and a bed. The story ends badly for the tree, and for Lilith. The gallant Gilgamesh cuts down the Huluppu. Inanna gets her furniture, and Lilith flees into the desert.
She shows up much later in the introduction to the first volume, published in London in 1903, of Reginald Campbell Thompson’s The Devils and Evil Spirits of Babylonia: Being Babylonian and Assyrian Incantations Against the Demons, Ghouls, Vampires, Hobgoblins, Ghosts, and Kindred Evil Spirits, Which Attack Mankind, the title of which is unfortunately more exciting than the actual text. Its author, Dr. Thompson, was a British archaeologist–cum–intelligence officer who would later be stationed in Iraq and reassigned to archaeological duties when that country and all its ancient riches fell into English hands after the First World War. War and wisdom, a single deity. Thompson’s writing is as good an example of Orientalist prejudices as one can find, citing anecdotal evidence from contemporary Malaysia, Syria, and Sudan alongside ancient Mesopotamian texts, as if they were all emanations of a single culture of universal primitivism, unvisited by the Western gods of history except as passive objects of observation. I’ll come back to him.
But Thompson does talk about Lilith, an otherwise obscure figure who by the turn of the century had already been woven into the new mythologies of modern Europe, the tales Europeans were telling themselves to reconcile themselves to the unprecedented and contradictory realities with which they lived. Specifically, Thompson mentioned two more ancient forms of her name: Lilîtu and Ardat Lilî. He says little of the former, only that she is a “night spirit,” and a bit aloof. Ardat Lilî has more intimate relations with humans. She is, Thompson suggests, “a restless ghost that wanders up and down, forced by her desire to roam abroad,” bringing illness and misfortune to the men with whom she lies. This is likely anachronistic, a layering on of the Victorian-age preoccupation with Lilith as femme fatale, a demonic incarnation of all ills associated with female desire. Other and more reliable sources suggest that in her earliest Mesopotamian incarnation it was women who were endangered by this early Lilith, not men, that she winged into houses in the night, causing miscarriages and killing infants in their beds. She was the female spirit on which otherwise incomprehensible evils could be blamed. Her name was invoked on tablets and amulets hung on the walls of homes: “O you who fly in darkened rooms,” read one, “Be off with you this instant, this instant, Lilith, thief, breaker of bones.”
It is perhaps as this sort of demon that she makes her sole appearance in Hebrew scripture, in Isaiah 34:14, in which the prophet