Desert Notebooks. Ben Ehrenreich
a book, or vanish without a sound like a closed tab on your browser.) The land of the Edomites will burn and lie desolate forever. It will be populated by jackals, ostriches, hyenas. Wild goats will bleat at each other in the ruins, and “Liliths will settle, and find for themselves a resting place.” Most English-language Bibles translate Lilith’s name with other terms: “night birds,” “night creatures,” “night monsters.” The King James Version went with “screech owl” as the closest approximation. Whatever we call her, there she’ll be, after the stars fall, among the ruins.
For post-exilic Jews in the first century A.D., residing in what is now Iraq, the already-ancient Lilith persisted as a baby snatcher, and something worse. She appears repeatedly in the Babylonian Talmud, which advises the pious not to sleep alone, lest Lilith slip into their beds and seize them. Archaeologists have unearthed ceramic bowls inscribed with spells in Aramaic to ward off Lilith, “Hag and Snatcher.” Around the end of the first millennium, an anonymous satirist (or, more likely, satirists) composed The Alphabet of Ben Sirach in Aramaic and in Hebrew. Written in part as a series of lewd and farcical interactions between Ben Sirach, the son of Jeremiah, and the Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar, it includes a new backstory for Lilith, who appears as the first wife of Adam, made not from his rib but out of earth, just as he was. Immediately they begin to fight. In bed, Lilith wants to be the one on top. So does Adam. It doesn’t occur to them that they might enjoy taking turns.
“We are equal to each other inasmuch as we were both created from the earth,” Lilith insists. Adam won’t hear it. She rebels, flying off through the air and, in her rage, speaking God’s forbidden name aloud.
Adam runs to tattle. God takes his side, announcing that all will be forgiven if Lilith submits. If she does not, he threatens, one hundred of her children will be killed every day. Lilith, proud, refuses. “Leave me!” she tells the angels who convey God’s offer. “I was created only to cause sickness to infants.”
The story was most likely meant as a joke, but the lure of a female demon who could be blamed for all manner of ills was too powerful to laugh off, and it was gathering momentum. This Lilith, the rebellious bride, will show up again in the key medieval texts of Kabbalistic Judaism, shorn of satiric intent. In the Zohar she begins in unity with Adam, prior to the differentiation of male and female. Adam falls asleep, and God hacks the feminine aspect from his side, and “adorn[s] her as they adorn a bride.” But Lilith does not want to be wed. She flees. Untamed by the bonds of marriage, she can only do ill: “And she is in the cities of the sea, and she is still trying to harm the sons of the world.”
Elsewhere in the Kabbalistic literature she appears as the consort of Samael, the archangel of death also known as Satan, and as a seducer of fallen angels, and of Jacob, to whom she came bedecked with jewels, “her words smooth like oil, her lips beautiful, . . . sweet with all the sweetness of the world.” Sweet, at least, until she and Jacob have spent themselves in love and she reveals herself as a fierce warrior “in armor of flashing fire.” Elsewhere she is accused of seducing Adam after Abel’s death and with his seed bearing all “the Plagues of Mankind,” elsewhere for causing men to ejaculate in their sleep or for scooping spilled semen from the beds of married couples to impregnate herself with ever more demons and plagues. There she will remain, just your average sheet-sniffer, obscure and cast aside like thousands of other forgotten figures of myth, until the nineteenth century when, suddenly, she would become useful again.
It was Christmas yesterday. L. and I went for a hike on a path that looped up through the rocks in an area of the park that was unusually lush with junipers and pinyon pines and even oak trees, the bare rocks heaving with life. At this time last year the mountains to the west, the San Bernardinos, were covered in snow, but they’re still bare. The rains haven’t come. Not on the coast, where the fires are still burning, and not here. More than three months have passed since the monsoons fell, but the bladderpod bushes were nonetheless in bloom, bursts of brilliant yellow up and down the trail.
For a long time white people didn’t think much of this place. In 1853, five years after the United States annexed half of Mexico, U.S. Secretary of War Jefferson Davis, later to become president of the Confederacy, dispatched surveyors to scout out “the most practicable and economic route” for a railroad to the Pacific. The demands of science, conquest, and capital cannot be easily parsed. One of the surveyors, Lieutenant R. S. Williamson of the Corps of Topographical Engineers, wrote that “nothing is known of the country” between the Mojave River and the mountains stretching south and east from the San Bernardinos: “I have never heard of a white man who had penetrated it. I am inclined to the belief that it is barren.”
But people lived here then and had for a very long time. Until the 1860s, the area surrounding the desert spring known as the Oasis of Mara was the home of the Serrano people. The Cahuilla ranged through the desert to the south and west, the Chemehuevi and the Mohave to the east. They knew where to find water, and lived well off of jackrabbits, cottontail, bighorn sheep, deer, pinyon nuts, acorns, and mesquite beans. Two years before her death in 2000, a Serrano elder named Dorothy Ramon published a book recording as much as she could of her people’s language and traditions. She described a landscape that was anything but barren: “Their Lord was living here, with them, he was alive, not dead. He was like us, alive here. And he would speak to them. He would explain to the people about how to live, about how to get along here on earth . . . He asked them whether they would allow themselves to be transformed to make medicine, so that medicinal plants would grow.” Some people became plants. Others, at the request of their god, became deer.
The Serrano creation epic, like the K’iche’ Maya’s, involves two twins, Pakrokitat and Kukitat. In a version told in the early twentieth century by an elder named Benjamin Morongo, then eighty years old, to the anthropologist John Alden Mason, Pakrokitat labored to create the first humans, but Kukitat, ever mischievous, didn’t like the way they looked. He thought they should have hands like duck feet and eyes and bellies in both front and back, and that they should die. The brothers quarreled, and Pakrokitat decided to leave, to create another world that would know neither death nor decay. Kukitat kept this one and lived on among the people, inciting them to fight one another until they grew tired of his taste for destruction and conspired with a frog to poison him. When Kukitat died, they burned his body, but it was too late. The people kept fighting among themselves, as they had when Kukitat lived.
Dorothy Ramon recorded a different story. Despite her efforts to preserve it, she was the last fluent speaker of Serrano, the last person on earth to think and dream in a language that had once been spoken from Los Angeles County almost to the Nevada line. The tale she told involved another world, a planet, once bountiful, that had been ruined and exhausted. The Serrano, according to Ramon, “used to live somewhere else. They were living on some planet similar to this one.” It got too crowded, and the crowding caused trouble. People began killing one another, so “their Lord brought them to a new world . . . This was to become the new planet. It was a very beautiful world. The Serrano talk about this in their songs . . . Coming from that other planet they started over,” at the oasis they called Mara.
It didn’t last. Worlds die all the time, and new worlds are born. By the early 1860s, the Serrano had left the oasis. Most historians blame smallpox. Ramon grew up with another version: White people arrived and “hunted them. They did all kinds of things to them. They killed a great many of them. They were lost.” Most of the survivors moved about fifty miles to the southwest, to the Morongo reservation at the foot of the San Bernardino Mountains, which was by then functioning as a catchall refugee camp for the displaced tribes of the Southern California desert: Serrano, Cahuilla, Chemehuevi, Cupeño, and Luiseño. Ramon was born there in 1909.
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