Lilith — the demon at the crib.
Incantation bowls written against her by Jews have been dug up in Iraq from the sixth century. She is the clearest evidence that a Judaism existed in kitchens and cemeteries that was never quite what the responsa said it was.
Lilith is what the tradition looked like below the level of the responsa. Aramaic incantation bowls from sixth-century Mesopotamia, written by Jewish scribes and buried upside down under floors, name her and bind her. Amulets naming Senoy, Sansenoy and Semangelof were hung over cradles in Europe and North Africa into the twentieth century, and the practice was widespread enough that Maimonides' contempt for amulet-writing was aimed squarely at a real market. Her biography — Adam's first wife, made from the same earth, who refused the position and left — comes from the Alphabet of Ben Sira, a medieval satire whose seriousness scholars still argue about. Since the 1970s she has been claimed as a feminist figure and a magazine has carried her name since 1976, which some Jewish women find liberating and others find like adopting a child-killing demon as a mascot. Both readings are alive in the same communities.
The same ground, other faiths
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