Lilitu

The oldest of these creatures has no face you can hold in your mind, only a direction: she comes on the wind, out of the desert, after dark. In the flat country beyond the last irrigation ditch, where the reed huts thin out and the land goes to salt and thornscrub, something moved that the Mesopotamians did not want to meet. They wrote her name on clay in the same breath as fever and miscarriage, as the cough that empties a house of its children. She was the lilītu, and she was old before the word Babylon existed.

She was never one being. The scribes spoke of a whole household of them: the lilû, a male night spirit; the lilītu, his female match; and the ardat-lilî, the maiden version, the girl who never got to be a bride. What bound them together was a specific grief. They were the dead who had been cheated. A young man carried off before his wedding, a girl who died with no husband and no child, an adolescent taken by the wasting sickness that struck just as the body ripened. Such spirits did not rest. They wandered, hungry for the life they had been denied, and they took it from the living, always from the opposite sex, always in the dark. A lilītu haunted men. Her male counterpart haunted women. The logic was as cold and exact as a ledger.

The name itself is a knot that scholars still work at. It sits on the Semitic root for night, so a reader hears “the night one,” and that fit her well enough. But underneath runs an older Sumerian word, lil, which does not mean night at all. It means wind, or breath, or the thin moving air that carries a ghost. That is the deeper truth of the lilītu. Before she was a demon of the dark she was a demon of the storm, a gust with intent, the disease that rides in on bad air. The wind and the sickness and the restless dead were one idea, and she was its edge.

For all the dread, a plain image survives of what she was thought to do. A woman lies feverish after a birth that went wrong, the room hot and close, the newborn too quiet. Outside, the desert wind rises and finds the gaps in the mud brick. That draft, on that night, was the lilītu arriving to finish what the fever started. The family knew the remedy was not medicine but words, an incantation spoken over the threshold, a small clay figure or an amulet naming the spirit and ordering her out.

She left one strange, disputed portrait behind her. In a Sumerian episode preserved at the tail of the Epic of Gilgamesh, the goddess Inanna plants a young huluppu tree in her garden at Uruk, meaning to cut its wood one day for a throne and a bed. Ten years on she comes to harvest it and finds the tree already occupied. A serpent that fears no charm has coiled at the roots. The Anzu bird is raising its chicks in the crown. And in the trunk itself a dark-dwelling spirit, the ki-sikil-lil-la-ke, has built a home. Inanna weeps. Gilgamesh takes up his axe, kills the snake, sends the bird flying to the mountains with its young, and the spirit in the trunk tears down her house in terror and bolts for the wild places she came from. Samuel Noah Kramer read that spirit’s name as Lilith, and for decades the identification stood as gospel. Later scholars are less sure. What is not in doubt is the shape of her here: something that squats in the hollow heart of a living thing and has to be driven out by force.

Pinning down her body is the same problem in a different dress. The lilītu is far more often invoked than described, a name in a list of afflictions rather than a figure with a face. The most famous image linked to her, a terracotta plaque of a beautiful winged woman standing on two lions between a pair of owls, her feet ending in a raptor’s talons, was labelled Lilith by early collectors. Museums now more often call that woman Inanna or Ishtar, and the link to the lilītu is exactly the kind of guess the sources refuse to confirm. The honest position is that she wore borrowed skins. Where she was pictured at all, she came with wings and bird’s feet, an owl’s night and a hawk’s cruelty folded into a woman’s shape, but the texts that name her most rarely bother to say how she looked. A thing made of wind does not need a face.

Her powers followed from what she was. She could ride the night air unseen, pass through the small openings of a house, bring on sickness and the failure of the body at its most fragile moments: birth, infancy, the first flush of adult desire. She drained the vitality of those she lay with, took the sleep and sometimes the life of the young. What she could not do was stay. The lilītu had no country and no household of her own, only borrowed roofs, and she could be named, bound, and expelled. The incantation that knew her true nature could turn her out; the amulet at the door could refuse her entry. She belonged to the margins, to the desert and the wind and the unmarried dead, and to the margins she could always be sent back.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is a Lilitu?

A lilītu is a female night and wind demon of ancient Mesopotamian belief, the counterpart of the male lilû. Together with the maiden ardat-lilî, these spirits were thought to arise from people who died young and unmarried, and they preyed on the living of the opposite sex, bringing disease, nightmares, and death to infants and mothers.

Is Lilitu the same as Lilith?

Lilitu is the older Mesopotamian ancestor of the later Jewish demon Lilith, not the same figure. The Akkadian lilītu and the Hebrew Lilith share a name and a nocturnal, dangerous character, and most scholars trace Lilith’s origins back to this Mesopotamian demon class, though some reject a direct line of descent.

What does the name Lilitu mean?

The name sits on the Semitic root for “night,” giving the sense of a night creature, but its deeper origin is the Sumerian word lil, meaning wind, breath, or spirit. This is why the lilītu was originally a storm and disease spirit carried on bad air, and only later became fixed in the imagination as a demon of the dark.

How did people protect themselves from a Lilitu?

Mesopotamians used spoken incantations, inscribed clay figurines, and protective amulets placed at doorways and thresholds to keep the lilītu out. Because the spirit could pass through small openings and strike at the most vulnerable, families guarded women in childbirth and newborn infants especially closely against her.

Where does the Lilitu appear in the Epic of Gilgamesh?

A spirit named ki-sikil-lil-la-ke, which the scholar Samuel Noah Kramer identified as Lilith or lilītu, lives in the trunk of Inanna’s huluppu tree in a Sumerian episode attached to the Epic of Gilgamesh. When Gilgamesh kills the serpent at the tree’s roots, this spirit tears down her dwelling and flees to the wilderness, though the identification remains disputed.

Related Entries

Lamashtu, Ardat-Lili, Lilith, Lilin, Alû, Utukku, Edimmu, Gallu, Pazuzu, Rabisu, Anzu, Inanna, Gilgamesh, Lamia, Gello