Lilith Returns to the latest Abridged issue! On the 5th June we'll be at the Golden Thread Gallery in Belfast from 5pm - 8pm to celebrate our new issue. Come say hallo, grab a free copy and see some very groovy art also!
And still she sits, young while the earth is old – ‘Body’s Beauty’, Dante Gabriel Rossetti
The first wife of Adam in Jewish and Mesopotamian mythology, Lilith – created equal, not from the rib but the very same clay – was banished from Paradise for refusing to obey him, replaced, and largely left behind in the story telling, becoming, effectively apocryphal. She has been characterised as demonic, hazardously seductive, horrifyingly bestial, destroyer of men, a threat to children. Across folklores, her image blurs with serpentine Lamias, feathered sirens, murderous mother figures, witches, vampires, spiders.
The original femme fatale, the monstrous feminine with dangerous hair, Lilith might be embraced as a feminist symbol. More than that, she might be seen to represent the silencing and demonisation of the past – the many pasts – that threaten how we think of ourselves now, those we think we can run from, even the dehumanisation of those who resist oppression. Lilith is a question mark that haunts our ideals – equality, memory, family, freedom, order, safety, women, belief, silence, and monstrosity. She is abjection, rage, doubleness, shadow, the notion of destruction at the root of creation, and a fierce protest against forgetting.
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This issue is supported by the Arts Council of Northern Ireland.
Abridged is supported by the Arts Council of Northern Ireland and the Arts Council of Ireland.
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