Lilith’s liberation from the garden can be compared to Inanna’s return journey from the underworld in Sumerian mythology or the ascent of Persephone-Kore in ancient Greek lore. The holy feminine longs for liberation and willingly risks much in the name of freedom, with Dark Goddess mythology commonly illustrating the feminine’s ability to destroy all worlds too small for her. Energetic embodiment of the Priestess of the Wild Earth means acknowledging the parts of your story similar to those of other divine feminine archetypes who were necessarily trapped for a time, sought liberation, and eventually freed themselves from seemingly inescapable cages. In effect, the garden is a particular hell disguised as a utopia, an Eden of masks and half-truths, but the wild woman can endure only so much illusion before her soul’s howled demands for truth grow too loud to be ignored.
Like Lilith, both Persephone-Kore and Inanna have had their stories appropriated by patriarchy. Just as Lilith’s story becomes one of empowerment and liberation in its feminist interpretation, Persephone-Kore, often conventionally cast as the victimized, vulnerable daughter who was abducted by Hades with her mother’s permission and forced to remain in the underworld for six months out of every year, can be viewed as a wise underworld guide. In prepatriarchal versions of her myth, Persephone-Kore is an empowered Maiden who, having been to the depths of hell, now descends and ascends willingly and regularly in order to move in rhythm with the natural world and receive the spirits of the dead. Inanna’s mythic journey, plunging into the depths of the underworld and stripping herself of all her protections so she may face her psychic beasts, is really a tale of shadow integration, of the agonizing process of descent and soul retrieval that is the very essence of spiritual growth. All three Goddesses have been initiated into the soulful wilds through a great wounding, a severance from all they had been, and all three Goddesses understand the merit of both rebellion and sacrifice in the name of autonomy.
The Priestess of the Wild Earth archetype embodies the empowered energies of Lilith, Persephone-Kore, and Inanna. She is entirely free from the story that caged her. She does not define herself any longer by her too-small life. She has been to hell and back again, and she has brewed her own salve for the wounds she acquired during those dark nights of the soul. She owns her scars without overidentifying with these past hurts, without needing absolution from any sky-housed deity who does not care to truly know her. In Aphrodite’s Daughters, Jalaja Bonheim writes that “the resurrected goddess does not ascend to heaven, but triumphantly returns to her people, very much physically alive, and laden with precious gifts of insight, vision, power, and compassion.” She is made more authentic for her ability to sit with her unsettled her-story, and she is so whole unto herself that she carries her own wild home with her, regardless of what pitfalls may lie ahead on her journey away from Eden.
Prayer of the Underworld Goddess Returned: My Muddy Wings Are Wide
Dearest Dark Goddess who is me,
I have come to a point in my healing, my ascent, where I will no longer apologize for who I am or who I used to be. My black demoness wings are wide, and I have risen against the sandstorm of those who think me wicked. I have erupted from the ground like a newborn phoenix covered in an afterbirth of mud and ash.
This is me, and I have survived my birth by fire. My hair is knotted, and my cheeks are stained with the tears of lost innocence and bitter disdain. I am untying the knots that kept me tethered to a life I did not want, to names I did not want to be called, and to the notion that a woman is an unchanging, steady touchstone for all who need her.
My name is Lilith, and I am not a teaching tool. The forbidden fruit was seductive truth contained in fine apple skin, and I have sucked every bit of succulent juice from that gift. I have looked into the snake’s shiny scales and scried my future. I have been called every shameful name ever spit from the lips of a bully, and I have let those labels roll from my back like water on feathers.
My name is Inanna, and I am still alive. These are not the musings of a whimsical poetess. These are the hellish hymns I learned from the ancients, and I speak the Mother Tongue of the anguished feminine. I know the way down, but I’ve learned to love the feel of sunlight on my bare breasts.
My name is Persephone, and I will not be dragged into my depths; I go there willingly, wearing my protection totems and singing my own praises. I go there to lead others out, and I am the holy healer returned, righteous, and resurrected. I am the primal feminine dark, the unruined Maiden, and the Priestess of fertile ground.
Blessed be my infinite worth, and blessed be the Holy Wild.
Parable of Eden’s Lost Heroine: Revisioning Lilith
For all her wisdom, Lilith could not understand why this precious garden, this manicured and flawless landscape that once dazzled her with its fairy-tale beauty, now appeared so fake and fragile. She was sure the brilliant-green grasses were painted and artificial and the flowers were paper and scentless. How had she not noticed this ruse before now?
She knelt at the knotted base of the Tree of Knowledge, the only tree in the garden that smelled of primal bark, blessedly bitter leaves, and dirty roots, the only growing thing she was sure was absolutely real here in this carved-up land. She drank in the heady, earthen scent and caressed the bark, suddenly starved for untamed nature and uncultivated ground. She yearned so deeply for far-reaching trees and soft-bodied creatures; she was homesick for a wild place she had never seen. She knew it existed. She glimpsed this many-colored wilderness in her dreams, but her conscious mind did not yet know the way. Each morning, she woke and wept in the underworld-garden, suffocating under the weight of a life she never chose and hungry for the hearty sustenance of the feminine divine.
Pressing her face to the bark, Lilith whisper-prayed to a Mother Goddess for salvation: “Bless me, Mother, for I will most certainly sin against this too-small life. I yearn so much for a freedom I know I deserve that my belly burns with the wanting. My blood is raging under my skin, willing me forward, and yet I do not know which path to take. I dream of a blood-red road, but I know not how to find it. Mother, show me the way out! I will die if I must stay here, if I must waste more of my precious life among mere fabrications of what I love, if I must obey rules I did not write, spending my days conforming to someone else’s notion of perfection. I am consumed by an ache I have no name for, and all I know is that I must leave before this sickness-of-desire ends me.”
So consumed with anguish this Wild One was, so certain of her belonging to a wilderness she had never seen, that she failed to notice when a snake slid up her bare back and coiled around her neck. So broken was she, so blinded by a dark and demanding restlessness, that Lilith did not see the gift of the forbidden fruit when it fell to the ground. She did not see it with her eyes, but she felt it in her blood. There was a certain ecstatic electricity buzzing from beneath the apple’s red skin that crooned to her like a warm maternal lullaby to a shivering orphan.
The snake continued spiraling around her neck, and Lilith wiped her tears. This soul-food was not fit for feminine consumption, she had been warned. She was breaking one of the rules of this place by simply being here. To eat from the Tree of Knowledge was to know too much, to commit an egregious sin against a wrathful God, but the snake’s cool scales were reassuring.