2 Bulletin of the Brooklyn Entomological Society Vol. XII 



some years, as a minimum. Still later (perhaps many centuries), 

 Adam, described as created out of dust, " gave names to all cattle, 

 fowls, beasts, but for Adam was not found an helpmeet for 

 him." So God took one of his ribs, made a woman. This was 

 Eve. To account for a population from which Cain and Seth 

 got wives, later commentators claim that early commentators 

 seized upon an Assyrian divinity and made her Adam's first wife. 

 This was Lilith, who subsequently appears as mothering a brood 

 of zehuh, or flies. A second brood of children attributed to her 

 were SuccuhcB, or devils which normally assume the female human 

 form. 



All mythology begins from a basis of fact. All myths, all 

 demi-gods, all gods (except alone the Monotheos, amorphous, in- 

 finite) are the imperfect recollections, distorted by ages of tradi- 

 dition, of living humans. Zeus and Hera upon Olympus, Thor 

 and Baldur, Beelzebub and Lilith were human as ourselves. 



Whence came Lilith is only partially recorded. There is 

 authority for regarding her as blonde, or, as Dante Gabriel Ros- 

 setti paraphrases, " with hair of ropes of gold." If so, she would 

 be Aryan, a predecessor of races of which the best known at 

 present are the blue-eyed Scandinavians. The earliest extant 

 account of Lilith is that in the Apocryphal Book, the alphabet of 

 Ben Sira, dating perhaps from the tenth century A. D. Of 

 course, this is no criterion of antiquity. It may be observed, 

 parenthetically, that there was a great cult in southern Europe in 

 the seventh century of Lilith worshippers, just as demon worship 

 has spasmodically broken out in almost every century in some 

 quarter. It may be observed, parenthetically, too, that the oldest 

 existing manuscript of the Old Testament dates from the twelfth 

 century A. D., although it is known from allusions long before 

 Christ. One cannot judge from manuscript the age of any of the 

 great books of Hebrew literature. Ben Sira states that Lilith 

 was beautiful, with wavy long black hair. At all events this 

 woman was so beautiful, so towering in intellectual gifts that she 

 was known everywhere around the place where Babylon later was, 

 and came to be worshipped as a goddess. There is Rabbinical 

 authority that Adam was as the Arab or Jewish races now are, 

 brown-eyed ; and that he was created (or born) with a brown 



