Lilith and Samael: how the Kabbalah created the couple of the Other Side

Two figures born apart

Lilith and Samael are inseparable in today's occult imagination: the queen and king of the Other Side. But each has a long, independent history, and their marriage is a relatively late invention of 13th-century Kabbalah. Following the sources shows how a night demoness and an angel of death became a couple.

Lilith: from the Mesopotamian night to the first wife

The name recalls the Mesopotamian lilitu, female spirits of wind and night. In the Hebrew Bible, the word lilit appears only once, in Isaiah 34:14, among the animals and creatures that inhabit the ruins of Edom. Translations vary between "screech owl", "night monster" and the name Lilith itself.

In the Talmud, Lilith is a long-haired, winged demoness, and there are warnings such as not to sleep alone in a house lest she seize you. The Aramaic incantation bowls from Babylonia, dating from the 5th to 7th centuries and buried under houses, carry formulas to keep Lilith away from mothers and newborns, sometimes with a "bill of divorce" that expels her.

The story of Lilith as Adam's first wife appears in the Alphabet of Ben Sira, a satirical text written between the 8th and 10th centuries. Created from the earth like Adam, she refuses to lie beneath him, utters the ineffable Name and flees to the Red Sea. Three angels, Senoy, Sansenoy and Semangelof, are sent to bring her back. She refuses, but promises not to harm children protected by amulets bearing their names.

Samael: the angel of death

Samael comes from rabbinic literature: he is the angel of death, the accuser, sometimes identified with Satan, and in some midrashim the angel who rode the serpent in Eden. The details are in Azazel and Samael in the Kabbalah.

The marriage: Castile, 13th century

The meeting takes place in the Treatise on the Left Emanation by Isaac ha-Kohen, written in Castile in the 13th century. The text describes a hierarchy of impure powers mirroring the holy one and presents Samael and Lilith as a couple. Gershom Scholem showed how this idea passed into the Zohar, where the two form the impure counterpart of the union between the Holy One, blessed be He, and the Shekhinah.

Some texts distinguish two Liliths: the Elder, consort of Samael, and the Younger, linked to Asmodeus. Raphael Patai, in The Hebrew Goddess (1967), gathered these layers and showed how Lilith became a kind of negative goddess in Jewish mythology.

Modern readings

• Ceremonial occultism. The Golden Dawn and Crowley associated Lilith with Malkuth in the qliphoth and Samael with Hod, following the tables in 777.
• Luciferianism and Draconian magic. Both become figures of liberation and power, in a deliberate inversion of the tradition.
• Feminism. Since the 1970s, the Lilith who refuses to submit has become a symbol of female autonomy and has given her name to magazines and festivals.

None of these readings is in the ancient sources, but all of them are in dialogue with them. Knowing where each layer comes from lets you work with these figures without confusing myth, tradition and reinvention.

Going further

Read the guide to the Kabbalah and, for the figure of the serpent and the Demiurge, the Gnostics and the Demiurge.