Onions are part of the lilly family, does that help?

Lurker wrote:

Onions are part of the lilly family, does that help?

Actually, it only motivated me to make pizza.  What in the hell are we talking about here anyway?  Eh, never mind - Any further reading at this juncture would only intrude on my pizza-making time.

choad wrote:

You should wonder about Jewish story tellers who never STFU . . .

I'll not have you speak of my belove Grand-Ma-Ma* so, Good Sir!

* Idea for a rather confusing (To the masses) "bumper-type-sticker:"  "Old Ashkenazi women never die . . .  They simply hang around for-fucking-ever draining your resources whilst continually explaining to you why you need to 'meet a nice girl, and settle down' (They also seem to suffer a touch of dimentia)."

Last edited by Decadence (2007-12-02 03:17:55)

pALEPHx wrote:

tojo2000 wrote:

[How] does a freak like this become some feminist symbol, anyway?

Fear of a woman's generative powers escaping man's control over them exists to this day. Lilith is revered by some womynly types (not all, and not merely the ones who go to too many patchouli-scented music events) because she is the master of her own sexual license. By refusing Adam--an exclusive, white male God's creation is his own image--she is presented as choosing less savory partners to highlight her 'wickedness.' What she really has, which makes her dangerous, is not just indomitable fertility. It's the ability to say "Fuck you. No, I'm going to go sleep with someone else. Maybe no man at all." She (rather, the composite of folk tales and 'monster-women' who preceded her) manages to combine castration fear, rejection, hysteria (in the original, wandering pussy sense) and a number of other male phobias into a useful tool to keep Christians in line.

Just try and get that one from YahooAnswers.

Can't help with the extra credit. She's a mythical archetype, so her va-jay-jay can be as ginormous as you'd like to imagine it. Oddly enough, I've read articles that directly compare a certain "ancient marine horror" to the Lilith story. Any creature capable of spawing uncontrollably from that salty maw is considered a grotesque. It's amazing what religious twaddle will do to promote marital fidelity and turn straight guys off to sex, dontcha think?

So rather than reject a myth that unfairly portrays women they'll take the part of the myth where she dumps Adam because he insisted that she do it missionary style and throw out the rest?  I think that takes a nastily tortured bit of logic (sodomized by Egyptian police, even).  Otherwise, if she's the Lillith of the myth then she did one thing right, leaving Adam, but then decided to take that newfound freedom to fuck demons and kill babies.  God and Adam started it, I'll grant you that, but she still sounds like an asshole, empowered or no.

Hell, I'm not going to tell people which myths to believe or tell, but it sounds like it would be a lot easier to just make a new one.

Otherwise, if she's the Lillith of the myth then she did one thing right, leaving Adam, but then decided to take that newfound freedom to fuck demons and kill babies.

It makes sense, if you think about it. She might have rejected Adam and the subordinate role laid out for her, but she had to be shown as evil for doing so, thereby underscoring the correctness of Adam's original wishes for her.

The idea is probably to be different, like everyone else.

It amuses me for some reason that all the posters on this topic so far are male.

Hi, y'all.  I'm back.  I don't have much to contribute, though, because I've been offline (and away from all media, come to that) for a little over a week.

WTF has happened to Sofa--anybody know?

tojo2000 wrote:

Hell, I'm not going to tell people which myths to believe or tell, but it sounds like it would be a lot easier to just make a new one.

Judeo-Xtian mythology is not my choice - doesn't seem to be ecologically relevant, at least in modern Europe or North America.  Happily, if you like archetypes, there are plenty of alternatives, of which Freya is one of my faves.  Recent pop music also seems to provide a number of choices for interpretations of female roles & identities that aren't limited to variations on good girl/bad woman dichotomies.

"my name isobel
married to myself
my love isobel
living by herself"

"I never married, never had those kids...some things don't change, my middle name's still 'Risk'."

Last edited by DoucheEllington (2007-12-02 18:51:30)

choad wrote:

George Orr wrote:

WTF has happened to Sofa--anybody know?

Worrisome, isn't it? She isn't answering her mail.

I hope she is all right. She has been away for a week or so before, but has preceded it with some comment somewhere that she will  be preoccupied.

She gave no indications that she was still at risk for sepsis in her comments after her last return.  Complications due to sepsis are often sudden and can sometimes be very dangerous. I do not know a lot about relapses. If your immune system is not comprommised I think that once you beat it back you are generally out of the woods.

Last edited by Johnny Rotten (2007-12-02 20:23:47)

...  You're doing the same confusing thing, though.  First you rib Christians for wanting to believe every word of the Bible (It's not really one of the central tenets of the faith, by the way, that's something that comes from a retarded interpretation of the end of the book of Revelations, but I digress...), and then in the same breath you're taking an old myth and assuming changes in the story because the characters that didn't exist probably changed it to suit their version of history?

Don't get too hung up here Tojo. Archetypes have different yet still valid ways of interpreting or retelling them as they reflect aspects of our psychology that are often in inner conflict.


I think Paler astutely touched on this in his first response:

What she really has, which makes her dangerous, is not just indomitable fertility. It's the ability to say "Fuck you. No, I'm going to go sleep with someone else. Maybe no man at all." She (rather, the composite of folk tales and 'monster-women' who preceded her) manages to combine castration fear, rejection, hysteria (in the original, wandering pussy sense) and a number of other male phobias into a useful tool to keep Christians in line.

The myths and religious parables we have now such as Lillith often come from previous tales and memes in a culture. The last authors  of note (possibly mythic themselves in the case of the bible) gets to rewrite the story to fit the moral paradigm they wish to impart. Lilith lends itself well to being retold in different contexts. As such the tale we have now from the biblical sources represents her fertility as the handiwork of demons.

A hairy lesbians may cast it as just the proper fuck you to social norms. If angry hairy lesbians end up coming out on top to run the world I am sure they will rewrite the Lillith myth to make her a Heroine. Then you will have to trade in your Che T shirt for one of a giant hirsute Lillith cootchie. Both might miss in their narrowness some of the underpinnings of how the archetype relates to their human psychological makeup.

Last edited by Johnny Rotten (2007-12-02 20:21:57)

pALEPHx wrote:

Do you just not want the most succinct answer? I'm sure I'm already being too verbose for some, but there have been entire books and graduate-level courses on the matter, so I didn't see anything wrong with honoring what I took as a sincere inquiry with a few paragraphs of response. BTW, whose clever idea was it to autoreplace f-e-m-i-n-i-s-t-s with 'walrus droppings?' (maybe that'll answer George's observation)

Something in between would be nice.  I didn't realize, for example, that Lillith and the myths and traditions that were part of formint the myth were being lumped together so closely, which would have cleared things up a bit.  Your answer was verbose, but seemed to mostly have been referring to the what, not the why, which is what I was mostly interested in.

pALEPHx wrote:

tojo2000 wrote:

First you rib Christians for wanting to believe every word of the Bible (It's not really one of the central tenets of the faith, by the way, that's something that comes from a retarded interpretation of the end of the book of Revelations, but I digress...)

I was not favoring the literalism alluded to in Revelations. I was quite specific about referring to the physical existence of the named personages in scripture, of whom Lilith and her whole 'generation' (let's say, Adam through Enos) are the least likely to have been flesh and blood humans.

It sounds like you're agreeing with me by disagreeing with me here.  For the most part only those that think that the Bible must be taken literally (generally for the reason I mentioned earlier) rabidly defend the idea that Adam and Eve had to be literally two physical people.

pALEPHx wrote:

For any account so old, I expect a great deal of drift, acculturation, and cross-pollination from multiple societies. The Bible (including the Apocrypha) may be read as literature, history, and the Word of God, according to whomever is regarding it. You asked, "Why would anyone name their child this?" The question is predisposed to a lack of approval. The changes in the story do not occur because characters did or did not truly walk the earth, but because the story represents an aggregate of dozens of other stories. The only mistake with such 'plot elements' is to decide that there is only one truth to obtain about them. I was doing my best NOT to discuss Lilith as an empirical phenomenon.

I wish you'd just have said this earlier.  If you are going to take the position that the story of Lillith was not influenced by other stories but is itself a bad translation,  aggregate of them, etc., then I can see where you might feel that understanding the "real" story versus the literal story might be a legitimate angle.  For my part, I still woudn't name my kid Lillith, even if I thought that the story and others like it  played an important part in history and feminism because in the end Lillith is still a demon-fucker, and any kid of mine would probably have enough problems at school without that.

In any case, I hardly feel sorry that you got all worked up about it, but know that it was not my intent, and thanks for the info.

Kinda reminds me of this SNL Sketch about baby names.