Looking for Lilith
I went back to the British Museum because I wanted to see the magic bowls. No one knows why Babylonians started making magic bowls in the sixth century and stopped two hundred years later. For a long time, archaeologists thought they were just crockery. Even though they often had strange drawings on, and tiny writing spiraling from their centres, and were often found at the thresholds of houses. Which wasn’t what you usually did with bowls, but who knew, it was so long ago. Museums all over the world hold magic bowls; there’s a roaring trade in them on the black market; a flood of monographs, translations and transcriptions; a Virtual Magic Bowl Archive online; a novel by Maggie Anton, Rav Hisda’s Daughter, about a Jewish sorceress who makes bowls; and an album called The Bowls Project by the radical musician Jewlia Eisenberg.
Archaeologists thought they were made by non-Jews, and by men, but now they think they were made by Jewish women. Iraqi Jewish women. While some of them were written in Syriac or in Mandaic (the language of the tiny, ancient Mandaean community, who worship in water, baptising themselves again and again in the Tigris), most of the bowls were inscribed with Jewish Babylonian Aramaic, the language that was the precursor to my language, the language the Babylonian Talmud was written in, that vast, sprawling, spiraling compendium of stories and laws, created by rabbis arguing with each other, in synagogues, on the page and across time.
The Babylonian Talmud became the basis of all Jewish law, and a guide to life for Jews across the world; not just a rulebook but a rudder in rough seas; a mad, marvelous, meandering stream of Jewish consciousness. For a long time everyone thought men also wrote the magic bowls, which some called demon bowls, or incantation bowls, mainly because no one thought sixth-century Iraqi Jewish women could write. Recently the feminist scholar Dorit Kedar has found evidence that not only could they write but some were professional scribes, some wrote their own divorces, and some wrote and made the bowls—and the rabbis didn’t like it. The Babylonian Talmud is full of rabbis shaming and marginalising magic women. They wanted a monopoly on magic. They wanted people in trouble to come to them, yet they kept asking for bowls to protect them from demons, and one demon in particular: the mighty, terrifying Lilith.
She was in the middle of the bowl I’d come to see, staring out with big eyes, wild, dishevelled hair, cartoon breasts, struggling to break the chains that bound her, all chaos, sex and danger, a fuck-you to the patriarchy. She looked like my own rage. She had my hair. She looked like she could burst the bowl, which was small, made of pale unglazed clay the colour of shortbread—unglazed earthenware is actually called biscuitware—with a crack down one side. In the museum’s Iraq study room, I turned it to follow the spiral of tiny black writing and looked at the translation to see her called ‘evil Lilith who leads astray the hearts of human beings . . . slaying boys and girls’. The words were a spell, a wish for Lilith to ‘be subdued and sealed’, and they just made her sound more powerful. She looked like she could eat the world.
I’d been a bit in love with Lilith since my childhood rabbi mentioned her, just once, saying she was Adam’s first wife. His bad wife. Later I learned that Lilith came in because Genesis was too confusing. First God creates man and then it says:
‘He created him; male and female He created them’ (what?). Then it says God makes a woman out of Adam’s rib. Who were ‘them’, and if there was a ‘them’ which was ‘male and female’ then why did Adam need another woman made from his rib? When the rabbis tried to answer these questions, they sometimes got carried away, and told stories that were wilder, stranger and more freewheeling than what they’d started with. Some said Adam was intersex but others said he had a first wife, a wrong wife, which is why he needed to sacrifice a rib to make a second. They needed a name for this first wife and they used Lilith which means ‘night creature’, ‘night monster’, ‘night hag’ or ‘screech owl’ or ‘witch’. They accused Lilith of causing miscarriages, killing babies, snatching babies, seducing and murdering adults, and marrying Satan.
All these stories swirled around for a long time until around 800 C.E., when Lilith snapped into focus in a much-contested text called The Alphabet of Ben Sira. In The Alphabet, Lilith is made out of clay at the same time as Adam. She refuses to have sex in the missionary position and gets turned into a demon who kills babies and causes wet dreams (one of these things is not like the other). The Alphabet sets it up as a comedy: ‘God created a woman . . . and called her Lilith. They promptly began to argue.’ She tells him they’re equal but he won’t let her go on top so she says God’s name—His unsayable, holy Name—and suddenly she’s flying. Actually flying. Airborne. Where before she could only walk. Did she know that saying it would give her wings? Or was it just an impulse? Was she surprised when her feet left the ground? Exhilarated? Terrified? Empowered even?
God sends angels to give Lilith an ultimatum; she can go back to Adam or a hundred of her children will die every day. ‘Leave me alone!’ she cries, magnificent in her malevolence.
‘I was only created to sicken babies: if they are boys, from birth to day eight I will have power over them; if they are girls, from birth to day twenty.’ The angels beg Lilith to reconsider, and she relents; if the babies wear amulets she will not take them. (I was rethinking the salt, and the evil eyes.)
Lilith raged on through generations of Jewish lore and stories, a demon to scare mothers. A curly-haired fiend. After Eve eats the apple, according to one Talmudic rabbi, ‘She grows hair like Lilith.’ My hair. It’s curious that while a lot of Jewish women have curly hair, Lilith hair, many straighten it or, if they are married and Orthodox, cover it up, often with wigs. Curly wigs are hard to make so the wigs are often sleek and straight. All this taming and smoothing and flattening made me uncomfortable. Jewish women don’t face the hair discrimination Black women do, but Jewish hair has still been problematised—the Nazis used it as a marker of racial impurity. There are reasons Lilith’s hair feels like a revolt. When I first saw a reproduction of Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s painting Lady Lilith, with her combing masses of hair—which he called enchanted in a sonnet he wrote on the painting’s frame—I was exhilarated. I was drawn to feminist reclamations of Lilith, like Judith Plaskow’s revisionist 1972 midrash ‘The Coming of Lilith’, where, having rejected Adam, God and the patriarchy, Lilith longs for a female friend; so she sneaks back into the garden and helps Eve quest for forbidden knowledge. I loved writing for the American Jewish feminist magazine Lilith, and I admired the Lilith Fund, a Texas charity supporting women needing abortions.
I also feared Lilith, especially when I became a mother. If I could have found a magic woman to make me a bowl to protect my child from Lilith, I would have done it in a heartbeat.
In the Iraq Study Room, I sat at a long wooden desk, surrounded by cabinets stuffed with tablets and fragments, and pulled on my blue latex gloves. In front of me was a tray of magic bowls, facing down. I didn’t know whether I dared release the demons. On either side of me, scholars were painstakingly translating cuneiform, and I was gazing at the bowls, and stroking their smooth sides. I decided to be brave. Carefully, I spun the bowls and then I turned them one by one. If the demons weren’t out, well, they were now.
Holding the bowls, I felt like I was in the kitchens with the women, trying to protect themselves and their families in a ravaged, uncertain world. The bowls were loud with stories of sickness and sadness, of petty rivalries and unrequited passions, of heartbreak and healing. The way they talked to the demons felt intimate; they didn’t order them about but cajoled them, connected with them. And what if the women didn’t commission bowls because they feared Lilith? What if they did it because they were scared they’d be blamed if bad things happened to their children, so they gave the blame to Lilith? And what if she took that weight? With generosity, with strength, to break the cycle of victim-blaming. It made me sad to think that if she did do this, she was then trapped, like a spider in a cup, her trap cemented down at the threshold. No wonder she tried to crack the bowl to get free. But then, as I held the bowls, willing them to reveal their secrets, I wondered: what if they weren’t traps but homes? What if, instead of warding Lilith off, the sorceresses were making deals with her, saying: stop haunting this house, and live instead in a room of your own, a tiny, domed dwelling, a place of safety where you can rest from all your wandering. I imagined her for a moment, beside me in the museum, looking at the bowls to see if she liked the look of them, and nodding. Yes. This was an agreement we could make. This was something we could honour. And then I flipped the bowls back one by one, each small, safe home. This was what you were supposed to do with your demons, wasn’t it? To name them and contain them, to give them somewhere safe to be so they weren’t roaming everywhere, fingers in everything, eyes roving wildly, wreaking havoc. To befriend them, perhaps?
I was thinking, of course, about my demons too.
The daughter of Iraqi-Jewish refugees, Samantha Ellis is the author of How to be a Heroine and Take Courage as well as numerous plays, and the first two Paddington films. She lives in London.
Excerpted from Always Carry Salt: A Memoir of Preserving Language and Culture by Samantha Ellis. Published by Pegasus Books on January 6, 2026.