George MacDonald, "Lilith's Saga"

I have already talked about “At the back of the North Wind”, by the Scottish George MacDonald, written in 1871, which has Death as its protagonist. The saga of Lilith, composed around 1895 and declined in the three novels “Beyond the Mirror”, “Lilith” and “The House of Regret”, takes up the figure of the female demon associated with the wind. The protagonist of the trilogy is Lilith, from the Akkadian Lil-itu, lady of the air, a creature connected to the storm and the cat. In Mesopotamian culture, Lilith was a demon, whom the Jews borrowed during the Babylonian captivity and turned into Adam’s first wife, repudiated for refusing to obey her husband. It has always had negative characteristics, of a nocturnal, witchy, adulterous and lustful feminine. In the nineteenth century, however, with female emancipation, it comes to represent the strong woman who no longer submits to man, and it is reevaluated by modern neo-pagan cults and assimilated to the Great Mother.

In the first book, the protagonist, Vane, finds himself in a parallel world, following Mr Raven, a disturbing librarian capable of transforming himself into a crow, whom we will later discover to coincide with Adam. Here he will experience all sorts of adventures, meet monsters, birds, children, skeletons, beautiful women, fabulous animals. Many are the topoi of fantastic literature. The first is the magic mirror, the device capable of acting as a link between parallel universes, such as the wardrobe of “The Chronicles of Narnia” — and not surprisingly C.S. Lewis was MacDonald’s greatest admirer. Other recurring images are the battle of skeletons (see Tolkien’s paths of the dead, films such as “The Mummy”), the dead asleep in the crypt, the dark and threatening forest (see Dark Forest, Mirkwood, Fangorn Forest.)

But the main meeting will be with Lilith, a beautiful but evil woman, prototype of all the previous and subsequent vampires. If the Jewish Lilith used the nightly pollutions of the youngsters to generate jiins, that of MacDonald behaves like a leech that bites and bleeds to maintain its strength. Her beauty is her strength but also her sin. Contemplating herself satisfies her, as happens to the perfidious stepmother of Snow White, but amplifies her self-centeredness, distances her from the Good, makes her self-referential and bad.

Like the myth’s Lilith, this too poses a threat to children. And the community of innocent children (who remember Diamante, the Child of God of “At the Back of the North Wind”) is a peculiar feature of the saga. But Lilith is also the embodiment of misogyny, of the fear that the male has of the woman, of the one who can envelop him, bewitch him, suck his soul away together with the seed. She is a belle dame sans merci not unlike Rider Haggard’s Ayesha.

Unlike Tolkien, who did not appreciate the Scottish writer for this reason, MacDonald’s fantasy — theologian, preacher and mystic — has a strong allegorical — religious connotation. In the treatise “The fantastic imagination”, MacDonald maintains that a well-constructed story must also have a meaning, not necessarily evident to the author, and modifiable according to the cultural level of the readers. It is no coincidence that the Auralia edizioni, edited by Marco Gionta, speaker of Vatican radio and expert on themes relating to Christian spirituality, such as angelic traditions, republishes the saga of Lilith. The whole saga, and, more generally, all the matter narrated by MacDonald, is based on the dichotomy Good / Evil, Light / Darkness, Damnation / Redemption, White Leopard / Spotted Leopard. Sin and forgiveness are the two main themes, closely related to each other. Sin exists, it is part of reality and creation. To overcome it, you need to know it and experience it.

Vane’s sin is obstinacy, the presumption of being able to do without others; Lilith’s, more serious, is having done without God, thinking that she imagined herself. Lilith lives immersed in the darkness of her selfishness, closed in on herself, blind to the needs of others, capable of even killing her daughter. The place that has been created is hell itself, or rather, the anguished desert of her sinful mind. Lilith is beautiful because she was conceived by God but has a stain on her hand, an indication of the corruption that is advancing, of the evil that consumes (like the portrait of Dorian Gray.) The leopard covered with macules is the definitive form of evil.

“This is not about the leopard but about the woman,” he said, “and will not go away until it has devoured you to the heart and your beauty will slip away from you through the open wound.”

It will take a white worm, a biblical snake that, like Shannara’s sword, will creep into her bosom, to show her to herself, revealing the abyss of her perversion, the horror of what she is. But unlike Terry Brooks’ magical object, the worm will perform an openly religious conversion in her. Only in this way can Lilith surrender to the good, let herself be redeemed, accept death, even lose a piece of herself. But from this loss a new beginning will spring, life will be reborn, the water of expiation and healing will flow.

“The evil you have planned,” Adam continued, “you will never realize it, Lilith, because God — and not evil — is the Universe, but it will end: what will become of you when Time is gone in the dawn of the eternal morning? Repent , I beg you and become an angel of God again! “ (pag 78 second volume)

MacDonald’s eschatology does not conceive of eternal damnation. Everything returns, sooner or later, to the Creator, to the one who thought the creature.

Even the protagonist is not free from sin, he is selfish and, by his own admission, greedy, impulsive, foolish. “You will be dead for as long as you refuse to die,” says the crow, aka Mr Raven, aka Adam. That is: you will be a sinner until you perform a catharsis, until you accept the loss of what you were previously, to transform yourself into something new, pure, healed. The concept that one must die to really live is fundamental. Only by surrendering, abandoning oneself to sleep in the cold chamber of death, will one be able to dream and then be reborn to real and imperishable life.

The moral law is one, it cannot be reinvented or reversed, even in a “secondary or sub-created” world. Where Tolkien invents an atheist universe, based on secular values ​​such as heroism, sacrifice, loyalty, MacDonald offers us a powerful religious nucleus that, if it starts quietly with the first book, becomes more explicit in the progress of the story. Numerous biblical allusions, even glaring, such as the presence of Adam and Eve, the Eden in which innocent creatures (the Children) live, the Shadow of the tempting serpent, the city of God of the finale. The events narrated also have several similarities with Dante’s journey, but without the realistic, as well as allegorical, power of the Florentine. MacDonald’s is a sweetened Dantesque universe, weakened and revisited in a Pre-Raphaelite key.

The defects of the book are, in my opinion, two: the feeling that, at least at the beginning, it proceeds by accumulation, letting itself be guided through the chapters only by the author’s fervid and gothic fantasy, and the lyrical impenetrability of the dialogues, due to the undeniable influence of the language of the Holy Scriptures.