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Driving home the other night I saw a shooting star, huge and green and straight ahead of me, streaking so low across the sky that it seemed to hang there for a moment before it faded. I thought for a second that it must be a stray rocket from the marine base just off the highway in Twentynine Palms, and perhaps it was. Hegel, the German philosopher who wrote a great deal about history and the nature of change over time, also wrote about strange things that fly through the early evening sky, and about owls. It’s one of his catchier lines, and certainly his most famous, from the preface to Elements of the Philosophy of Right: “The owl of Minerva begins its flight only with the falling of dusk.” Minerva being the Roman equivalent to Athena, the Greek goddess of wisdom, weaving, and war, who at times took the form of an owl. What Hegel meant is that wisdom comes too late. Always. (“It is only when actuality has reached maturity that the ideal appears opposite the real and reconstructs this real world, which it has grasped in its substance, in the shape of an intellectual realm.”) At any given moment the froth and swirl of events can only blind us and confuse us. There is no way to get above them from within the confines of the present. Only after the fact, when night is already falling, are we able to look back and understand.
We might now look back, for instance, to 1820, when Hegel first published those words, when coal-powered steam engines were beginning to replace water wheels in the busy textile mills of northern England. (Germany and the United States would not turn to coal until after the transition in Great Britain was complete.) But for that owl and its nocturnal habits, we might, with all the smugness of hindsight, insist that the black smoke that spilled from their chimneys and filled their lungs should have given early industrialists a potent clue that this would not end well. And we might remind ourselves that the owl will fly again tonight, and again at dusk tomorrow, and that none of this has ended yet.
Hegel, in any case, looked back and saw something like God, which he called Spirit. Human history was for him a rational process, and also a divine one. Subjected to the vigilance of philosophy, the logic propelling it would reveal itself, but only after the fact. History was the very thought of God as it developed over time. It formed a single epic narrative, the story of the growing self-consciousness of Spirit, of God coming to know himself, through us, in time. The trajectory was clear: from slavery to freedom. (Not incidentally, this could also be expressed geographically: “World history travels from east to west; for Europe is the absolute end of history, just as Asia is the beginning.”) The latter arrived, for Hegel, in the perfection of the modern state, which, he wrote, “is the realization of Freedom, of the absolute, final purpose, and exists for its own sake . . . The state is the divine Idea as it exists on earth.”
One hundred and twenty years later, Walter Benjamin, a different sort of German philosopher, saw things differently. Months before he ended his life in a hotel room on the French-Spanish border, despairing of an escape from the Nazis, he wrote twenty paragraph-length fragments on “The Philosophy of History.” In the ninth, the most famous of them, Benjamin described “the angel of history” being propelled blindly into the future, still facing the past: “Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet.” The angel is pushed onward, Benjamin wrote, by a terrible storm. “This storm is what we call progress.”
Yesterday the Rhino—the perfection of the modern state—recognized Jerusalem as the capital of Israel and promised to move the U.S. embassy there from Tel Aviv. The announcement was condemned by pretty much every government in the world except Israel’s. I spent the morning trying to figure it out. Surely there was some rationale for his recklessness, if not a strategy then at least some sleight of hand. As far as I can tell there wasn’t. To please his most rabidly right-wing and pro-Israel donor (the Las Vegas casino magnate Sheldon Adelson) the Rhino had made a promise during the campaign. He was convinced that keeping it would please not only Adelson but the evangelical Christians who form a large part of his base. He is said to have refused to explain his decision to the Palestinian president, telling him only that “he had to do it.” Unnamed aides told The Washington Post that the Rhino “did not seem to have a full understanding of the issue.” So we race into the abyss.
I record this not as evidence that the Rhino is particularly stupid, shortsighted, addled, deluded, demented, arrogant, venal, and vain, though he is all of those things. And night is dark, the sun hot, and bright. The Rhino’s election and the recklessness with which he rules are not potential causes of global chaos but symptoms of a breakdown that is already under way. A healthy, confident nation would not have elected such a man. This one is sick to the bone, stumbling everywhere it steps, knocking things over, making a mess. Empires do not go down quietly. Usually they take the whole world with them for a while. The last great hegemonic handover, from Great Britain to the United States, followed two world wars and the loss of many millions of lives, most of them neither British nor American.
The Rhino, with his vituperative, uncomprehending eyes, his puckered lips and painted orange scowl, is the face of this collapse. He’s what we look like now. Every buried crime and contradiction on which the American polity was built sprawls in the open over the sidewalks and the streets and the endless crawl of cable news. The Klan is out of hiding. The dumb ones wear swastikas. The rest, in suits and ties, strut the soft-carpeted corridors of power. The rich are stealing everything. They don’t bother to hide the graft or to disguise the contempt in which they hold us. All the sexual horrors are spilling out, hungry priapic wraiths with sticky palms and iron grips haunting every workplace. This is what we look like. Nothing remains concealed. The past is returning. The unconscious won’t stay un. And into this cauldron the hurricanes and fires blow, one after another.
Or think of it this way. Hundreds of millions of years ago, our distant cousins—various phytoplankton and zooplankton, cycads and ferns—lived lives as full of passion and drama as any, and then went ahead and died. Buried in mud or water and deprived of oxygen, they were compressed over the centuries by layer after layer of sediment and stone. Slowly, pressure and heat transformed them into a black and viscous goo, into gas that stinks of flatulence, and into strange, hard, oily lumps. Cut to the early nineteenth century, when British industrialists found a use for these otherwise unpleasant substances, the transformed bodies of the earth’s early dead. They burned them, and made things move, and turned that motion into money, which could be turned into more money to mine more ancient fuels from the earth and make more things move and make more money. The carbon that had for millennia slept beneath the planet’s crust in vast and oozy subterranean cemeteries was suddenly spat into the air through smokestacks, chimneys, exhaust pipes. It stayed up there and commenced absorbing more and more of the radiant heat of the sun, causing the earth to precipitously warm, the ice at its poles to melt, its oceans to rise, their currents to shift. You are no doubt by now familiar with this process. What is it, really, though, but a haunting—the ancient dead disturbed from slumber, punishing us for our greed and blindness, our restless lack of reverence? What is it but the past come back, and time unhinged, collapsing?
Walter Benjamin attributed the failure of the social democratic politicians of his day to reckon with the threat of fascism to their “stubborn faith” in progress. If mankind was destined to advance, how could the fascists, with their crude and backward-looking talk of blood and soil, be taken seriously? But they were serious, and so are their descendants today.
The problem for Benjamin was not simply that faith in progress was mistaken. It was that the entire idea relied on a concept of time—a time that was “homogeneous” and “empty”—that was itself illusory, and dangerous. The opportunities and hazards of the present, Benjamin argued, could not be understood unless time itself was reconceived.
If this was true then, how much more so is it now, when fascism is not the only peril that we face?
Last night, by a hair, and against the wishes of nearly 70 percent of the state’s white voters, Alabama failed to elect to the U.S. Senate a man who spoke nostalgically of slavery and who was banned from his local mall for preying on teenage girls. Time is not moving smoothly forward. It’s circling back, getting knotted up in oblong loops, stopping, stuttering, plunging on.
In the summer of 2014 I was living in Ramallah. It was a very bad year. War didn’t break out until early July, but for most of June Israeli troops had been flooding the West Bank. The days were long, the nights even longer. I don’t remember sleeping much, only lying in bed, listening to the dogs bark, waiting for the call to prayer to announce the arrival of the dawn. The clashes at the checkpoints started in the afternoon and stretched late into the night: boys and young men throwing stones at soldiers who fired back with tear gas canisters, rubber-coated bullets, live ammunition. No one flinched at the blasts. The young men took breaks from throwing stones to direct traffic and smoke cigarettes, trying to keep the city flowing. Later, when everyone but the kids standing watch outside the refugee camps had gone to sleep, the soldiers came into the city to raid houses and make arrests. Shots and explosions shattered the night. Each morning’s news was worse than the last’s. Then the war started. Too much was happening, all of it bad.
Time seemed to have changed its shape. The clocks behaved as they always had, ticking away, counting off the hours. They seemed to mock us. Time no longer proceeded evenly and sequentially, but according to a strange logic of dread. It curved and bent, revealing pockets inside itself, pockets and holes in which it was easy to get lost. Sometimes time rushed forward, then something happened—usually death—and it stopped, melted, and recovered. It lurched off, racing once more, zigging and zagging before dissolving again and somehow, from nothing, reconstituting itself and limping on.
I had felt this before in other countries on the verge of collapse. I’ve felt it since, not quite so acutely but nearly constantly, in the year since the Rhino’s election. I don’t know what to call it. The Time of Crisis, Vertigo Time, the Time of Collapse, Black Hole Time. The days and hours lose their shape, their uniformity, the confidence with which they once marched forth. Time appears to fall apart.
For the Romans too, and the Greeks before them, owls were messengers. Better put, they were a glimpse of the goddess herself. Sometimes symbols are the very thing. Athena’s human form was no less a mask than her owlish one. She was the patroness of Athens, so Athenians, proud inventors of democracy, stamped owls on their coins and branded them on the faces of slaves captured in battle. (That’s a lot of owls: per the classicist Moses Finley, slaves accounted for as much as one-third of the population of Classical-era Athens.) Throughout the Mediterranean, the goddess appears on pottery and in sculpture standing beside an owl, or holding one, or with an owl on her head. Wisdom takes some funny shapes. Sometimes she had an owl’s wings and talons growing from an otherwise human female form, or an owl’s body and a human head, helmeted and ready for war.
Over the centuries and throughout classical literature, owls meant one thing—trouble—unless you were lucky enough to be from Athens. Plutarch wrote of an owl alighting on the mast of an Athenian ship before the battle at Salamis, lending the Greeks the courage to defeat the Persians. The tyrant Agathocles is said to have released owls over the ranks of his army to convince his soldiers that the goddess was with them. In Aristophanes’s The Wasps, an owl flies over the Persian troops just before the fighting commences, a sign that the Greeks would triumph. So complete was the association that the bird became a proverb: according to the British classicist Arthur Bernard Cook, to observe “there goes an owl” meant that victory was close. But, Cook cautioned in a footnote, “The bird which portended victory to friends naturally portended defeat to foes. Consequently the owl also had a sinister significance.”
The owl is always ambiguous. Archaeologists have dug up pendants in southern Italy showing Athena with an owl’s wings and human hands, which she uses to spin wool into yarn. Weaving, wisdom, war: How can one deity oversee such disparate charges? In “The Writing of the God,” Borges also described that whirling wheel of time as a fabric embroidered with impossible complexity. (The words text and textile are both from the Latin texere, to weave: writing is, perhaps first of all, woven, a fabric of overlapping threads.) His imprisoned priest glimpsed the entire weave at once without any of the comforting lies of narrative, without cutting it down to a single and seductive swathe that, once chosen, negates all other possibilities and obscures the remainder of the cloth from which it’s spun. But it’s all still there, even when we fail to see it. Pull any thread and you’ll tug another that you didn’t mean to move. You’ll find entire worlds. In some of them gods could be birds and birds gods. Homer depicts Athena as a pigeon, a swallow, a hawk. In the Iliad, she and Apollo appear as vultures perched high in an oak tree to watch the Greeks and Trojans battle. They like to watch us fight.
The archaeologist Marija Gimbutas saw in Athena an incarnation of a much older divinity, which she called the Snake and Bird Goddess of Old Europe. Gimbutas, who was born in Lithuania and had to hide during the war from succeeding military occupations by the Russians and the Germans and the Russians again, had a brilliant but fairly conventional career until the early 1970s, when she began to write about goddesses. In 1974 she published The Goddesses and Gods of Old Europe and first laid out the hypothesis that she would continue to elaborate until her death twenty years later. It began by proposing that there was such a thing as Old Europe, a distinct and sophisticated Neolithic culture that stretched from what is now Ukraine and the Czech Republic to the northern shores of the Mediterranean, one that did not owe its achievements to the more storied civilizations of Mesopotamia and the Levant. The societies of Old Europe, Gimbutas was certain, were matriarchal, egalitarian, and pacifistic, and centered on the worship of a nurturing goddess. All that was destroyed, she argued, by invaders from the east: fierce, equestrian Indo-European nomads who replaced the earth-oriented and goddess-centered pantheon with cruel male gods of sky and storms, and who brought with them patriarchy, hierarchy, exploitation, and war. What little of Old European culture was able to survive would be forced into subterranean channels.
All this was widely dismissed by archaeologists at the time, many of them making the sort of complaints—that Gimbutas’s conclusions were irrational, sentimental, and insufficiently rooted in empirical evidence—that men tend to make when women say something they don’t like. (“Most of us tend to say, oh my God, here goes Marija again,” Bernard Wailes of the University of Pennsylvania told The New York Times.) But feminist archaeologists would also find much to criticize in Gimbutas’s ideas, which were most wholeheartedly embraced outside of the academy, by New Age feminists hungry for alternatives to the patriarchal and militaristic society in which they lived. In which we still live.
Looking back, it’s hard not to find something sinister in the narrative of a lost utopia that she imagined—a genteel and gentle Europe assaulted by brutish outsiders invading from the East. If only structurally, it too closely echoes the primitivist fantasies of the latest generation of purity-obsessed ethnonationalists. And Gimbutas surely gave too little credit to the goddesses, and to actual women, stripping them of all but the most stereotypically maternal aspects of human personality. Athena would not have easily forgiven Gimbutas for suggesting that she had been transformed by corrupting foreign influences from a nursing, protective mother god into a goddess of war, and that she only became capable of ferocity and wrath after being “Indo-Europeanized and Orientalized during the course of two millennia of Indo-European and Oriental influence in Greece.” It’s a bit like Botox: Athena’s youthful beauty is restored here, but she’s no longer able to scowl.
Still, I can’t help but find myself circling back to Gimbutas. However loopy the details, in broad outline much of what she wrote seems right. They may not have organized themselves into model feminist communes, but for many, many centuries and until quite recently, humans all over the planet did worship goddesses, and then they stopped. Most of them anyway. Implicitly if not explicitly, under both monotheist and rationalist conceptions, the cosmos is gendered male. This shift seems worth thinking hard about: what it means, what was lost, what might be worth recovering. Someone else can take that up.
What keeps drawing me to Gimbutas is her combination of the darkest apocalypticism and an optimism that, though it is only two decades distant, feels at once difficult to salvage and, in some basic sense, essential to our survival. In her telling, time has a different shape. It’s not a vector pointing upward that is suddenly, cataclysmically collapsing. The disaster already happened. It came in hordes from the East, on horseback, carrying cruel gods and weapons of bronze. Nothing was left standing. Doomsday came and went. It happened so long ago that we’ve forgotten it, repressed it, hidden it from our collective memory. This notion—perhaps more than any imaginative overreaching and selective marshaling of archaeological evidence—may have been what put Gimbutas on the outside of the academic mainstream: she is saying that we got it all wrong. Civilization as we know it is not an achievement, but a tragic defeat. Most of what we recognize as history was founded on a catastrophe that has only been compounded with the accretion of the years. But this also means we are not damned to this, that there are other ways to live, that we have far less to lose than we thought we did, and a great deal still to learn.
“We’ve reached the end of the world,” Gimbutas said in a 1990 lecture. “We’re starting to create another. I expect we shall become a healthier society. We shall worship the earth—well, not in the same way, nothing returns from the past. We cannot repeat the whole thing from the beginning, we can only transform ourselves and use our knowledge about the past and apply it for creating the future. This is my feeling.”
Long after the era that obsessed Marija Gimbutas but more than a millennium and a half before James Watt patented his steam engine, propelling the mills of Great Britain into the feverish consumption of coal and the planet into the current era of cataclysmic climate change, the island’s Roman occupiers were already, on a far smaller scale, digging that miraculous, slow-burning black stone from the coal beds of England and Wales. They used it in smithies, to forge the weapons and armor that allowed their empire to advance; they used it to keep warm through the wet English winters; and they used it to fuel the eternal flame that they kept burning in Bath, in a temple erected there to Minerva, the wisest of the gods.
Athena was not always admirable, but then gods are notoriously proud. Arachne, a common girl from Lydia, now somewhere in western Turkey, was a weaver like Athena, and grew famous for her talent with the loom. In Ovid’s version of the story, Arachne was also proud. She did the unthinkable and challenged Athena, whom Ovid calls Minerva. The two competed, the goddess and the girl. Athena wove an image of the gods arrayed in all their majesty, and embroidered in, as a reminder, the fates of various mortals foolish enough to challenge them, transformed into birds or trees or icy mountaintops. It communicated all that power ever wishes to, seamlessly, at once propaganda and threat. (Ask Hunahpu and Xbalanque: the messages of the powerful are always invitations to submit.) Arachne, defiant, wove the gods as she saw them, as deceivers, rapists, thieves. The beauty of her tapestry exceeded even Athena’s, and it achieved something the goddess’s could not: truth. Athena tore it from the loom and thrashed her. Arachne, despairing, would not consent to be humiliated. She would not kneel. She hanged herself instead. The goddess, unyielding, turned her into a spider, that she might forever weave, and hang, in warning.
L. is home. She flew in yesterday. In June she got a job overseas. Since then we’ve been apart far more than we would like to be. Friday afternoon I drove into L.A. to pick her up. The sky was yellower than usual. The fires are still burning, and spreading. I spent the night at S. and D.’s. The timing was good. When I got there they were making tamales for the holidays. Their daughters hadn’t shown up yet, but D.’s mother was over, standing by the stove, monitoring one pot of chicken and another of pork. I helped for as long as they let me, taking a position on the assembly line, spreading masa onto corn husks, smearing the corn paste with a dollop of meat and sauce or a sliver of cheese and a couple of rajas, tying them shut. When I left for the airport, D. sent me off with a dozen.
L.’s flight got in late and it was nearly midnight by the time we made it out of the airport. I drove straight to the desert, L. dozing beside me, KDAY on the radio keeping me awake. When we had left the interstate I opened the windows and let the cold air fill the car. It smelled of creosote. L. woke up grinning. There was no moon. The desert was dark and the stars were bright. L. stared up through the windshield, pointing and calling out the names of the constellations as she spotted them, like old friends she hadn’t seen for years. I tried to lean over the steering wheel to see them too but the highway was twisting as it climbed up through the hills and she punched me in the leg so I kept my eyes on the road until at last we turned onto our street and passed the barrel cactus at the end of the unpaved driveway. I remembered to swerve to avoid the anthill and we got out of the car and stood in the cold, necks craned back, shivering a little, our eyes adjusting, holding each other when we got too dizzy to stand.
My grandfather, in his later years, developed an interest in astronomy. He bought a roll-up screen and a slide projector and whole carousels of images of the planets and the galaxies. He was a big, lumbering man. I remember him, well into his evening gin, shouting at my sister and me to shut up and sit still during a mandatory after-dinner slide show. Was he the one who bought me that little blue paperback astronomy primer that I have carried with me every time I’ve moved for thirty years? I still have it in a box somewhere. I never read it. He gave me a poster too, of a supernova remnant in the constellation Vela, wisps of brilliant pink and blue folding over and into one another, giving the blackness space, volume, and depth. As a kid it looked to me like a man, broad-shouldered, tall, and slightly stooped. Like him. It’s up on the wall of the office I still rent in L.A., faded, its corners scarred by the thumbtacks that have held it to other walls in other cities where I’ve lived.
I did wonder a lot, as a teen, when he was at his worst, how it was that he had let his world narrow so precipitously while at the same time directing his gaze to the outer expanses of the universe. As if there were a balance that had to be struck. After the last and worst of several drunken car crashes, his decline was quick. Within a couple of years he could not perform the most basic cognitive tasks. He couldn’t recognize his own children, or at least not the only one who still spoke to him, and couldn’t access the words he needed to ask for the simplest things. My mother lost him once at Denny’s and found him in a corner, pissing in a potted plant. Dementia eventually cured his alcoholism. He forgot that he drank, forgot that he had smoked two packs of Camels every day for the previous half century. When paranoia and confusion did not propel him into rages, he was gentler and more affectionate than I remember him ever having been before.
He had once been a man who valued intelligence above all other qualities. The greatest, grudging compliment he had known how to pay was to describe someone as “pretty smart.” Toward the end he took to sketching out the solar system—Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Neptune, Uranus, and Pluto, which had not yet been demoted—labeled, in order, and to approximate scale, with a spot on Jupiter and a ring around Saturn. At one of the homes in which he spent his final years they must have had an arts and crafts room because he gave me a stiff sheet of cardboard painted in tempera with the planets in their orbits against a light blue background. It’s possible that I still have it somewhere. But even when he couldn’t name them anymore, he kept drawing them in their concentric ellipses, in ballpoint or pencil on napkins or envelopes or whatever scrap of paper he could find, Saturn always with its ring.
For most people on the planet, for thousands of years, owls have meant only one thing. In The Faerie Queene, Edmund Spenser called the owl—though he called it an owle—“deaths dreadfull messengere.” Two centuries earlier, Chaucer had written, “The owle al nyght aboute the balkès wonde, / That prophete ys of woo and of myschaunce.” Balkès being a Middle English word for the beams that stretched from one wall of a house to another. Six centuries after that, the association between owls and ill fortune made it to suburban Long Island. I don’t remember ever hearing it from a reliable adult, or an unreliable one, but I grew up with the superstition that if an owl roosts on a house, someone within will die. Not that I ever saw any owls on Long Island.
Only once have I seen an owl roost on a building. It was in 2003, at an artists’ residency in the hills across the bay from San Francisco. One afternoon I spotted an owl perched on a dormer above a second-floor bedroom in the house where I was staying. I saw it there again a few days later. I remember feeling mildly alarmed for a moment, but that I know of, nothing out of the ordinary has befallen anyone who was living in the house at the time. Or nothing so ordinary as death. A little more than a year later, though, I got a phone call about a woman who had been staying in precisely that second-floor bedroom a week or two before the owl appeared. Perhaps it had been there then as well. She was in her thirties when I met her, healthy and strong. She was the girlfriend of a close friend of mine. They were planning to get married. He called me, distraught, from overseas. She had come down with what seemed to be a simple flu. Quite precipitously, her fever grew worse. She died before he could get her to a hospital.
The daily spiral. The Rhino’s ambassador to the United Nations held a press conference at a military base in Washington, D.C. She stood in front of a cylinder of rusting metal. It was, she claimed, an Iranian missile that had been fired by Yemeni Houthi fighters at an airport in the Saudi capital. “When you look at this missile,” she said, “this is terrifying, this is absolutely terrifying. Just imagine if this missile had been launched at Dulles Airport or JFK, or the airports in Paris, London or Berlin.”
Her performance was a shabby reenactment of Colin Powell’s 2003 speech to the UN about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, as if we had all forgotten that one, and that the Bush administration had lied us into a catastrophic war. This time it read more as satire than sequel. “You’re going to see a rapid flow of other things,” she promised. It would be funny if it weren’t so frightening.
Another new study, this one predicting that the oceans will rise 1.5 meters by the end of the century, submerging “land currently home to 153 million people.” The same researchers published another report three years ago. Their worst-case estimate that time was the same as their midrange estimate this time. Yesterday’s panicked fears are today’s sober expectations.
Marija Gimbutas was not the first one to spot the shadow of an older goddess hanging over Athena. In the third volume of his Zeus: A Study in Ancient Religion, the British classicist Arthur Bernard Cook proposed that Athena may in fact have been “a pre-Greek mountain mother of the Anatolian kind,” by which he meant something like the goddess Cybele, whose cult lasted into Roman times. Cook found what he believed to be “a curious confirmation” of this claim in a four-thousand-year-old Babylonian clay tablet, of which he had seen a photograph in the newspaper. This was in 1936. The world was about to explode, but it hadn’t yet, and Cook, who taught at Cambridge, didn’t have to travel far to see the original. A century of imperial looting had its advantages: The tablet was in London, in the private collection of a Mr. Sydney Burney. Nineteen and one-half inches high and “in a state of almost complete preservation,” it depicted a nude, winged goddess flanked by two owls, an apparent forebear of Athena. She had talons for feet and stood atop two crouching lions. The expression in her eyes was knowing, and defiant.
Cook was puzzled. The nudity of the goddess, he conjectured, suggested Aphrodite or perhaps Ishtar, also known as Inanna, the Mesopotamian goddess of eros and war. The lions, though, hinted at Cybele. Cook had received a letter from a colleague, the Assyriologist Sydney Smith, who speculated that the goddess on the tablet was more likely one of the nocturnal spirits associated with storms and wind that the Babylonians called Lilitu and the Hebrews called Lilith. With that latter name she would have been known to any educated Englishman of the era: Lilith had made an appearance in Goethe’s Faust as Adam’s first and disobedient wife, a beautiful deceiver, and was later taken up by Victor Hugo and by Browning and Rossetti. She was the bad girl of nineteenth-century painting and verse, and a very bad girl indeed: longhaired and lovely but a seducer of men, murderer of infants, sower of miscarriage, death, and disease. She would make a brief appearance in Joyce’s Ulysses too, as “patron of abortions.”
By then Lilith would have come to stand in for every conceivable evil that men could think to pin on female sexuality. Dark, irrational, and corrupt, she was the fetid, tangled underside of bright, right-angled, Apollonian modernity. The Assyriologist Smith was troubled: Could such a creature truly be an antecedent of Athena, whom the Greeks, inventors of philosophy, logic, and rationality, had venerated for her wisdom and virtue? “To establish a firm connection between Athene and the goddess of the plaque,” Smith worried, “will it not be necessary to show that the goddess was not originally, as later, representative of Law, Liberty, and Reason, but a local demon who fell upon the transgressor (witting or unwitting)?”
It’s funny, isn’t it, how much we cannot see? By 1936, after one world war and on the cusp of another, and after centuries of imperial slaughter in the colonies, it should not have been difficult to imagine that daylight might be bound to night, that reason, law, and liberty were also forces of great and chthonic violence. Walter Benjamin saw this with a clarity that must have been excruciating when, three and a half years later, just before fleeing Vichy France and taking his own life in desperation, he wrote those twenty short “Theses on the Philosophy of History.” It would be his last completed work. “There is no document of civilization,” he wrote, “which is not at the same time a document of barbarism.” That line is on his tombstone now.
But delusions are often dearly held, and nowhere more than in empires that have not yet fully crumbled. Were not the British, as the Greeks had been—and as Americans have been—the globe’s sole legitimate possessor and exporter of law, liberty, and reason? Could such treasures be inherited from a mere local demon?
Yesterday and the day before it was quiet, but about an hour ago the crinkled yellow leaves from the chinaberry tree outside the house began chasing each other across the ground in angry little circles. Now the wind is screaming and all the creosote bushes are thrashing about, rioting. Sometimes at night it sounds almost human, keening in the dark, drowning out the coyotes and every other noise. It can be unsettling, but hearing it and beginning to understand it—how the wind pushes the sand and carves the rocks and shapes the land over long millennia—has been one of the joys of living here, some awareness of those slow processes, the intimacy of geologic time.
It’s nearly Christmas and it still hasn’t rained. The fires are still burning outside L.A. The big one up in Ventura has spread to 272,000 acres, an area larger than that of Berlin, Bangkok, Madrid, or Seoul. After more than two weeks it’s only 60 percent contained. The winds are picking up there too, the same hot, dry winds that blow through the deserts here.
Perhaps Lilith can help explain how we got here. Or at least give us a better idea of where here is. The first mention of her name appears in the ancient Babylonian Epic of Gilgamesh, the oldest human story preserved in writing that we are able to read. Specifically in the Akkadian language preserved in cuneiform script, pressed with a wedge-tipped stylus into clay tablets that have been dated to the eighteenth century B.C. Lilith’s appearance in the epic is brief. She has made her home, we are told, in the trunk of a Huluppu tree. She is not welcome there. (Huluppu is usually translated as willow, though it is not, presumably, Chilopsis linearis, the fragrant variety that grows in the washes of the Mojave Desert.) The goddess Inanna, also known as Ishtar, wants the tree for its wood, to build herself a throne and a bed. The story ends badly for the tree, and for Lilith. The gallant Gilgamesh cuts down the Huluppu. Inanna gets her furniture, and Lilith flees into the desert.
She shows up much later in the introduction to the first volume, published in London in 1903, of Reginald Campbell Thompson’s The Devils and Evil Spirits of Babylonia: Being Babylonian and Assyrian Incantations Against the Demons, Ghouls, Vampires, Hobgoblins, Ghosts, and Kindred Evil Spirits, Which Attack Mankind, the title of which is unfortunately more exciting than the actual text. Its author, Dr. Thompson, was a British archaeologist–cum–intelligence officer who would later be stationed in Iraq and reassigned to archaeological duties when that country and all its ancient riches fell into English hands after the First World War. War and wisdom, a single deity. Thompson’s writing is as good an example of Orientalist prejudices as one can find, citing anecdotal evidence from contemporary Malaysia, Syria, and Sudan alongside ancient Mesopotamian texts, as if they were all emanations of a single culture of universal primitivism, unvisited by the Western gods of history except as passive objects of observation. I’ll come back to him.
But Thompson does talk about Lilith, an otherwise obscure figure who by the turn of the century had already been woven into the new mythologies of modern Europe, the tales Europeans were telling themselves to reconcile themselves to the unprecedented and contradictory realities with which they lived. Specifically, Thompson mentioned two more ancient forms of her name: Lilîtu and Ardat Lilî. He says little of the former, only that she is a “night spirit,” and a bit aloof. Ardat Lilî has more intimate relations with humans. She is, Thompson suggests, “a restless ghost that wanders up and down, forced by her desire to roam abroad,” bringing illness and misfortune to the men with whom she lies. This is likely anachronistic, a layering on of the Victorian-age preoccupation with Lilith as femme fatale, a demonic incarnation of all ills associated with female desire. Other and more reliable sources suggest that in her earliest Mesopotamian incarnation it was women who were endangered by this early Lilith, not men, that she winged into houses in the night, causing miscarriages and killing infants in their beds. She was the female spirit on which otherwise incomprehensible evils could be blamed. Her name was invoked on tablets and amulets hung on the walls of homes: “O you who fly in darkened rooms,” read one, “Be off with you this instant, this instant, Lilith, thief, breaker of bones.”
It is perhaps as this sort of demon that she makes her sole appearance in Hebrew scripture, in Isaiah 34:14, in which the prophet describes the vengeance that God will take on the enemies of Israel. The stars will fall from the heavens, Isaiah promises, and the sky will roll up like a scroll. (To update the metaphor, it will slam shut like a book, or vanish without a sound like a closed tab on your browser.) The land of the Edomites will burn and lie desolate forever. It will be populated by jackals, ostriches, hyenas. Wild goats will bleat at each other in the ruins, and “Liliths will settle, and find for themselves a resting place.” Most English-language Bibles translate Lilith’s name with other terms: “night birds,” “night creatures,” “night monsters.” The King James Version went with “screech owl” as the closest approximation. Whatever we call her, there she’ll be, after the stars fall, among the ruins.
For post-exilic Jews in the first century A.D., residing in what is now Iraq, the already-ancient Lilith persisted as a baby snatcher, and something worse. She appears repeatedly in the Babylonian Talmud, which advises the pious not to sleep alone, lest Lilith slip into their beds and seize them. Archaeologists have unearthed ceramic bowls inscribed with spells in Aramaic to ward off Lilith, “Hag and Snatcher.” Around the end of the first millennium, an anonymous satirist (or, more likely, satirists) composed The Alphabet of Ben Sirach in Aramaic and in Hebrew. Written in part as a series of lewd and farcical interactions between Ben Sirach, the son of Jeremiah, and the Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar, it includes a new backstory for Lilith, who appears as the first wife of Adam, made not from his rib but out of earth, just as he was. Immediately they begin to fight. In bed, Lilith wants to be the one on top. So does Adam. It doesn’t occur to them that they might enjoy taking turns.
“We are equal to each other inasmuch as we were both created from the earth,” Lilith insists. Adam won’t hear it. She rebels, flying off through the air and, in her rage, speaking God’s forbidden name aloud.
Adam runs to tattle. God takes his side, announcing that all will be forgiven if Lilith submits. If she does not, he threatens, one hundred of her children will be killed every day. Lilith, proud, refuses. “Leave me!” she tells the angels who convey God’s offer. “I was created only to cause sickness to infants.”
The story was most likely meant as a joke, but the lure of a female demon who could be blamed for all manner of ills was too powerful to laugh off, and it was gathering momentum. This Lilith, the rebellious bride, will show up again in the key medieval texts of Kabbalistic Judaism, shorn of satiric intent. In the Zohar she begins in unity with Adam, prior to the differentiation of male and female. Adam falls asleep, and God hacks the feminine aspect from his side, and “adorn[s] her as they adorn a bride.” But Lilith does not want to be wed. She flees. Untamed by the bonds of marriage, she can only do ill: “And she is in the cities of the sea, and she is still trying to harm the sons of the world.”
Elsewhere in the Kabbalistic literature she appears as the consort of Samael, the archangel of death also known as Satan, and as a seducer of fallen angels, and of Jacob, to whom she came bedecked with jewels, “her words smooth like oil, her lips beautiful, . . . sweet with all the sweetness of the world.” Sweet, at least, until she and Jacob have spent themselves in love and she reveals herself as a fierce warrior “in armor of flashing fire.” Elsewhere she is accused of seducing Adam after Abel’s death and with his seed bearing all “the Plagues of Mankind,” elsewhere for causing men to ejaculate in their sleep or for scooping spilled semen from the beds of married couples to impregnate herself with ever more demons and plagues. There she will remain, just your average sheet-sniffer, obscure and cast aside like thousands of other forgotten figures of myth, until the nineteenth century when, suddenly, she would become useful again.
It was Christmas yesterday. L. and I went for a hike on a path that looped up through the rocks in an area of the park that was unusually lush with junipers and pinyon pines and even oak trees, the bare rocks heaving with life. At this time last year the mountains to the west, the San Bernardinos, were covered in snow, but they’re still bare. The rains haven’t come. Not on the coast, where the fires are still burning, and not here. More than three months have passed since the monsoons fell, but the bladderpod bushes were nonetheless in bloom, bursts of brilliant yellow up and down the trail.
For a long time white people didn’t think much of this place. In 1853, five years after the United States annexed half of Mexico, U.S. Secretary of War Jefferson Davis, later to become president of the Confederacy, dispatched surveyors to scout out “the most practicable and economic route” for a railroad to the Pacific. The demands of science, conquest, and capital cannot be easily parsed. One of the surveyors, Lieutenant R. S. Williamson of the Corps of Topographical Engineers, wrote that “nothing is known of the country” between the Mojave River and the mountains stretching south and east from the San Bernardinos: “I have never heard of a white man who had penetrated it. I am inclined to the belief that it is barren.”
But people lived here then and had for a very long time. Until the 1860s, the area surrounding the desert spring known as the Oasis of Mara was the home of the Serrano people. The Cahuilla ranged through the desert to the south and west, the Chemehuevi and the Mohave to the east. They knew where to find water, and lived well off of jackrabbits, cottontail, bighorn sheep, deer, pinyon nuts, acorns, and mesquite beans. Two years before her death in 2000, a Serrano elder named Dorothy Ramon published a book recording as much as she could of her people’s language and traditions. She described a landscape that was anything but barren: “Their Lord was living here, with them, he was alive, not dead. He was like us, alive here. And he would speak to them. He would explain to the people about how to live, about how to get along here on earth . . . He asked them whether they would allow themselves to be transformed to make medicine, so that medicinal plants would grow.” Some people became plants. Others, at the request of their god, became deer.
The Serrano creation epic, like the K’iche’ Maya’s, involves two twins, Pakrokitat and Kukitat. In a version told in the early twentieth century by an elder named Benjamin Morongo, then eighty years old, to the anthropologist John Alden Mason, Pakrokitat labored to create the first humans, but Kukitat, ever mischievous, didn’t like the way they looked. He thought they should have hands like duck feet and eyes and bellies in both front and back, and that they should die. The brothers quarreled, and Pakrokitat decided to leave, to create another world that would know neither death nor decay. Kukitat kept this one and lived on among the people, inciting them to fight one another until they grew tired of his taste for destruction and conspired with a frog to poison him. When Kukitat died, they burned his body, but it was too late. The people kept fighting among themselves, as they had when Kukitat lived.
Dorothy Ramon recorded a different story. Despite her efforts to preserve it, she was the last fluent speaker of Serrano, the last person on earth to think and dream in a language that had once been spoken from Los Angeles County almost to the Nevada line. The tale she told involved another world, a planet, once bountiful, that had been ruined and exhausted. The Serrano, according to Ramon, “used to live somewhere else. They were living on some planet similar to this one.” It got too crowded, and the crowding caused trouble. People began killing one another, so “their Lord brought them to a new world . . . This was to become the new planet. It was a very beautiful world. The Serrano talk about this in their songs . . . Coming from that other planet they started over,” at the oasis they called Mara.
It didn’t last. Worlds die all the time, and new worlds are born. By the early 1860s, the Serrano had left the oasis. Most historians blame smallpox. Ramon grew up with another version: White people arrived and “hunted them. They did all kinds of things to them. They killed a great many of them. They were lost.” Most of the survivors moved about fifty miles to the southwest, to the Morongo reservation at the foot of the San Bernardino Mountains, which was by then functioning as a catchall refugee camp for the displaced tribes of the Southern California desert: Serrano, Cahuilla, Chemehuevi, Cupeño, and Luiseño. Ramon was born there in 1909.
