Lilith, Eve and Kundry
This web-page will look
much better in a browser that supports worldwide web
standards although it is accessible to any browser.
You appear to be using an older browser that does not
support current standards. Please consider upgrading
your browser. We suggest the latest
version of any one of the following: MS
Internet Explorer, Opera, Safari or Firefox.
Left: Lilith, by Dante Gabriel Rossetti.
 osmarie Klier, in her
reflections on Parsifal, notes that Wagner's
Kundry exhibits, in
her respective personalities, two female archetypes:
the serving, self-sacrificing wife (Eve) and the
wild, man-dominating woman (Lilith). The connection
with Eve and Lilith is supported by Wagner's letter to King Ludwig in which
he suggests (but with considerable caution! )
an analogy between Adam- Eve- Christ and Amfortas- Kundry- Parsifal; and by Klingsor's invocation of
Kundry as
Urteufelin (first she-devil).
 ccording to the
Rabbinic Talmud, Adam had a wife before Eve, whose
name was Lilith. Her story seems to have been
invented to reconcile the different creation myths of
Genesis chapters 1 and 2. In chapter 1, man and woman
are created out of the earth; but in chapter 2, Adam
is alone, and so God makes Eve from his rib. The
rabbis began with the Biblical reference to man's
first creation as a bisexual being: male and
female He [God] created them [the first human] .
Some of the rabbis found in this image something
similar to what Aristophanes proposed in the
Symposium: a dual bodied being later divided into two
who must thereafter seek each other out. But others
tried to take into account the later creation of Eve
detailed further on in the text. If woman was created
from Adam, after his initial creation, than what
happened to the female created at first? The answer,
according to the Midrash, was that she was Lilith;
created with Adam, she refused to comply with Adam's
demand that she submit herself to him, and in the end
fled from him by using the Ineffable Name. Adam then
complained to God about his loneliness, and the
creation of Eve followed, together with the
Fall and the Expulsion from Eden. Adam,
blaming this on Eve, separated from her, and for a
time reunited with Lilith, before finally returning
to Eve.
Link: Lilith home page
|
