(This thread has been started in response to a question here because I didn't want to divert that thread from its purpose by answering the question there)
There is a disconnect between the way in which people think of real, living people and the way they think of mythological or cultural figures. When we think of real people, we assume that those people have true natures and our estimations of those natures are either more or less accurate. For example, this thread was prompted by a question from 777 on a thread concerning Jimmy Savile. That thread offered the idea that Jimmy Savile was a wizard. Most people who watch the documentary in the thread will come to one conclusion or another: either the evidence supports the idea that Jimmy Savile was a wizard or it does not. People who believe one way will agree with those who believe the other that there is a right answer and that he either was or wasn't.
But when it comes to mythological or cultural entities, we do not have that same definition: our ideas are much more vague. Take a look at the Roman god Mars. He began as a god of agriculture and became a god of war. We might say that to the early Romans, Mars was a god of farmers but to later Romans he was a god of war. This shows, though, that what people are talking about is an image, not the being itself. When Christian priests called Odin a chief demon, it was not that they changed any essential quality of a being called Odin, but they changed the image of Odin. What we are doing is confusing the part of a character with the part of the actor.
When a Wiccan invokes Kali as a "dark mother", is that person speaking of the same Kali as the Indian "thug" cultists who assassinated people as an act of devotion to the goddess of wholesale slaughter? We only come across a problem when we hold that these are two images of one real, discrete being. If we consider Kali as an archetype or an image whose personality is a function of the thoughts of her "audience", then we have no problem: Kali is what her devotees make her and she can be the stern but ultimately beneficial dark mother figure who confirms people through trials, while at the same time being the heartless, devouring patroness of assassins.
This attitude reveals the contrivedness of religion. You are free to interpret Frodo Baggins in whatever way you like as long as that conforms to the available evidence. Maybe Frodo Baggins is a hero whose innocence carries him through, or perhaps he is a bumbling fool dependent upon the skill and diligence of others to account for his many failings. Frodo Baggins is a character and no more: he has no independent existence. When it comes to J R R Tolkien, on the other hand, he is either one thing or another. Our evidence might not be enough for us to make definitive declarations about his person, but we know that there is a truth there one way or another and because of this, it isn't a matter of opinion. Tolkien either liked onions or he didn't. As far as I know, we have no evidence indicating his opinion either way, but he either liked them or he didn't.
So when it comes to religion, mythology and cultural figures, we have to make a clear distinction between what we know of an entity versus what we know of the parts that entity may have played. When it comes to figures like Lilith, we have to clearly delineate those things which count as knowledge and those things which count as interpretation. Interpretation deals with the "character of Lilith", while knowledge deals with the "actress of Lilith". To the Abrahamic religions, Lilith represents a demoness because she was unwilling to submit to Adam and has therefore been interpreted in the last few decades as a femminist icon.
Let's take another look at it. Take for example Elizabeth Báthory. There are many different interpretations of this woman dubbed the most prolific female serial killer of all time. One interpretation paints her as little more than a stark-raving mad lunatic who killed people to bathe in their blood. Another interprets her as a figure struck down by a sexist system for having survived too well without her husband Ferenc Nádasdy. In this second interpretation, the string of murders attributed to her is nothing more than a centuries-long defamation used to bring down a woman who survived too obviously while her husband was away. Now imagine we had a way to bring the historical figure of the woman into the present day, as though she had never died (etc.) — the person "resurrecting" her might think they were resurrecting a serial killer and be disappointed by the arrival of a decent person. Another person trying to resurrect her might think they were resurrecting a defamed woman and giving her a chance to set the record straight but be met by homicidal psychopath.
We accept this possibility with historical characters. Maybe Elizabeth Báthory wouldn't set the record straight if you recreated her after all. Maybe Churchill would or wouldn't approve of bigots using his name and image. Maybe Hitler wouldn't be everything present day Nazis think he would be as they pleasure themselves into a frenzy.
But when it comes to the Archangel Michael or Lilith, nobody ever really has the same caution. Nobody pauses before invoking the name of a god or spirit to ask themselves if their impressions of that spirit are accurate. Why? Because when we express a view of figures we view as real, we try to be descriptive: we hope our impressions are accurate. When we express an opinion on figures that are mythological, we are being prescriptive: we're making an assertion as though our insistence has some bearing on the reality.
This is the reason for all the religious disharmony. One group has one view of their deity and insist that is the true view, while another group has a different view and believe just as surely. They're like two computers competing for access rights to edit the "image of god". The image maybe never looked anything like the real thing in the first place, but they go at it editing it to make it conform to their wishes. They want to assert an image of god that suits them and then call this prescription a description to give it objective legitimacy. The kind Christians who want to emphasis "God is Love" over "suffer ye not a witch to live" are just as guilty of this, even if their revisionist religion is motivated by kindness.
It doesn't occur to them as they edit away at this image that that image might have been created by a real being, and when they call upon their god, expecting to be met with their image, they're actually met with the real thing (perhaps an intergalactic despot). Maybe the "image of God" was never an accurate likeness for the "being of God" and all known accounts in which "god" appeared are propaganda. There is a gullibility in accepting things as they seem, in assuming that "God" wasn't working an image campaign. When you read "Wayomer Elohim: Na'ase Adam b'tsalmenu kidmuthenu ... Wayivra Elohim et-HaAdam b'tsalmo, b'tselem Elohim bara oto: Zakhar unk'va, bara Otam" ("And said the Elohim: Let's make Man in our image after our likeness ... and created the Elohim the Man in its image, in its image the Elohim created it: male and female he created them"), ask yourself how much the "image of god" aligns with the truth of the nature of god. The word "tselem", which is interpreted here actually also means phantasm and even "vain show" and "idol". Made in the phantasm of god? Cast into the deceit of God?
This disparity plays into encounters with "spirits". When an entity appeared in Fátima in Portugal and called itself the Virgin Mary, everybody accepted that this was the truth. There were those who doubted that the children had seen the Virgin Mary, but, once they had accepted that they had seen something, nobody disputed that the being really was Mary. Why? Because they don't really view Mary as real the way they view living humans as real. Children are warned not to trust strangers, even if they seem nice, because that niceness could be an act. Who has ever told their children not to trust apparitions of religious figures in case that apparition is not the saint or deity it purports to be?
An old person living alone might have the nous not to let somebody into their house just because they insist they're the gas man, but if a woman thinks an angel saved her from a car crash, she commits two mistakes:
- She assumes that the thing that saved her was an angel. It could have been from a class of entity unknown to her. That is, she interprets the event through her own cultural assumptions rather than attempting to determine the truth. If a stranger helped you, you wouldn't make assumptions about their nature even if you were sure only a certain kind of person was so helpful. Nurses are the kindest people, so the woman who returned my lost wallet to me must have been a nurse. We don't think like that because it's irrational, but it's exactly what people do when they think they have encountered an angel, for example.
- She then goes on to assume that the event happened how it appeared to happen. She doesn't consider the possibility that the being orchestrated the disaster in order to be seen coming to the rescue. There is quite a phenomenon of "arsonist firefighters", who start fires in order to garner the admiration they receive from saving their own victims.
In other words, two assumptions: 1) what seemed nice must genuinely have been nice, and; 2) since it was nice, it must have been an angel (etc.)
My response to your question then, 777, would be to ask you why you believe the nasty entity you encountered was Lilith and not just something that wanted or allowed you to believe it was Lilith. In fact, the closest we can get to knowledge about Lilith, rather than interpretation (for the actor-character/knowledge-interpretation distinction I made earlier) shows that "lilith" was not originally a single entity but a category of entities. In fact, the only time the word appears in the Hebrew bible is as an item on a list of categories of beings. It wasn't until Judaism painted "the" Lilith as the first, equal and disobedient wife of Adam that a single entity emerged. Even today in modern Hebrew "לילית" refers to spirits of the night (the "Lil" part is connected to the word for night, laila). There is also a posited connection to Sumerian spirits of the wind (with "Lil" meaning wind in Sumerian), but wherever the term crops up, it doesn't speak of a single being but a group of beings.
So I would answer your question with another question: why do you think the thing you encounted was Lilith, or even "a lilith"?