Transgressive Women

2 Transgressive Women

According to the Bible the first transgression on earth was committed by the first woman on Earth: Eve, who ate the forbidden fruit and transgressed God’s will.

The biblical Eve soon learned her lesson however; she became obedient to God and her husband and never transgressing again as far as we know. It was too late though; the whole of mankind and womankind has had to pay for her original sin. Or not: we will meet several women writers vigorously disputed this idea of Eve.

Out of her cave came the ancient Lilith; Lilith the wise; Lilith the enchantress. There ran a little path outside her dwelling; it wound away among the mountains and glittering peaks, and before the door one of the Wise Ones walked to and fro. Out of her cave came Lilith, scornful of his solitude, exultant in her wisdom, flaunting her shining and magical beauty. ‘Still alone, star gazer! Is thy wisdom of no avail? Thou hast yet to learn that I am more powerful, knowing the ways of error, than you who know the ways of truth.’ AE The Cave of Lilith

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In the Gnostic tradition Eve was Adam’s second wife, the good wife. She had been preceded by Adam’s very transgressive bad wife Lilith, ‘the witch he loved before the gift of Eve,’ according to Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s poem about her. Lilith refused to obey her husband and refused to lay underneath him in the missionary position. She left him and went off to become a succubus, stealing men’s semen and abducting children; about as transgressive as a woman can get.

Out of her cave came the ancient Lilith; Lilith the wise; Lilith the enchantress. There ran a little path outside her dwelling; it wound away among the mountains and glittering peaks, and before the door one of the Wise Ones walked to and fro. Out of her cave came Lilith, scornful of his solitude, exultant in her wisdom, flaunting her shining and magical beauty. ‘Still alone, star gazer! Is thy wisdom of no avail? Thou hast yet to learn that I am more powerful, knowing the ways of error, than you who know the ways of truth.’ AE The Cave of Lilith

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Several male authors have written about Lilith – half in love with her, half scared of her: the beautiful but deceitful transgressive temptress who will seduce and betray any man she wants. Aleister Crowley, the Great Beast 666 himself, wrote his book Lilith in such ambivalent terms.

Ah! Were those virgin lips of thine polluted with some rank savour of Sabbatic lust? What spell turned thee, the maiden, to a monkey jabbering antiphonal blasphemies To those chaste chants I wooed thee by, the moment that touching thee, my fruit dissolved to dust, Fair-seeming Sodom-apple! Yet thy kisses smote all my spine to shuddering ecstasies!

What woman would not love to be called a fair-seeming Sodom-apple? The medieval Jewish mystical text Zohar also refers to Lilith as the original transgressive woman.

Approaching the earthly Garden of Eden, she sees cherubs guarding the gates of the Garden, and she dwells there by that flaming sword, for she emerged from the side of that flame. As the flame revolves she flees and roams the world, finding children who deserved to be punished. She toys with them and kills them.

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Very transgressive. In other myths of origin the woes of the world are also attributed to a woman not doing as she was told by men. In Greek myth everything was perfect until Pandora opened a jar containing nothing but trouble. As Hesiod described the event:

For ere this the tribes of men lived on earth remote and free from ills and hard toil and heavy sickness which bring the

Fates upon men; for in misery men grow old quickly. But the woman took off the great lid of the jar with her hands and scattered all these and her thought caused sorrow and mischief to men. From her is the race of women and female kind: of her is the deadly race and tribe of women who live amongst mortal men to their great trouble, no helpmates in hateful poverty, but only in wealth.

Often in early myth it is women’s lust that is seen as men’s downfall, especially when the woman is said to be a witch or a sexually predatory goddess like Athena or Lilith. Female lust was always – until very recently and perhaps still today – seen in patriarchal societies as being transgressive but sometimes it led to unspeakably transgressive acts: in Cretan mythology – from which we get Europa, the first European – the witch Pasiphaë lusts after a bull, though only because she has herself been bewitched. She has a

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wooden frame built to resemble a cow so she can hide in it while the bull penetrates her; her lust transgresses even the species barrier. Also transgressing that barrier was the sorceress Circe, who turned Odysseus’ crew into swine, though thankfully not for sexual purposes.

Other transgressive ancient Greek women include Helen of Troy, who caused a catastrophic war; Medea, who killed her children; Clytemnestra, who killed her husband, and Clytemnestra’s daughter Electra, who plotted to kill her mother and stepfather in revenge. There was also Antigone, daughter of the incest between Oedipus and his mother who broke the law because she wanted to bury her brother, and Lysistrata, who led the world’s first sex strike by women. And of course in Greek myth, Amazons, Harpies, Fates, Furies, Gorgons, Maenads and Sirens were all female and were all a threat to peace and patriarchal order.

In India, although Hinduism has much-loved gentle goddesses like Sita, Laksmi and Saraswati, as well as the equally-loved, semi-divine Sakuntala, mother of India’s founder Bharat (of the Mahabharata), it also has fierce, relentless goddesses like Kali and Durga. However, as in Tibetan or Tantric Buddhism, which has Penden Lhamo, Rachigma and Troma, the fierce warrior goddesses are a threat mostly to evil male deities rather than ordinary people.

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Going back to the Christian Bible we have Delilah, who cut off Samson’s hair to rob him of his strength and we also have two women who went even further and cut off men’s heads – surely the most transgressive thing a woman can do: Judith, who cut off the head of Holofernes before he had chance to rape her – a scene lovingly painted by, among many others, pioneering woman artist Artemisia Gentileschi, herself named after Artemisia, the warrior Queen of Caria – and the highly transgressive Salome, who seduced her stepfather in front of her mother so that she could have the severed head of John the Baptist, who had spurned her – a story lasciviously retold by Oscar Wilde and sensuously set to music by Richard Strauss.

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