Lilith and the draconcopes. Maiden-headed tempters from the Talmud to Boccaccio

One of the masterpieces of Florentine Renaissance painting, the fresco cycle 1424-1428) in the Brancacci Chapel of the Carmine Church, begins with the scene of the Fall from Paradise. While the cycle was made truly great by Masaccio’s contribution, the leading master here was Masolino, and he also painted the opening picture. In it, we see the first couple in a light, dancing, Gothic posture under the tree from which the tempting snake hovers over them. But this snake has a strangely human head: a charming female face with a hunge blonde crown of hair.

Who is this woman?

The well-informed would immediately reply: Lilith, Adam’s ex, who has been known to the educated European since Goethe’s Witch Saturday (1808):

“MEPHISTO: Adams erste Frau! Nimm dich in Acht von ihren schönen Haaren, Vor diesem Schmuck, mit dem sie einzig prangt, Wenn sie damit den jungen Mann erlangt, So läßt sich ihn so bald nicht wieder fahren.”

“MEPHISTOPHELES: Adam’s first wife is she. Beware the lure within her lovely tresses, The splendid sole adornment of her hair! When he succeeds therewith a youth to snare, Not soon again she frees him from her jesses.”

This picture is also taken from Goethe by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, the founder of the Pre-Raphaelite school, in his sonnet entitled Body’s Beauty, published in 1881, which, however, originally accompanied his picture Lady Lilith (1866-1873) with the title Lilith:

„Lo! as that youth’s eyes burned at thine, so went Thy spell through him, and left his straight neck bent And round his heart one strangling golden hair.”

The other impressive Pre-Raphaelite portrait of Lilith by John Collier, 1892, Merseyside, Atkinson Art Gallery

However, we know that the devil is the father of lies, and thus the marriage certificate shown to Dr. Faust that mentions Lilith is also a big fake.

In fact, Lilith appears in one single place in the Hebrew Bible, in Isaiah 34 (13-16), where the Lord foretells how He would destroy Edom:

“Thorns will overrun her citadels, nettles and brambles her strongholds. She will become a haunt for jackals, a home for owls. Desert creatures will meet with hyenas, and wild goats will bleat to each other. There the lilith לִילִית will also lie down and find for themselves places of rest. The owl will nest there and lay eggs, she will hatch them and care for her young under the shadow of her wings. There also the falcons will gather, each with its mate.”

The role of the lilith is here to mark, along with all the other ominous beings, how desolate the Lord makes Edom. But as to exactly what kind of being it is, we are not told, since the name is a hapax legomenon, a word that only occurs once in the Bible. Nevertheless, it must have been familiar to the Jews of the period if it could be used to indicate the extent of destruction. As if we were reading today that a place has become a home for vampires and orcs, the nest of Dracula. The products of the fantasy literature of the last hundred years are pretty much in the public consciousness, they don’t need to be explained.

The words lili and līlītu in the Mesopotamian languages Sumerian, Akkadian and Assyrian, meant ʻspirit’, in some texts a disease-bearing spirit living in the wind. It was probably from there and in this sense transferred into the Aramaic language spoken by the Jews of Babylon and the Bible. In the 4th to 6th century AD, “bowls of incantation” were widespread in the area: these were hidden in the base or ground of the houses as traps to catch the liliths intruding in the houses. These bowls were used by all local cultures and languages. Several hundred of them have been found from Jews with texts in Aramaic. biblical or talmudic references.

A Jewish bowl of incantation from the 6th century (above) and its contemporary counterpart collected by Penn Museum (below)

Typically, Bible translations did not know what to do with the name. The Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Diaspora Jews merges the hyenas with the lilith under the name “onocentaur”, and translates the goat, understood as a satyre, as “demon”.

“καὶ συναντήσουσιν δαιμόνια ὀνοκενταύροις καὶ βοήσουσιν ἕτερος πρὸς τὸν ἕτερον ἐκεῗ ἀναπαύσονται ὀνοκένταυροι εὗρον γὰρ αὑτοῗς ἀνάπαυσιν”

“and demons will meet onocentaurs, and they will cry to each other; there will rest the onocentaurs, finding a resting place there.”

Basically, this translation is followed by the Vulgate, the Latin translation of St. Jerome, which translates the lilith as lamia, a child-devoring female demon in Greek mythology:

“et occurrent daemonia onocentauris et pilosus clamabit alter ad alterum, ibi cubavit lamia et invenit sibi requiem”

“and demons will meet onocentaurs, and hairy beings cry to each other. The lamia also abides there, it finds a resting place there.”

The meaning of ʻonocentaur’ was only slightly clearer than that of the lilith. Based on ὄνος = donkey, it was interpreted as a kind of donkey-centaur. This is how a 12th-century Franco-Flemish bestiary depicts the encounter of the demon with the onocentaur:


In Jewish rabbinic literature, the name only occurs four times, always referring to the text of Isaiah, in a sense of “evil spirit” until the 8-10th c. AD, that is, well into the Middle Ages, when a Hebrew treatise called The Alphabet of Ben Sira made it a person. The treatise contains twice 22 proverbs in Aramaic and Hebrew, arranged according to the Hebrew alphabet, and illuminates the meaning of each with a Midrashic story. According to the story that interests us here, Ben Sira heals the sick little son of King Nebuchadnezzar with an amulet. When the king asks him what he wrote on the amulet, Ben Sira tells him that God kneaded the first human couple from the dust of earth, and they were thus equal. The woman, Lilith, therefore, did not want to lie under Adam in the bed, as required by Jewish sexual morals, but she wanted to be above. She rebelled and fled to the Red Sea, where she mated with demons. God sent three angels after her, Senoy, Sansenoy and Semangelof, who, however, failed to bring her back. All they could agree with her was that although she as a demon now had power to infect newborn children, nevertheless if the names of these three angels were written somewhere, she would not hurt the child there.

Literature considers this tractate a kind of satire, a compilation of parodies brought together by bored yeshivabohers, a huge hoax full of pedantic talmudic hochmetsing over assorted smut, from farting through masturbation to incest (for example, Ben Sira himself is said to be born from the union of Prophet Jeremiah with his own daughter). This is how seriously we have to take the tradition of Lilith as Adam’s first wife. True, in the double creation story of the Book of Genesis, God first creates the man and the woman in His own image (Gen 1:27), and then He creates the woman from the rib of the man (Gen 2:22). For believers in the literal interpretation of the Bible, these were two creations: but then, where is the first woman? This logical hiatus was made up for by the yeshivabohers with the lilith which stood without any real meaning in the Bible and the Talmud. Before them, however, neither the Jewish nor the Christian exegetical tradition raised and answered this question, especially not by creating a “first wife”.

In any case, the amulet recommended against child death sounded too good to be left behind. Better safe than sorry, the amulet began to become a reality in Jewish circles, and was widely used until the 20th century.

A medieval amulet, with the names of the three angels in the three bird-like figures, from the Amsterdam 1701 edition of Sepher Raziel HaMalach (Archangel Raziel’s Secret Book) (above), a 18th-century printed kimpetbrivl (kind+bet+briv, child-bed-letter) from the Jewish Museum in Berlin (below), and a 19th-century silver amulet with the figure of Lilith from the collection of the Israel Museum in Jerusalem (more below)

And along with the amulet, the idea of Lilith as Adam’s first wife gradually took root in Jewish folk religiosity. However, this idea excited Christians even more, when they first became acquainted with this Jewish tradition which they considered a very ancient and holy secret knowledge. This happened just in Florence at the end of the 15th century, when in Lorenzo de’ Medici’s Platonic Academy, of which Pico della Mirandola, the first Christian kabbalist, was a member, they started translating excerpts from the Kabbalah and rabbinic literature. This is how the motif appeared in works of artists who were visitors of the Academy. Filippino Lippi, for example, painted in the Filippo Strozzi Chapel of Santa Maria Novella the first four patriarchs, including Adam as he protects his little son Seth from Lilith (while he still casts a dreamy look at his ex of rich red hair). Some art historians also see Lilith in Michelangelo’s temptress in the Sistine Chapel, or in Bosch’s first woman in the Garden of Earthly Delights, but their arguments are not convincing: these works can be perfectly explained from the medieval Christian tradition, which we will see below.




The Neoplatonic trend, however, died out in the 16th century. Lilith was resurrected by Goethe, and elevated to new heights and made a “Victorian icon” by the Pre-Raphaelites, so much that she is now considered a feminist patron saint as the first woman who did not renounce her equality with man.

It is interesting to see how modern Bible translations change with the spread of the Lilith myth, and how Lilith, created by the yeshivabohers, Goethe and the Pre-Raphaelites, moves into the barren homestead of the lilith as a harmful spirit of Is 34:14. Luther still translates lilith as Kobold, the later versions as Gespenster, ʻspirits’, while the Geneva Schlechter of 2000 as Lilith. The earliest English versions as lamia, borrowed from the Vulgate, the King James Version as screech owl, while the later English versions represented it more and more as lilith, and even Lilith. The first – Protestant – Hungarian version has éji boszorkány (night witch), while the new Catholic version has Lilith. The myth seems to have done a good job, and soon you will be able to prove from the Bible itself that Lilith was a central figure of ancient Jewish faith, at least since the time of Isaiah.

The very first printed amulet against Lilith. Amsterdam, c. 1700. “Adam and Eve, excluding Lilith. Senoy, Sansenoy and Semangelof guardian angels, break the Satan.”

The image of the maiden-headed serpent tempting Adam and Eve in paradise, however, had been born much before the Jewish esoteric tradition was translated in the Medici court: in fact, not long after the yeshivabohers’ arsing-about gave birth to Lilith as Adam’s first wife. Its author, Petrus Comestor was the head of the 12th-century Parisian theological school, who in 1173 published his Historia scholastica, the “popular Bible” of the Middle Ages, which became a basic handbook of the university curriculum and was translated into most European vernaculars. He wrote:

“Because Lucifer was afraid of being found out by the man, he approached the woman, who had less foresight and was [like] «wax to be twisted into vice» and this by means of the serpent; for the serpent at that time was erect like a man, since it was laid prostrate when it was cursed. … He also chose a certain kind of serpent … which had the countenance of a virgin, because like favors like; and he moved its tongue to speak, though it knew nothing itself, just as he speaks through the frenzied and the possessed.”

A maiden-headed snake standing on two feet in Hugo van der Goes’ The fall of man (after 1479), in Vienna’s Kunsthistorisches Museum

An erect snake. Furtmeyr Bible, Regensburg, after 1475

Speculum humanae salvationis, German, 14th c. British Library, Harley 4996 f. 4v

Johanna of Castilia’s prayer book. British Library, Add. MS 18852, fol. 15v

Book of Hours, Bruges or Ghent, 15th c. Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, MS 287, fol. 46r

And here you have that “certain kind of serpent” chosen by Lucifer: the draconcopes (=ʻsnake-footed’). From the Hortus Sanitatis,1491. Originally from Vincent of Beauvais’ 13th-century Speculum naturale: “Draconcopedes serpentes magni sunt, et potentes, facies virgineas habentes humanis similes, in draconum corpus desinentes.” (Dracontopedes are large and strong snakes, whose maiden-face is similar to the man, but their body ends in snake body.)

The image was adopted by many authors. One of its most popular distributors was the 12th-century Norman-English mystery play Le Jeu d’Adam, which, in three acts, presented creation, the Fall and the prophecies about the coming of the Savior (here you can see its modern presentation). The piece, played across Europe, was mostly performed in front of the main gates of the cathedrals, and at a certain point displayed a “cleverly contrived” snake on a tree. It was certainly maiden-headed, because its figure also passed on to the carvings of the portals made at that time.

Paris, Notre-Dame, western façade, 13th c.

Another important mediator of the image was Boccaccio’s On Famous Women (De mulieribus claris), also translated into many languages. The series of famous women began with Eve, whose story, in the 14th- and 15th-century manuscripts, was illustrated with the Fall, invariably with a maiden-headed snake. The most moving example is the manuscript at the Getty Museum illustrated by the Boucicaut Master between 1413 and 1415, in the opening picture of which Boccaccio, sitting at his desk at the left side wall of the Paradise, is waiting for old Adam and Eve arriving from the right, to record oral history with them.

Très Riches Heures du duc de Berry, Limbourg brothers, between 1411 and 1415, fol. 25v

Boccaccio, The Fall of Princes, translated by John Lydgate, 1450-60. British Library, Harley 1766, fol. 11r

It was only a step away from the work of an Italian author to an Italian painter to paint the motif as well. In the early 1420s, Paolo Uccello was commissioned to paint the cycle of Creation and Fall in the so-called Green Cloister of Santa Maria Novella in Florence. The pictures – which were severely damaged by the 1966 flood of Arno – were still fresh when Masaccio worked here on the fresco of the Trinity, and in parallel on the fresco cycle of the Brancacci Chapel, where a similar woman-headed tempter would soon appear.




We have seen the actors; let the cycle begin.

Saint Raphael the Whale-Slayer

St. Raphael’s icon on the chapel at the bridgehead of the Blue Nile, 19th c.

I have already written that the iconography, that is, the system of representations of the Ethiopian church, living isolated at the edge of the Christian world, had evolved in a separate way, and developed many pictorial formulas that are apocryphal to other Christian churches.

Such as the prominent role of the seven archangels in the church frescoes. The Ethiopian monastery churches of Lake Tana are circular wooden constructions, with square-based stone sanctuaries inside. On each of the four sides of the sanctuary, a gate opens (or, more precisely, is closed to the ordinary believer), and on their double doors are painted a pair of archangels (and on the doors of the fourth gate, the seventh archangel and the Virgin Mary).

Archangel Raphael (to the right) on one gate of Ura Kidane Mihret monastery church. The counterpart of the slaying of the big fish is everywhere another sea scene, the crossing of the Red Sea and the destruction of Pharaoh’s army in the water.

Who can name all seven archangels? Probably not many of us. In fact, the Bible mentions only two or three of them by name, depending on confession. Michael, who pushes down the rebellious angels with a fiery sword, and Gabriel, who forwards the divine message to the Virgin Mary with a white lily in hand, are known to everyone. And the Catholic Bible also includes the book of Tobit, which is not accepted in the Jewish and Protestant scriptures, since it had no Hebrew original, only a Greek version was known. In this, a third archangel, Rafael, accompanies the young Tobias from Nineveh to Media – to Ekbatana/Hamadan, a significant Jewish settlement at that time, the later funeral place of Queen Esther and Mordecai, to connect it also to today’s Purim celebration.

At the same time, apocryphal or not, this is the book which establishes that seven is the number of archangels. In its final part, the archangel reveals himself: “I am Raphael, one of the seven angels who stand in the glorious presence of the Lord, ready to serve him.” (Tob 12:15) The idea of the seven archangels – the lords of the seven planets – was taken over by the Jews from the surrounding peoples, especially from the Zoroastrian religion, where it first took shape, during the Assyrian-Babylonian captivity, when Tobias’ story also takes place. The Yezidi Kurds preserved from the same cultural milieu the cult of the seven archangels, for which they are now being massacred by the extremists of ISIS. This cult was also popular with local Christians in the first centuries, so much so, that the Council of Laodicea of 363 (Article 35) had to expressly prohibit the worship of the angels, and allow only their veneration. The Latin church limited this to the three archangels known by name, while the Orthodox church has preserved to this day the veneration of the seven archangels, celebrated on 8 November in a special feast called “the gathering of the archangels” (Σύναξη τῶν Ἀρχαγγέλων), “the gathering of Archangel Michael” (Собор Архистратига Михаила), or “the gathering of the bodiless” (Σύναξη τῶν Ἀσωμάτων). At this meeting, the seven archangels hold a council at the end of time, just before the last judgment.

The gathering of Archangel Michael. Russian icon, 19th c., with the names of the single archangels in their halos: Yegudiel, Uriel, Selaphiel, Barakhiel, Gabriel, Michael, Raphael (the latter with the young Tobias, who holds the fish in hand).

Especially remarkable among the Ethiopian representations is the figure of Raphael, who always stabs a big fish with his spear. In the Book of Tobit, Raphael and Tobias wandering together catch a big fish from Tigris River, whose heart and liver are later used to expel the demon Asmodeus, and its gall to heal the blind eye of Tobit, the father of Tobias. We might think that the Ethiopian pictures of Raphael also show the fish of the Book of Tobit. It is peculiar, however, that we always see a small chapel beside the fish or on the fish’s back, with people praying inside. What’s that?


The answer is given by an Ethiopian source. The 14th-century Synaxarium Aethiopicum, the collection of the biographies of the Ethiopian saints, ordered by feasts, celebrates on 8 September the feast of Archangel Raphael, about whom it tells, amongst others, the following miraculous story. The Coptic Patriarch St. Theophilus (385-412)

“…built many churches, and among them was the church, which was on the island outside the city of Alexandria, and was dedicated in the name of the glorious Archangel Rufa’el (Raphael); and Abba Theophilus the Archbishop finished the building thereof and consecrated it as it were this day. And whilst the believers were praying in the church, behold the church trembled, and was rent asunder, and it moved about. And they found that the church had been built upon the back of a whale of the whales of the sea, on which a very large mass of sand had heaped itself. Now the whale lay firmly fixed in its place, and the treading of the feet of the people upon it cut it off from the mainland; and it was Satan who moved the whale so that he might throw down the church. And the believers and the archbishop cried out together, and made supplication to the Lord Christ, and they asked for the intercession of the glorious Archangel Rufa’el. And God, the Most High, sent the glorious angel Rufa’el, and he had mercy on the children of men, and he drove his spear into the whale, saying unto him, “By the commandment of God stand still, and move not thyself from thy place”; and the whale stood in his place and moved not. And many signs and wonders were made manifest, and great healings of sick folk took place in that church. And this church continued to exist until the time when the Muslims reigned [641], and then it was destroyed, and the whale moved, and the sea flowed back again and drowned many people who dwelt in that place.”

In this story, we can recognize two “Wandermotive”, traveling motifs. One is the big sea fish which is thought to be an island, but which, after a while, swims away or submerges in the sea. Its best known example is read in the sea travels of the 6th-century Irish abbot St. Brendan, where the abbot and his companions moor at night on an island. However, when in the morning they read Mass, and then set fire, the island moves, and slowly swims away. The companions flee back in horror to the ship, where they hear from St. Brendan:

“God has last night revealed to me the mystery of all this; it was not an island you were upon, but a fish, the largest of all that swim in the ocean, which is ever trying to make its head and tail meet, but cannot succeed, because of its great length. Its name is Iasconius.”

Navigatio Sancti Brendani Abbatis. The voyage of St. Brendan the Abbot, ch. 10., translated by Denis O’Donoghue, 1893

St. Brendan’s island, c. 1230-1240. British Library, Harley MS 4751, f. 69r.

The other traveling motif is the subjection of the great fish / water monster. This story often appeared in various creation stories in Mesopotamia, where the Book of Tobit was also written: the deity (Ninurta, Marduk, Hadad etc.) overcomes the great fish / snake / dragon living in the ancestral sea of chaos, and creates from it / builds upon it the world. This myth was also taken over by the Jews at the time of the Babylonian captivity, and although later they replaced it with the two creation stories now read at the beginning of the Book of Genesis, its traces were retained in the Bible. For example, in Job 40:25-32, where God reminds Job of His greatness with references to the former struggle: “Can you pull the Leviathan with a fishhook… will it make an agreement with you for you to take it as your slave for life?” or in Psalm 74, which briefly summarizes the creation myth to illustrate God’s greatness:

“It was you who split open the sea by your power; you broke the heads of the monster in the waters. It was you who crushed the heads of Leviathan, and gave it as food to the creatures of the desert. It was you who opened up springs and streams; you dried up the ever-flowing rivers. The day is yours, and yours also the night; you established the sun and moon. It was you who set all the boundaries of the earth; you made both summer and winter.” (Psalm 74:13-17)

The creation founded on the Leviathan in the center of the Hasidic synagogue of Łańcut (on the vault of the bimah), late 18th c.

The Ethiopian legend of Raphael bears a great resemblance to this creation story. The archangel, at the command of God, stabs the great fish, so it serves as a solid foundation for the house of God. Is it possible that the Ethiopian tradition has retained something from the Jewish myth, in which, perhaps, the Archangel Raphael fulfilled the subjugation of the ancient water monster at His command, just as the rebellious angels were pushed out from heaven to the underworld by the Archangel Michael in His name?

This is justified by a motif that was unintentionally left in the Book of Tobit. Known as the “Tobias’ Dog Problem”, it has excited the fantasy of commentators at least since the age of confessional debates. It is about the dog that appears twice in brief mentions without any antecedents, and then disappears again without any further role in the Book of Tobit:

“So the son and the angel departed, and the dog went after them.” (Tob 6:2)

“They both arrived, and the dog went after them.” (Tob 11:4)

Tobias and Raphael depart and then come back, and on these occasions the dog appears next to them. Jacob van Maerlant, Rijmbijbel. Utrecht, 1332, miniatures by Michiel van der Borch

According to the analysis of Naomi S. S. Jacobs (What about the dog? Tobit’s mysterious canine revisited, 2014), the dog remained in the Book of Tobit from a more detailed folk narrative, written – as it is indicated by its Greek vernacular – as an entertaining and teaching Midrashic story. In the original narrative, it might have been the helper of Raphael who subjugated the great fish / water monster, just as in similar myths, the evil-chasing dog helps the deity to overcome the water monster / dragon. In the final version, it appears at the two key points of the fish story: before the catching of the great fish, and when Tobias and Raphael heal the blind Tobit with the fish gall.

It is thus conceivable, that this unique motif of Ethiopian iconography, Archangel Raphael stabbing the big fish and firmly founding the house of God on it, as well as the Book of Tobit, written in the 3th century BC in a Greek-speaking Jewish diaspora of Mesopotamia or Egypt, preserved the memory of the most ancient “third creation story” on these two edges of the Jewish and Christian religions, where the authority of the official Book of Genesis, redacted in Judea in the 6th century BC, had not yet completely pushed the original myth into oblivion.

Archangel Raphael (to the right) on a gate of the Azwa Mariam monastery church at Lake Tana.

In any case, the fish scene is well suited to the monasteries built on the islands of Lake Tana. The frescoes of the nearly two-dozen monastery churches willingly reach back to those biblical or apocryphal scenes, where the holy figures catch or eat fish, thus blessing and elevating up to a higher sphere the most important daily food of the islands’ inhabitants.