Chateau Lloyd

I saw the other day that Amazon has a new cartoon that does the typical inversion of the Bible's creation narrative, making Satan the good guy, God and His angels meanies, etc.

All boring old stuff, and it includes the very 90s twist of making Lilith Adam's estranged first wife.  This trope is supposedly why there are two creation narratives in Genesis, and it's based on the usual "bible scholar" conceit that the Jews were too stupid to edit books they copied over and over again.

One sees this quite a bit, usually just in time for Christmas or (especially) Easter.   When they are pushing fantastically heretical texts of comically dubious provenance, they fall back on trying to tease out contradictions and then declare that these are the results of "loose ends" created by earlier edits.  They then pronounce the "true" version, which of course they made up.

Anyway, it seemed like a good idea to revisit some of the good moments of the Lord of Spirits podcast, which for the record I left in sadness rather than anger.  Going back and looking at their take on Lilith and other monsters warmed my heart, because the podcast really was great during its first couple of years. 

There was a hint of anti-Catholic animus, but it was easy to overlook because of their fun, 1990s pop culture nerd references and sick burns of Calvinists.  Their problem was that they were running out of material and the podcast suffered as a result.

Anyhow, Lilith was not a nice person and had a very nasty reputation throughout Near Eastern cultures.  The Greeks and then Romans incorporated her into their pantheon as Lamia, who was likewise a woman done wrong with an endless thirst for revenge.

Like all angry pagan goddesses, she like killing kids.  A lot.  Between that and her fondness for having sex with lonely, isolated men and then killing them, she wasn't so much worshiped as paid off.  A lot of pagan gods were like that - assumed to be angry and vengeful and the best one could hope for was to convince them to ruin someone else's day.

The feminist recasting of her as a justifiably angry first wife is (like all neo-paganism) utter nonsense, but I'm very much open to the idea of that particular spirit trimming her sails to the times.  The pagan gods were real, and people flirt with them at their great peril.  Yes, the packaging is slicker, but demons are still demons.  Fallen angels are not the good guys, folks!

Indeed, it's interesting to note that within the Catholic calendar of saints, there are lots of strong, empowered and virtuous women.  Weird that feminists reject that and celebrate a desert-based sex/death cult.

As for Hazbin Hotel, it looks like a trite piece of trash.  It did, however, inspire me to dig deeper into Lilith, so it's not a total loss.