“I’m a cisgender, heteronormative, circumcised, bar mitzvahed, fifth-generation Jew from the American South,” I said.

  To my utter relief, there was laughter.

  Rabbi Jill Hammer opened the morning session. She was seated cross-legged in front of a small altar. “Today I want to talk about one of the most notorious demons in history,” she said. “Her name is Lilith, and she embodies the aspects of darkness, terror, and escapism that all of us carry around within us. She also represents all of us who don’t want to be ‘good girls.’”

  Jill is a slight woman, with superlong, slightly graying brown hair, on top of which she wears a crocheted skullcap. She looks like the kind of ethereal figure you might see illustrated on the cover of a girl’s young adult fantasy novel. She’s also deeply learned, with a PhD in social psychology, an ordination from the Jewish Theological Seminary, and a day job teaching finely tuned distinctions in religious law at the Academy for Jewish Religion, a pluralistic rabbinical seminary in Yonkers, New York.

  In her spare time, Jill has spent more than a decade preparing women to lead religious rituals, from baby namings to funerals. The catch: She doesn’t train her students to be clerics, rabbis, or prelates. She trains them to be priestesses. Specifically she grooms them to mix traditional religious practices with natural spiritual rituals like reverence for the seasons, worship of the moon, and celebrations of the monthly fertility cycle.

  “Three weeks ago I officiated my friend’s wedding in the desert of California,” one of the priestesses explained to me. “The couple wanted an intergalactic high-desert affair that would also appeal to the groom’s Midwest, middle-of-America parents along with CEOs and crystal healers. I said, ‘Sounds like a job for a priestess!’”

  In all the years I’ve been traveling in the footsteps of biblical stories, one thing has struck me more than anything else: the Bible’s remarkable powers of regeneration. No matter what’s going on in the world, these stories, the youngest of them thousands of years old, have the uncanny ability to reinvent themselves to become utterly urgent today. A huge part of this is because the text attracts a never-ending cast of devotees and enthusiasts who embed themselves in its characters and find meaning in its themes.

  Jill Hammer is a perfect example. Though she comes from a different theological, spiritual, and cultural tradition than John Mark Comer, in many ways she’s attempting something similar. She’s trying to take followers who might otherwise drift away from organized religion and find a way to keep them engaged. In her case, the constituency she’s appealing to would be ideal candidates for the nondenominational, free-form spirituality currently in vogue. I’m not religious; I’m spiritual. Her message: Don’t give up on tradition; don’t give up on rigor; don’t give up on the Bible.

  Jill had what she calls a bourgeois Jewish upbringing in rural New York, where her father was a dentist and her mother a German war refugee. Unable to have children, they adopted Jill. “My adoption had a deep impact on my desire to look for mother figures,” she told me.

  After marrying and earning her PhD, Jill became involved in traditional religious practice, but with a feminist twist. “I began leading services using feminine pronouns for God and the feminine name for God, Shekhinah,” she said. One day a visiting professor gave a lecture in which she said that it was immoral to use this kind of language. Jill confronted her, but the woman refused to back down. That night Jill had a dream.

  “I was at a cocktail party, and everyone crowded around waiting for the guest of honor,” Jill explained. “The guest of honor turned out to be God, who was an enormously radiant, glowing pregnant woman. She had long, honey-colored hair, breasts, belly, the whole thing.”

  Jill was ecstatic. “I jostled to sit next to her and began telling her all I think about God and gender. She thought it was all very funny. Then she picks up an unlit, wrought-iron lantern, gives it to me, and . . . I wake up.” Jill turned to her husband next to her in bed. “God gave me a lantern, and I don’t know what to do with it!”

  “Boy, are you in trouble,” he said.

  The next day she applied to rabbinical school.

  In the seminary, Jill excelled at the most esoteric aspects of Jewish law but was horrified by its male-centeredness. During a study year in Israel, she grew attached to the legacy of honoring the land, building altars, and using other forms of worship that had been squeezed out of daily practice. She also got divorced and began dating a female drummer named Shoshana.

  “For a gift, Shoshana bought me a Web site and said, ‘Go figure this out,’” Jill said. She organized an experimental weekend gathering of women to explore their spirituality. On the last day, everyone gathered in a cave with a river running through it. Candles were everywhere.

  “Shoshana was drumming,” Jill said. “I climbed down the ladder and felt, ‘My God, this is what our ancestors meant by ritual.’”

  Along with a colleague, Taya Shere, Jill started a priestess institute called Kohenet, using the feminine variation of kohen, or priest. The two designed an intensive three-year curriculum that prepares students to fulfill any number of spiritual roles women have played over the centuries, from midwife to storyteller to wisewoman.

  “And let me tell you,” Jill said. “We succeeded beyond our wildest dreams.” The forty women who had graduated so far had led prayer, facilitated marriages, written books, delivered babies, and generally helped others embrace the sacred feminine in their lives.

  “These women testify to a reality only partly revealed in the Bible and other sacred texts,” Jill said. “Priestesses are part of our history. Now they are part of our future as well.”

  Tonight was the graduation ceremony for the fourth class, and this morning was the final session. A number of alumnae were also in attendance. Jill passed around a few medieval texts, along with photographs of silver amulets. Jill drew special attention to one that said, “ADAM AND EVE: OUT LILITH.”

  “What this shows,” she said, “is that there has always been a threatening aspect of women’s sexuality. Adam and Eve were ‘in’; Lilith was ‘out.’ We have to speak more openly about our eagerness to conceal our power.”

  The women responded with a chorus of “Hmm,” “Uh-huh,” and “You said it.”

  At the end of the discussion, Jill brought forward a dozen wooden bowls filled with stones and beads. There was malachite representing hope and pregnancy, jasper for willpower and sexual energy, and so on.

  “This would be a good time for you to make a personal amulet in response to our conversation,” Jill said.

  • • •

  THE IDEA THAT LILITH, a maligned figure for centuries, could somehow go in the course of just one century from being “out” to “in,” is a remarkable turnabout and represents an enormous shift in how the story of Adam and Eve resonates. The single most common question I was asked when I told people I was writing about Adam and Eve is whether I was also writing about Lilith.

  Hollywood played a critical role in this. From the early years of film, the names “Lilith,” “Lil,” or “Lola” have been given to women of unbridled sexuality. Mae West had her biggest Broadway hit with 1928’s Diamond Lil, which became a film in 1933. The following year Jean Harlow played Lil in Red-Headed Woman, a movie so controversial it was pulled from circulation. In Damn Yankees! (1958), Lola is an employee of the Devil who sings “Whatever Lola Wants, Lola Gets”; Lil runs a brothel in Gaily, Gaily (1969), is a hooker in Islands in the Stream (1977), and owns a bar in Coyote Ugly (2000). In the long-running sitcoms Cheers and Frasier, Lilith is the icy psychiatrist who first dates, then marries, and later cheats on fellow shrink Frasier Crane. Even the children’s cartoon series Rugrats (1991–2004) has a Lil who eats worms and drinks from the toilet.

  Two of Hollywood’s biggest stars addressed the story directly. In The Private Lives of Adam and Eve (1960), Mickey Rooney plays the devilish Nick, who’s bickering with his wife, Lil. When the couple find themselves on a bus to Vegas with another feuding pair, Ad and Evie, the two couples switch partners. An elaborate dream sequence ensues that replays the story of the Garden of Eden, which jolts everyone back to their senses. The film ends with Ad and Evie reunited and expecting a baby.

  In the 1964 film Lilith, Warren Beatty plays Vincent, a returning soldier who takes a job in a mental institution, where he falls in love with Lilith, a schizophrenic played by Jean Seberg. The sexually omnivorous Lilith sleeps with a female patient, fondles a boy, and confesses to trying to seduce her brother. After a doctor warns that mental illness can lead people to act as predatory spiders, Lilith weaves her own hair into a blanket for Vincent. Lilith is a figure of such sexual wantonness she can out-wanton Warren Beatty!

  A far more consequential moment in the resuscitation of Lilith occurred in a far less storied place. In 1972, the Grailville retreat in Loveland, Ohio, hosted one of the earliest conferences of women in theology. Among the speakers was Judith Plaskow, a Long Island native who was a graduate student in theology at Yale.

  “Every single teacher in my program was male,” Judith told me over lunch near Manhattan College, where she’s a professor of religious studies. “Every single book and every single article was written by men.”

  Judith joined with a smattering of peers to start the first-ever women’s caucus at the American Academy of Religion. They also began hosting conferences like the one in Loveland, where they discussed how to introduce women’s lived experience into the study of religion.

  “Consciousness-raising is really how we experienced the world,” she said. “The exercise was built around what we called the ‘yeah, yeah experience,’ from the Beatles song. Someone would say they read an article by a woman and saw their life reflected on the page, and everyone would mutter approvingly, ‘Yeah, yeah.’ Someone else would say they attended a lecture and suddenly a piece of their life fit together in a new way, and everyone would say, ‘Yeah, yeah.’ The ‘yeah, yeah’ moment is how we became sisters.”

  On the final day of the conference, Judith retreated to her room and wrote a story she hoped could tie together the myriad themes of the conference. “It’s the only thing I’ve ever written where I feel like I was a channel for it,” she told me.

  What she wrote was an 850-word retelling of the Lilith story. It begins conventionally enough, with God forming Adam and Lilith equally from the earth. But Adam, looking for ways to make Lilith subservient, says, “I’ll have my figs now.” Lilith has no interest in being Adam’s manservant. She utters God’s name and flies away.

  When Adam complains to God about that “uppity woman,” God attempts to sooth his loneliness by creating Eve. Adam and Eve get along nicely for a time, until Lilith threatens their peacefulness. The outcast woman tries to breach the walls of the garden. Adam hurriedly strengthens the barricades and tells Eve there’s a fearsome demon living on the other side who threatens pregnant women and absconds with their children.

  The next time Lilith makes a failed assault, however, Eve catches sight of her. She doesn’t look like a demon, Eve thinks. She looks like me. “The very idea attracted Eve,” the story says. “Sensing capacities in herself that remained undeveloped,” Eve goes in search of this other woman. She spots an apple tree at the edge of the garden, climbs it, and swings over the fence.

  Lilith is waiting for her. “What is your story?” the two ask each other. They talk, laugh, listen, and cry, “till the bond of sisterhood grew between them.” Back in the garden, Adam and God are worried by Eve’s absence. They’re even more befuddled when she returns with her newfound lady friend, “bursting with possibilities, ready to rebuild the world.”

  That night, at the closing dinner, Judith read what she had written. “People were ecstatic,” she recalled. “One person asked to reprint it in a book the following year. Others invited me to give speeches. I delivered the story at the first conference on feminism and religion and got a standing ovation. People totally recognized their own experience in the story. In today’s terms, it went viral.”

  Judith Plaskow’s Lilith story is now widely regarded as the signature moment in what we might call the second coming of the longtime demon outcast. Overnight, Lilith as a symbol of female strength became an icon to the feminist movement. Magazines were named after her. Operas were composed in her honor. And in her most unlikely glorification in her four-thousand-year-old history, the fiendish succubus who first entered history in whispered incantations by the rivers of Babylon became the public face of a traveling music festival founded by Canadian singer-songwriter Sarah McLachlan.

  “Lilith Fair” featured female artists like Shawn Colvin, Queen Latifah, Emmylou Harris, and the Indigo Girls. Organizers chose the name, they said, because Lilith was a woman who sought equality and independence. Not everyone appreciated the reference. The editor of Jerry Falwell’s newspaper denounced the fair for linking itself to what he considered to be Devil culture.

  “Lilith mated with demons and had a demonic brood of children,” he told the Washington Post. “That is dangerous, and parents need to know.”

  The charge of Devil worship had the opposite effect, of course. It helped stir up publicity. The fair grossed $16 million in its first outing, the highest of any touring festival that year.

  So what does Judith think today of this frenzy she initiated?

  “It feels very funny to me,” she said. “Initially I thought it was because the story captured the power of consciousness-raising. Today I think it’s more about rewriting the creation story.”

  People care deeply about Adam and Eve, she went on, and this story caused people to view them differently.

  “Lilith is not a demon; she’s a self-confident woman who was named a demon by a tradition that doesn’t know what to do with strong women. Being strong used to be threatening. I guess we helped make it appealing again.”

  • • •

  SIX HOURS AFTER their class on Lilith, the nine women of the fourth class of Kohenet priestesses marched into a tent on the grounds of the retreat center to attend their ordination. They were dressed in floor-length white gowns and flowing outer garments: turquoise vests, earth-hued scarves, iridescent coats. Their hair was braided, dreadlocked, tucked into buns, or left to hang naturally. A few were barefoot, some wore heels, one sported bedazzled high-top tennis shoes with blinking lights. They looked like a cross between debutantes and an a cappella singing group at Burning Man.

  The first graduate to step before the wooden and stone altar gave a history of the class. The next led the audience in a prayer to the four elements—fire, earth, air, and water. Another paid homage to the ancestors.

  Finally the time came for the formal ordination. One by one, Jill called the graduates to the altar and rubbed dirt on their feet. “From before,” she said. Taya spread anointing oil on their foreheads. “From above.” Shoshana lay hands on her stomach. “From below.” And the scores of loved ones gathered in the tent cried in unison, “And from this moment on. You. Are. A. Kohenet!!”

  Afterward, as everyone gathered around hummus, cantaloupe, and green tea, Jill relaxed in the corner, playing with her eight-year-old daughter. I asked her to reflect on the long journey that had finally brought Lilith and Eve together.

  “The whole idea that Lilith doesn’t belong in the garden is a split many of us are no longer prepared to live with,” she said. “Lilith and Eve are really the same person. They belong together. That’s one of the things we’re doing here. We’re reuniting women with their shadows.”

  “So those negative aspects of her have gone away?” I asked.

  “No, they haven’t gone away. We’ve embraced them. Look, I have an Eve in me. I’m a mother who worries about who gets fed and who takes a bath. And I have a Lilith in me who wants to run away and write poetry and hang out with these women.

  “Literally, on this campus, I’ve been running back and forth between the two,” she continued. “The question is when do I listen to my Lilith and push myself to play more, and when do I listen to my Eve and say, ‘You know what, you need to be the responsible one. Sit this one out.’”

  I asked what she would say to others who wrestle with similar tensions.

  “That everyone shares your struggle,” she said. “We all have this part of us that we can’t live out or don’t want to live without. We all have a piece of us that wants to run off to Paris, or never have become a parent, or doesn’t like the job we’re in, or the relationship we’re in. That’s why we need Lilith. To remind ourselves of what it would have meant to do those things. Lilith is our way of feeding our fantasies. She’s fun, she’s sexy, she’s rebellious. If we didn’t have her, we’d be boring.”

  I left Jill to enjoy her daughter and walked outside the tent. Part of my conviction that Adam and Eve have something to say to modern relationships is based on Lilith. These days, most everyone has a lost love by the time they settle down. The idea that virginal, barely mature children are set up by their parents and live happily ever after in Eden-like relationships might have been fine for earlier centuries, but it hardly applies to today. These days, heartbreak has become indelible to narratives of the heart. As psychologists, friends, barkeeps, and horoscopes remind us, sometimes stumbling miserably at love is a precondition for later succeeding in love.

  To me, Lilith represents that part of us that has tried and failed at love, that’s been wounded, shamed, or embarrassed, was immature, unready, or just the victim of bad timing. Whatever the reason, we all have past loves that even though long gone still call to us when we least expect it, inviting us to remember them in our darkest moments of doubt, as our current lovers, partners, or spouses lie next to us in the bed, wondering who is calling.

  And those voices from the past become part of our ongoing relationships, the shadows that bring meaning and light to the pairings that have succeeded them. If we’re lucky, those memories might even make us appreciate what we have today even more.