That she should be credited with being the author 01 "Evil night-dreams" shows how prone the partners of spirit brides have been to subjective hallucinations. We do not find any such wholsesale charge brought against spirit husbands of portraying evil dreams as is brought against Lilith. The imaginations of men's hearts must indeed have been evil in those days and their brains beclouded or the difference between a materialized spirit bride and the subjective phantasm of an amorous dream would have been more sharply defined. The psychic who conforms two separate planes of existence has forsaken the path of selfcontrol and clear-headedness, and has entered upon the path whose end is insane delusion.
In the supplement of Littre's Dictionary, (French), 1877, occurs a suggestive etymology of the word lilac (or as it is in French, lilas.) The writer connects the root of this word with the Persian nil, indigo, and calls attention to the various Persian words, nilah, niladj, liladj, lilandj, lilang, all relating to indigo. He connects the word lilas (French for lilac) with these words and also with the diminutive lilak (bluish, as fingers blued by the cold) a tint which perfectly characterizes the flowers of the lilac of Persia which are of a pale purple. May there be some philosophical connection between this palely purple flower "lilas" and the ghostly "Lilis" or "Lilat" or "Lilith?"
Lilith figures in a text of Isaiah: but we have to go both to Mohammedan and to Ancient Greek folklore to find the connecting link between this text and the Lilith of Rabbinical traditions. The text refers to the destruction which the Lord threatens will befall Eden, and reads:
"And thorns shall come up in her palaces, nettles and thistles in the fortresses thereof; and it shall be an habitation of jackals, a court for ostriches and the wild beasts of the desert shall meet with the wolves [or howling creatures]: and the saytr [or he-goat J shall cry to his fellow: yea, the night-monster shall settle there, and shall find her a place of rest." Isaiah XXXIV. 13, 14, Revised Version.
The word "night-monster" is in Hebrew, "Lilith," The King James version translates this word "screech-owl;"
