From women clutching amulets to ward off a deadly monster during childbirth, to modern feminists lauding Lilith, this is a book about women’s beliefs for the past 4000 years.
Clegg has a PhD in the ancient history of Mesopotamia, and reads Sumerian, Akkadian, Arabic, Greek and Latin. She has been researching monsters and their demonic traditions ever since she became fascinated with Lamashtu for her BA thesis.
So who or what was Lamashtu? She first appears in Mesopotamian texts from 2000 BC, specialising in choking babies on amniotic fluid and using her terrifyingly long fingers to reach inside women and drag out foetuses before their term. Even after babies were born, she could kill them. Amulets grasped by women to protect them during pregnancy and childbirth show Lamashtu as a demon with the head of a lioness, the talons of a bird, and a human torso, with animals feeding from her breasts, and with snakes in each of her upraised hands.
In direct descent from this demon of ancient Mesopotamia were Lamia, Lilith, murderous mermaids, and other serpentine succubi. Then there was a snake-tailed ancestor of Richard the Lionheart, a Roman spirit of headaches, the Queen of Sheba herself, and a sad virgin ghost called Lilitu. A related oddity seems to be the Starbucks logo, featuring a twin-tailed mermaid. Such demons were found in Mesopotamia, classical Greece and Rome, in Judaism, Christianity and even Islam. As recently as the 1980s, some older women in a small Greek village warded off child-killing demons.
These beliefs represent the way people have always rationalised the reasons for deaths of mothers and children. Lilith, Adam’s first wife who left after he denied her equality, has now become a women’s liberation symbol.
Woman’s Lore is not light reading, each chapter could be a book in itself, with a side helping of entertaining facts about men’s attitudes to women down the centuries.
Reviewed by Jennifer Somerville
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