Lilith

Reviews and more on my blog: Entering the Enchanted Castle

I read this book many years ago as a teenager or in my twenties, because I had loved MacDonald's books as a child. But Lilith was something else again, and I think it must have put me off with its mostly dark and inscrutable images, and philosophical talk about death being the only way to true life. I don't have a strong memory of my response at the time; interested but puzzled, I think.

Since then I've read and learned more about esoteric Christianity, spiritual development, and paths of initiation, and gone through a kind of death-rebirth process of my own through an extreme personal crisis at midlife. Now, picking this book up is like reading a textbook written in fairy-tale images about such a process of initiation. Extraordinary, and marred only by the twee sayings of the “Little Ones” who are far too cutesy (but that is a nineteenth century literary disease), and the sometimes murky prose. I will be reading it again, I'm sure, and there are lots of passages I want to copy and ponder at length.