this woman was an altogether different creature from the
first. The contradiction was most ingeniously explained by the learned
Jewish Rabbis, who considered the first woman the organic germ from
which the special Hebrew-Christian devils were evolved. The Rabbis
discovered that the name of the first woman was "Lilith"[1] (the
nightly); they knew positively--and who can disprove their
assertion?--that she was the most perfect beauty, more beautiful than
Eve; she had long waving hair, bright eyes, red lips and cheeks, and a
charmingly finished form and complexion; but having been created at the
same moment as the first man, and like him, in the image of God, she
refused to become man's wife; she objected to being subordinate to the
male part of creation--she was, in fact, the first strong-minded woman,
claiming the same rights as man, though a woman in body and form. Under
these circumstances the existence of the human race was deemed to be an
impossibility, and therefore the Lord had to make good his error, and He
created Eve as the completing part of man. The first woman left her
co-equally created male, and was changed into an enormous, most
beautiful, and seducing "She Devil," and her very thoughts brought forth
daily a legion of devils--incarnations of pride, vanity, conceit, and
unnaturalness. Happily these devils were so constituted that they
devoured one another. But in their rage they could take possession of
others, and more especially entered little children--boys under three
days old, girls under twenty days--and devoured them. This myth, by
means of evolution and the law of action and re-action, engendered the
further legend about the existence of three special angels who acted as
powerful antidotes to these devils, and whose names, "Senoi, Sansenoi,
and Sanmangeloph," if written on a piece of parchment suspended round
the neck of children afforded certain protection against them.

The origin of the Devil may thus be traced to the first vain contempt
for the eternal laws of nature. The woman, refusing to be a woman,
engenders devils; the man, trying to be a God, loses paradise and his
innocence, for the element of the supernatural intruded upon him and
abstracted his thoughts from this earth. These were the half idealistic
and half realistic elements from which the three greatest spiritual
incarnations of the Evil Spirit sprung up. Luther took the Evil Spirit
as a bodily entity, with big horns, fiery eyes, a r