THE SONG OF LILITH
HAND MADE ARTIST BOOK
Woodcuts printed on handmade paper from organic materials
Lilith is the She- Demon, documented in Hebrew and Middle Eastern mythologies. Through the ages and until our times, Lilith appears as a notorious night demoness, feared for her wild sexuality and social disobedience.
Talmudic writings from the 10th century tell her story: Lilith was Adam’s first wife, they were created equally from the earth and placed in the garden of Eden. However; they did not find happiness together since Adam demanded Lilith to obey him and lie beneath him, to that Lilith responded: Why should I lie beneath you when i am your equal since both of us were created from dust? When Lilith saw that Adam was determined to overpower her, she uttered the magic Name of God, rose into the air and flew away to the Red Sea, a place where demons dwelled, where she made her home.
After this failed attempt at creating a wife for Adam, God created the second wife, Eve, this time from Adam’s rib, so that she would behave properly.
From antiquity to the age of enlightenment, Lilith accompanies Mankind, as a projection of Patriarchal consciousness, incarnating man’s desires and worst fears towards women and wild Nature. She is the femme fatale, the whore, the queer, the fallen one.
In the Light, Lilith is the independent female, the free-spirited intellectual and sexual woman who demands freedom of expression and equality in all matters and as such she embodies a serious threat to societies based on the domestication of women and Nature.
THE SONG OF SONGS
Developed in collaboration with Yair Medina, Jerusalem Fine Art Prints
The calligraphy was made by Shlomo Ochayon z”l (2009)
The song of songs- “Shir Hashirim”- the scroll “Song of Songs” is one of five scrolls in the Bible. It is thought to be written by King Solomon. Traditionally this text is understood as an allegory for the relationship between the creator and his beloved creation.
These images of the light rise from the roots of the soul that knows love, loss, and beyond. They “sing” our human longing to unite with the Divine, as we feel it when we fall in love with a person, when we become one with the beauty and mystery in nature, or when we simply feel the creator in us.
While working on the Art i imagined it in the seed of the plant that dreams the flower, in the essence of the cocoon that transforms into the butterfly, in the sacrifice of the tree that creates the fire, in the breath of the woman, the kiss of the bird, the eyes of the beloved, the touch of the wind, in the union of heart with mind.
The ultimate song is always a love song to the miracle of life and death and transcendence.
The Female Nature
Seldom a great artist emerges who has so pertinent a message for troubled times as has Liliana Kleiner. Her paintings and wood cuts are a marvel, as she renders nature and the feminine juxtaposed in a consummate way. And she otherwise takes us to the depth of the feminine; a depth, which has come to her living in simplicity, in a cabin off the grid, on the British Columbia coast, bonded with wild nature and her dream work, devoted as artist. Her output is strikingly large but not with the sacrifice of quality. I leave it to those who read her book, to judge. One slant I bring to a review of her work is
a life time as a Jungian psychotherapist because I see the similarity in some of her work, to art of our ancient ancestors, art that has a reverberation with the depth of the psyche and therefore the feminine. That it speaks to our times is obvious in a time when people have lost their connection to the feminine and to nature, and to both seen together. Native American peoples and First Nations peoples have not lost a connection to our Mother Earth and are charged to assist the creative and evolutionary forces available, in tewardship of our “Mother”. The exposure to the feminine through such effective art as Liliana Kleiner’s is by my definition, a touchstone for a resurgence of our human and cultural origins and values.
David Roomy
writersunion.ca/member/david-roomy
The Sacred Feminine is still very much alive in Wild Nature where the ‘hand of man’ had not yet tamed or raped Mother Earth for its use and abuse. When we experience Nature in its wild force and beauty, we are obliged to bow down to it in awe and feel in all modesty that we are just a tiny part of this magnificent universe. This encounter, besides waking us to our true original roots, can bring our inflated ego down to Earth, an experience that is most humbling, healthy and necessary for growth. Away from Wild Nature, in our modern urban lives, the Sacred Feminine can reach us through love and the imagination, the arts, dreams, myths and stories, touching our souls and awakening the uncontaminated life forces, the real true forces of rebirth living in our unconscious. History shows again and again that our ‘normal’ ego mind-consciousness is not enough to manifest critical lasting changes in humanity. Thinking alone is not sufficient, we need the powers of the imagination, of the heart and spirit. Female and indigenous cultures and mythologies, their stories and images, have the potential to awaken in ourselves new forces. Their ancient wisdom is likely to revive feelings and insights in us that are buried deep in our collective unconscious for generations, and that could evoke the self-knowledge needed for a lasting change from the roots up. The Feminist Spirit is not about reversing back patriarchy into matriarchy, making strong women and weak men as typical of the submission-domination paradigm.
The Redemption of Matter is the ‘middle road’, the path of individual integration and brings a message of healing to our wounded hearts, opening new doors of perceptions into a consciousness of Wholeness by embracing the rejected Sacred Feminine, in its Totality. The writer, like the artist, composer, and inventor, have a fundamental need to discover and create something new and whole, to express the beauty and harmony that is clearly found and seen in nature, a new psyche leading to new orders. To a new World. My stories and images come from such a creative impulse. They are the creation of a psyche in search for Unity, the unity of the three worlds that have been separated for too long, the re-union of Heaven, Earth and Underworld; of spirit, matter and psyche. A world of Sacred Matter.
Liliana Kleiner