Etymology of Angel Names in DF

[Foxed]

edit: on a completely unrelated sidenote, a strategy/TD game on my iPad (Kingdom Rush: Origins) got an update with a new hero character, a fallen angel.  Named Lilith.  "Noooooooo!"

Lilith is... not quite a fallen angel, per folklore. I imagine her as the progenitor of the Whites, actually.

[megarows]

Might be something to that, Lilith was originally Mesopotamian and the WCVs speak ancient Etruscan.

[Quantus]

Might be something to that, Lilith was originally Mesopotamian and the WCVs speak ancient Etruscan.

Not that I disagree with the possibility, but wasn't the Etruscan civilization in modern day Italy, whereas Mesopotamia is in the modern Iraq region?

[Second Aristh]

Might be something to that, Lilith was originally Mesopotamian and the WCVs speak ancient Etruscan.

The Etruscans were centered in Italy, well over 2000 miles away from Mesopotamia.  The ghouls are the ones that speak Sumerian.

If we wanted to delve into the origins of the White Court, looking into the background of the Lamia seems to be a good option.  The geography, language, and habits are a better fit at least.

[Foxed]

Lamia and the lilitu demons of the Middle East sound like very similar monsters.

[megarows]

I understand the spatial difference, but there is a link in the mythology, I think via Phoenicia.  I don't know if it applies to Lilith.  See Minerva, and the Ishtar / Astarte influences.  And lamia is how Romans translated Lilith.  Perhaps for the etymology that Foxed notes.

[Quantus]

I understand the spatial difference, but there is a link in the mythology, I think via Phoenicia.  I don't know if it applies to Lilith.  See Minerva, and the Ishtar / Astarte influences. 

Im interested, but Im not finding an mention of it, at least not in the link you provided.

[Griffyn612]

I thought Lilith was just a made-up story by some dude who's wife cheated on him or left him, so he had a story added about a deceitful whore of a First Wife of Adam?

[megarows]

Im interested, but Im not finding an mention of it, at least not in the link you provided.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uni_(mythology) has the link to Astarte.

I thought Lilith was just a made-up story by some dude who's wife cheated on him or left him, so he had a story added about a deceitful whore of a First Wife of Adam?

Would trusted scholars be so petty?  Anyway, she existed elsewhere in myth first.

[Quantus]

I thought Lilith was just a made-up story by some dude who's wife cheated on him or left him, so he had a story added about a deceitful whore of a First Wife of Adam?

Nah, nothing so simple, or settled for that matter.  There's lots and lots of debate, but general sense seems to be that she was a borrowed figure from other, mostly older polytheistic traditions.  Some have her as an individual figure, many others as a class of demon.  Looks like the oldest mention is in the Dead Sea Scrolls, which was one of the relative few that actually specified a singular entity. 

[Serack]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uni_(mythology) has the link to Astarte.

Would trusted scholars be so petty?  Anyway, she existed elsewhere in myth first.

Not that Dante's Inferno was exactly a scholarly work, but I remember learning in High school that he placed some of the people that wronged him in his life in the lowest level of hell.

[Quantus]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uni_(mythology) has the link to Astarte.

Wow, cool!  This is a whole other layer to the Greco-Roman mythology that I wasnt even aware of. 

Would trusted scholars be so petty?  Anyway, she existed elsewhere in myth first.

Well, this is the same organization that at one point in their history was marketing fake religious trinkets ("this isnt just any stick, it's an actual chunk of the original Cross!  I swear...) for sale as a way to literally buy your loved ones way into heaven.   

[Griffyn612]

Nah, nothing so simple, or settled for that matter.  There's lots and lots of debate, but general sense seems to be that she was a borrowed figure from other, mostly older polytheistic traditions.  Some have her as an individual figure, many others as a class of demon.  Looks like the oldest mention is in the Dead Sea Scrolls, which was one of the relative few that actually specified a singular entity.

I just did some serious research (Wikipedia), and I don't see where Lilith the human is canonical until after 700-1000 AD, when she was first described as Adam's wife.  Before that, every interpretation seems to describe her as a spirit or demon.  That doesn't seem to clash too much with her potentially being a fallen angel.  No more or less than the Naagloshi. 

Really, there are parts of the Wikipedia description that remind me is Mab.  Many translations point toward the name meaning "night demon", but some are saying a combination of wind and night.

As in, Air and Darkness?

[Quantus]

I just did some serious research (Wikipedia), and I don't see where Lilith the human is canonical until after 700-1000 AD, when she was first described as Adam's wife.  Before that, every interpretation seems to describe her as a spirit or demon.  That doesn't seem to clash too much with her potentially being a fallen angel.  No more or less than the Naagloshi. 

Really, there are parts of the Wikipedia description that remind me is Mab.  Many translations point toward the name meaning "night demon", but some are saying a combination of wind and night.

As in, Air and Darkness?

OOOOHHHhhh!

[Foxed]

For what it's worth, Prince of Air and Darkness is also a title for Satan. Discovered that reading either The Penguin Book of Witches or Spirit of the New England Tribes. My money's on the latter, because it explicitly states that this title is what caused the Puritans to conflate Hobbamock, the Wampanoag spirit of air and darkness (and the god of magic/shamans) with the devil.