20 centuries before Christ, Mesopotamians carved this clay plaque of the goddess Lilith. Paint traces show her body was red and her wings black, the colors of blood and death. The owls' feathers alternated red and black, and the lions' manes were black.

In the act of love, should the man or the woman be on top? These days, we might think this a silly question, a mere matter of taste best left to the couple to decide. But for thousands of years, for Christians, Moslems and Jews, it has been a serious moral issue, even a metaphysical conundrum!

Meet Lilith, Adam's first wife, who left him because he refused to let her get on top. She then became Satan's favorite wife and the Queen of Hell. Or so say centuries of Judeo-Christian lore.

Originally Lilith was a Sumerian goddess of death and the underworld. She once lived in the garden of Inanna, the Sumerian fertility goddess. But by Assyrian times she had become a demon of waste places and was called ardat lili, the "maid of desolation." Dreading her as a succuba, a demon doomed to roam at night until she found a mate, the Assyrians made her a wind spirit, wild-haired and winged.

And that's how we see her here -- winged, taloned, and feather-legged like the two owls that flank her, on this terra-cotta (baked clay) plaque, probably placed over her altar or shrine during her rites, She holds in her hands measuring ropes to measure out the span of a man's life or take his measure after death. Her triple crown indicates a goddess, as does the divine mountain (symbolized by a traditional scale pattern) on whose ledge she stands, ready to swoop silently down in the night like a bird or beast of prey. Like an owl, for example. And in that form men may glimpse her flying through the dark woods at night to claim one of their number.

An early fragment of the Gilgamesh epic says she builds her house in the middle of a hollow tree, as owls do; and in the Bible (Isaiah 34:124) she is called Lilith, a name translated in the King James Bible as "screech owl." Or like a lion: like her mistress the Sumerian Inanna, the Babylonian Ishtar, or Ashtoreth, the Assyrian and Canaanite goddess of fertility, love and war, Lilith stands on the backs of lions.

What happened to this dread Mesopotamian deity when Jews and Christians got hold of her? It's a fascinating story.

The rabbis had long wrestled with the different accounts of creation in the Book of Genesis. Especially troubling was the seemingly simultaneous creation of man and woman in chapter 1 ("man and woman created he them") vs. the much older story in chapter 2 of Eve's creation from Adam's rib.

Then came a godsend. A Jewish book called The Alphabet of Ben Sura entered Europe from the East in the 6th century A.D. In it, the delighted rabbis read that Lilith, not Eve, was Adam's first wife, created at the same time and from the same dust. Claiming to be thus created equal, she refused to sleep or serve "under him." When Adam tried to force her into the "inferior" position, she flew away from Eden into the air, where she copulated with demons, conceiving hundreds more each day. God sent three angels after her, who threatened to kill her brood if she refused to return to Adam. But she did refuse. So God made Eve from Adam's rib to be his "second wife."