Lamashtu: Your Great-Great-Great Grandmother's Monstrous Bitch
Hey, y’all! We’re a month into 2025, and it’s not going so good, so I figured I’d just haul us back 4500 years, to Ancient Mespotamia. Again.
The longest-lasting and most influential Monstrous Bitch of ancient Babylon is the she-demon, Lamashtu. She’s a monstrous bitch who shape shifts like crazy, appearing at different times, in different stories, across huge spans of time in Mesopotamian culture. But, despite all that slipperiness, there are things about her that remain the same, no matter what. Lamashtu is a demoness, and she is the daughter of a god, though she herself is not fully divine—like, because technically she’s a demon. But, unlike other Mesopotamian demons, who can only act on the orders of the greater gods, Lamashtu can act entirely on her own recognizance. She is autonomous. She does as she pleases, and what she does pleases no one but herself. What pleases Lamashtu most, it turns out, is to tamper with human reproduction.
Indeed, Lamashtu is known in Ancient Mesopotamian culture as the enemy of procreation. She was believed to slay fetuses in the womb, as well as to murder newborns and young children. She attacked mothers and expectant mothers, as well as young women who hoped to be mothers. She was a bringer of both miscarriage and crib death. Ancient Mesopotamian women and children lived in abject fear of Lamashtu. Plus, because of her, the patriarchy had much to fear, since inheritance and property lines were thought to be radically destabilized by her monstrous interference. In addition to tampering with human reproduction, she drank the blood of men, infected rivers and lakes, and generally brought disease and death.
Monstrous bitch, par excellence.
And she’s been around a long, long time. Scholars say that she had a clear and consistent character by the early second millennium, BCE, but there appear to be incantations directed at her centuries well before that.[i] So, Lamashtu is at least four thousand years old.
Her iconography is pretty intense, and only barely anthropomorphic. Yes, she has the body of a human, but often she has a lion’s or dog’s or wolf’s head, bloody bird-claw hands, bare breasts, and tons of body hair. She also is repeatedly said to slither like a snake.[ii] She suckles piglets and puppies at her own breasts, indicating her greater affinity with beasts than with humans. She often clutches snakes in her hands. Many visual depictions of her show her with extra fingers on each hand, signifying the ease with which she snatches up fetuses, babies, and children, carrying them off as her prey.
The extremity of Lamashtu’s terrifingness, of course, points to a very real social problem facing ancient cultures. She represents what we might call a core social fear: the risks attendant on pregnancy, childbirth, and infancy. The risks, that is, that came with any attempt to continue a family line. After all, we’re talking about a historical period with nothing we would now recognize as obstetric medicine, no way of assessing the health of a fetus internally, no gynecological surgery, nothing like that. To be sure, there were medical practices around pregnancy and birth, but they primarily involved talismans, amulets, poultices, prayers, and incantations, as well as herbs and tonics that may have had substantial effects for pregnant or laboring women, and may not have. The reality is that women, men, and children of ancient Mesopotamia faced something truly terrifying when they faced a pregnancy: the very real possibility that one or both of mother and child would die, before, during, or shortly after the birth. Maternal and infant mortality rates in this period—and indeed, continuing right up until the last hundred years or so—were devastatingly high. And in Ancient Mesopotamia, all this very real and very abject terror about reproduction got rolled up into and personified by Lamashtu, demoness of the night.
So, to combat Lamashtu, ancient Mesopotamians in the so-called Archaic Period (between about 2300 BCE and 1850 BCE), devised prayers and chants, to keep her away from their homes, their wombs, their mothers, their sisters, their patients, their babies, their communities. These incantations are found—like all other writing from this region and this period—on clay items that survive: amulets, tablets, charms for the household, talismans, or other pottery. They are found on the regular, everyday objects of the domestic sphere. In a very real sense, then, these short incantations against Lamashtu represent a very early archive of what we might call women’s literature. Written words meant to appeal primarily to women; written words primarily about one particular female antagonist.
Fascinatingly, the incantations, rather than being soothing or conciliatory toward Lamashtu or her designated victims, are horrifying in their own right. They acknowledge Lamashtu’s power, her evil intentions, and her origin, making no attempt to mollify or diminish her.
She is singular, she is uncanny,
She is a child born late in life; she is a will-o-the-wisp,
She is a haunt, she is malicious,
Offspring of a god, daughter of Anu,
For her malevolent will, her base counsel,
Anu her father dashed her down from heaven to earth.
Her hair is askew, her loincloth is torn away.
She makes her way straight to the person
Without a (protective) god.
She can benumb the sinews of a lion,
She can…the sinews of a youngster or infant.[iii]
We learn an immense amount about Lamashtu just from this one incantation, pressed in cuneiform writing into a clay surface. First, we learn that Lamashtu is high-born, being the daughter of Anu, one of the most powerful and ancient gods in the Mesopotamian pantheon. Second, we learn that her “malevolent will” and “base counsel” caused her father Anu to banish her from heaven. That is, Lamashtu spoke out about something that angered and disgusted the divine patriarch, and she was cast out, down to earth.
The “something” she spoke about was her desire to eat human flesh—in the form of newborn babies.[iv] So Lamashtu appears to be a predatory, cannibalistic infanticide. The other gods find this desire abominable. As a result of her banishment, Lamashtu is constrained to live on earth, among mortals, in a state of dishevelment and chaos, rather than to take her place among the other immortals. She is immensely powerful—strong enough to overmaster a lion—but her preferred prey, it appears, is young children. She heads to vulnerable people “straight” from her banishment; her will, clearly, is bent on some kind of revenge or violence as she roams the earth, looking for fetuses, babies, and children to kill and eat, for women to torment and destroy.
In another incantation from the same Archaic Period, we learn that not only is she banished from heaven, but that her habitations on the earth are sordid, uncivilized, and that her manner of attacking human children is brutal and violent:
She is furious, she is terrifying,
She is uncanny, she has an awful glamor,
She is a she-wolf, the daughter of Anu.
Her dwelling is in the grass,
Her lair is in weeds.
She holds back the full-grown youth in rapid progress,
She yanks out by breech the premature child,
She brains little babies,
She makes the witnesses swallow birth fluids.
The spell is not mine, it is a spell of Ninkilim,
Master of spells.
Ninkarrak cast it so I took it up.[v]
Lamashtu is wolf-like in appearance and unnatural, yet somehow glamorous and seductive. This strange duality, wherein Lamashtu is both profoundly physically repulsive and also somehow weirdly alluring, is one we’ll see play itself out again and again for the next several thousand years. In keeping with her wild appearance, she lives in untamed nature—grass and weeds—in a lair; she is beyond the civilizing effect of towns or cities. She is a wild-woman. Her wilding power allows her to stunt the growth of children, to cause premature birth by “yanking” babies out too soon. She is an abortionist, but one that no one wants to be visited by.
In addition to killing fetuses, she kills infants, and causes people to choke on amniotic fluid. Uncanny, uncivilized, wolf-like, ripping people apart and forcing others to drown in bodily fluid, she sounds, for all the world, like the monster from a body horror film of the 21st century. The speaker of the incantation is terrified of her, yet understands this incantation as a possible way of warding her off, keeping the household safe from her malign will to tamper with reproduction. The speaker asserts the authority of the spell, that it comes from the “master” of spellcasting, as if hoping that authority will somehow stop Lamashtu in her tracks.
But Lamashtu is very, very hard to stop. Indeed, her terrifying presence is well-attested in the Classical Period, too, between 1850 and about 1500 BCE. In an incantation from that period, we learn again that she is Anu’s daughter, and that great Ea raised her, but that Enlil—another Mesopotamian god—cursed her with the face of a lion. Perhaps angered by her disfigurement, she goes on rampage: now she has long hands with long nails, and her arms are smeared with blood. We are meant to envision her having thrust her claw-like hands into a woman’s body to rip out a baby. Again, she is clearly an abortionist, but one undesired by the mother, or anyone else in the house. Indeed, she is said to “slither” over doorposts, like a snake—no need for slithering if the occupants of the household want you to be there. As soon as she catches sight of a human baby, she causes seizures in the baby’s belly.[vi] What’s terrifying about Lamashtu is that she enters into places she should not—like homes while a woman delivers a baby—and poses as a doctor or midwife sometimes: “Though no physician, she bandages, though no midwife, she wipes off the babe.” Lamashtu is insidious, sneaky, and lethal. She appears to pose as a midwife, performing the duties normally assigned to such a woman, but with violent, murderous intent, instead of with care and tenderness.
Who would be most afraid of Lamashtu in Ancient Mesopotamia? Clearly, women. Women wore amulets to protect them from Lamashtu. They employed exorcists to banish her from their homes; these exorcists used elaborate prayers to cast her out.[vii] And for good reason:
She is fierce, she is wicked…
She slinks about, she is uncanny…
She reckons off the months of pregnant women
She likes to block the dilation of women in labor…
She seizes…little one from the wet nurse’s shoulder.[viii]
Fierce, wicked, sneaky, and supernatural, this demoness has the power to prevent cervical dilation in a laboring woman; any reader who has endured labor will shudder in horror at such a power. And remember, this is the ancient world, which was lacking in anaesthetics or dilation-producing drugs. A woman whose cervix wouldn’t dilate would simply die. Lamashtu snatches infants from the breast they suckle—which is to say, she causes what we now call Sudden Infant Death Syndrome. Lamashtu is a demoness designed to keep reproductive-aged women in a state of apoplectic terror, and she is also an explanatory mechanism for how and why pregnancy and birth were so devastatingly dangerous.
I spend a lot of time talking and teaching and writing about monsters and monstrosity. And I can honestly say, I’ve never encountered a scarier one than Lamashtu. It’s horrifying to think of women dying in childbirth because of some reproductive malice flung forth by a demoness. Thinking of tiny babies being cannibalized by a night-roaming, disheveled nightmare hag.
In fact, Lamashtu encapsulates both sides of what America’s very polarized discourse around abortion finds horrifying: on the one hand, she’s killing fetuses and babies, often by removing them from the womb. But on the other hand, she makes pregnancy itself desperately dangerous to women, killing off untold thousands of young women each year. She represents and embodies women’s lack of control over their reproductive lives, but also represents and embodies infanticidal impulses.
She is a demoness who has quietly slithered into our twenty-first century political discourse and made her home there. We should all get to know her better, and realize that, on some level, we’re all afraid of the same thing.
[i] Hefron, Yagmur, “Revisiting ‘Noise,’” Journal of Near Eastern Studies 2014: 83-93, at 89-90.
[ii] “Against Lamashtu, Anu Begot Her,” p. 173 in Before the Muses, ed. Benjamin Foster.
[iii] “She is Singular,” p. 76 in Before the Muses, ed. Benjamin Foster.
[iv] F. A. M. Wiggerman, “Lamaštu, Daughter of Anu, a Profile,” in Birth in Babylonia, p. 245.
[v] “She is Furious,” Foster, p. 77.
[vi] “Anu Begot Her,” Foster, p. 173-4.
[vii] “Against Lamashtu,” 173-4.
[viii] Foster, 174.