Originally, the Temple of Lylyth has the policy of spelling the English word "Lilith" as "Lylyth." This can be seen in the occult community as a common phenomena, as in the words "Vampyre," "Magick" and, more recently, "Wyccan." Whenever a common word changes spelling, it is because we are reformulating what the word symbolizes (keep in mind that all words are symbols).
When discussing our thealogy with others, we ran into many disputes based on the historical nature of the Lilith legends. We also wanted a way to separate the character of Christian mythology from the Shekhina. Over time, we came to use the term "Lilith" when talking about the mythological character, who exists as an apocrypha to the Bible, and the term "Lylyth" when talking about the Dark Principle in Nature.
The distinction, however, is somewhat artificial. Both terms refer to the same set of Hebrew characters, and both are pronounced exactly the same.
The best way to understand this is through Kabala. There is a saying, "Malkuth sits on the throne of Binah." Malkuth is the easiest of the ten Sepheroth to understand. It is the world we live in. Binah is a bit harder to understand, but it is understandable nonetheless. Phil Marsh wrote elegantly of Satanic cosmogony in his essay
Light Forces and the Dark Force, and I will not try to paraphrase this here. Isaac Myers presented a radical concept in occultism. Most Kabala hold that in the Tree of Life, the second of the sephers, the one that brings the sense of "different" to the Singularity of Kether, is Chokmah. However, through historical research Myers discovered that the original Kabala presented Binah as the second, not Chokmah. In terms of cosmogony, Kether is the "Big" of the Big Bang, a perfect singularity. Binah is the "Bang" of the Big Bang. Binah is the asymmetry introduced to the perfection of Kether that caused the universe to start to unfold itself into what we see now. Lilith is a symbol not only of the first woman, but of the completed emanation of the universe (Malkuth). Lylyth is the Grand Architect of the Universe, the "Mother Who Gives Birth to Heaven and Earth."Unlike Messianic religions (including Aradia-style witchcraft), we do not believe that the essence of the Divine was concentrated into a single human or human-like creature at any one time. The demonic essence, manifest in all people, is the Black Flame. We believe that the Black Flame is what most people would consider "God," in that is the Dark Principle as manifest within a person. It is the "
Holy Spirit" that you feel.We give a human personality to the Goddess through the guise of Lilith, and thus the Mother with a Thousand Names receives one more from us.