Background: The informant is my roommate and a college student. She was raised in Catholicism and often attended the related events and ceremonies, but has since begun to question her religious beliefs.

Informant: When something really important happens an angel comes and delivers you from that state to the new state. There’s this one story in the bible that I’m obsessed with about Lilith….it’s only in the Old Testament, but she was Adam’s first wife before Eve. And she I guess like refused to like, ‘submit to him’ and there’s now like a lot of speculation on the internet about what it means and like cause literally it’s not mentioned in the New Testament and people in church don’t talk about her. The only time she’s referenced in the Old Testament is like…when sinful children get lost Lilith will scoop them up and like, eat them. Like grabbing lost sinning souls and delivering them to the devil. And she’s supposed to live in like….the desert…I think. Or just like….bad places maybe. They reference her as this like evil woman even though she just didn’t want to submit to Adam. I think because of that she’s also like a feminist icon type thing now…

Me: Where’d you hear about like the new theories and references to her?

Informant: I don’t remember if it was in a conversation with another Catholic person but I think like…there’s some stuff in Jewish folklore. It was referenced in the Old Testament which probably came from Jewish folklore before like Catholicism was even a religion, and it probably worked its way into the Old Testament. But now there’s so much weird shit about it online. I think I might have seen theories about her on TikTok or something?

Me: Where’d you first hear about Lilith?

Informant: I was talking to our youth minister and someone I used to go to youth group with…I think we were just having a conversation about it and the youth pastor was just telling us about it…I felt silly because I didn’t know anything about her. But then I looked it up later and that’s pretty much all I know.

Context: This was told to me during a recorded in-person interview.