Over and over, I hear two sounds. Near whispers, silent and sibilant, like the crack of a serpent’s tongue. Lilith. The screech-owl voice shrieking in the twilight, crouched over the edge of sanity, stealing the breath of babes and whisking away the dreamers’ seed. The touch of every shame, the glinting teeth of a lover none will admit but all desire. The Dark Queen who will rise to usher in the end of the world.
I’ve seen her. You’ve seen her. A cult of her devotees celebrates her example, and any number of books, pamphlets, songs, scriptures and tracts have been created to damn, divinify or define her. The mortals even enjoy a Lilith Fair, in which women supposedly break the role of trophy and define their femininity in song. (An amusing conceit, when you look at it: a playground of granola-folkies sing-songing homilies in Lilith’s name.)
According to rabbinical legend and the bygone testaments of Ur and Babylon, Lilith was the First Woman, the left to Adam’s right, the equal grown from his back, flesh of his flesh. Beside her, Eve, the “mother of all,” is a pale spectre. As part of the Original Two, Lilith inherited magical birthrights and learned great arts. Rightfully, she considered herself the equal of Adam; like most men, he saw things differently. When he raped her, Lilith appealed to the Most High, who delivered her out of Eden and cast her out into the un-formed world. From that point on, it is said, she became a vengeful demon, killing children, stealing seed and waylaying virtuous men.
Hers is not, shall we say, an unfamiliar story.
In the lore of Caine, our much-beloved sire, Lilith becomes the mother who taught him the arts of night. Out of pity, she took him in when God and man had cast him aside. Her recompense was to be demonized as a “Dark Mother”; for 13 generations, Caine’s offspring have conspired against her, even as the mortals did. Charms have been fashioned, blood hunts called and entire bloodlines obliterated in the name of this genocidal campaign.
Some people, awed by the legendary prowess of this woman, feel compelled to know, “Is she real?” as if the knowledge would grant them a sudden visitation. Others demand, “What is she? A vampire? A magus? Some goddess or moon-blessed creature?” I can only say with certainty that
Lilith Is Lilith
…and she will not be constrained by an arbitrary set of classifications.
Is Lilith real? One might ask the same of Jesus of Nazareth, or Moses, or Gautama Buddha or any of a thousand other quasihistorical figures whose images breed devotion and terror. If you’re asking “Can you prove that Lilith walked the Earth?” my answer is no. I cannot point to a skeleton or a set of footprints or a list of quotations and statistics and say, “That is Lilith.” I might note, however, that all things are possible in this strange world of ours, and that mythology has a nasty way of sneaking up on you when you least expect it and sinking its teeth into your neck.
In the words of our elders, Lilith represents a great threat. Her cults, when they have been found among our kind, have been extinguished with the tenderness we have come to associate with our fratricidal breed. Our “holy scriptures” (so lovingly codified by the esteemed Aristotle deLaurent) cloak her in two vastly different robes: the compassionate mentor of our sire, and the “dark queen” he will battle at the end of time. How fitting — a nurturing mother and a demonic whore.
So much for the transformative powers of the Embrace.
The tale of Lilith is the tale of us all; I speak not only of my sisters in darkness, but of all Kindred. Like her, we grasp a forbidden inheritance, consume it and become as gods, superior to all that we once were. Like her, we suffer for that transformation, becoming outcasts even among our children. Like her, we establish dominions only to see them swept away by those we helped sire. And like her, we must retreat into the darkness, gather ourselves and scream defiance against the eyes in the night before we can truly taste the fruit we have eaten.
Ironic, then, that she should be so hated.
That has a lot to do, I suspect, with the legacy of Lilith’s catspaw: Caine, the sire of all our kind. He Who Embraced the Night, yet passed down a litany of forbiddance that each one of us defies each night we exist — a collection of antiquated laws based on the superiority of elders and the sanctity of their eternal wisdom. Those laws, we are told, are essential for our survival; faced with an array of enemies mortal and otherwise, we require a code of conduct to sustain us. Who better to dictate our immortal strictures than a Great Dark Father?
What better enemy than his counterpart, the seductive, incestuous mother that countless generations have learned to fear? What good are strictures without a threat? Better still, how could our kind continue to revere Caine’s laws if that sire existed in the shadow of She Who Raised Him from the Dust?
What would happen, I wonder, if we were to toss Caine’s laws into the sea and follow our instincts, as our Mother bids us?
There’d be chaos, our elders say, and they’d be right. But there is wisdom in chaos. The Sabbat recognize that much, even if they fall prey to reveling in disorder rather than learning from it. The magi realize it, too; from what I’ve seen over the years, their constant infighting stems from a disagreement over the level of chaos it takes to achieve enlightenment. We Kindred are chaotic beings at heart. Yet from my admittedly short experience in our undead state, I have to confess that we seem static and dull, lusterless as a tarnished silver ankh, pressed into service for a series of masters, all of whom claim to know what is best for our kind. Weighed down by the mantles of clan and Caine, we wander in the shadow of some mythical Gehenna. Some night soon, we are told, ancient ghosts will rise, kick ass and settle down to a long breakfast of souls.
This is our law. And we consider ourselves masters of the night? Better we should stick with that overused and absurd moniker children of the night. God knows we certainly act that way sometimes. While we cringe at the throne of some vaunted ancestor (who may or may not be pure mythology) and his princely stand-ins, the Dark Mother beckons us to renounce the rules that our forefather made. Caine handed down laws that he himself could not abide; by his own admission, his elder Lilith told him to draw away from the Tantalus- fruit of ultimate power. He did not, and he accomplished great things. Might we all not do the same? Of course!
Do I spew heresies? Good! The truth always sounds heretical, and the lie-keepers always seek to keep it buried. Lost. Forbidden. Punishable by death. But without the shining truth in heresy, without the hammer-strike at the pillars of order, we are chained like pit bulls — or poodles — at our lieges’ tables. Yes, even we “masters of the darkness”: We, perhaps most of all, are imprisoned by our own immortality. Only an immortal can be a slave for many lifetimes.
Lilith is the antithesis of slavery. Be free, she says, and suffer. Oh, yes. The Dark Mother is all about suffering. She has suffered, her children have suffered, her devotees suffer, and I shall doubtless suffer for daring to put this all down into words. I can see the parchments with my name inscribed with vitae, tossed in the fires to signify a dozen — hell, a thousand — blood hunts. I’ve already given up hope of immortality. Some morning, probably soon, the sun will claim me forever. My assassins, congratulating themselves on a job well done, will return to their masters’ tables, gobble a few scraps and continue on their way, convinced that the night will last forever — or at least until Gehenna. And I’m going to be laughing at you all the way to Hell. Because in my suffering, I will have achieved an insight that my assassins will never know. And that insight will make me free.
Only through pain can we open our eyes.
I entered Lilith’s garden on a quest for my sire. Determined to expose the “Lilithites” (actually called Bahari) before the altar of our esteemed Camarilla, I dove into an endless sea of hidden lore. My prize: the coveted “Cycle of Lilith” described by M. deLaurent — and, of course, a fat reward from my O'so revered creator.
You see, I had noticed what so many of our elders had not: that it is the way of Lilith to hide in plain sight. In songs, in books, in the rantings of politicists and the crumbling belltower of human society. Our elders are too static, too aged, to see the signs. They do not understand the immensity of modern culture, and so the songs of Lilith are waved away with dismissive hands. In that dismissal the songs grow louder still, until those swelling arias drown out the dusty chorus of tradition.
An elder cannot hear the songs I hear. Cannot see the visions I have seen.
Lilith is among us now. Her devotees are legion; most do not understand what they serve, and they worship at her altar of pain out of sheer abandon — which is the point!!! — not out of some archaic set of scriptures. The true Lilith cults, collectively called the Bahari, are minuscule, infinitesimal societies among the Damned and living alike, but the true followers of Lilith are everywhere; whenever people cast off all fear and cross into the fields of the outlaws, Lilith smiles from the shadows. In those fields, she knows, they will learn — or they will perish. Usually both.
This realization became mine as I watched the nightly parade of horrors on my TV screen. Seduced, I threw aside my civilized clothing and dove into the Endless Sea. In the sing-song of secret Bahari muses (like the punk poetess Patricia de la Forge, whose work I reprint here with her blessings), I felt the flush of faith rising like a bruise on battered skin. In the fingernail-furrows of adolescent crazies, in the bulimic puke of would-be doll-children, in the heroin needles of those whose only prayer is oblivion, I began to hear her gentle refrain. Live. Learn. Suffer. And Transcend. As I have. And so I did.
I went to standing stones at the height of the full moon; I danced beside the witch-folk and drank their bitter potions; I pissed at the roots of trees alongside our Lupine foes and I drank the blood of mortal antiquarians. When possible, I sampled the abysses of human excess — torture in Bosnia, Satanic rites in Berkeley and drugged frenzies in Berlin — all the while taking mental notes of the songs that rose in my head each time I tempted my admittedly inhuman limits. Each experience made the words a little clearer, until I heard them everywhere. Ahi hay Lilitu — “All hail Lilith.” Now that I recognize the refrain, I see it everywhere — in graffiti, in popular dance songs, in subliminal messages worked into advertisements and dressed with the waifish corpses of emaciated “fashion models.” Through pain, I have been initiated into a surreal fellowship that may or may not even know the allegiance it professes.
Since that time of recognition, I cannot get enough sensation. I have been whipped with flaming straps, branded (exquisite pain for a Kindred, let me tell you!), dragged naked through shards of glass and submerged likewise beneath floes of ice. The sensations only heighten the chorus within my head — a chorus so loud it invades my daytime sleep. That chorus drives away the fear that was once my Kindred inheritance; hell holds no more terrors for me. Although dead, I have learned to live more freely than I ever had before. Through learned friends, commanded pawns and sacrifices of flesh and spirit, I have opened my ears to Lilith’s gospel. What I had hoped to make a document of our enemies became a firebrand, burning me from the inside out even as I sought to put the flame-song into words.
Lilith wants us to burn ourselves away. To blacken the skins of our spirits as her own was burned in the desert between worlds. To fall and scrape our knees and comfort ourselves on our own blood, welling from the wounds. To sup on the tears of our damnation. Because in pain we learn. In suffering we grow stronger. In defiance we thrive, like a plant pruned back by a gardener’s hand. Lilith is the gardener, the cruel mother, the thorn on the rose of our survival. Without pain, she teaches us, nothing else matters. Without a scream in the night, our voices are choked by the stillness of eternity.
My quest for the Dark Mother has ripped the shades from my eyes and forced me to confront that truth that drove countless elders mad: Our laws are lies. Our existence is a joke. Our sire was a pawn in an endgame with God, and God Himself is a pale reflection of a brief flash of existence in between endless nothingness. Lilith understands this. Her devotees (who take the name Bahari as a tribute to Ba’hara, the third garden raised by the Dark Mother) realize it, too. Her offspring, damned as demons and now thousands of years dead, see it from the buds of the trees planted in their honor in the third garden of the Dark Queen. Without pain, without change, existence is meaningless. Comfort is decay. Power is a raindrop drying in the desert heat. Agony is the doorway to ecstasy.
Lilith is our mother in the truest sense. Through defiance, she made herself a god. Through love, she devastated Eden. She is the great serpent coiled at the roots of the Trees of Life and Knowledge, and her venom is the wisdom coursing through the sap and bubbling into the fruit. Although her sphere is the moon, the touch of her kiss is napalm fire.
I confess that fire has left me burned, and I am glad of it. I have squandered the small but enviable cache I gathered in my unlife, spent it on a vanity pressing of 20,000 copies of this heretical little diatribe, and had it shipped to bookstores across the world. Fuck you, fuck your pathetic “Masquerade,” and fuck the petty power politics that so epitomize your existence. I am free of all of them. My final nights will be spent in the clearest haze I have ever known. Perhaps others will follow my lead.
I know that my existence from this point onward will be measured in days or weeks, and so I choose to spend my holdings on a gift to the Dark Mother. Call it a lesson from the twilight — a broadside fired from a sinking ship at the waterline of her would-be conquerors. It is the way of Lilith, I have learned, to teach with pain. To throw aside the decidedly deadly consequences of freedom in order to embrace the lessons you learn on the way to oblivion. Lilith herself has survived — assuming, of course, that she has survived! — only by the grace of fortune, the immortality of her arts, and the blazing example she sets for those with the courage to follow it. I cannot hope to do the same, so I welcome the sun with open arms, heart and spirit.
Rape me into ashes if you will. I can take it.
Ahi hay Lilitu,
Rachel Dolium