Road of Lilith
Nickname: Bahari or Lilin (These are both singular and plural.)
The first woman was not Eve. Eve was a submissive, pure, behaved creation, designed to satisfy Adam's arrogance and to indulge his foolishness. The first woman was Lilith. She demanded knowledge and equality and was cast from the Garden of Eden for that sin.
It was in her long years of wandering that she found Samael, the Lightbringer Angel. He too was fallen. Lilith gave him her flesh and her love and he gave her knowledge. At least, that's how some tell it. Others say he raped her and she stole magic from him in revenge. The details do not matter, only the result: Lilith was pregnant and she had learned the power of angels.
God sent the angels Senoy, Sansenoy and Semaneloff (Snvi, Snsvi and Smnglv) to subdue Lilith and drag her back to servitude in the Garden. Her first children claimed that the three angels raped and abused her and put a curse upon her. If anyone carved the names of those three angels on an amulet and held it to her or her children and shouted, "Out Lilith," she (and her children) would be powerless and would have to flee. Lilith, betrayed again, bleeding and wounded, gave birth to the angels' children.
In later years, she met Caine, the son of Adam, wandering in the Land of Nod. She took him in, clothed him and taught him the secrets she had gathered from Samael, from the angels, from the demons that she had taken as her lovers, and from the wild ones who had sheltered her when she gave birth. Perhaps she loved Caine. He too bore a curse, an exile from God akin to her own. Caine, too, betrayed her.
Eventually, elder succubae and incubi offered their allegiance to Hell, or traveled away from the Earth. Lilith went into hiding, disappeared or died. Others say she walked the Earth, stalking the tribes of man as they spread. "The Dark Mother," they called her, giving her names such as kali, Morrigan, hel and Tiamat. But where she went, her children followed. Their blood mingled with all the races of man so that in each tribe there lay the potential for the dark, beautiful, demonic and immoral Lilin to be born.
Before the Flood, the Lilin ruled huge kingdoms in defiance of heaven and the sons of Caine. Then three of them, grandchildren of Lilith herself, entered Enoch to offer themselves to the dark gods who ruled there. In the Sons of Caine's lust for the children's blood, beauty and knowledge, the vampires gave the Lilin the Dark Gift. And in time, the Children of Lilith bade their siblings rise up and slay the sons of Caine.
The Bahari say they were the first to walk the Path of Lilith, and the first vampires to know Lilith's truths.
Basic Beliefs: The Bahari (or Lilin as they sometimes refer to themselves) are a large, diverse group of worshipers of the Dark Mother. Many Cainites worship Lilith, but only a few of those use such worship as the focus for a Path of Enlightenment.
Lilith worshippers do not follow any one canonical theology. Rather, they each follow one of a number of apocryphal and contradictory beliefs, oral traditions and fragments of ancient texts. All agree, however, that Lilith is the Dark Mother, Caine's lover and the explorer of hidden things. To find her truths, one must suffer her thorns.
A common concept discussed by the Bahari is the notion of "the Torture Garden" or "Lilith's Garden" - a perfumed oasis of pain, suffering, dark sensuality and enlightenment. The garden is both a mythological place - spoken of in several stories about her - and a metaphorical thing. To be a true Lilin, one must dwell in the lair amongst the sharp, barbed flowers and the sweet moans of the seekers as they enjoy the Dark Mother's torments. For a vampire, one of Lilith's thorns is the hunger of the Beast.
To progress on this path, one must move deep into the garden, wherever darker pleasures and sharper agonies await. At the center of the place lives the Tree of Enlightenment, which by legend Lilith grew from the stolen seed of God's tree, and which in metaphorical terms is the final initiation that balances Beast and intellect, pleasure and pain, intellect and sensurality. by opening one's self to true experience, suffering and ecstasy, enlightenment and madness, one can comprehend the truth of reality.
This following has no place for insincere compassion or false conscience. The Mother suffered for her children's joys and died for their sins. Those who chose to follow her ways must suffer and endure as she did. Those who do not follow her ways are fools. Those who try to follow and fail her tests are chaff to be cast aside. compassion is indulging other's weakness. Conscience is giving free rein to one's own hypocrisy. Only the strong can follow Lilith's ways. Only those brave enough to defy God and petty civilized "mortality" can ever strive to enter her garden.
Vampires who follow Lilith's teachings must lust - no, have a need far beyond lust - for her secrets and experiences. A postulant must prove that need. She must demand agonies - be it the torments of the whip and fire, or the rages and depredations of the Beast - before the Bahari accept her. Only then, when the initiate has taken the first tenuous steps into the exquisite agonies of the Dark Mother's love, do the hierophants - the vmapire-priests - come to her and challenge her.
The Hierophants, the torturer priests of Lilith, become the student's lovers, and their ministrations are merciless. From the beginning, an acolyte experiences pain beyond comprehension. If the student's need is sufficient, the pain draws her deeper into that metaphorical garden and the Hierophants show her the Mother's thorns.
In the end, when the postulant has proven herself, when she has demonstrated her pure, reavenous need, the Hierophants put away their knives, hang up their whips, remove the barbs, sheath their instruments, take her as a disciple and whisper the first secrets of Lilith's way.
The Path of Lilith is not an infernalist path. One of its sub-paths strays close to infernalism, but Lilith is no mere demon.
Some Bahari hold that Lilith is the creator of all vampires - that the Caine myth is some form of revisionism - but most feel that Lilith's status as "mother to demons" is only allegorical. Some argue that vampirism is an ancient expression of god's displeasure, that all who are cast from His light are doomed to darkness and eternal bloodlust. If that theory is correct, the hierarchies and genealogies so lovingly compiled by the Children of Caine are false.
The Lilin coven known as teh Silent Rose, a group of six female vampires lead by the Gangrel Yasamhain and based in Croatia, has studied the so-called "Cathayans." they not that the vampires of the East describe their progenitors as a man and a woman, a dark father and a dark mother. The Silent Rose has traveled extensively and seeks to understand Lilith by unearthing as many secrets of the undead as possible. Unlike other Lilin, Yasamhain and her coven also seek Noddist lore. By understanding the lies and half-truths of Caine worshippers, they hope to hone the truth of Lilith.
The Bahari rever the archaic written records of their faith. Texts such as teh Guarded ubrics, Revalations of the Dark Mother and others are treasured, copied and compared to one another in order to find hidden meaning in their intersections. many Lilin temples are also home to extensive research libraries.
Destinies: The path's catechisms hold that Lilith will return on the Night of Gehenna, after Caine has awakened, exacting revenge on him before taking revenge on Lucifer and God and all others who have used and hurt her. Lilith - the true mother of humanity and the true mother of monsters - will then ascend into Heaven and make it her own.
Description of Followers:
