Review: “Lilith: Goddess of Sitra Ahra” collected by Daemon Barzai

Lilith: Goddess of Sitra Ahra is an anthology released by Daemon Barzai under Black Tower Publishing, and I have to say, I am not terribly surprised that this book wasn’t my cup of tea, but I was surprised at exactly how bad it was. Believe it or not, I truly hate to write a second flatly negative review, but this book somehow manages to squeeze every absurdity about Lilith ever perpetuated in history into a short, single volume and I genuinely can’t think of anything nice to say about it. Well, let’s get into it…

I’ll start out with the “little” stuff. The Ben Sira story is repeated over half a dozen times. If I were the editor, I would have put a complete moratorium on re-writing this story over and over again, and it goes to show how little coordination there was between the contributors and the editor. If all the various retellings of the Ben Sira story were removed, the book would probably lose about a quarter of its length. This is a short book — easily consumable in an afternoon. But it is so repetitive that actually doing so is pretty irritating.

My old nemesis Selene Lilith makes another appearance, repeating the “ancient all-goddess” falsity, and carries on banally about how true liberation is fucking any random dude who asks. She then proclaims, bizarrely and completely unprompted, that Asenath Mason is the reincarnation of Lilith herself.

“Red Serpent” by Frater G.S. is almost unreadable due to persistent grammatical errors. Many other pieces are also extremely poorly edited, but this one is so exceptionally bad that it drowns the rest of them out. Where was the editor?

But now I’d like to address the volume as a whole.

This is probably the edgiest, most juvenile, most blatantly misogynistic volume about supposed Lilith work I have ever read. And that’s saying something — we’re competing with Joy of Satan and Become a Living God, here.

Many of the pieces are just attacks on Christianity, with no substance on their own terms. Blood rituals seem to be inserted merely for the sake of saying they’re doing a blood ritual, with no esoteric rhyme or reason. Almost every ritual is just a porn-y male fantasy masquerading under the guise of magic, in which the feminine energy is little more than a bobo doll filling the empty space around their dick, with some authors even referring to occultists as a whole in purely male terms. One author, Ari, literally calls Lilith a bitch, as in a female breeding dog.

Piece after piece is just thinly veiled, terminally online big titty goth GF porn with little rants against feminism scattered throughout (Duvendack seems particularly bitter), and only the brief interruption of Selene Lilith’s farcical hero worship to give a moment of respite from the overpowering stench of chronic masturbation.

I have never seen anything that so consistently misses the mark across so many different authors.

And it is not just that I disagree with the cosmology or subject matter of the authors. In many cases, I don’t. I’ve also spoken before about the fact that I don’t agree with Mason’s cosmology, and yet I find much of her work interesting.

It is that nearly every single one of these people are the perfect representation of all of the worst stereotypes about LHP practitioners in the West: self-obsessed, porn addicted incels, acting out against their mother and her religion, probably from inside her basement. There’s an ironic metaphor buried in there somewhere, but I don’t care enough to find it.

Out of curiosity, I went through the names of the authors of all the pieces and tallied up those where the author’s name seemed to belong to a man, those that seemed to belong to a woman, and those where I wasn’t sure.

I wound up with 18, 2, and 5, respectively. That means 90% of the authors whose likely gender I can discern are male, and women are almost entirely excluded from this collection. It shows. This is, quite literally, a circle jerk.

This is not truly a book about working with Lilith, or even really about sex magic. It is a collection of greasy-fingered occult porn, pathetically fetishizing Lilith and women more broadly. I doubt most of the authors are serious practitioners, and I wouldn’t be surprised if some were outright armchairs given the lack of coherency in many of the rituals.

But, who knows, I wouldn’t be too surprised if a couple of them really had made contact with Lilith either. She does enjoy driving men like this over a cliff, after all, and more than a couple seem pretty close to falling off the edge. May the dark lady guide them.