The Analects of the Third Garden: The Trinity

I should perhaps mention my other big work. The Analects of the Third Garden is a supplement for Vampire the Masquerade that I published on Storytellers Vault about a year ago. It is supposed to be an in-universe collection of texts from a lost cult of vampires dedicated to Lilith and practicing Abyss Mysticism. It all started with a larp over ten years ago, where I thought about playing an abyss mystic. I thought that there wasn't enough written about it, and while Vampire do have a number in-universe texts such as The Book of Nod or Revelations of the Dark Mother, I never thought that they felt like the old tomes of lore that I envisioned.

So I sat out to write my own. I soon made the discovery that White Wolf never made enough material for Abyss Mysticism to fill a whole book (It is mostly just a collection of powers, and rather lacking in moral outlooks and such). I guess I could have used my own imagination, but I'm lazy and my imagination needs a starting point, so I decided to fill out this lack by mashing in other ideas. Primarily the Bahari cult, and Kabbalah. Now if you don't know, the bahari are vampires (and others) worshiping Lilith as the first vampire, opposing Caine and believing that all true knowledge comes from suffering.

At this point the project came to a halt and lay resting for many years, until I on a whim started it up again and like, started actually writing on it. It quickly expanded and shifted focus. The bahari stuff gradually took over the project. The kabbalah became mostly an influence on the style of the work rather than the content. The abyss stuff is still there, but honestly, if I would do it all over I would probably have replaced it with necromancy, and tied it in with the Lamia bloodline. I might actually do that some day, but don't hold your breath.

So why did I combine these three? well, mostly I just liked them, knew about them and saw that they fit different purposes for the work. The bahari, have a strong ethic, and every cult need that. The abyss mysticism have secret powers, which also is nice for making a cult interesting. The bahari tend to talk a lot about secret knowledge, but there is grave lack of examples of this secret knowledge. And finally kabbalah have the advantage of existing in real life, being hundreds of years old, and thereby existing in copious amounts in the public domain. (Later a fair amount of Wicca and Gnosticism was used for these parts as well.)

But there are also reasons that they fit well together. The abyss mystics is described by white wolf as reclusive scholars sitting in their chambers studying and writing letters to each others, and only reluctantly sharing their wisdom with their communities. It reminded me very much of how kabbalists relate to the wider Jewish community, or at least the stereotype of them. Kabbalah and Bahari goes even better together. Nearly everything about Lilith actually comes from Kabbalah. I have to admit that I wasn't really aware of this when I first started this project.

The meta history of the Bahari, or rather the Path of Lilith in Vampire is actually rather interesting. It started with The Dirty Secrets of The Black Hand, that introduced the True Black Hand, a super secret organization, consisting of various groups of vampires that where more or less inversions of other bigger groups. You had the emotionless True Brujah, that was the opposite of the regular overemotional Brujah. The Old Clan Tzimize who despised the use of Vicissitude. And finally you had the followers of the Path of Lilith, who being the opposite of the Nodists (the followers of the Path of Caine) instead venerated the enemy of Caine, Lilith. (According to the Book of Nod).

This version of the path wasn't that interesting, as it was mostly a copy of the Path of Caine, with Lilith substituted for Caine. The point where the path turned interesting was with The Revelation of the Dark Mother. This was WW's second in universe publication and dealt specifically with Bahari, in fact I believe it was the book that introduced the term. It positioned Lilith as the true creator of not only vampires but possibly werewolf's and mages as well. It created the central tenet of pain leading to wisdom. This has been reflected in every incarnation since then.

What people might not know is that much of the story of Lilith in Revelations is taken from The Alphabet of Ben Sira, a central work of Kabbalah, of course with the inversion of Lilith not being totally evil (But also not exactly good). Not much is needed for this inversion though as our sense of good and evil have evolved a far bit in the 1000 years since the Alphabet was written.

So, eh that is why combining Kabbalah, Bahari and Abyss Mysticism works great. With this clear I started scouring WW books for any information that could be used, as well as public domain works, like the Zohar, but also Abramelin the Mage, Gardner's Book of Shadow, The Poetic Edda, The Gilgamesh Epos. etc. I also used a big deal of influence from the Circle of the Crone in Vampire: The Requiem. They are clearly based on Bahari, but expanded, and honestly a bit more generic. None the less, a great source of ideas for Bahari.

I mixed this all together, and out came the Analects after a lot of work. It was a really interesting journey. In many ways it didn't feel like writing a story, but more like working as a historian, trying to figure out what actually happened. One amazing insight was that there was a pattern to the story. It's a generational story about children rebelling against their parents, and the parent going into exile. This exchange is actually repeated six times, which I certainly hadn't planed when I started.