#lilim

Satan loves all his succubae and incubae ⛧

If no one told you today,

You are beautiful,

You have a cute ass

You are appreciated

Your sex magick is wild and powerful because you love yourself ❤️

You help men and women want to live and be alive,

You are not only sexy and intelligent, you are nurturing and encouraging in your Dark Art.

Have a wonderful morning my lovely friends and remember Lilith loves you ^_^

Part 2: The church of Lilith (initial thoughts).

Interlude: Centaurs from three settings (this one's part 3...and the correction).

Part 3: uncategorized updates.

Part 4: A shocking revelation about this world, the difference between magic as a historical practice and magic as understood by the fantasy genre, and how these facts lead to a massive overhaul of the project's lexicon.

Part 5: Does a world ruled by witches have patriarchy?

So yeah, I'm changing up the format here, for several reasons. One, the original thread was getting ridiculously long (I did originally append this to the thread, so trust me when I say it looked ridiculous). Two, having to format the "chapters" in such a way to have the first paragraph tease what's under the cut was genuinely kind of annoying in the last chapter (to say nothing of the fact that the OP was never meant to do this, and so its first chapter does it poorly). Three, I'm un-shadowbanned now and can properly farm engagement.

Speaking of which, don't worry, I didn't immediately backtrack on yet another piece of lore--I just used "witch" in the title over "lilim" to grab more eyeballs.

Anyway, one might naively assume that a world in which the entire ruling class is composed of women would axiomatically not be a patriarchy, to which I say: Hey, why was the Victorian era called that, again? Or less flippantly, the fact that this world's nobility is composed entirely of lilim tells us nothing about how the peasants live. Many of their material conditions remain unchanged, and so much of their lives will remain unchanged.

Furthermore, I sincerely doubt many cultures in this world consider lilim and women to be the same thing, and I doubted it even before half of the lilim became monster girls. If you don't think a few socially reinforced norms differentiating how lilim should dress, cut their hair, act, present themselves, and be in general from how women should do these things (I'm imagining butch/fem discourse, but more so) is enough to make it just as "natural" and "obvious" to the people of this setting that women and lilim are as categorically different as men are from either, I invite you to attend a drag performance some time and see how arbitrary and performative gender presentation is in our culture. And of course if there are three genders, then there is no cognitive dissonance at all in making the social hierarchy lilim > men > women.

But on the other hand, the existence of lilim hasn't not impacted patriarchy; I've said in prior updates that patrilineality is a no-go (for obvious reasons), and as such all that comes with it (such as marriage and monogamy) has been taken out back and shot like Old Yeller is inconceivable to these people. So whose to say that there aren't other impacts? For instance, if it's possible for a lilim to wipe out a whole army with a gesture (and to be clear I don't know how strong I want to make them yet) then these people will simply not use armies of men to fight their wars, and surely men not being allowed to be soldiers would be another blow to the logic of patriarchy, right?

...Right???

I've mentioned Dr. Justin Sledge and his youtube channel, Esoterica, earlier in this series. Given the subject matter of his channel, it's only natural that he has a playlist dedicated to witchcraft, and given that for a time I was desperately trying to justify continuing to call lilim witches (in spite of the fact that the magic system here is obviously much closer to super powers than anything you'd call witchcraft), it's only natural that I watched the entire thing in hopes that he'd throw me a freaking bone here. Alas he did not, but what he did do was have a video about Sylvia Federici's Caliban and the Witch. And on that note I do apologize for the length of the following quote--believe it or not, this is the pared down version:

By the high middle ages, urban women were also enjoying a great deal of social autonomy, including upward social mobility and widespread guild representation. Milenarian and so-called heretical groups were actively challenging the hegemony of the Catholic Church. Urban workers, especially in the northern European textile industry, were consistently challenging the monopoly and hierarchy of the system of the guilds. Bawdy university students were turning to secular professions, rakish lifestyles, and even sorcery. The Europe of 1325 was anything other than stable--it was a social powder keg. What lit the match, according to Federici, was the Black Death…. …And crucial for Federici's theory is the labor shortage it created. With so many workers killed, those that remained could--and did--demand higher wages…. …Overall wages and buying power would rise in the aftermath of the Plague before peaking between 1450 and 1500 to levels that they would not reach again for centuries, and it is into this situation, the rising tide of peasants and workers in the European heartland, the conquest of the New World beginning in the 16th century, and the rise of the slave trade, that Federici locates the horrifying logic of the witch trials: for her, the witch trials were part of a larger struggle to settle social antagonisms in the interest of the landed gentry and the ascendant and urban mercantile class…. …[F]or Federichi, the inner logic of the witch hunts was not about seeking out heresy but about targeting women's bodies and especially their knowledge around their own reproductive technologies. If the theological developments around diabolism and heresy could be linked to specific control over women's fertility, then the wielders of such technology could be targeted for extermination. It is here that Federici notes the continual and conspicuous [I think he skipped a word here] between women's bodies, their sexuality, and especially fertility and women's autonomous control over that technology in the mind and texts of the witch hunters. This is so much so that if one begins to read much of the demonological literature of this time one begins to notice that the term maleficia, or witchcraft, simply becomes a byword for birth control, abortifacients, and the lingering and persistent myth of the witch as a killer of infants. Of course, this doesn't require that every witch hunter had these ideas in mind when they went about their grim task--most of us don't think of ourselves as carrying out widespread social agendas when we go about our daily lives and work, but of course, we are--but for Federici, this is the overall effect of the logic of the witch hunts. Further, the labor of women, especially in the urban environment, came under attack…. …Relying on age-old misogyny, the church and the mercantile class could levy working-class men against working-class women, increasingly creating a situation in which public labor was the domain of men and private, un-wage domestic labor became the domain of women. The stereotype of the medieval woman as pregnant, barefoot, and in the kitchen was the result of just this process rather than an accurate representation of the role of medieval women prior to it.

You have no idea how hard it was not to just transcribe the entire goddamn video. Seriously, just watch it; I haven't read Federici's books myself, but this was seriously eye-opening.

For one thing, I now consider the witch hunts to be the first wave of fascism (leveraging bigotry, fear, and ignorance to ensure the ruling class's continued control of an exploited majority that was becoming aware of and resentful towards their chains, you say? Where have we seen this before???).

More to the point, though, is that while this isn't directly relevant to the setting--it's not medieval, and there was never a Black Death thanks to widespread healing magic--it does lay bare patriarchy's purpose in class society: wheresoever a privileged minority must exploit an oppressed majority, it is in their interest to inflate the numbers of that majority so as to better leverage the principle of supply and demand against it, and patriarchy is the tool that allows them to accomplish this. This is the essential core of patriarchy--all else is a means to that end.

And as such, obviously it exists in the setting. Even if I were to strip away all the excuses that are and have been used to justify patriarchy in our world, they will simply make up new excuses to place the men of a class above the women of that class. Patriarchy can change its form to meet the material conditions and wax and wane in reflection of the power of the ruling class, but until there's a communist revolution it will never go away (in the setting, or in real life).

...Well, that was dark.

On the bright side, though, this decision being taken out of my hands like this simplifies the project immensely. I was seriously considering trying my hand at unmaking the patriarchy, in spite of the fact that every fucking matriarchy to ever be dreamed up by a man in the history of speculative fiction has sucked fucking ass--but any power level that would have made men useless in war would have had other consequences.

For instance, the oceans would straight-up belong to the mermaids, and there's no way they're letting a bunch of Europeans compete with--or worse, disrupt--their trade networks by sailing to the Americas and looting everything in sight. And I mean, what does a nineteenth-century Europe without colonialism even look like? Surely it'd remain a cultural and intellectual backwater and I'd have to move the Enlightenment to India or China or something.

And I mean, I could do that, but all of the work I've done on the actual characters and such has assumed they come from a vaguely European history and culture. For instance, not!Darwin is literally the daughter of not!Galileo (remember that lilim have long lifespans) and has an understandable chip on her shoulder towards the Lilith!church about that. I'd basically have had to rethink everything.

LILITH IS OPEN! IF YOU WANT, YOU CAN WORSHIP HER! BE YOU JEWISH OR GENTILE 💖

Four points:

lilith is open, but making ancient levant pregnancy protection bowls with botched hebrew and saying its idk a modern michigander witch invention, THAT is appropriation. Just saying a prayer to Lilith as a gentile is, can’t believe i have to say this, not appropriation.

lilith is jewish, as known from oral tradition, ancient and medieval apotropaic artifacts, Zohar, and of course the Alphabet of (falsly attributed) Ben Sirach ~ she’s jewish but, just like judaism, she’s is an amalgam of common experiences witnessed by peoples in antiquity

lilith is actively worshipped, observably, in reality, by jewish and gentile women and queers for decades. My friends aren’t antisemitic just for me inviting them in, that’s batshit talk.