The Book of Lilith Website

This site contains links devoted to The Book of Lilith, a work of fiction by Robert G. Brown. Many of the links, of course, will also be of interest to anyone interested in the myth of Lilith and her relationship to Adam, to Eve, to Gilgamesh, to Cain in both historical work and modern culture. [Vampire fans be warned! The Lilith portrayed in this book (and in most of the links below) is not a bloodsucking demoness of the night. Sorry. You might like it anyway, though.]

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The Book of Lilith (Trade Paper)
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The Book of Lilith

Site Contents

  • Review/Synopsis
    To give you an idea of what the book is all about.
  • Reviews and Previews
    To give you a good idea of what the book is all about.
  • Stores and Formats to get The Book of Lilith
    Store links where you can buy TBOL in trade paper, hardback, Sony formatted PDF, Kindle e-book, and trade-paper image PDF
  • Author's Writing/Club Links
    A little bit about rgb -- what he reads, what he thinks. Of course to get a bigger better picture you might want to visit rgb's Home Page directly, which gets roughly 500,000 web-hits a month (so there must be something there worth looking at, right?).
  • Lilith Web Links
    These are useful and entertaining Lilith references, including some of the links that were used to do research for writing the book.
  • Lilith Books and Mags
    More of the same, but these you have to buy. Not from me.
  • Lilith Webring Station
    TBOL is on a number of webrings that overlap with Lilith, feminism, spouse abuse, eventually other topics. I put all the links in one spot at the bottom, but I make it easy to get there in one hop so you can continue if you arrived on the webring train and this station isn't, so to speak, your cup of tea...

Review/Synopsis of The Book of Lilith

The Book of Lilith is a work of serious fiction. You should find it entertaining, and it should make you think. The general category for the work is magical realism, or perhaps satiric fantasy in the spirit of Barth's Chimera. It is a story set in a pseudo-academic framing story involving the supposed discovery of lost scrolls in war-torn Iraq by a somewhat mysterious maiden, who is then subjected to a very hard time by the various patriarchal sides of the war's participants. This part is pure black humor, but can be a bit shocking as well. They should be, as events like the ones portrayed turn up in my newspaper every week, where somehow they've lost all their shock value.

These scrolls, when translated, turn out to be the oldest written documents ever discovered, the first person story of Lilith herself. This is a clear spoof on the Nag Hammadi scrolls discovered by an Arab peasant in Egypt in 1945, that were kept around his house and (alas) even used to start fires before it was discovered that they contained very early copies of books that were purged out of the New Testament by the Council of Nicaea in 325 CE: the Gnostic gospels, as well as the Book of Thomas (not properly a Gnostic text as Thomas was of course an Apostle).

Although the frame is just part of the story, it is told realistically enough that it fooled at least one early reader into asking me if he could "see the real scrolls" (whereupon I added a careful note at the beginning pointing out that the book is fiction). Fiction or not, the story itself is carefully researched and Lilith's adventures span four cultures from the early Bronze or late Stone age. It is not just a physical travelogue, however, it is a spiritual travelogue, as Lilith takes from each place a painful lesson on her road to wisdom.

Lilith doesn't travel alone on this journey; she takes the reader with her as the crazy course of her life ensouled carries her from its beginnings in a magical Eden located in ancient Sumeria to Sidon in early Phoenicia, to Mohenjo Daro and the Harrapan civilization, and finally to a wicked and corrupt India in the years immediately preceding the violent cleansing portrayed in the Mahabharata. The Book of Lilith is lovingly derived from many scholarly and historical works and epics, including The Book of Genesis, the Epic of Gilgamesh, the Upanishads, the Alphabet of Ben-Sirra, the Dead Sea Scrolls and more.

Note well that the Lilith portrayed is not the "goddess" worshipped by various cults, nor is she the she-demon portrayed by various patriarchal writings. She is a real person. She is the first, untamed wife of Adam, with a surprising relationship with the more submissive Eve. In fact, she is the first real person gifted with a soul by God, and it is her appointed task to bring the gift of Soul to all things in Creation (beginning with Adam) by means of her love, just as it is Adam's task to bring about the rule of Law and hence begin the process of evolving a just and ethical society.

That's not to say that Lilith isn't more than a bit magical. To do her job she has been given a tiny bit of the miraculous power of God, which she uses for better or worse as her life evolves. Her life does come with some very definite percs. For example, she enjoys both preternatural knowledge of all things but herself and a personal relationship -- one that involves sharing sushi and shopping trips to early bazaars - with Goddess in the metaphor of Inanna (given that any human representation of God is at heart an anthropomorphic projection of a genderless state of Perfect Knowledge and Perfect Being). Herself she must learn about the hard way, just as you or I might.

Many themes (some of them somewhat disturbing or even shocking, be warned) are woven into the story, but the overall story is one of growth. Lilith is in turn an eager (and somewhat naive and foolish) young bride in love, a young mother coping with what turns out to be a possessive, insecure, and slovenly husband, a beaten and raped wife who prefers to work as a harlot to feed herself and her children rather than ever again be "owned" by any man, a miracle worker beloved by God and granted the power to heal the sick or punish the wicked, a penetrating judge who can plumb the depths of the darkest heart and consign its possessor to freedom or a horrible death, and, in the end, something more. She is throughout her life a seductive lover with the uninhibited knowledge of sexual pleasure she is ever willing to share -- as long as she gets to be on top, or at least to take turns.

At the end of all this -- eventually -- she turns out to be neither more nor less than an extraordinary human being who suffers from her pride and mistakes, who struggles with her appointed task (sometimes succeeding and sometimes failing) and who learns from the pain and reward of a life well spent that knowledge and wisdom are not the same thing.

There are surprises and adventures, wickedness and great good, laughter and tears, and -- perhaps -- a nugget or two of wisdom, so give it a try. I think you'll enjoy it!

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Reviews and Previews of The Book of Lilith

  • Preview of The Book of Lilith
    This is an online free preview of The Book of Lilith containing the preface and first three chapters in their entirety. Because html doesn't support proper "pages" without a page browser, the footnotes in the actual text are presented as inserts. However, it should read pretty well in most web browsers, especially if you resize the browser to a convenient line width for easy reading at your font size.
  • Online Page Version
    This is an online preview site set up by fans of TBOL in Australia who wrote:
    We laughed and cried. He deeply stirred all our emotions. In fact we were mesmerized by this remarkable book and loved it so much so that we wanted to help Robert spread the word. So we contacted him and offered to create this web site. We hope you buy The Book of Lilith as a gift for someone special this Christmas, as it is truly the first classic fable of the 21st century, that will act as a beacon for the future, for whoever are fortunate enough to read it.
    No kidding! Almost embarrassing, actually. They set up a flash-based page-at-a-time preview here as well.
  • Podpeople Blogspot Review of TBOL
    A review by Cheryl Anne Garder, author of dark, erotic novels such as The Thin Wall. She says:
    I loved it, and the author's approach to the story not only made me giggle a bit, but it also made me ponder and appreciate what it means to be a woman -- a candid and tough woman, struggling in the world of men.
  • BreeniBooks Review of TBOL
    Sabrina Williams (in her email back to me letting me know she posted the review) said that it was "a really really great book." High praise, from one of the best known and respected online reviewers! Here's the conclusion of her review:
    I found myself emotionally involved in Lilith's tale, at times laughing out loud, at times brimming with joy or seething with anger. At some points, I was lost in the story so much that it seemed real to me, and when I brought myself back to reality, I longed for it to have been a true account. It's a wonderful work of fiction that encourages the reader to examine humanity's existence and the sacred feminine from many perspectives.
    Breeni likes TBOL enough that she selected it as the best book she read in February!
    by far the best book I read in February was The Book of Lilith by Robert G. Brown. If you like to invest in new authors, here's one you should definitely run right out and buy.
    "Run" being figurative, of course, since it is available online at the links below, or you can order it at your favorite independent bookseller by its ISBN: 9781430322450 (often via the Book Sense link below). Still, sounds like good advice to me!
  • Mrs. Giggles' Review of TBOL
    Mrs. Giggles reviewed TBOL on her own, so to speak -- I discovered the review accidentally when googling around on the web. Mrs. Giggles didn't ``get'' the story the way that Breeni did; she didn't seem to pick up on the fact that the tone change over the course of the story is deliberate and actually echoes the process of Lilith's personal journey of self-discovery as she starts out as an innocent in Eden and is exposed in the harshest of ways to all of the real evil in the world. Even so, Mrs. Giggles says:
    ...this one has its charms, particularly as an unapologetically feminist interpretation of the myth of a previously maligned figure in Biblical canon that has in recent times become a positive icon for the feminist movement.
    I can live with that. Given that TBOL is my first published novel, I can even take Mrs. Giggles criticism of my literary style and use of irony, satire, black humor, light humor all mixed in with a serious work at face value. MG, I vow to work on this in the future but (given the reviewers who don't seem to mind the style or even applaud it) I'd suggest that potential readers check out the previews (at least) before making up their minds.
  • Odyssey Reviews
    Odyssey Reviews gives TBOL 4.5 medallions (out of five)...and this from a reviewer that frankly admits that he didn't want to like the book and generally dislikes the genre! A few quotes:
    I normally dislike this genre of book; mostly because they just come off as a blatant show of the author's brilliance and wit; smug and lofty. But I can't bring myself to hate the Book of Lilith. Trust me, I tried. The truth is, I kind of liked it. I kind of really liked it, actually. sigh I know...The horror!
    Also:
    Lately, I've had a hard time keeping focused on reading, yet this book had my attention whenever I had it in my hands. I kept reading it; I wanted to keep reading it, despite the fact that I don't even like books about spirituality or etudes related to religion beliefs. This book was far from mind-numbing.
    Finally:
    All in all the Book of Lilith is up there in the ranks of self-published books. The quality of writing, the style and voice of the author made the book quite compelling and a good read.
  • They aren't exactly review sites, but a number of people have thought enough of The Book of Lilith to set up links to this page on their own without being asked by me (seriously). Since that takes work on their part and selects TBOL out of the vast sea of books they could have put up to promote to their friends instead, we'll count that as "five stars". Here are some of them:
    • Connie Pierce's Personal Website which is very well done (not all random and chaotic like my own personal website:-). Worth checking out, and be sure to sign her guestbook.
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    rgb's Writing Links

    • The Author's Den
    • Goodreads
      Goodreads is a great online book club, for those that like book clubs. It is a place where book readers hang out. Some authors seeking to promote their books (blush, blush) sure, but on this site they are readers first. TBOL has a chapter up there, and there is also a link to it in review-space.
    • rgb's Lulu blog
      I'm too busy writing (I'm working on some five or six books simultaneously) to blog out, but I do try to write a bit here from time to time. It's one of several decent places to see what's going on.
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    Links to Different Media Versions of The Book of Lilith

    Amazon Trade Paper
    Buy the book at Amazon! Be sure to leave a review.
    Amazon Kindle
    Deliver The Book of Lilith to your Kindle in a matter of seconds, and save a bunch of money as well!
    Barnes and Noble Trade Paper
    Barnes and Noble has a great price and free shipping if you are a member! Again, please leave a review and help to spread the word.
    Sony-sized E-book
    This is a special PDF version of the book formatted to display perfectly on the Sony E-book reader. It will also display on any PDF browser, though, so it will work on laptops and other E-book readers with a similar sized screen that support PDFs.
    HTML formatted E-book
    This is a special web version of the book formatted to display perfectly on pretty much any web browser. It is being offered for a short time at the special price of only $1.25 (the other E-book formats for regular E-book readers are $6.95)! Read The Book of Lilith for about the cost of a soda out of a machine...
    Your Favorite Independent Bookseller Trade Paper
    As an independent writer and publisher, I strongly support independent booksellers! However, one of the dark sides of publishing through Lulu is that their current publishing arrangement makes it impossible to offer books at the 40% discount required by a brick and mortar store so that they can make a small profit at list price or afford to offer a discount to their customers. As a result, most brick and mortar stores do not sell The Book of Lilith directly inside the store. However, they often do allow you to order it through their store via Book Sense. If you wish to support your local independent, follow the link above, enter your zip code, select your local store, and then search on ISBN 978-1-4303-2245-0, or order it directly from your store using this same ISBN. That way they'll make money on the sale, which is fine with me.
    Lulu Trade Paper
    This is the home of the ISBN paperback version of The Book of Lilith. It has an online previewer where you can read much of the book for free. Reviews or comments welcome!
    Lulu Hardback
    As you can see, one can buy The Book of Lilith in several formats. This site sells the only hardback edition of the book. It does not have an ISBN at this time, and may end up being a bit of a collectors item. The hardback (like the various e-book formats above) is basically a typo-correcting revision ahead of the trade paperback as well, and is very slightly more polished.
    Lulu PDF
    The hardback site also sells a 6x9 trade paper PDF image of The Book of Lilith, available for instant download. This is the least expensive copy currently available, and is the actual image used to create the hardback book. This lets me offer it at a discount compared to the other e-book formatted versions (which require considerable additional work to get formatted just right). It is a great size for easy readability in any PDF page browser on a Windows, Mac or Linux computer.
    rgb's Lulu Bookstore
    This is where all my available books published through Lulu are for sale. There are two complete books of poetry, a science fiction novel, a Classical Electromagnetism lecture note/textbook, and a book on Beowulf computing (the latter two somewhat under development) there for paper copy sale or PDF download. Check it out!
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    Useful and Interesting Lilith Links

    • Wikipedia Article on Lilith
      A truly excellent one-stop-shop scholarly review of Lilith, it contains the various myths, the legends, the history, with numerous cross-links. This page was hardly more than a stub when I began this project, but at this point it is simply superb. They even selected the same work of art to depict Lilith that I used for my cover! I still learn more about Lilith every time I visit this site and follow its links.
    • Alan Humm's Lilith Website
      This site, assembled by Alan Humm, is an excellent and authoritative cross-referencing of Lilith's appearance in history and literature from ancient times to the present. A very good starting place, and almost invariably included as a reference on other Lilith websites. From the content, I suspect that Humm is also responsible for most of the Wikipedia article, although one cannot be sure.
    • Aaron Leitch's Lilith Website
      This website, assembled by Aaron Leitch, is a very interesting survey of Lilith-iana and includes a number of web-links to other references. However it is most interesting (I think) for its presentation and critique of various views of Lilith (in particular the "feminist" viewpoint that is indirectly advanced in my book) and its advancement of the notion that the Lilith mythology as it has emerged in the present time has a psychoanalytic interpretation. This is not a unique viewpoint (see the books link) but he does a good job of presenting it.

      As I noted in at the end of The Book of Lilith, however, I personally prefer the humanist metaphor of continuing evolution where I deliberately liberate Lilith from her demonic roots and her symbolic soul roots and make her into just a person. She is a special person, one with a special relationship with God and a special task, but aside from the odd bit of magic there is nothing about my Lilith that makes her particularly different from you or I. She's equipped with different tools, but she's moving down the same road.

    • Ramblin Rosen's Lilith Website
      This is a compendium of links to primary references on the historical roots of the Lilith myths in Babylonian/Sumerian culture through medieval times (when the myth of Lilith as the "first Eve" emerged). The site has excellent essays and links, a mailing list, and a message board (where the latter has a strong occult flavor to it, but hey, that's one part of what Lilith is all about).
    • Lilith the Mother of Musical Worship Website
      This is apparently a link on a biblical reference website, and is most interesting for its presentation of Lilith myths (including those that reference "Naamah", a Lilith-like demoness that might be another term for Lilith herself or a sister of Tubal-Cain) and for connecting those myths, interestingly enough, to the development of music in culture and worship. I don't know how sound the scholarship of this site is compared to, for example, that linked to Alan Humm's site above, but it nevertheless has interesting versions or interpretations of the Lilith/Naamah story on it and is a site that links Lilith strongly with Inanna, in a positive way and as a goddess in her own right, not solely as a demoness and a negative one.
    • Gilgamesh and the Huluppu-Tree
      This is the earliest known appearance of Lilith, in one of the earliest known written works of mankind. I incorporated the notion of Lilith, as the "always laughing" and happy handmaiden of Inanna living in a tree with wise birds in the branches in Eden directly from this myth. Gilgamesh becomes Adam, who tore down her tree and forced her to flee into the waste. However, I am melding several myths together; the waste isn't a surrounding desert per se, it is the wasteland created by the flood as the Sword of God (a small asteroid) is brought to Earth to destroy Eden and drive out Adam as well.
    • A Chapter from Hebrew Myths on Lilith
      This is a fairly serious Gnostic website. It excerpts the chapter from the book by Robert Graves and Raphael Patai that deals with the myth of Lilith as it is presented in e.g. The Alphabet of Ben-Sira and elsewhere. It is another very important source for The Book of Lilith -- in particular the it contains the patriarchal crap that inspired it, where Lilith was the woman made on the sixth day but out of "filth and sediment instead of pure dust". It is also where Adam tries to compel her obedience by force to have sex with him on the bottom -- that is, he rapes her. I reject the rest of the story here as too ridiculous for words, transforming Lilith from a sensible woman who flees an abusive man into some sort of demon-loving child murderer. But it is very useful to see just how misogynistic the Hebrew Lilith legend really is, and how badly it needs a makeover.
    • Lilith in The Alphabet of Ben-Sira
      This is one of the primary sources for the modern view of biblical Lilith as the first wife of Adam. Note well that it is not clear that the Alphabet is intended to be taken seriously. It might have been a self-mocking satire, it might have been a scurrilous work by anti-Semites.
    • Lilith in The Zohar
      I include this because this is a central work in the Kabbalistic tradition of Lilith, one that binds together many earlier legends and shows that Lilith has long been an important part of Jewish culture, usually representing the dark side of the female, the side that dares to be man's equal, the side that is tied to both the devil (in the person of Samael) and the Serpent as well as Eve. I did not use this directly in my mythopoeic reconstruction of Lilith's life, save for the obvious connections -- Lilith (and Adam) have a critical connection to a serpent, but it is a very different serpent than the traditional tempter, a serpent that bridges the gap between Biblical/Sumerian Lilith and Lilith in India as the mother of Krishna, where the same snake is now the well-known protector and umbrella of Krishna at his birth. Note that these last two sites are themselves part of a large site devoted to Lilith that is well worth exploring.
    • The Lilith Library
      This is a site that was originally devoted strictly to Lilith but that has subsequently branched out. It is on two webrings associated with Lilith, and has crosslinks to literature and art and music associated with Lilith.
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    Books and Literary Material

    The following books and magazines may be of interest to people interested in learning more about Lilith. Several of them seem to be linked to my book on Amazon, so at the very least it seems probable that the same people who read them like my book and vice versa. Inclusion here does not mean that I've read them myself, however -- fascinating as I find the Lilith story, reading Scholarly Works in general (even in physics, actually) makes me yearn to give myself a root canal with my Black and Decker instead.

    Besides, in most cases the messages they convey could be equally well conveyed in a good five paragraph essay, and be equally believable. IMO, anyway. Not that I'm not equally guilty in my own little essay in the Appendix of The Book of Lilith.

  • Lilith Magazine
    This is the contemporary Jewish feminist magazine. It very much appears to be run by women, for women, all of whom (like my Lilith in The Book of Lilith) aren't about to spend their lives on the bottom, not economically, not sexually, and not emotionally. Oh, and it looks like it is useful and interesting outside of the dialectic, as well.
  • The Book of Lilith by Barbara Black Koltuv
    This is one of three or four works entitled The Book of Lilith. It is supposedly a Jungian analysis of Lilith in history, myth, and poetry, but I have not read it and do not know for sure. I'm presenting it in all fairness as an "important" work you're bound to run across if Lilith is your thing. If I had known about it when I named my book, I would probably have named it "The Lilith Scrolls" instead, which also works, but then, The Book of Lilith is a great title, isn't it? And my book is plain old fiction, plain old fun, where BBK's book is, um, Scholarship.
  • Lilith - The First Eve: Historical and Psychological Aspects of the Dark Feminine by Siegmund Hurwitz
    This is also a Jungian analysis of Lilith, apparently less historical and more psychoanalytical. Again, haven't read it, and it seems to be in a bit of a war with BBK's book above. From what I've read second hand, its scholarship is likely a bit better, but it may be a bit harder to read as a consequence. Thankfully, I'm just writing plain old fiction...;-)
  • Lilith by George MacDonald
    A frankly weird little religious fantasy. I'm not being critical -- so is The Book of Lilith. It is one of the few genuine works of magical realism from that period, and was enormously influential. In particular, as I note in my TBOL essay, it influenced C. S. Lewis, where his White Witch character was supposedly descended from Lilith and is very much a Lilith character (of the dark, demonic sort) herself. My only problem with it is that it drags a bit plotwise, although MacDonald's "luminous" language and fancy rescue it to some extent. Also the symbolism is a bit heavy handed. Not that Lewis's wasn't as well, but Lewis's plots are fabulous. It is available for free from Project Gutenberg as a straight text e-book if you're comfortable reading in that format -- I personally wish they'd make it into either PDF or HTML/zip or both, but hey, not enough to do the work for them.
  • The Lost Book of Lilith by Rachel S. Havrelock
    This link (or rather, a link to www.lilithinstitute.com) might well have gone in above, and this isn't really a "book" but is rather a very short story, but it is a literary rendering of the Lilith story and again shares a lot of the same title, so it deserves mention somewhere. The Lilith Institute links on this site will take you off many places as well.
  • Agatha Crup and the Legend of the Olin by Ray Hayden
    This is a unique and imaginative online concept comic produced by veteran music producer and graphic designer Ray Hayden of Opaz Multimedia. With its CGI graphics, mythical characters and an adult twist, it is the evolution of the traditional paper comic.

    The graphic novel is centred on the supernatural character Agatha Crup who secretly works against the destructive force of Lilith and her demon army. In Hebrew folklore Adam had a wife before God made Eve from his rib, (Genesis 1.27 & 2.23) her name was Lilith. A human clone could not have a soul, thus the spirit of Lilith returns All Hallows when the dead walk the earth and possesses a cloned female. She unleashes an incurable mutating disease spread by genetically modified foods and animals that infects men. The widespread infection radically changes the world as we know it putting women firmly in control

    Comic creator, Ray Hayden, says: "We were painting in caves before we could put pen to paper, it is one of our oldest traditions as a species. Using CGI graphics I am able to bring something new to the comic strip to tell Agatha's story. By combining theology/mythology with main-stream science and a largely female cast I'm hoping to redefine the female heroine."
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    Webring Station

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    This page is maintained by Robert G. Brown, and he cherishes communication from readers interested in the philosophy, the religion, the humanism, or just the plain old story told in The Book of Lilith. His obfuscated, anti-spam email address is rgb at phy dot duke dot edu; feel free to contact him there.

    Communication can also be established in blogspace if you are more interested in that medium. The author maintains a writing blog on lulu, and will sooner or later read and reply to comments made on the book's pages on lulu, on the author's Writer's Den site, or on the Goodreads site.