The Bahari

IMPORTANT: The Bahari have been removed as a playable cult so the information provided here is no longer cannon.

Bahari Lore | Bahari Convictions | Bahari Rituals

The Bahari believe that Lilith, the Dark Mother, would have been the greatest gardener of Eden, if not for Adam and the human God. She had three Gardens; Elona, the Garden of Hope, D’hainu, the Garden of Renewal, and Bahara, the Garden of Suffering. Whether the Gardens were each a physical place or a metaphor is of some debate, but their names and the events surrounding them are without question part of Bahari belief and what one could call their liturgy.

In one of the few ways the Bahari have always been united, they are intent on forming new gardens of paradise (or their interpretation of what paradise is) around the globe. Historically, the Bahari named the city of Jericho their new Garden of Renewal, where between the 9th and 14th centuries CE, Kindred could find sanctuary, succor, and time to pacify their Beasts. The Inquisition of the time routed the domain, but for a time it was one of the Bahari’s strongholds. Likewise, a powerful Bahari cell declared Oslo their Garden of Suffering in the 19th and early 20th centuries CE, but that group disappeared almost overnight prior to the start of the Second World War, leaving other Kindred to discover the domain had been used for the imprisonment, torture, and diablerie of countless vampires for over a century. None of the Oslo cell have re-entered society under the same names since that time.

The superiority of Lilith to Caine is a vital part of their belief structure, and the hate of Cainites is not something open to interpretation, let alone something to be approached with passivity or without violence. Cainites, down to the very last one, will either become Lhaka in the Garden, or die. The religious opinion that all supernatural creatures in the world are the children of Lilith is widespread, but not required. In the end, beneath any poetry, sin within the Bahari comprises a spectrum.

Organization

Members of the Bahari start somewhere on the outskirts of someone else’s Garden. As they embrace the lessons of the Dark Mother, they progress in acceptance, and education, before they can stand in the Garden with their fellow worshipers — or be buried in it, depending on how far they get in their time as a newly minted Ba’ham. But none should be afraid of watering the Garden.

A Garden is led by at least one person, frequently two. The number of Bahari in the Garden’s grasp is limited only by the goals and resources of the group. In cities where initiates may draw attention to the Garden, their number is tightly controlled, and replaced only as needed. When an initiate is human, with no supernatural gifts, their study before their ritual of initiation delivers only basic information about Lilith, focusing primarily on lessons of pain, the extinction of personal fear, and the necessity of blood sacrifice. Would-be initiates drawn from the ranks of mages and the psychically gifted have more openly supernatural discussions during their early studies, while Cainites receive formidable and painful deprogramming about the mythos of Caine, and indoctrination into the story of Lilith.

Outside coven-scale organizations, regions of Bahari will from time to time work in concert on large-scale rituals, or to coordinate the destruction of influential Cainites standing in the way of Bahari goals. When traveling to new cities, a Ba’ham may find some or all of the local Bahari customs quite alien on their face, with only the essential elements of the Dark Mother’s wisdom (blood and creation) recognizable. The oldest Garden still in existence — the Garden of Hope in Budapest — is a place of holy pilgrimage, and echoes of their liturgy have been carried piecemeal through centuries of Bahari immigration to other places, seeded into daughter-Gardens over time. Not every Garden is modeled on Lilith’s three, but undoubtedly, the Bahari would love to bring them back to life.

Rites

There are all manner of rites and rituals performed by the Bahari, some as frequently as several times a night, others perhaps only once every millennium. The Bahari are an oral tradition by pride and preference, written rites being exceedingly rare. Even the most devoted and murderous lilin looking for surviving written works are lucky to find even fragments of such past worship. Winter is a cherished time for rites that mourn and reflect on Lilith’s pain, leaving blood and entrails to steam on the snow before they freeze. Spring is as vicious as the birth pangs felt by the Dark Mother, but any season and nearly any sacrifice can be made within, or to start, a Garden of one’s own. At the most basic level, the rites and rituals of the Bahari should contain or celebrate pain, water, death, fertility, sex, excess (particularly of food, blood, etc.), fury, and grief. Marking someone or something for suffering and death would be particularly apt.

Among intrepid lilin who focus their attention on the seas are rituals like the Dark Fall (a sort of whale fall, albeit conducted with a chained Camarilla elder in torpor rather than a deceased cetacean, to bring prey to the denizens of the ocean floor), the Memory of Storm (a dusk-to-dawn vigil in honor of lilin lost in hurricanes), and Deep Songs (a marathon rite praising the creatures that live in the deep trenches, with continuous singing until the rite is done; the first three lilins to falter in the song are sacrificed at sea). These arcane practices have no material benefit, but provide a spiritual calm to the participants, reassuring them that they’re following the correct path.

Those preserving the land and the followers who dwell on it have the Song of Poison Gardens (for places poisoned by war or industry, to bleed away the poison and make them worthy of Lilith), Blood and Roses (sacrifices are killed in ghost forests or copses of trees to keep the Garden fertile), and Night of Shadow (lilins who were taken into the Bahari due to exceptional grief are imprisoned in a place of death or sorrow during the Winter Solstice, either to confront their grief and rise above it to serve Lilith, or be sacrificed to keep their Garden untainted by their past).

A lilin is not unmoved by life, or the dictates of their heart. Love, hate, grief, joy, sorrow, all expressions of feeling have their place in the Garden of Lilith. Their depth of feeling keeps them from falling prey to purposeless sadism, dangerous sorrow, or profane lust that would take them away from their purpose. As long as Lilith is first in their lives, and their Gardens second, any and all love, rivalry, or other attachments are treated as natural parts of existence. Whether one of the Bahari is human or something else, an empty heart is an invitation for the wrong things to take root within it. The pride, pointless violence, egotism, abuse, politics, and purposeless lives of the Camarilla and much of humanity are a threat to the purity of Lilith’s truth. It is the denial of deep roots, and the disrespect for the fertility of life, that places so many beyond the reach of the Bahari.