Rites of Lilith: Grimoire of the Queen of the Night by Asenath Mason (Nephilim Press, 2021) Hardcover

Asenath Mason. Rites of Lilith: Grimoire of the Queen of the Night. Nephilim Press, 2021. Hardcover. 460 pages.

Condition: Fine

Description from the publisher:

From the Author,

“Rites of Lilith” is a grimoire that also contains a historical overview of the myths and legends associated with the goddess from earliest antiquity to modern times. Today Lilith occupies a prominent place in various esoteric philosophies and is one of the symbolic deities of the Western Left Hand Path. Thoughts on who Lilith is and how she can be worked with are as many as there are practitioners, but most of them are based on common prejudice and misunderstanding. This book attempts to change this erroneous image of the goddess, showing that Lilith is a being with a multiplicity of faces, a powerful initiatory model for practitioners on the path of self-deification, and one of the most complete personifications of the Divine Feminine.

Written from the female perspective by an author with over 25 years of experience in working with the goddess, this book gets to the very core of the Divine Feminine by looking through her eyes and presenting a complete and un-distorted picture, showing her as she was before she became vilified by patriarchal dogmas. It examines her “masks” and manifestations, which are both benevolent and malicious, dark and bright, and shows how to work with her and how to understand her presence in the modern world.

These “masks” are names and titles under which Lilith has been known throughout the last two millennia. From the magical perspective, all of them have a practical function and each of them reveals a different aspect of the goddess, from her benevolent and protective attributes to her infamous reputation of a terrifying hag and child-killing demon. All of them also show the diversity of her character, and over the ages they have developed into unique spiritual beings in their own right. Sometimes they are similar to one another. Other times they are so different that we could hardly suspect that we are dealing with the same goddess. What is important, though, is that each of them can be approached as a standalone being - and this is also what this grimoire is about.

This book explores each of these names and titles as a goddess in her own right. It presents their history and etymology and discusses their manifestations and role in today’s magic, showing how they can be used by a modern practitioner. Also, each one of the chapters includes a portrait of the discussed “mask” of Lilith, showing how she manifests in rites of magic and providing a starting point for scrying practices, invocation, or other forms of astral work. History and mythology, the role of Lilith in the Qabalah, her function as the Dark Initiatrix, the mysteries of female magic, sigils and evocative portraits of the goddess, methods of work, and analysis of Lilith’s presence in the modern world – all this is included in this extensive grimoire."