Lilith, the ancient Mother of Demons is on a millennium-long quest to bring forth her children and conquer the world.
Fall From Heaven
At the dawn of humanity, Lilith’s true origins were already lost, but some claim she began life as a member of the Heavenly Hosts alongside her sister Na’ameh, with whom she shared the affections of her husband Samael. When Samael, later calling himself “Satan,” led a rebellion against Heaven, Lilith and her sister stood at his side, Lilith herself leading 480 legions into battle. When their rebellion failed, Lilith, Samael, and their followers were cast from Heaven into the realms that humanity later named “Hell.”
Evidently seeing little future with Samael, Lilith allegedly became the lover of Adam, the father of humanity, whose creation, some sources state, sparked the rebellion. Lilith conceived many children, known as the Mazikim, by Adam but ultimately found him oppressive and abandoned him. Senoy, Sansenoy, and Semangol, three entities calling themselves angels, slew most of her children in response, and the grief-stricken Lilith fled to demon cities beneath the Red Sea, vowing that her future children would dominate humanity.
Magical Feats of Lore
Lilith’s powers have fluctuated over the millennia as her status has shifted to angel, demon, goddess, and more. Originally, she was so infused with the universe’s ambient mystic energy that direct combat with her could potentially weaken dimensional barriers. At present, she possesses at least the typical superhuman strength (up to Class 25), endurance, and durability of a god. She can conjure visions of distant events, create bolts or walls of mystic energy, kill via invisible force, teleport, and perform other magical feats. The full extent of her power, whether current or potential, remains undetermined.
She can augment her power by absorbing life force from the Lilin (and, presumably, any of her other offspring races), whom she can mentally contact across thousands of miles. She can summon Lilin from other dimensions, enabling them to re-enter the Earth dimension via “re-birth” through portals in her body. She can apparently reshape other beings into Lilin and create new Lilin from occult energy at will; the more Lilin or other Lilith-spawn that exist, the more powerful she becomes.
She has vast knowledge of magical lore, much of which originated with her. According to legend, Lilith’s power is less effective against women than against men. In ancient times, she supposedly wore wings and wielded a mystic sword, as well as a bow whose meteor-stone arrows could cure or inflict illness.
Mortal and Immortal Enemies
Lilith faces many mystical and supernatural foes over her millennium-long life, such as the demon hunter known as Caretaker and the Order of the Midnight Sons.
In modern times, she battles the Sorcerer Supreme Dr. Stephen Strange, AKA Doctor Strange, and his loose-knit confederation of mystically powered heroes, originally called the Nine. Strange’s allies informally became known as the Midnight Sons and included Ghost Riders Daniel Ketch and Johnny Blaze, Dr. Michael Morbius, AKA Morbius, the Living Vampire, mystic-hunting heroes Eric Brooks, AKA Blade, Frank Drake, and Hannibal King, and occult experts the Darkhold Redeemers trio Louise Hastings, Victoria Montesi, and Sam Buchanan. She even faces the alien Skrulls when they invade Earth but uses the opportunity to yet again attempt to unleash her spawn.
Blood Bonds
More often than not, Lilith is motivated purely by the desire to have as many children as possible who will one day rule the world, and as such goes through many lovers throughout her nigh-immortal life. Some of her lovers include the Olympian God Zeus, the Judeo-Christian God, and the ancient demon Zarathos.
The Lilin are Lilith’s loyal army of demonic offspring who are at her beck and call and may one day take over the world. Though, her son Pilgrim proves to be the most loyal of the Lilin, standing by her side through many bloody battles.
Demonic Pursuits
Lilith’s activities throughout most of the subsequent millennia remain unrevealed if not unimaginable, but as of some 20,000 years ago—the era of the occult heroes called the Midnight Sons—she was residing in Atlantis, where she may have participated in the creation of the first vampire; when the Atlantean Empire was destroyed in the Great Cataclysm, she was one of its few survivors. When Atlantis’ gods faded from human consciousness, new ones arose, with Lilith taking her place among the Annunaki, worshipped in Mesopotamia, but she reportedly deteriorated into a storm demon before withdrawing to the desert beyond the Euphrates River, which flowed through what would become Iraq. In subsequent centuries, Lilith courted both mortal and mystic power, ruling various kingdoms in her human form. She also continued her quest to conceive powerful children, including the demonic warriors called the Lilin, whose lineage might one day overwhelm the world. Her many lovers supposedly included the angel Shemhazai, the fertility deity Attis, the Olympian God Zeus, and even the Judeo-Christian God himself.
Ancient stories claim that Lilith fought the immortal king Gilgamesh circa 3000 BC and, over two millennia later, joined other demons to challenge Israel’s King Solomon, who enslaved and banished many such demons, including some of the Lilin. Per the stories, Lilith took the form of one of her many daughters, the Queen of Sheba, to conceive a child by Solomon, the supposed chosen one of God. Less than a century after Solomon’s time, Lilith became the nemesis of the prophet Elijah, whom she fought during his desert retreats and who, some claim, she also deceived into fathering more of her children. Allegedly, it was she who slaughtered the children of Job at Satan’s command and, when Rome fell three centuries after the birth of Christ, she reigned in the ruins as jackals and kites roamed the desolation, feeding upon the carrion of an empty empire—or so the stories say.
As Christianity spread, Lilith followed it across the continents, continuing her unending quest to conceive powerful children by seducing men in their sleep and, in turn, to slay humanity’s own newborns. Scarcely a century after Rome’s fall, amulets carved with the Mazikim’s killers’ names were already being used to guard against her. In 12th century Asia, while her son Hurmin challenged the King of Mehuza, Lilith met perhaps her most humiliating defeat at mortal hands when a Turkish midwife, her name lost to legend, briefly trapped her within a bottle. Lilith fared far better a century later when the prophet Joseph della Reina, hoping to hasten the coming of the Messiah, dared confront her and her latest consort, the demon Ashmodei. Although Reina had studied dark sorcery under Lilith herself, he was no match for her power and ended his days in insanity, trapped in the form of a black dog. By the 17th century, Lilith was at the height of her power over mortal men, even while they emigrated to the New World in greater numbers. Although, she was challenged decades later by the mystic Rabbi Elimelekh of Poland, she ultimately outlived him as, it seemed, she had all earlier foes.
Despite various accounts of her physical death, at some point in centuries past, surviving Atlantean mages ensnared Lilith within a monstrous sea beast, perhaps the legendary Leviathan, the Annunaki’s alleged progenitor Tiamat, beached upon what became northern Greenland; thus, it may have been her spirit form that accomplished her feats of recent millennia. Lilith’s spirit may in fact have crossed not only the continents and eons, but the dimensional barriers themselves, to worlds where the laws of magic and vampirism widely differed, and certainly her power was invoked by denizens of multiple plains. With their mother gone, many Lilin were slain, while the survivors fled across the dimensions or into the throng of humanity. Eventually, surviving tales of Lilith’s rebellion and independence made her a mythic heroine to many, who had little idea that she truly existed and even less of the bloody exploits that the legends shrouded.
In recent years, Lilith finally freed herself from the great beast’s corpse when its remains were discovered by a scientific expedition. Drawing strength from the scientists’ emotions, she tore her way out of her carrion prison and further bloodied her hands with the lives of the luckless explorers, then summoned her teleporting son Pilgrim to gather his brethren for a pre-emptive assault on “the Nine,” fated successors of the Midnight Sons, including Ghost Riders Daniel Ketch and Johnny Blaze, Morbius, and others. Forming alliances with Nightmare, immortal Centurious, Darkholder spy Randolph DeGuzman, and others, Lilith sent her son Fang to mystically mutate Morbius, empowered ninja assassins to send against Victoria Montesi, briefly remade Dan Ketch’s disembodied spirit into a Lilin, and otherwise undermined the Nine before the Lilin were dispatched to the Shadow Side Dimension by a mystic explosion caused by Ghost Rider.
Rescuing and reinvigorating her spawn, Lilith, too powerful for even Sorcerer Supreme Doctor Strange to directly confront, summoned a Dark Mist from the Shadow Side, intending to infuse Earth with it to cement her power. Infecting Morbius with another son, Bloodthirst, Lilith weakened the newly allied Midnight Sons from within. In the course of one clash, the demon Zarathos, ancient even in Lilith’s youth, escaped from his confinement within Centurious’ body, and Lilith, seeing in him a worthy prospective mate, manipulated the demon into joining her forces. Following a mass assault by the Lilin upon New York’s Brooklyn Bridge, she manipulated Morbius into killing Montesi’s mentor Louise Hastings and caused the temporary destruction of Strange’s Sanctum Sanctorum. Nevertheless, the Lilin were ultimately re-banished, but Lilith shrugged off their fate and, abandoning her millennia-old family to their exile, returned to Earth, having conceived Zarathos’ child or children and consigned the demon himself to her lengthy list of abandoned lovers.
Resurfacing after the apparent birth of Zarathos’ spawn, Lilith, her powers reduced but her arrogance intact, bedeviled Doctor Strange and his protégés the Witches (Topaz, Jennifer Kale, Satana) when the demon/god-spawn Hellphyr stalked the Earth, slaying magic users. Callously creating a new Lilin to die in battle with the Witches, Lilith nearly slew Strange before the Hellphyr’s destruction boosted his powers. Her extradimensional sanctuary, along with many other realms, was sealed off by fairy king Oberon during a Skrull invasion to prevent the aliens from misusing those realms’ magic. However, British mutant Peter Wisdom was forced to undo Oberon’s work in order to free the sorcerer Merlyn, freeing Lilith and other powerful evil entities in the process. Although Lilith and her ilk helped drive the Skrulls from Great Britain, she was thus granted freer access to Earth and an expanded ability to reclaim her ancient powers. Her current plans remain unrevealed, but plans she surely has, for she has waited the whole of human history to make the Earth a playground for her children, and she can wait longer still, for she deals in lust and blood, two of humanity’s most common coins.
