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The Serpent of Lilith
Book by Stewart farrer
254 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1976
48 people want to read
About the author
Stewart Farrar
43 books38 followersStewart Farrar, along with Janet, wrote many books on witchcraft and was a well known witch appearing frequently in the media. He lived in Ireland and regularly toured the U.S.A. giveing lectures and workshops.
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
March 4, 2016
The first time I read The Serpent of Lilith, I hated it.
That was many moons ago. During my youth I read little but hardcore lit'ra-chure for school & high fantasy doorstoppers on my downtime. This was back when I was only just beginning to amass Victoria Holt & Victorian-era potboilers -- I hadn't yet discovered the joys of bodice rippers & vintage-milled paperback WTFery.
In short, dear reader, I was ignorant. :P
Yet something about it stuck with me, even through the vaguely-remembered haze of dislike. When I stumbled across that cover on Goodreads, I recognized it immediately -- and a tiny voice inside my head suggested I give it another chance. My tastes have changed since then, especially re: historical witchcraft WTFery, so I decided to listen to the tiny voice. If nothing else I could treat it as a grand experiment in altered states of reading consciousness. How much have I changed in terms of tolerating -- rather, ANTICIPATING -- the crazy-ass antics of occult gothics?
...And guess what? I really enjoyed it this time.
Yes, there's that creepy bronze cock. It's creepy. It's bronze. It's unsanitary. :D Yet what struck me wasn't the occult stuff (vivid, yes indeed; elegant, not always), but the temptation & corruption of innocence -- particularly for those who are doing bad things for supposedly noble reasons. At the heart it's a sympathetic story: Jessica's loving grief & simple gifts of witchery, which she molds into angry plans for revenge...leading to her initial involvement with the fringes of the coven...followed by her indoctrination & reluctant participation in what she knows to be unhealthy, evil rituals that still give her some sense of enjoyment. Jessica's story makes for a universal good vs evil parable, & I thought Farrar/Villiers portrayed it well.
Can someone who has fallen save herself? Can she overcome her fear enough to confide in those who might help her? Can she put her past aside to start fresh? Can such corruption be wiped away -- or at least balanced -- by positive forces?
Of course there's also crazy-ass WTFery, because that's what occult gothics are made of. This one includes village-based white witchery, blood sacrifice (they killed a puppy, dammit), virginal bodies + bronze cocks, manipulative femmeslash, bodice-shredding villainy, giant statues of goddesses, secret underground rooms, attempted ped0bear, plagues of rats, & emotional manipulations of weather. It's not a happy story...but it ends on a positive note & that makes it satisfying. (See, bunnies & rainbows aren't necessary -- just a hint of something upbeat to balance the battle against evil.) WTFery aside, it's competently written (despite the ritualistic preparations sometimes bordering on a checklist of What Witches Do) & the style is cleanly old-fashioned (though Farrar uses a lot of semi-colons).
Solid 4 stars for gloomy, campy, oddly believable Victorian horror with more substance than many witchcraft gothics. (And yes, I'll read it again someday. Go figure. :P)
That was many moons ago. During my youth I read little but hardcore lit'ra-chure for school & high fantasy doorstoppers on my downtime. This was back when I was only just beginning to amass Victoria Holt & Victorian-era potboilers -- I hadn't yet discovered the joys of bodice rippers & vintage-milled paperback WTFery.
In short, dear reader, I was ignorant. :P
Yet something about it stuck with me, even through the vaguely-remembered haze of dislike. When I stumbled across that cover on Goodreads, I recognized it immediately -- and a tiny voice inside my head suggested I give it another chance. My tastes have changed since then, especially re: historical witchcraft WTFery, so I decided to listen to the tiny voice. If nothing else I could treat it as a grand experiment in altered states of reading consciousness. How much have I changed in terms of tolerating -- rather, ANTICIPATING -- the crazy-ass antics of occult gothics?
...And guess what? I really enjoyed it this time.
Yes, there's that creepy bronze cock. It's creepy. It's bronze. It's unsanitary. :D Yet what struck me wasn't the occult stuff (vivid, yes indeed; elegant, not always), but the temptation & corruption of innocence -- particularly for those who are doing bad things for supposedly noble reasons. At the heart it's a sympathetic story: Jessica's loving grief & simple gifts of witchery, which she molds into angry plans for revenge...leading to her initial involvement with the fringes of the coven...followed by her indoctrination & reluctant participation in what she knows to be unhealthy, evil rituals that still give her some sense of enjoyment. Jessica's story makes for a universal good vs evil parable, & I thought Farrar/Villiers portrayed it well.
Can someone who has fallen save herself? Can she overcome her fear enough to confide in those who might help her? Can she put her past aside to start fresh? Can such corruption be wiped away -- or at least balanced -- by positive forces?
Of course there's also crazy-ass WTFery, because that's what occult gothics are made of. This one includes village-based white witchery, blood sacrifice (they killed a puppy, dammit), virginal bodies + bronze cocks, manipulative femmeslash, bodice-shredding villainy, giant statues of goddesses, secret underground rooms, attempted ped0bear, plagues of rats, & emotional manipulations of weather. It's not a happy story...but it ends on a positive note & that makes it satisfying. (See, bunnies & rainbows aren't necessary -- just a hint of something upbeat to balance the battle against evil.) WTFery aside, it's competently written (despite the ritualistic preparations sometimes bordering on a checklist of What Witches Do) & the style is cleanly old-fashioned (though Farrar uses a lot of semi-colons).
Solid 4 stars for gloomy, campy, oddly believable Victorian horror with more substance than many witchcraft gothics. (And yes, I'll read it again someday. Go figure. :P)
October 8, 2020
Looking up various books I read waaay back in the day on here, I thought, “Nobody’s going to remember this one. It’ll never be here, it’s too obscure.” Surprise, here it is!
This is definitely a curious one. In the early ‘70s, there was a rush of horror books and Gothic romances on the market dealing with witchcraft and Satanism, due to the popularity of Rosemary’s Baby and The Exorcist. Going to library book sales when I was a kid/teenager yielded a ton of these things. Most of them were badly written exploitive quickies. This book wasn’t one of them.
For one thing, the author, Stewart Farrar - writing under a flowery-sounding GOTHIC ROMANCE NOVEL AUTHOR HERE, YEP pseudonym - was a dyed-in-the-wool Wiccan high priest. Meaning, HE KNEW HIS STUFF. The meticulously detailed rituals are drawn from his own experiences (though I have been informed by practicing friends that Wicca does NOT involve slaughtering puppies, people having sex on the altar or new initiates utilizing oversized bronze dildos). Much of the book’s underlying philosophy - that nobody is all good or all evil, but success in life depends on finding the perfect balance between the light and the dark - also comes from his spiritual background.
The plot itself is a variation on the idea of the good girl who falls in with a bad crowd and finds it hard to turn away - because being bad feels so good. Jessica Brady is a minister’s daughter who has always felt a connection to nature and the feminine aspect of the divine. When her father dies under mysterious circumstances, and she finds a sachet of strange herbs in his robe, she suspects that foul play is somehow involved. She is taken in by a family of nobles, whose second son reveals to Jessica that her mother had been a white witch. He tells her she can claim the same powers, if only she joins his temple of Lilith . . .
Once Jessica is in, she’s in all the way - though one thinks alarm bells SHOULD have gone off given that her initiation involves sex, animal murder and having an inverted pentagram painted on her in blood. She not only goes full- tilt into the rituals, they start to bring out the worst in her - she commits acts of magical malice with icy detachment, and she begins emotionally manipulating the High Priestess with an eye toward stealing her position. And yet, enough humanity remains within her to keep her from going to the dark side entirely. Also, there’s a rather appealing doctor (with the eyebrow-raising name Stephen King) who’s helping to keep her grounded, and who may have occult secrets of his own.
We’ve seen this kind of thing before, in tales of everything from girl gang members to drug addicts - the once good girl addicted to the thrill of the forbidden. It’s the authentic grounding in both magic and psychology that makes this one special. We FEEL for Jessica, even when she’s coldly destroying a farmer’s livelihood just because he committed a minor offense against her high priest - because we know she’ll struggle with that decision later.
Oh, and later on in the book there’s an amusing comedy relief character - Ivy, a brash young witchling. She deserved her own spinoff book, dammit.
This is definitely a curious one. In the early ‘70s, there was a rush of horror books and Gothic romances on the market dealing with witchcraft and Satanism, due to the popularity of Rosemary’s Baby and The Exorcist. Going to library book sales when I was a kid/teenager yielded a ton of these things. Most of them were badly written exploitive quickies. This book wasn’t one of them.
For one thing, the author, Stewart Farrar - writing under a flowery-sounding GOTHIC ROMANCE NOVEL AUTHOR HERE, YEP pseudonym - was a dyed-in-the-wool Wiccan high priest. Meaning, HE KNEW HIS STUFF. The meticulously detailed rituals are drawn from his own experiences (though I have been informed by practicing friends that Wicca does NOT involve slaughtering puppies, people having sex on the altar or new initiates utilizing oversized bronze dildos). Much of the book’s underlying philosophy - that nobody is all good or all evil, but success in life depends on finding the perfect balance between the light and the dark - also comes from his spiritual background.
The plot itself is a variation on the idea of the good girl who falls in with a bad crowd and finds it hard to turn away - because being bad feels so good. Jessica Brady is a minister’s daughter who has always felt a connection to nature and the feminine aspect of the divine. When her father dies under mysterious circumstances, and she finds a sachet of strange herbs in his robe, she suspects that foul play is somehow involved. She is taken in by a family of nobles, whose second son reveals to Jessica that her mother had been a white witch. He tells her she can claim the same powers, if only she joins his temple of Lilith . . .
Once Jessica is in, she’s in all the way - though one thinks alarm bells SHOULD have gone off given that her initiation involves sex, animal murder and having an inverted pentagram painted on her in blood. She not only goes full- tilt into the rituals, they start to bring out the worst in her - she commits acts of magical malice with icy detachment, and she begins emotionally manipulating the High Priestess with an eye toward stealing her position. And yet, enough humanity remains within her to keep her from going to the dark side entirely. Also, there’s a rather appealing doctor (with the eyebrow-raising name Stephen King) who’s helping to keep her grounded, and who may have occult secrets of his own.
We’ve seen this kind of thing before, in tales of everything from girl gang members to drug addicts - the once good girl addicted to the thrill of the forbidden. It’s the authentic grounding in both magic and psychology that makes this one special. We FEEL for Jessica, even when she’s coldly destroying a farmer’s livelihood just because he committed a minor offense against her high priest - because we know she’ll struggle with that decision later.
Oh, and later on in the book there’s an amusing comedy relief character - Ivy, a brash young witchling. She deserved her own spinoff book, dammit.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews