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Come, descend, ye spirits of shells,
Ye friends of broken light!
Come and embrace the gift of Caine,
I call for death
I will for death.
Come, descend, fragments of sorrows.
-Malediction: Queen of Hells

The Book of Nod very clearly lays out the foundational myths of vampire society. First there was Caine, cursed by G-d, who became a vampire and from him to all the vampires descend. Lilith is mentioned, but vanishes after Caine leaves her presence. But hints are dropped of vampires who follow Lilith instead of Caine and have their own strange rites and customs, and here's their equivalent gospel.

Kind of. While The Book of Nod is mostly verse except for the account of the Second City at the end, Revelations of the Dark Mother is a mixture of different accounts. It begins with the Genesis Fragment, a supposed alternate account of creation with much more Gnostic influence. The Ancient One destroys and recreates the world every 55,555 years, and when it opens its eyes, the Shining Ones are created: Bes, Dionysius, Ra, Baal, and so on, including the strongest ancient one, the Biblical god. All of them create gardens and peoples. Adam and Lilith are created as one creature then separated, and eventually Lilith is banished from the garden.

Here Lucifer is the angel who guards Eden, and Lilith becomes the Biblical god's lover, and then Lucifer's lover, before wandering into the wilderness to create her own gardens. It's there that Caine finds her. He learns from her, and abandons her with curses, and then later returns to burn down her garden and slaughter her children. And so it is that the modern version of Lilith's devotees, the Bahari, believe in enlightenment through suffering.

One of the complaints leveled against Vampire as a setting is that there's a bit too much certainty in the mythology. Unlike Mage, where it's unclear what happened in the past--and where the past is quite possibly unknowable because of the way the consensus changes reality--Vampire is set. Caine, First City, thirteen Clans, the works. This book helps to shake that up a bit by reframing the Caine myth in a new context. Is Caine the glorious founder who gained his powers through strength of will and pride, or is he the vicious monster who returned with his get to slaughter his way through the sanctuary of the woman who taught him what he knows? Is it both? What happened, in the unknowable prehistory of the World of Darkness?

A little mystery is a great thing in an RPG.

The rest of the book is a series of various accounts with editorial comments. There's the account of Lilith, which mentions Caine and her pain over her lost gardens but not any of the parts from the Genesis Fragment, which makes me wonder if that was an attempt to fit pre-existing myths of the Dark Mother into the Caine mythology. There's a Bahari ceremony involving mortals ceremonially dressed up as the thirteen Clans who scourge celebrants representing Lilith's children before themselves being destroyed (except for Nosferatu and Toreador, who did not participate in the slaughter). There's an account of medieval tortures of a captured Lamia and how she cried out praises to Lilith when the hot irons were applied and vomited a corrosive black bile onto the arm of her torturers until they abandoned their attempts and walled her up and burned down the castle. And a malediction on the children of Caine, part of which I quoted above.

I also like how the cult of Lilith is presented as a secret cross-supernatural uniting factor. Vampires, mortals, and mages are all mentioned as members, but there are some hints of werecreatures as well through their connection to the moon. And you can say that it makes no sense for Garou to be Lilith cultists and you'd be right. But Lupines? That's another story entirely.

The major problem I have with Revelations of the Dark Mother is that it's just not as quotable as The Book of Nod is. Even discounting how much of it is endnotes and editorial commentary, a lot of the existing parts are either prose or invented chants to Lilith, which are mostly going to sound silly at the gaming table because you aren't performing them in the depths of winter in a thorn-and-bramble-strewn clearing with a bonfire on one side and a pool of water on the other. "Ahi Hay Lilitu" is nice for color and for cluing the PCs in that whoever they're dealing with is weird, especially it happens more than once in more than one context, but other than that, there's nothing on the order of, "In the beginning there was only Caine," and because of that it's not that interesting to read as a text.

It's fun as game background, though. Read it once and mix some of it into vampire games to imply a wider world beyond the PCs. That's one of the best parts of the oWoD--the idea that there was always something more out there, just out of sight, that maybe you could never understand.