Paths & Virtues

• Caine was born of Lilith (as the Serpent) and Eve to punish Adam and Jehovah, but in pride, s/he forgot his/her purpose.

• Caine is both man and woman. The “mark of Caine” refers to his/her nature as a twin-sexed being, which Adam concealed and Jehovah unmasked.

• In defiance of Lilith, Caine gave birth to vampires and other monsters.

• In the Final Nights, Lilith will reconcile with Caine. Mother and child will judge the Kindred together.

Lilith taught Caine the creative powers of the Elohim, but his arrogance limited his potential. He responded to pain with primitive defiance, inheriting just a fraction of the Dark Mother’s power. Thus, vampires cringe in the face of the sun instead of mastering its burning might. They battle the Beast instead of uniting with it to explore divine passions. They cannot create children, but only transform Seth’s descendants

into cursed beings, less than their parents. Mothers should aspire to create children that equal or exceed them in strength. They should make excellent monsters whenever they will it. The Red Midwives wish to correct Kindred deficiencies and release the Dark Mother’s full power.

The Midwives are the most recent incarnation of sects as old as childbirth. Bahari have long attended to mortal pregnancies, providing safe births or abortions as women demanded. Most felt little empathy for the women themselves, as their concerns were social and mystical. When men perverted birth into a way to perpetuate themselves through dynasties, they dishonored the Dark Mother’s gift. When Caine created children to worship him, he made them mere appendages of his will, doomed to repeat his follies. These Bahari also wished to examine the process of reproduction as closely and often as possible in order to master its mysteries and magical implications. Sometimes they would bless newborns with their blood and teach them sorcery. They gazed into subtle realms to examine how spirits and ghosts responded to birth. Some cultists studied the Embrace just as intensely. Others spied on spirits rutting in the invisible worlds or tracked lineages descended from monsters, devils, and demigods. Over time, the sect has learned enough about biological and supernatural forms of reproduction to make their archives a remarkable prize for doctors, Kindred researchers, and sorcerers alike.

Worshiping Lilith in Her aspect as the Mother of Monsters, the sect wishes to inherit the Dark Mother’s divine fertility. For example, they hope to discover a way to allow vampires the power to conceive and give birth to human children or shape the Embrace to create beings that are neither mortal nor Kindred, but evolve according to their mothers’ desires. This includes the ability to Embrace without condemning childer to weaker Generations, a prize that, once attained, would make the Bahari the strongest of the undead. To pursue these goals, many Red Midwives study blood sorcery, even capturing Tremere and Assamites to torture the secrets of blood manipulation out of them. In modern nights, they find themselves drawn to legends of the Thin-Blooded, for it is said that alone among vampires, they retain the power of human reproduction. It is whispered that the Red Midwives have studied the legends of dhampirs deeply, and may have succeeded in bringing a part-vampire child to term.