Lilith In Astrology

A female tiger. She is magnificent, powerful. We treat her with respect, awe, carefully so as not to arouse her anger. She can hurt, but we are allowed to stroke her. Somehow she is surrounded by a round enclosure, trapped. A number of male cats come in and rape her. She is covered in blood after the second. After that, she is left encaged, her heart destroyed. Anyone who approaches her is stopped by a terrible, hateful, warning snarl. She is dangerous, ferocious, destructive, defensive. Why such a royal upbringing to be led to this fate? M. Kelley Hunter

The Meaning Of The Black Moon Lilith In Astrology

Lilith is one of the dark goddesses, like Isis, Persephone, Hecate, or Kali, expressing the feminine power of the divine creative, transformative force. If we follow their trail back in time, down to the roots to find the source of their darkness, of the fear and negative side they typically represent in mythologies, we often discover, not only a major shift in the collective human image of the feminine, but also some deep undercurrent, some hidden essence that needs to be acknowledged and healed in our personal lives.

The Black Moon, also called Lilith, is said to be the mother of Adam (of Adam and Eve) and at the same time his lover. But she refused to be his servant only and wanted to be his equal (unlike Eve). And so the Black Moon stands for an independant woman, equal in rights to man, having the same status as a modern western woman as opposed to that of a submissive woman of oriental cultures.

She is not like a mother but rather like a liberated, childless woman, behaving in a very masculine way. She decides whatever she wants to do and acts it out on her own. She loves freedom and wants everything her own way.

The Black Moon is a mixture of Saturn, Uranus and Pluto.

I’m so ugly. They hate me. They cut me out of their lives because I am so whole, because I will not take a back seat, second place. I believe in wholeness and sharing. I undercut you when you’re not being whole, when you cut yourself off, where you seek blood. I give – on my terms, elemental, the one woman before man. Am I the Creator – or the first emerged feminine? There is no difference. I am of that original Heaven. I do not leave it.

In The Book of Lilith, Barbara Koltuv shares her research. One story she relates from the Hebrew mystic tradition – that God made two great lights, the Sun and the Moon, shining with equal brightness. They were not at ease shining together in the same sky. So God said to the Moon, “Go and diminish thyself.” The Moon felt humiliated and asked, “Why should I be as one that veileth herself?” God replied, “Go thy way forth in the footsteps of the flock,” (i.e., following the shepherd).

Since that time, the Moon has had no light of her own, but reflects the light of the Sun. This represents a change in the status of woman, represented in Western cultures by the Moon. She now reflects the light of the Sun, of man, as the consciousness of Eve comes from the rib of man’s body.

It is further told that from the demeaned Moon’s resentment at the loss of her freedom of choice, Lilith is born – a woman down to the waist and flaming fire or a serpent below. In this form, she is sometimes pictured offering Eve the apple in the garden of Eden. Astrological theory postulates a Black Moon. This “moon” occupies the second epicenter in the elliptical orbit of our Moon around the Earth and is an unseen center, an invisible vortex of energy.

Whereas the reflective Moon represents personal subjective feelings, the Black Moon represents a primal, impersonal, creative source which seeks manifestation beyond the material or emotional. This Black Moon is named Lilith. Her energy lures us through whatever our selfish, illusionary dream is in order to purge negative desire and lead us to the truth within our hearts, thereby awakening the deepest desires of the soul.

As part of the Earth-Moon system, Black Moon is a center intimately bound to the center of the Earth. These are the two centers or the double center, around which the Moon orbits. Lilith is a twin to the core energy of the Earth, the deep heart of fire. This is the central fire that feeds and sustains our body and our Earth bodies. The creative vitality of the Sun gives life to the Earth and fuels this central core fire.

Black Moon Lilith takes in the energy of the Sun as well, but she takes it into a different dimension. She is not a manifest energy on the material plane like the Earth. A sister to the Earth, she reminds us of our source on other planes. She is not a physical body, but is in relationship to the physical bodies of the Earth-Moon system. There is a trinity here, of the Earth, the Moon and the Black Moon. Mother Earth, Grandmother Moon and the Holy Spirit.

Another figure in Hebrew mythology is the Shekinah, God’s Beloved, known as Sophia in Gnostic Christianity. She, too, is Wisdom as a feminine aspect of divinity. Later Christians came to call her the Holy Ghost. Imagine Lilith as the deep-rooted Shekinah, like the root of the tree seeking sustenance in the soil, while Sophia is the sky- reaching branches and the fruits. Truly they are one, but as the Judeo-Christian religion elevated the masculine aspect of divinity, they de-spiritualized material, sensual reality. The “lower” Shekinah became unclean, unholy. The Hebrews came into the Sumerian and Babylonian lands, where the Venusian love goddesses Inanna and Astarte were celebrated in a sacred marriage ritual between her priestesses and the kings. In these cultures and as well as in the Celtic culture, it was the goddess who gave the king his power through her love. The religious transition to masculine gods made these rites blasphemous. However, the sacred marriage comes down to us even in the Bible, as Solomon’s Song of Songs.

In Sumerian mythology, the oldest known literature, Lilith was the handmaid to Inanna, goddess of love. Lilith brought the men in from the fields for the sacred rites. In another story, Lilith lives in the tree that Inanna has planted in her garden, the first Garden of Eden. Lilith, with a snake and a large wild bird, dwell in the tree and have knowledge to give Innana, who is not yet ready to accept it. She calls in her brother, Gilgamesh, to get rid of the creatures and cut down the tree for her throne and bed. This myth was developed by Dragon Dance Theater in Vermont, USA into a creation play called The Huluppu Tree.

Lilith is a dark goddess who speaks from deep feminine attunement to the mysteries, the life-death-rebirth cycle of the Great Round. The source of her wisdom and power is hidden, subtle and sacred. Like a flute player serenading a cobra, she pulls up the energy from deep within the Earth, and we are pulled down into our soul selves to meet it. At the invisible second center of the Moon’s orbit around Earth stands the Dark Goddess, She Who Knows the Way, She Who Sees in the Dark. We must trust her, for we have no choice.

Lilith challenges both women and men to connect with their instinctive passion for life, for this natural force denied, unfulfilled, caged or exiled, turns destructive. Her voice is crying out very strongly now around the world – in Somalia, Bosnia, in the stormy weather, volcanoes, tidal waves, hurricanes, fires. Lilith came to me in another dream, this time in her serpent form. I share this dream to honor the healing power re-emerging from the depths of Earth herself for our shared awakening.

M. Kelley Hunter

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The Black Moon Lilith keywords are:

Individuality, independance, “not wanting to be together with”, someone who says “NO”, detachment, silence (non communication), wild, sacrifice, ideals, unreachable, perfection, strict, fascination, solitude, secrecy.

Lilith wants perfection and cannot accept compromises. She is very demanding with herself and others and she knows clearly what she wants. She cannot adapt to others and she will stick to her ideals.

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The Astronomical Meaning of Black Moon

Another meaning of the Black Moon is derived from astronomical facts : it is a place of void, a focus of emptiness related to the moon’s path in the sky.

That is why the Black Moon also stands for the feelings of wanting and not getting, unsatisfied desire, everlasting feeling of incompleteness, of things being not like they should be, feelings of beeing estranged from home, of lacking essential things or persons.

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Black Moon Symbols

• ANIMALS a wolf, a spider, a snake, a dragon, a horse, a scorpio
• OBJECTS a mirror, a key, a knife, a veil, a mask
• PLACES a fountain, a mountain, water, a cliff
• BODY PARTS eyes, hair, teeth, scars
• NATURE a cave, ice, rocks, an apple

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Is the Black Moon Important For Me?

Lilith is important in your chart if it is found withing 10 degrees of the angles or of the ruler of your rising sign and/or if it makes a conjunction or an opposition to any of the major planets. Otherwise it should be considered as a mild influence only.

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Three Different Liliths

The “Black Moon Lilith” is not the same as the “asteroid Lilith” or the “Dark Moon Lilith”

1LILITH THE ASTEROID

(1181 on astro.com). The glyph for Lilith the asteroid is a straight horizontal line with 4 small vertical lines sticking up from it, sort of like an upturned rake head, and then on the right below the horizontal line is a very small mark like a capital L (or in some cases a V). Some say it is an upturned hand. When you are writing about the asteroid you can just say Lilith. It takes about 5 years for Lilith to travel through all 12 signs, since it does retrograde a lot.

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2 BLACK MOON LILITH

(h13 on astro.com). What is BML? Black Moon Lilith is a point in the moon’s orbit. It is not a body in the sky. It is the lunar apogee, the farthest point that the Moon gets from Earth. Black Moon Lilith moves 40 deg 40 min. per year, or about 3 deg. 23 min per month. It takes about 9 years to complete one pass through all 12 signs. The glyph is a black third quarter Moon with a black cross below. The tips of the Black Moon point to the right.

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3 DARK MOON LILITH

(h58 on astro.com) This is a “second moon” to the Earth. It is a non-reflective body(hence the name Dark Moon) that orbits the Earth about every 119 days. It was first sighted in the 1600’s. Dr. Georges Waltemath, a German astronomer, was the first to document it in 1898. His calculations are the correct ones and can be found in Solar Fire as Dark Moon W’math. To find it, have a chart on the screen, click on Reports, then on Other Bodies. The glyph is a circle or zero with a diagonal line like a forward slash, cutting through it. In writing use Dark Moon Lilith at first, then Dark Moon or DML to avoid confusion.

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References:

Pagels, Elaine, The Gnostic Gospels, Random House, NY, 1981.
“The Song of Solomon,” The Holy Bible, King James version. *I adapted the translation of this line.
Sterling, George, Lilith, The Macmillan Company, NY, 1926.
Inner Visions, women’s chants.
Koltuv, Barbara, The Book of Lilith, Nicolas-Hays, Inc., York Beach, Maine, 1986.
Jay, Delphine, Interpreting Lilith, AFA, Tempe, Arizona, 1981.
Mac Donald, George, Phantastes and Lilith, Wm. B. Eerdsmans, Grand Rapids, MI, 1964.
George, Demetra, Mysteries of the Dark Moon, Harper, SanFran,1992.
George, Santoni and Suyterman, The Black Moon Book, Sum Press, Fairfield, IA, 1994.
Wolkstein and Kramer, Inanna, Queen of Heaven and Earth, Harper and Row, NY, 1983.

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Last updated on February 16, 2017 at 5:47 pm. Word Count: 2785