Lilith

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What the tradition reads

In astrology, Lilith most often refers to the Black Moon Lilith, a name Wikipedia's survey of proposed astrological bodies traces to a fictitious invisible moon of Earth, about the same mass as the real Moon, proposed by the astrologer Walter Gorn Old in 1918 and never found. In present day astrology the name is instead usually given to a point marking the actual Moon's apogee, the position in its monthly orbit farthest from the Earth, which completes its own slow circuit of the zodiac in about eight years and ten months. Because the Moon's real orbit wobbles rather than tracing a fixed ellipse, more than one calculation goes by the same name: Wikipedia's page on astrological symbols distinguishes a mean, smoothly averaged apogee from a true or osculating apogee that follows the Moon's actual instantaneous position, both called Black Moon Lilith depending on which a given chart uses. A separate and unrelated body, the asteroid 1181 Lilith, also carries the name and is tracked by some astrologers as its own point with its own longitude. Every form of the astrological Lilith, in other words, marks either an empty point in an orbit or a small asteroid, never the invisible moon the name first meant.

The story

The name belongs first to a figure far older than any astrological chart: lilitu, a class of Mesopotamian demon spirit associated in Akkadian sources with those who died before marriage or childbirth, and a figure scholars have long suspected, though not conclusively proven, lies behind the later Lilith of Jewish tradition. Lilith herself surfaces by name among the destructive spirits of the Dead Sea Scrolls and in the protective incantation bowls of Sassanid Babylon before the Alphabet of Ben Sira, a text usually dated between the eighth and tenth centuries, fixes the story most later tradition inherited: Lilith as Adam's first wife, made from the same substance as him rather than from his rib, who refused to lie beneath him and fled Eden rather than submit. Medieval Kabbalistic sources, above all the Zohar, developed her further into a cosmic figure paired with the demon Samael, and it is this long accumulated image of a first, refused, uncontainable woman that later astrologers had in mind when they borrowed her name for the Moon's most distant point from the Earth, a point with no light of its own that, unlike every planet and every other point on a chart, is defined only by absence, the empty focus of an ellipse rather than any body actually standing there.

Written from

Corpus key glossary:lilith.