The library · The other points and bodies

Black Moon Lilith in Aries

the mean Black Moon Lilith (the mean lunar apogee) in tropical Aries

What the tradition reads

Black Moon Lilith is not a body but a mathematical point, the mean apogee of the Moon's elliptical orbit, the place where the Moon travels slowest and stands furthest from the Earth; the tradition that reads it treats this empty point as a symbol of what a person has learned to be ashamed of, rather than as a planet with mass or light of its own. Cafe Astrology's delineation reads Lilith in Aries as shame felt around self assertion itself: a person who has learned, somewhere, that taking the lead without asking, making an executive or self centred decision, or simply asserting a want out loud is selfish or wrong, so that the very Aries qualities of directness and initiative become the thing this placement is warned away from rather than drawn toward. The same source reads a wariness in these natives toward other people who assert themselves without apparent guilt, together with a private, unresolved pull toward exactly that freedom. Left unexamined, the reading holds that this shame produces cycles of overcorrection, a sudden burst of self assertion followed by regret and withdrawal, repeating until the person learns that the right to assert themselves was never actually in question. The tradition's suggested resolution is plain acceptance of the trait rather than continued alternation between denying it and overdoing it.

The story

Lilith enters modern astrology by an unusual route: the astrologer Sepharial, the pen name of Walter Gorn Old, proposed in 1918 that a second, undiscovered moon of the Earth existed, and named it Lilith after the figure of medieval Jewish legend said to have been Adam's first wife. Sepharial claimed the body matched an earlier claim by the scientist Georg Waltemath from around 1898, but Waltemath's proposed moon had already been discredited by working astronomers at the turn of the century, and no second moon was ever confirmed to exist. The name survived the discrediting of the body it was first attached to: astrologers kept using Lilith, but redefined it as a point rather than an object, specifically the second focus of the ellipse the actual Moon traces around the Earth, the place opposite the Earth in that ellipse, completing a full circuit of the zodiac roughly every eight years and ten months. In Aries, the sign of first assertion and of the zodiac's own beginning, a point defined entirely by absence, by the far, empty focus of an orbit rather than by any body occupying it, sits in unusually pointed contrast with a sign the tradition already reads as presence itself, asserted without apology.

Written from

Corpus key point:Lilith:sign:Aries.