Black Moon Lilith

Meaning

Black Moon Lilith is not a body but a point: the apogee of the Moon’s orbit, where the Moon is farthest from the Earth, projected onto the zodiac. Some astrologers prefer the empty second focus of the orbit’s ellipse, which lies in the same direction. The smooth mean point goes round the zodiac in about 8 years and 10 months, some nine months in each sign.

Its name comes from Lilith, a figure of Jewish folklore who, in a medieval tale, was Adam’s first wife and left rather than submit. Astrologers read the point as raw desire, refusal and what was pushed out of sight: the part of a person that will not be domesticated, anger at being controlled, and a hunger for something absolute that ordinary life cannot fill. Where the Moon nourishes and comforts, its far point is read as the Moon’s wild, unreachable side.

It is not a curse or a dark fate. It describes where someone needs freedom from roles laid on them, and where honesty about desire can become a strength.

In practice

• Its sign and house show where conventions chafe: in the 7th, a refusal to play the agreeable partner; in the 10th, impatience with authority that asks for conformity.
• With Venus or Mars in close aspect, desire and anger run strong and are not easily hidden.
• Which Lilith? The mean, true and interpolated points can stand far apart in the same chart, so it is worth checking which one a reading uses.

Across traditions

• Chinese astrology of the Seven Governors and Four Remainders counts the lunar apogee among its four invisible “remainders”; with the lunar nodes, it reached Chinese astronomy from India in the eighth century.
• Indian astrology does not count it among the nine grahas, and Human Design does not use it.

Origin and history

The name is old: Mesopotamian demonology knew wind spirits called lilitu, the Hebrew Bible names a lilit once, and the Alphabet of Ben Sira, a medieval text, tells of Lilith as Adam’s first wife. The astrological point is recent. In 1898 Georg Waltemath claimed to have seen a second moon of the Earth, and in 1918 the astrologer Sepharial named such a hidden moon Lilith; when no second moon was found, the name passed to the Moon’s apogee, which French astrologers in particular developed as the Black Moon, publishing ephemerides of its true position. The asteroid 1181 Lilith, found in 1927 and named after the composer Lili Boulanger, is another object again.

How Ulune calculates it

Ulune uses the osculating apogee from the Swiss Ephemeris, called True Lilith in its tables: the far point of the ellipse the Moon would follow if its motion at the birth moment continued unchanged. Because the Sun keeps reshaping that orbit, this point swings up to about 30° either side of the mean one within a month and often moves backwards; Ulune does not offer the mean point.

It is aspected with the same orbs as the planets. The calendar does not date transits of Lilith itself, since its jittering would give more than two hundred exact contacts a year, but a birth chart’s Lilith is a target for the transits of the other planets.