Axel Harvey on Lilith

Lilith, Lilith, Lilith, Lilith and Charybdis.
by Axel Harvey

"What is Lilith?" people frequently ask. There are at least four of them--and there are several more if one includes technical variations on what is conceptually the same Lilith.

1. The star Algol (beta Persei) has sometimes been called Lilith.

2. There is an asteroid (1181) Lilith.

3. There is an invisible satellite of the Earth. What led people to chase this entity may never be known. Some have guessed that the inspiration was a body described by the 17th-century Jesuit astronomer G.-B. Riccioli--his object, like the elusive satellite of later times, travelled at around 3 degrees per day; but the Jesuit was writing about a comet whereas Lilith was supposed to be an invisible rock circling the Earth outside the Moon's orbit. Whatever the case may be, the idea of an unseen object connected to the worst aspects of human karma became popular during the "spiritualist" vogue in the late 19th century. The first astrologer to incorporate it in his work was probably Thomas H. Burgoyne, whose correspondence course (circa 1887) deals in part with a "dark satellite". The name "Lilith" seems to have been given by Sepharial, who devoted a chapter to it in his Science of Foreknowledge (1918). Notions of one or two dark satellites were current in Theosophical and Golden Dawn circles before the First World War (Annie Besant thought there were four such bodies).

The home base of Lilith lore thus appears to be the English-speaking world, first and foremost, though some ephemerides were produced in Russia and the Netherlands East Indies. The French were not affected by the vogue until quite late: Robert Ambelain published his ephemerides only in 1937, and the claim that the U.S. astrologer Ivy Goldstein-Jacobson lifted her ephemerides from Ambelain's is dubious.

Lilith is a famous name in Judaic tradition. Some say she was Adam's first wife, who refused to be surbordinate to her husband and was thus the first to be expelled from Paradise: the stories vary and I won't go into them here. Incidentally, Lilith is related to the mythical "maid of desolation" of the Babylonians, ardat lili, a designation which inspired the great Newfoundland poet E.J.Pratt to introduce

The witches three (whose surnames ran
Lulu, Ardath, Maryan)

in his comic-epic poem The Witches' Brew. Lulu was the name of a companion "dark satellite" circa 1900, when people like Besant thought there were more than one.

4. In the 1930s, the great technician Dom Néroman (Maurice Rougié‚ 1884-1953) introduced the concept of the Moon's apocentre--the place where she reaches her apogee or farthest distance from Earth--as an astrological factor. Unfortunately, he called it Lilith.

Néroman was no doubt influenced by the invisible-satellite lore of his more "spritualist" colleagues, but he probably became aware of the lunar apocentre through the work of the German researcher G. W. Maag, who had published a book on astro-meteorology in 1928 and lectured in Paris the following year about the effect of lunar apogees on the weather.

(Here I must record a linguistic preference. "Apogee" describes an event, the time when the Moon is farthest from Earth. To avoid confusion, the place-on-the-Moon's-orbit-where-the-Moon-is-at-her-apogee-IF-the-Moon-happens-to-be-there should be called something else; the astronomical term "apocentre" neatly covers the point we are talking about without ambiguity.)

There is a mean apocentre, easily derived from the polynomial that officially defines lunar anomaly. There are tiny differences between theories, but as far as the mean apocentre is concerned we are talking about discrepancies of +/- 0.0... something seconds of arc.

The mean apocentre has direct motion and goes around the tropical Zodiac in about 8 years 309 1/2 days.

There are two further technical questions:

i. (a) whether the value should be taken as is and applied symbolically to the Zodiac, or whether (b) the point on the Moon'sorbit should be reduced to the Zodiac geometrically. The discrepancy between these two attitudes varies cyclically between -8' and +8'. I take position (b) myself.

ii. whether or not (and how) the apocentre should be modified to take into consideration gravitational perturbations of the lunar orbit caused by the Sun, the planets, and the Earth's equatorial bulge. Unlike question i, which only requires a clearcut yes-or-no answer and only involves a difference of a few minutes, question ii depends on philosophical positions about how to define the lunar orbit--indeed about whether there really are such things as orbits at all--and no-one agrees. The French, who are the guardians of the apocentre-Lilith tradition, have serious debates around this problem, which involves practical differences of many degrees in the calculated position of the body. No truce is in sight. The trouble is that there is no way to define an apogee when the Moon is not there--and even when the Moon IS conjunct a perturbed apocentre according to the various formulas proposed by one or another French mathematician, it can be hours before or after the physically observed apogee.

The following is extracted from the Swiss Ephemeris web page (www.astro.com/swisseph/swisseph.htm):

2.2.1 Mean Lunar Node and Mean Lunar Apogee ('Lilith', 'Black Moon')

[ ... ]

Lilith or the Dark Moon is either the apogee [ ... ] of the lunar orbital ellipse or, for some people, its empty focal point. As seen from the geocentre, this makes no difference. Both of them are located in exactly the same direction. [ ... ]

Because the Earth is located in one of the two focuses of the ellipse, it has also been argued that the second focal point ought to be called Dark Earth rather than Dark Moon (Ernst Ott).

The opposite point, the lunar perigee or orbital point closest to the Earth, is also known as Priapus. However, if Lilith is understood as the second focus, an opposite point makes no sense, of course.

Originally, the term Dark Moon was used for a hypothetical second body that was believed to move around the earth. There are still ephemerides around for such a body, but todays observational skills and knowledge in celestial mechanics clearly exclude the possibility of such an object. As a result of confusion, the term Dark Moon was later given to the lunar apogee. However, from the astrological symbolism of the lunar apogee, the expression Dark Moon seems to be appropriate.

[Axel's note--If I recall correctly, sometime in the 1970s or 80s an edict was issued at an astrology conference that one of the Liliths would be the Dark Moon and the other would be the Black Moon, but nobody remembers which is Dark and which is Black. As you may have gathered from the Alois Treindl's text quoted above, people switch from Black to Dark without even noticing. It even happens to Demetra George. In French it is always Lune noire; "Lune sombre" has not caught on as an alternative expression.]

The Swiss Ephemeris apogee differs from the ephemeris given by Joelle de Gravelaine in her book Lilith, der schwarze Mond (Astrodata 1990). The difference reaches several arc minutes. The mean apogee (or perigee) moves along the mean lunar orbit which has an inclination of 5 degrees. Therefore it has to be projected on the ecliptic. With de Gravelaine's ephemeris, this has been forgotten and therefore the book contains a false ephemeris. As a result of this projection, we also provide an ecliptic latitude of the apogee, which will be of importance if you work with declinations.

[Because we are dealing with a mathematical point rather than a rock moving through space, we have the choice of using it with or without zodiacal latitude. Experience is the only deciding factor: one must test the point in primary directions or some other technique where latitude can make a substantial difference.]

There may be still another problem. The 'first' focal point does not coincide with the geocenter but with the barycenter of the earth-moon-system. The difference is about 4700 km. If one took this into account, it would result in a monthly oscillation of the Black Moon. If one defines it as the apogee, this oscillation would be about +/- 40 arc minutes. If one defines it as the second focus, the effect is much greater: +/- 6 degrees! However, we have neglected this effect.

Now what does it mean in practice? Marc Bériault's book on Lilith is very good in my opinion "La Lune Noire : l'autonomie de l'être," Éditions du Rocher, 2000).

Myself? Like Marc I use the apocentre, but I have gotten rid of Lilith. I call it Charybdis, which has fewer namesakes. Granted, there is also asteroid (388) Charybdis, but it's easier to ignore one rival than three. See my reasons at the end of this note.

The apocentre is the place on the lunar orbit where we are threatened with the loss of the Moon. If instead of an orbit we imagine a force sucking the Moon away from us, yet never quite succeeding, that is the apocentre.

So Charybdis is a point of the horoscope which is antithetical to all the reassuring instincts of the Moon. All those lunar clichés--the understanding that one needs clothes when cold, that one eats when hungry, that one does not slaughter babies and young animals--are ignored, or else work against the native, in whatever part of the horoscope it happens to be. Being a geometrical point and not a rock, it receives aspects but does not cast them. It is not a force like a planet, but a place in the birth map where nothing works to one's satisfaction unless one is prepared to dispense with even the animal decencies. However, since the animal decencies are minimal requirements for collective living, Charybdis is always a point of negative tension. We are close to the "maid of desolation" odour of the other Lilith; this is probably why Néroman borrowed its name when he introduced his new factor.

The confusion of the two Liliths reveals the bankruptcy of the Doctrine of Names approach to astrology--the idea that one can determine how a horoscopic point or planet behaves by taking the dictionary of mythology off the shelf and looking up its name. In the late 20th century the notion of an invisible satellite became less attractive than it had been two generations earlier, while the apocentre began to be appreciated in the English-speaking world. When Francis Santoni brought out his improved apocentre-Lilith ephemeris in French, in 1993, the introduction was purely technical. When his ephemeris was published in English in 1994, the technical details were swept aside and replaced by the testimony of two goddess-experts, Demetra George and Lee A. Sluyterman. George's introduction speaks about three perfectly different entities--the asteroid, the hypothetical satellite, and the mathematical point--as if they all meant the same thing because of a name: "All three Lilith's [sic] each contain the entire symbolic meaning of the archetype." She does, however, propose a "tentative theory" according to which the asteroid is the White Virgin aspect of the Moon, the invisible satellite is the Red Mother, and the apocentre is Black Crone. She then proposes brief delineations of each of the three Liliths. It all seems like an exercise she had to impose on herself because of her belief in names.

So why "Charybdis"?

It's not that I'm against using pretty mythological names, but the names must be given ex post facto, either because of some astronomical property or because one has had the time to observe how a point acts astrologically (they called that red planet Mars because it turned up whenever fights broke out; the fights didn't happen because it had Mars for a name). I chose Charybdis for astronomical reasons--the apocentre seems to suck the Moon away from us, and Charybdis is the very model of sucking whirlpools. "Between Scylla and Charybdis," we used to say before the expression was replaced, within my lifetime, by the bland "between a rock and a hard place." Charybdis has another great advantage: nothing is known about her as a mythological personality--maybe she was never developed as a character--so the goddess experts can't pre-judge her by cribbing from their dictionaries of mythology.

In the Odyssey, book 12, Circe warns Odysseus of the dangers he must overcome on his journey, and mentions "...the spot where enormous Charybdis blackly sucks down the sea. Three times a day she sucks it down and three times she spews it out: an awful sight. May you not be there while she sucks in! No power, not the Earthshaker's own, could then deliver you from ruin." Soon afterwards the hero finds himself at the whirpool's edge: "Whenever she swallowed-in the yeasty ocean one could see right down the whorl of her maw. At its very bottom the sea's floor showed muddy and dark with sand. The cliffs about thundered appalingly. My crew turned sallow with fright, staring into this abyss from which we expected our immediate death." (Lawrence of Arabia's translation.) If you want to know what happens next, buy the book!

Lilith, Lilith, Lilith, Lilith and Charybdis. by Axel Harvey

Lilith, Lilith, Lilith, Lilith and Charybdis.
by Axel Harvey