Lilith: Myth vs. Archetype
I’m spending a lot of time these days with Adam, Lilith & Eve, digging into the mythos to understand more about why the natural feminine is perceived to be so dangerous.
We hear that Lilith represents the demonic feminine and that she’s to be feared. Yet when you actually read the myth, you’ll find that you don’t know anyone who’s done the heinous things attributed to her.
There’s a gigantic gulf between how we’re taught to think of Lilith and how we live her story. This is because the story of Lilith is essentially the myth of the patriarchy, and the feminine expressed is, from its perspective, the most dangerous possibility. There’s a lot to work with here, but the underlying message I have for you today is to keep in mind this gulf between the theory we teach our children and the way that they will in actuality live the story.
Look up the myth anywhere and read it. As you do, remember that it’s a control mechanism designed to make people feel bad about having an instinctive side that can’t be controlled by the mind. Essentially, we’re supposed to feel bad about ourselves because we are biological beings, and not mere computer minds.
The fact that we still live her story, despite the attempts to demonize her, is a perpetual thorn in the side of those charged with maintaining our culture as it is. This natural part of us can’t be stomped out, no matter how much it might seem to serve the aims of the particular kind of society we’ve created.
Our task now is to re-interpret Lilith based in how we actually live her story, the archetype, as we leave behind the feminine-negating mythos that villifies Lilith, Adam’s other half, and elevates in her place the bland, milquetoast, watered-down, opinionless submissive who is Eve.
See Tom’s website to order a new true Black Moon Lilith natal report and to book a private consultation.
June 11, 2008 By Tom Jacobs
Lilith in Real Life
I’m taking a pause after writing a natal true Black Moon Lilith report while the Sun was in Taurus. I have a sense of needing to bring my energy back in and recharge. The present Mercury retro is pretty convenient timing, isn’t it?
Here’s me debriefing myself: I learned a tremendous amount about Lilith while writing the report, with useful words coming through about what I know in my bones about Lilith. I also connected on a new level with my own experience of the archetype (it’s in everyone, not just women). For a few years I’ve been working with my clients’ Liliths, helping them see in what arena of life they’ve invited suppression for bringing out their instinctual selves, and what they can do now to release whatever they’ve taken on about others’ fear of witnessing the wildness in them.
A major part of this is in affirming for people that this part of themselves is not a bad thing to feel shameful for having. We’re told Lilith is a demon, and the word needs to get around that demonizing the wild in us is a measure of control devised by people afraid that individuals will flail around violently and injure others, and destroy groups. Yet it’s our instinct, and we need it to be healthy.
The truth is that the wild in us can be integrated into our daily lives. Sometimes it does involve flailing (but this can be enabled consciously), and it acts violently only as a result of suppression. I’m assiting people to figure out how to integrate this energy proactively, with consciousness, into their lives.
My true Black Moon is in Sagittarius in the 2nd, conjunct Neptune-Mercury-Moon in Sagittarius/2nd-3rd. An astrologer a few years ago used a phrase for this that’s stuck with me: the satellite dish. It seems I can gather intuitive information of any sort if I just choose and figure out where to aim the dish, and that’s a fun and exciting part of the work that I do. And yet with Lilith there, I’ve internalized others’ fears that I might say inappropriate things, so I’ve mostly had a big tarp draped over this amazing tool.
A few years ago I realized that a key dynamic in my family growing up was that there were two people who were terrified someone would say something important-seeming and disturb the status quo, and there were two people who couldn’t stop saying things they felt were important, precisely to disturb the status quo.
I was in the second group, and when young, it seemed to my child logic that love and acceptance from my sister and father might depend on keeping my mouth shut.
So, can you guess what I did?
Yup, threw a tarp over the dish that seems designed to bring info to shake up the status quo.
And now, here I am, being asked what astrology conferences I speak at and where are my books, and I’m learning how and why to take the tarp off this admittedly amazing piece of equipment I’m blessed to be sporting.
Everyone has a Lilith story. Understanding what your Lilith has to say, and how to bring that out with consciousness, is an integral part of wholeness, of health. You have an instinctive voice waiting to come out that offers you a chance to usher yourself into a more vibrant aliveness. Lilith represents our primal selves, which are our means of connecting with life on a more meaningful, less merely-brainy ways.
Tom is available for private consultations. See his website for more info, to book a consultation, or to order a new true Black Moon Lilith natal report, outlining your Lilith by natal house, sign and aspect and upcoming transits and progressions.
May 27, 2008 By Tom Jacobs
A Lilith Profile
Recently, I met an astrologer with Neptune in Scorpio precisely on the Midheaven (Aug. 24, 1968, 6:22 PM, Redding, CA). I asked her if she’s an antenna for Neptunian power plays, and we talked about her 8th house South Node and what the 2nd house North Node is asking her to do.
All of us are conditioned in early life, and therefore much of what we have to heal & release typically involves what we learned from our families, whether spoken outwardly in the environments of our youth or not. She told me about the dynamics in her home growing up, mostly in terms of the differing levels of support for each of the children in the family, the attitudes their parents had about each of them that carry through to the present. And it sounded a little like something beyond an 8th house Libra South Node might be at work, though there were plenty of 8th house-related power plays and dark Libran issues of relationship imbalances and buried resentment.
Something in the story told me she’d been singled out in her family system for some reason that no one understood or had any idea how to talk about, so I looked up her true Black Moon Lilith (BML), which is opposite that Neptune, precisely on the Taurus IC.
Adding Lilith to the discussion helped contextualize her experience. Lilith in a person’s chart tells us many things, but the first is what part of the person is judged by others to be dangerous, and is therefore (according to others) in need of editing or suppressing. Lilith is a wild, instinctive influence in us and doesn’t want to be corralled, edited or reshaped. Yet we might give in to this pressure because, especially when we’re young, our survival might be threatened if we were to be thrown out of the group.
Not every situation is really that dramatic, of course, but many of us are carrying emotional memories from past lives in which we didn’t survive precisely because we didn’t yield to the mandates of the groups of which we were members. And when we’re young and our families are most of our world, it can certainly seem that survival is at stake.
Her true BML is in Taurus on the IC, the beginning of the 4th house, the house of family, heritage, roots and a person’s most private self. My acquaintance seems viewed by her family as Lilith, dangerous and in need of editing or suppressing. Her natural sense of establishing a value-based approach to life (Taurus) seems dangerous to them, and gets her into trouble with them. If she’s honest with herself about where she’s rooted (4th house), and what’s truly going on inside (4th house again), she’ll find Lilith there. And even if she doesn’t, others will still see the energy in her.
With Lilith on the IC or in the 4th house, it’s also true that our family of origin (or those who raised us, whether blood relatives or not) carries Lilith’s story. Her family has, likely for many generations, experienced at least some aspects of Lilith’s story. The censure from the greater society that any family would receive for representing Lilith will be distilled into rules and directives centered on how not to draw negative attention or punishment for being in some way wild and outside the reach of a community’s or society’s censuring arm, and will then be passed down through the generations framed as information necessary for survival.
The underlying energy of such inheritance can feel/seem like this: People, we can’t afford to have anyone around here acting out of bounds. Get in line, stop complaining and get with the group program. There’s a reason for everything, and just trust that it’s for your own good.
And then you have my acquaintance, who appears as Lilith to them, threatening to start leaking uncomfortable truths that seem to threaten the stability of the family system (Taurus/4th) at any moment. Even if she never spoke truths that made them uncomfortable, she would, to them, always seem on the verge of potentially doing so. And so they do everything they can to make her feel like she shouldn’t express herself - of course they do! They’re afraid of the potential repercussions, the kind they carry emotional memories of from the karmic past (past lives).
She’s got a karmic role in her family system as someone volunteering to speak uncomfortable truths, and exploring how to develop and stick with her own value system in a filial climate that doesn’t want what she’s bringing, that’s afraid of it. A big challenge for her is to honor her own needs while not cutting herself off from her family.
Much of her healing related to Lilith involves accepting that the ways that they have treated her are reflections not of her actual value or worth as a person (Taurus/4th house), but of their fear of having the status quo of the family disturbed by uncomfortable truths (also Taurus/4th house). As she lives the story of Lilith, she can change the entire dynamic by honoring who she deeply knows she is above all the feedback from others that might be hurtful.
And in case you didn’t see this coming, this echoes and underscores the symbolism of her Aries 2nd house North Node, where she’s asking herself to learn to bravely assert and directly live (Aries) a life based in her own value system (2nd house), which will result for her in a new level of self-esteem (2nd house), putting her love for herself before the judgments/esteem of others (Libra/8th house South Node).
Tom is available for private evolutionary astrology & intuitive counseling sessions. See his website for more information, and to pre-order on his new True Black Moon Lilith natal report, available in late May.
May 19, 2008 By Tom Jacobs
Notes on the Black Moon Lilith and Saturn
The following is excerpted from the new natal report I’m writing on Lilith. Specifically, it belongs in the Lilith-Saturn natal aspects section, but since we’re all subject to Saturnian realities via the way we organize into a collective - how we figure out how to live together in society - it seems appropriate for everyone.
With a Lilith-Saturn aspect, maturity and structure in Lilith expression is called for. In a sense, this has to do with learning to choose one’s battles while also picking or creating the right kind of turf on which to have them. The urge to explode and the resulting violence of giving in to Lilith’s anger does not have to happen - havoc is not necessary. With this aspect, you’ve signed up to figure out how to learn how to grow in your Lilith expression by introducing structure and form to it, thereby enabling the development of maturity. Along the way, healing of all wounds related to having been judged and punished for carrying Lilith’s energy, or being her outwardly, is required. For anyone with difficult and painful histories of interacting with Saturnian energy, the healing includes becoming a Saturnian figure. These people need to develop their own versions of Saturnian expression, versions rooted in personal relevance. And with a Lilith-Saturn aspect, relevance means incorporating Lilith into the structures of one’s life in positive, pro-active, creative ways.
Anyone looking to consciously reconnect with the primal, wild energy inside that is Lilith, which fuels our creativity and sense of connectedness to all of life and the earth, faces this challenge. The biggest hindrance to incorporating the primal wisdom of Lilith we each carry is the fear of negative sanction/punishment from Saturnian figures and institutions.
Healing these fears is paramount if we want to live in the present and create total health. Anyone who chooses to look at the wild inside in a new light, and see how to integrate it into their outer lives, moves into a more-human stance than we’re used to being or seeing. It’s a place of radical honesty, healing, empowerment and aligning with our individual portion of natural wisdom.
Tom is available for private consultations. See his website for more information and to order his new Black Moon Lilith natal report, available when the Sun enters Gemini. Pre-orders with $5 off are available until the Sun leaves Taurus (May 20th, 2008), making the cost $22 instead of $27.
May 9, 2008 By Tom Jacobs
Emotional Healing with Astrology
To have the kind of life we want in the present, we must heal our memories of and attachments to the past.
Astrology offers a vocabulary for and means to heal whatever we’re carrying from the past into our lives in the present day.
Evolutionary astrology is based in the fact that people change, over the course of a life and over the courses of many lives. One of its aims is to help people heal and release the past and gain awareness of the present, so they can choose to develop the kinds of lives they’d rather be living.
No one wants to relive the pain of the past, yet we don’t often have the awareness to heal it and put it in its proper place and move in the present. We end up, then, reliving what’s comfortable, which is often painful, and wondering how to move out of these destructive patterns that keep us from enjoying life and being happy about what we’re doing here.
Some key players in the emotional healing process:
- The South Node of the Moon, the ruler of that node by sign (Venus for Taurus, Jupiter for Sagittarius, etc.) and Pluto (all three players by house, sign and aspect) offer the vocabulary for any person’s emotional imprinting from past lives. These configurations speak to our past-life conditioning and wounding. Identifying and integrating the lessons we’ve set ourselves up to learn, as told by these symbols, is a key to beginning to live in the present moment and move into the arenas of our unique syllabus of soul growth.
- The asteroid Lucifer (1930) tells us about a person’s relationship with the notion of a higher power. What’s a person’s relationship with what could be called his or her inner goodness barometer? Another side of it: Has the person learned how to develop a healthy, distinct sense of ego while serving something greater than the self?
- The true Black Moon Lilith (BML) represents the instinctive, primal & wild part of us we’ve experienced shame and punishment from others for expressing. As the empty focus of the Moon’s orbit around the earth, the true BML is a part of our emotional makeup. As a point that’s never visible from the Earth, however, it often seems an elusive part of us, usually seeming best left in the shadows of our psyches. Locating and reintegrating our hard-wired portion of Lilith energy means finding creative and constructive means to express our wildness, based on house, sign and aspect.
Tom is available for private consultations. See his website for more information and to order his new Black Moon Lilith natal report, available when the Sun enters Gemini. Pre-orders at a discount are available until the Sun leaves Taurus (May 20th, 2008).
May 8, 2008 By Tom Jacobs
The Right Way to Lilith
I’ve been working lately on the Black Moon Lilith (BML), working to describe how to integrate the energy into your day-to-day life, and getting over the automatic, conditioned fear that she’s to be feared and avoided.
By house, sign and aspect, each of us can find the right way to Lilith - as a noun (finding her energy), and as a verb (bringing her energy consciously into our lives).
As an example, my true BML is at 3 Sagittarius in the 2nd, with Neptune & Mercury in the 2nd and Moon in the 3rd house (4, 9, and 11 Sagittarius, respectively). It sextiles Pluto-Venus in Libra/12th.
For me, opening up the satellite dish that this Sagittarius stellium can seem, and flowing with words that want to come out, is one way. Allowing myself not to edit too much too early, just to let it flow. Lilith brings a primal, irrational, instinctive and uncontrollable energy, and when I open the channel and write what comes through, I’m more productive than working in any other way.
Incorporating Lilith into our lives, bringing her out of the closet, or out from under the rug, leads to a feeling of greater wholeness. When I allow myself to write in this way, I’m not only productive but also I feel like an important part of me had the chance to participate. It feels like a gift I give myself.
As I wrote above, anyone can figure out how to let his or her Lilith flow. The trick is in releasing the conditioning and pain we’ve accumulated along the way, when we’ve internalized the judgments of others that this natural part of us is not okay. It’s natural for others to try to get us to normalize, as they’re looking out for our best interests. Yet each of us at some point has opportunities to identify, reclaim and bring out who we really are.
Tom is available for private evolutionary astrology & intuitive counseling sessions. See his website for more information, and for information on his True Black Moon Lilith natal report, available in late May.
April 29, 2008 By Tom Jacobs
Announcing a new Black Moon Lilith natal report
I’m accepting pre-orders for a new natal true Black Moon Lilith report. It’s original material reflecting my work with clients, intuitive research and experiences over the last few years with this little-understood archetype.
If you know anything about Lilith and/or how she’s understood in astrological circles, you’ll have a sense of how important it is to get this information out. People want to reconnect with this authentic, creative part of themselves and heal the suppression and abuse, and release the limiting conditioning that gets heaped on those living out the archetype. They’re hungering to figure out more authentic ways to express themselves and live in greater alignment with their true natures. Understanding the natal true Black Moon Lilith is, in my experience, critical in such a process.
The report discusses the true Black Moon in general and in your chart. It has sections on Lilith’s mythology and how the archetype informs people’s lives (how we live her story), plus personalized info on your Lilith placement: natal house& sign, natal aspects with other planets/points, and important upcoming transits and progressions to Lilith. The report will be a 6,000-7,000 word PDF.
I’ll offer the report at $27, but by pre-ordering you’ll save $5, making the price $22.
This discount is available for the duration of the Sun’s trek through Taurus (until Tuesday, May 20th, at 9:01 AM PDT).
If you’re curious to learn more about Lilith before ordering the report, you can find an article on my site (http://tdjacobs.com/user/BML%2015Jun07doc.pdf) and some posts in my blog (http://tdjacobs.spiritcrossing.com/category/lilith/ - begin with the earlier posts first).
To order the report, e-mail me (tom at t d jacobs dot com). I’ll then invoice you via PayPal. I’ll also take checks mailed to me – contact me for the address. I’ll begin e-mailing the reports as PDFs when the Sun enters Gemini - the time of year to open up to new info and renew our curiosity.
April 21, 2008 By Tom Jacobs
Lilith & Health
When I sit down to work out thoughts on Lilith, I often find myself inside one or another feeling, and seem unable to express anything cogent or cogently. Yet when some other being asks me about her, I can respond with a torrent from I-don’t-know-where.
This is adapted from my response to a reader’s question about Lilith’s relationship to healing:
my thoughts on lilith and healing: lilith invites us to embody an uncompromised relationship with our bodies as extensions of the natural world. not a flowery, let’s-hold-hands ”we are the world and maybe we should all recycle” sort of thing, but that we have our own wild sides. that the wild is us, is natural, and can course through us if we let it, and it can inform how we tie together our whole beings and relate to all of life.
i live in los angeles, and we have coyotes here. LA has lots of hills, and at night they step out and roam here and there. people are often paranoid about letting their dogs and cats out at night. the presence of these coyotes (and their so very anti-urbanity howling!) makes me think of lilith often. i feel lilith is clear that the natural processes of life, even though messy, are of prime importance.
people terrify themselves with the idea of the messiness of life, and lilith is an energy that invites us to honor the fact that we’re tied to all of life, that we’re animals with drives and something wired into our makeup that is the wild of the natural world, and that things running their natural courses do get messy.
“it’s normal that pets get killed” would not be the point to lilith, but that when the natural flow of things is not interfered with, this kind of thing can happen. but it’s not heartless, it’s absolutely heartful in a way that modern people, civilized people, have tried to squeeze out of themselves. the good news is that we can never squeeze it out of us, never. it’s part of who we are.
so, then, think of health as the wholeness of body+heart+mind+soul, and consider where interventions thought of as modern (and therefore better than what people used to do, have done for a long time) interfere with the natural order of things. while we’re not aware of it yet on a grand scale, a huge giant bigbigbig thing on our collective plate right now is what happens to a woman using hormonal birth control. this is just huge. the body, and therefore the whole being, gets tuned out of whack by a chemical intervention, and any wisdom that the whole being might be offering by manifesting a hormonal imbalance in the body is not possibly seen. (it doesn’t mean that certain women aren’t positively benefitted by this as a treatment, but not the numbers who are prescribed it as an attempted answer to a problem.) can we recover the kind of eyes needed to see the messages of the whole being that the body has to offer? will we choose to relearn how to relate to ourselves in this way as extensions of nature, and therefore possessing in each of us the wisdom of the natural world?
transfer this kind of thinking to type ii diabetes, cancer, overweight, depression, and everything else and you’ll begin to have a handle on what lilith has to offer about health considerations: when the wisdom of the body is ignored, the whole being suffers. in the long term, we have gotten ourselves into screwing ourselves over for choosing to believe the newtonian perspective of science/medicine that the body is merely a machine. lilith would have us search out and experientially test potential remedies to bring the body back in balance. what does this food in my hand feel like to my body? does my body support taking it in and making it part of me? the headline: we’ve forgotten that we’re part of nature! and lilith offers a door into reconnecting with the wisdom of our wild selves, which possess much undeveloped and untapped wisdom and strength.
when we doubt the wisdom of the natural world (and forget how to identify as the natural world), we buy into the cartesian-newtonian model of life that we’re using to destroy ourselves.
March 10, 2008 By Tom Jacobs
Profile: Director & Writer Julie Taymor
Last week I saw Julie Taymor’s film Titus (1999), an adaptation of Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus. I had no idea what it was about, but a blue-painted & affectless Anthony Hopkins mug on the cover seemed to draw me in. I guess I was in the mood for something serious?
Well, if you know anything about that Shakespeare guy, you know that he’s got two kinds of properties: comedy and tragedy. This is one of the tragedies, it was easy to figure out pretty quick. And the only thing I knew about Julie Taymor was her name, and I was trying to figure out if I was merely confusing it with “Jeffrey Tambor.”
Anyway, I stepped into the film with no idea of anything about it. It’s been on my mind since seeing it, and I just looked up Taymor’s birth data (12/15/52, Boston, MA, 10:06 AM) to try to put a vocabulary to my reaction to the film, which has to do with the particular flavor of vision that informs the production design, timing and the framing of many of the visuals - the shots.
The first things I note are the aspects to the nodal axis:
-true Black Moon Lilith (BML) on the Leo/7th South Node
-the asteroid Lucifer (1930) in Scorpio/9th square the axis
-retrograde Jupiter in Taurus in the 3rd house square the axis and opposing Lucifer
-Venus in Aquarius/12th and Mars in Aquarius/1st, both conjunct the North Node
-Descendant conjunct the South Node
This is just one conversation, in more or less fixed grand-square fashion, yet it needs to be broken down. What she knows a lot about is Leo BML in the 7th, as anything on the South Node indicates something we come into this life understanding much about. BML here points to an understanding of the power of one’s primal creativity, and the effect such expressions can have on other people. And conjunct the Descendant, ways of exploring how to achieve balance and harmony are well-understood.
The unresolved issues (squares to the nodes) are Lucifer in Scorpio/9th and rx Jupiter in Taurus/3rd, indicating a conversation between the urge to get to the bottom lines of, via & with ideas (Scorpio/9th) and the desire to slow down the mind in order to get clearer about what it is that’s worth expressing (rx Jupiter in Taurus/3rd).
And then this business on the North Node - Venus in the 12th, Mars in the 1st and the Ascendant, all in Aquarius. Perhaps her karmic past includes a getting caught up in the collaborative expression (SN Leo/7th) that left out her unique creative vision (Venus in Aquarius/12th on NN), leaving her feeling she didn’t get to assert herself creatively as a true expression of her independence (Aquarius Ascendant & Mars in Aqua/1st on NN).
The 3rd-9th axis has something to say about how information gets in and out (and what kind of information it is), and Taurus-Scorpio as an axis has much to do with power: Taurus is about learning to run under the steam of self, while Scorpio is about pooling steams and running with others.
She certainly seems to have learned to integrate that stuff on the North Node - nothing she does looks even remotely like what others are doing, and it’s the last thing you’d expect. She seems also to have found a balance between that Leo SN and the Aquarius NN in doing that unique thing that makes her work stand out and be immediately recognizable, yet not having left behind her skills and strengths of working collaboratively with others.
Tom is available for soul-centered astrology consultations. See http://tdjacobs.com for more information and to sign up for his mailing list.
January 25, 2008 By Tom Jacobs
Lilith’s Reality
From an e-mail written today about Lilith, to an individual very much living her themes:
to her, we’re not brains that exist to make money so we can make more brains so they can make more money to make more brains - we’re animals with souls, and desires to express the experience of that intersection in visceral ways that affect us and others viscerally. for her, reality is visceral and visceral is real.
November 14, 2007 By Tom Jacobs