⚸ Lilith

Named for Lilith, a night spirit of Mesopotamian and Jewish lore

Night Wild places Independence

Which sign is Lilith in now?

Lady Lilith by Dante Gabriel Rossetti
Lady Lilith Dante Gabriel Rossetti, 1866, altered 1872–73 Delaware Art Museum, Wilmington She combs her long hair while looking into a hand mirror. The museum notes the poppy at the lower right, the flower of sleep. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

A night spirit of ancient lore who became, in a medieval tale, Adam’s first wife, and in our own time a symbol of independence.

The legend

In the ancient sources Lilith is not a goddess but a demon. Babylonian lore knew the lilû demons and their female counterparts, the lilitu, spirits of young men and women who had themselves died young and who “slipped through windows into people’s houses.” The Bible names a lilith only once, among the wild creatures of a ruined land in Isaiah 34:14: “There too the lilith shall repose and find herself a resting place.” The Jewish Publication Society’s translation notes “a kind of demon,” or perhaps a night bird. The Babylonian Talmud warns that whoever sleeps alone in a house will be seized by Lilith, and pictures her with wings and long hair. As a single character she first appears in the Alphabet of Ben Sira, a satirical Hebrew work of the eighth century. There God made Lilith from the earth, just as he had made Adam. They quarrelled over which of them should be above the other, and she told him, “We are equal to each other inasmuch as we were both created from the earth.” Then she spoke God’s name and flew away into the air, and would not come back even when three angels were sent after her. The tale explained a custom that was already widespread: amulets bearing the three angels’ names, to keep her away from newborn babies. In medieval Kabbalah she became the consort of Samael. From the 1970s, Jewish feminists reclaimed her: the magazine Lilith, founded in 1976, took her name because its editors were inspired by her fight for equality with Adam, and she has become a symbol of autonomy and independence.

How the point got its name

Astrologers first used the name “Dark Moon” for a supposed second moon of Earth, an object that modern celestial mechanics clearly rules out. The name then passed to the lunar apogee, the point of the Moon’s orbit farthest from Earth, which astrologers now call Lilith or the Black Moon. The Moon’s orbit is an ellipse that slowly turns, so its farthest point creeps forward through the zodiac. This site shows the mean (averaged) apogee, which goes all the way around in about 8.85 years.

Symbols

Wings Long hair Night bird

The point

Lilith is not a body but a direction in the sky: the way to the Moon’s apogee, the farthest point of its orbit, on average about 405,500 km from Earth (its nearest point, the perigee, is about 363,300 km away). Some astrologers instead define Lilith as the empty second focus of the Moon’s elliptical orbit; seen from the center of the Earth, both lie in exactly the same direction. The Swiss Ephemeris, Astrodienst’s astronomy library, works out its own refined mean apogee; in checks for this site, its Lilith differed from this one by up to 9 arcminutes.

The Moon at apogee
405,500 km its farthest from Earth, on average
The Moon at perigee
363,300 km its nearest, on average
Around the zodiac in
8.85 years moving forward through the signs

Distances are the mean apogee and perigee from NASA’s Moon Fact Sheet. The time around the zodiac is worked out from the formula this site uses for Lilith (Meeus, Astronomical Algorithms, chapter 47).

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