“Living out the energy and stories of Lilith in our lives…reveals inner terrain on which love and war intermix”
– Tom Jacobs, Evolutionary Astrologer
Image: MUD JOY Go! Push Pops x Metagasm Genesis NFT
Mother of all demons, Lilith deals in the myths of separateness and isolation. With monstrous talons, she magnifies distortions of power. Nature malefic, sex-pot, shadow of the Empress, the all-pervasive, devouring feminine – the list trails on in Lilith’s three designations as Dark Moon, Black Moon and Asteroid. In her book Asteroid Goddesses, Demetra George positions Lilith as mistress of conflict resolution, she who tames wild beasts in the night. From taming the inner wild to fiercely guarding one’s sense of freedom, autonomy and worth – working with Lilith is ultimately about releasing shame, confronting anger, and returning to self.
As an intermediary step between Mars and Pluto, Lilith speaks to issues related to personal, sexual power and repressed anger. Lilith’s repressed anger makes her manipulative, with the potential to explode into sexual domination and violence. But the answer with Lilith is not battle, it’s rather – a deep healing of the balance of masculine and feminine energy in the body. Lilith teaches us consensus – how the transformative energy of Mars-Pluto can be utilized to democratize rather than destroy relationship.
In his book on the subject, Lilith buff Tom Jacobs talks about how when we open our heart to love, we are expressing our feminine energy – which makes us vulnerable. Not only does an open heart make one more susceptible to hurt, for those of us that have ever loved and lost, it ignites a potential avalanche of undigested feelings. Jacobs writes that this state of “receptivity to life and each other” is one which we have “been taught should be stamped out or left to teachers, nurses, wives and mothers.” As a queer woman looking back at my twenties, I see the way in which much of my beating men at their own game mentality – working hard, playing hard, sexing hard – was not only incredibly depleting, it was crazy-making and out of integrity with my inner feminine. My inner wild desires relationships which are loving, connected, safe, pleasurable, communicative and secure. It requires multi-orgasmic sex magic and cuddle ecstasy. Which is why our journey with Lilith must encompass looking at the myriad ways men, as well as women and non-binary folks participate in her repression and can contribute to her rise.
Under Judaism, the story of Lilith was a primary vehicle of patriarchy. With the shaming of Lilith came the shaming of all women’s bodies. Authentic sexuality expressed as an aspect of the perfection of nature went underground as patriarchy locked in its agenda to pass land exclusively through male lines and control women’s reproductive capacities. Resurrecting Trillith, the true + real Lilith, takes many forms. Among them healing sexual trauma, histories of domination-submission and learning to respect the Earth and our bodies as an extension of nature.
In myth, Lilith chooses isolation and separation over being dominated by her husband Adam. Lilith literally leaves the last man on Earth in order to retain her autonomy, subsequently becoming the cultural personification of female evil. A dark demoness who comes to seduce and destroy men at night, at the most extreme – Lilith threatens pregnant woman and kills their children. Lilith, like many women who have fled abusive domestic environments – left into the unknown, without resources, contacts or a place to live. Jacobs writes that in order for it to be a Lilith story, one must be leaving a literal or figurative “home,” a place where we feel a sense of belonging. Oftentimes, the woman fleeing violence leaves to initially encounter a world revealing itself to be even more cruel than the one left behind. In classical myth, Lilith’s story dead-ends in anger. Once the handmaiden of the Great Goddess Innana of Sumeria, the patriarchal Lilith oscillates in a vicious cycle of rage. Another Great Goddess is demoted to haunt the cultural imaginary, sell widgets, and get fuckbois off. Lilith, a night monster forever more, shows up by many names in many cultures. She is borderland bride and archetypal woman from the unseen world: seducer, devil, bearer of demons, embodied horror of the grave, unreasoning terror, harlot, female-desert monster, granny-witch and serpent-woman. Evolutionary astrologer Tom Jacob’s work proves exceptional in that it opens up a door to healing our Lilith stories completely by moving through rage into grieving, acceptance of responsibility, recommitting to the essential self, and reentering the world whole.
As any astro/feminist will tell you, Trillith (the true and real Lilith) predates patriarchy. As Innana of Sumeria’s handmaiden, she brought men from the fields to the holy temple for the sacred, sexual customs. Lilith recalls the earliest religions of the Great Goddess and women’s rituals of fertility linking land to clan.
Astrologically speaking, the first Lilith to appear in 1918 was known as The Dark Moon – a mysterious body we cannot see nor calculate. Jacobs highlights how the discover of this “theoretical body” brought to light in the early 20th century mirrors how ill-equipped Western society was at that time in terms of a capacity to acknowledge her themes – the rape, abuse and violence done to the feminine, the Earth and people of color as a prerequisite of white male capitalist patriarchy. Just as marital rape would remain a legal grey area in America until 1993, popular Lilith “myths” of institutionalized violence orchestrated to maintain the white male monopoly on power and resources still circulate unchecked. Jacob’s also links the discover of this proto-Lilith to the rise of the Western Women’s Suffrage movements. Asteroid Lilith (discovered in 1927) meanwhile deals in the collective (less-individuated) reality of Lilith, and often makes herself prominent in charts of artists and social-workers who dedicate their life’s work to advocating for those living out Lilith stories in damaging ways.
The third and most contemporary Lilith, known as Black Moon Lilith, offers perhaps the most visceral, potent, and personal expression of the archetype. Black Moon Lilith, the geometric point in the sky that marks the furthest point of the moon’s orbit around the earth (or Lunar Apogee), illuminates where pretensions, false roles, and delusions must be cut away. Moving in a 9-year cycle, the resolution of Lilith involves penetrating to the heart of our pain. Wherever we find Lilith in our chart is a place where it takes tremendous courage to proceed consciously. The potential is a release of lifetimes of repressed anger and complete TRANSFORMATION – whereby the creative energy of the feminine and masculine can now pour through one equally, harmoniously, divinely attuned to nature. Where emotional pain is felt, we know it is because we have compromised our inner wild and must make peace with mother consciousness disavowed.
While the majority of astrologers today choose to calculate Black Moon Lilith’s placement in a chart by the mean (or average) of her oscillating position, others, who use what they call True Black Moon Lilith, use the volatile apogee itself. Referred to by Juan Antonio Revilla as a ghost image, ideal future or psychic projection of the moon, True Black Moon Lilith proves astonishingly hard to pin down. With changes of velocity and direction so erratic the mean camp considers the point “nonsense,” True Black Moon Lilith goes to places the moon itself will never go. As our deeper (more queer, more Black, more femme) understandings of astrology and astro/feminism evolve, Black Moon Lilith’s “non-sense” speaks to a deeper resolution collectively with the mercurial, chaotic quality of feminine energy. With true Black Moon Lilith indicating the moon’s ghosts, rather than the moon itself, this fear and dismissal of what is unknown and beyond the veil makes the osculating apogee of Trillith that much more provoking. Jacobs writes that the favoring of the mean over the true indicates a general cultural climate in which “we have not been ready to open to feel and ultimately process the deep cache of anger that the true BML can represent.” That is the “fatal” responses to the “wild feminine” we’ve seen across time in the form of slavery, rape, witch hunts, domestic violence, hanging, stoning and all of the lesser expressions and micro-aggressions making up toxic masculinity and white supremacy. It’s not coincidence there’s only one letter difference between the Black Lives Matter and the Black Moon Lilith shorthand (BLM/BML).
A prominent Lilith in a natal chart indicates independence and a refusal to submit to an other. In synastry, Lilith contacts signify the need to learn negotiation, with potential problems related to sexual fear, rejection, anger and suspicion. Lilith-Ceres aspects connote resolving conflicts in family matters. Lilith-Jupiter aspects indicate religious conflicts. Lilith-Venus aspects bring the focus to love and sex. When aspecting the lunar nodes, particularly the south node associated with our past life karma – Lilith is truly haunting in her capacity for exquisite transmutation. While Lilith “sextile” the south node might generally suggests a positive aspect, here Lilith more likely reveals a place we erroneously find shelter in what turns out to be a feedback loop of self-sabotaging folly. On the positive side, the south node is the point of detachment, known for draining Lilith of her vampiric pull and transcending matter. Through this process of transforming past hurt, we ultimately release and heal from the sense of separation which is so engrained in the psyche of Lilith.
Demetra George makes an additional association between Lilith with Toro, the Spanish bull deity asteroid representative of fertility in ancient nature-based consciousness. Like Lilith, Toro is an intermediary between Mars and Pluto, and represents brute force. Unconscious manifestations involve violence, while the higher octave reflects an ability to meet our inner demons and make an ally out of any enemy. A prominent Toro suggests channeling one’s inner power for good is a life-long theme. When inner power is projected, fear, paranoia and/or victimization occur. In synastry Toro indicates where power struggles arise in relationship.
Having lived my own karmic Lilith story for many lifetimes, this June I’m invoking her energies performing as Trillith for my new socially-engaged sacred arts ritual Victory to the Mother! – a Hip Hop Yoga Puja occurring end of this month on my Grandma’s 100th Birthday no less. Trillith is my second attempt to rhyme for Lilith, the disavowed feminine, all my original lyrics set to Pop Smoke instrumentals (R.I.P.) BLUE FALLZ – my Black Moon Lilith in Taurus flow, was about burning through inner anger and internalized body shame around our deep nature – including fear of the chaos and destruction we associated with Earth, being “dirty” and the dark feminine. With Lilith in Taurus suggesting one who is both sexually insatiable and irresistable, in my sexual peak at thirty-six still doing the splitz, isolated and alone, I sang about blue balls, and blue fallz (My sun in Scorpio makes frozen water a boon)! In my second try, Trillith – I am taking a deeper dive to the temple at the bottom of the sea.
As I learned Lilith, I meanwhile nursed a neurotic sexual obsession with someone whose Lilith in Taurus conjunct mine. I was seeing him less in the heteronormative sense and more in the telepathic, transpersonal sense. Less in the hand-holding and emoji-bombing, more in the erotic lucid dreaming and nocturnal emissions sense. When another person’s planet or point touches your Black Moon Lilith, you’ll surely be lured in, so tread with caution. Lilith often draws partners together who are soulmates with serious problems to work out, which can veritably leads to not just passion, but also rage, anger and staggering heartbreak. With this synastry, we were both able to out-charm, out-seduce the other. Both parties see pieces of their own seduction/charm/insatiable sexual appetite in the other. Deception is often critical to the affair, what was in all senses a *fated connection.*
It’s not just the voracious sexual appetite of Taurus in my eleventh house of friends hopes and wishes (also mob psychology, tribes, movements, large groups of people, open marriage) which proves threatening to the status quo. With the eleventh house placement of Lilith we see the social outcast and ostracism, perhaps strong feelings of shame for wanting to be one of the crowd – causing one to feel quite wary of people who seem to need these things. Lilith in Taurus placement deals with creating self-sufficiency in a way that bucks off internalized judgments and expectations of others. For some this might manifest as extreme anger and rage around our personal finances, feelings of scarcity and speaking out against the historical circumstances within which it is rooted (racism, patriarchy, capitalism). Ultimately, for the Lilith in Taurus native our natural sense of self-worth and how we develop it carries a vibration which threatens the norms and comfort of those around us. And therein is the healing. Lilith’s inner wild reaches maturation when one truly understands the value and care we must reserve for ourselves, with an openness to the instinctual, primal, irrational wild inner nature that must ultimately guide us.
…
TRILLITH
Shawty fill the cosmic void, fix cross of matter
Shawty Exile herself, it make a bitch badder
Created from fertile earth, she a perfect union
Primal Spiral, Triple Goddess, Her Womb Communion
Her power coopted, but she Ain’t no Demon
Night Monster, Embodied Horror, She swallow Sea men
Empress or Queen, in between
From the Womb to the Tomb, Nah Mean?
What you know bout love?
I got what you need
Run Away or Trillith will seize you
She get who she please
You a full-fledged Goddess, preparing to Rule
It’s just you and me
You know what she be on, making men drool
Cause I like what I see
Look bae, I said I ain’t gone front
When it comes to you and me I claim sovereignty
Break them karmic cycles, take the quantum jump
From the higher octave, to the baby bump
Balancin* the inner bea$t, Taurus exhaulted at the feast
Singing flesh – do you know what Trillith represents?
Dark pleasures, put to the test
Possessive, paranoid, hedonist
But no fake breasts, we ain’t needin* this
Trillith Huggin on ya – nightmares, obsession
Spirit Bride, Night Monster, harlot, confession
The disavowed feminine back to bewitch
She apply the pressure, cuz she the hidden treasure, she that bitch!
…I think I’m fallin* in love…
What you know bout love?
I got what you need
Run Away or Trillith will squeeze you
You get what you need
You a Full-fledged God preparing to rule
It’s just you and me
You know what you be on – Don’t act a fool!
Cuz I like what I see*
…
R.S.V.P. here for Or Nah’s live performance of TRILLITH June 26th during Victory to the Mother! A Hip Hop Yoga Puja at Grace Exhibition Space Funded by the 2020-1 Franklin Furnace Fund Award. Featuring Alees Yvon as KALI MA!, Elisa Garcia del la Huerta as PATCHAMAMA, Kelly Shaw Nyala as BRIGID, Fanny Perez as HURACAN & Or Nah as TRILLITH. Evening concludes with a GONG bath led by Siri Rishi’s Temple 143. Henna by @lovablebodyart audio/visuals by METAGASM
*TRILLITH is a riff on Pop Smoke’s hit What You Know Bout Love, performed to the instrumental with original lyrics
Download your Black Moon Natal Lilith Report on Tom Jacob’s website
Bibliography
Asteroid Goddesses: The Mythology, Psychology, and Astrology of the Re-emerging Feminine Demetra George and Douglas Bloch, Florida: Ibis Press, 2003
Lilith: Healing the Wild by Tom Jacobs, Middletown, DE: 2008-2012 Tom Jacobs
“Asteroid Goddesses – the undistorted Natural/Divine Feminine” School of Evolutionary Astrology, online
About Katie
A yogi of over 20 years, Or Nah is a spiriturl gangsta hailing from the blessed coast. She received her 200-hour YTT with @Mamamedicine and has led sacred rituals in venues throughout the US, UK and Asia. A long-time student of Siri Rishi, her practice fuses Hatha-Vinyasa, Kundalini and shamanic styles of yoga. Cercone has exhibited at the Brooklyn Museum, Bronx Museum, Whitney Museum, Dallas Contemporary, Momenta Art, C24 Gallery, Changjiang Museum of Contemporary Art (China), Dodge Gallery and Aljira Center for Contemporary Art. Her work has been featured in Dazed, MILK, Interview, Japan Times, Huffington Post, Bitch Magazine, Hysteria, ART PAPERS, ART 21, PAPER, Washington Post. Cercone is adjunct faculty at SVA where she teaches GENDER TROUBLE. A pioneer of Hip Hop Yoga, from 2015-19 Katie collaborated with native New Yorker and conscious MC UNDAKOVA developing a unique fusion of hip hop and yoga bringing together modern day mystics to create magical, substance-free wellness parties. Katie’s transformational work lies under a sacred canopy of co-created ritual and magic to align with higher consciousness. Cercone was a 2015 National Endowment for the Arts Fellow for the U.S.-Japan Exchange Program in Tokyo and a 2020 Franklin Furnace Fund Awardee. Follow her on instagram @0r__Nah_spiriturlgangsta
Learn more at KatieCercone.com
