Lilith is not a celestial body. It is a void that calculation locates in the birth chart, in three different ways, and I have given each one a face. I would like to explain here what this void is, why it is calculated three times, and why three calculations call for three faces.
Lilith: what the Black Moon is
I begin with the astronomical fact, because everything else depends on it. The Moon travels around the Earth on an ellipse, and an ellipse has two foci. The Earth occupies one; the other remains empty. The direction of that second focus, projected onto the zodiac, is what astrology calls the Black Moon, and names Lilith. I can calculate this direction, place it in a sign and a house, follow its movement. No telescope will ever show anything there, and yet this focus defines an axis with the Earth. That is the paradox that held me.
The name has a history, and I prefer to recall it in order to clear up a frequent confusion. In 1898 an astronomer published the elements of a second satellite of the Earth, and into the 1930s people still spoke of Lilith as a celestial body waiting to be discovered. In 1937 Dom Néroman shifted the gaze: the Black Moon no longer designated a hidden moon but the unoccupied focus of the lunar orbit. That void is what I mean by the word, never a hypothetical satellite, nor the asteroid 1181 Lilith, which is another object and another point in the chart.
I must also say at once what the Black Moon is for me, and what it is not. Most pages devoted to Lilith make it, from the outset, the shadow zone of the chart: repressed desires, the wild part, the fault to be atoned for. I do not say this shadow does not exist. I say it is not the identity of the Black Moon, but what the Black Moon becomes when its call is repressed.
The Black Moons proceed from no original fault, and shadow is not their identity. Lilith opens a process. She embodies becoming, not an error to be atoned for.
The Black Moon, the three faces of the Call, volume 1
A void is not a fault. It is a place left open, and it calls. As long as the call is heard, something can take shape there. When it is refused, stifled, what remains unaccomplished does not disappear: it changes face, and that is when the Black Moon becomes a shadow zone where monsters dwell. The myth gives their name.
What we refuse to look at ends up looking in our place, and freezes us. Medusa is the Call of life turned to terror because it has not been heard; she rises from within, in dreams and obsessions, or fixes herself outside upon a person or situation, which then becomes a mirror of the inside.
The Black Moon, the three faces of the Call, volume 1
Athena and Medusa belong to the same story: it was Athena, Ovid tells us, who turned Medusa's hair into serpents. The goddess and the monster are the two faces of a single reminder, welcomed or refused. The folkloric image of Lilith, the demoness, the wild woman, the shadow one exorcises, has its roots in this refusal of the call: it describes what the Black Moon becomes when it is not heard, and it has been mistaken for the Black Moon itself. The whole question, for me, is therefore what can take shape in this void before refusal peoples it.
Three calculations
If the Moon's orbit were a fixed ellipse, there would be only one Black Moon and I would not have written this book. But the orbit is constantly deformed by the Sun's attraction, and its major axis turns. Depending on what one retains of this movement, the position of the apogee, and therefore of the Black Moon, is determined in three ways.
The Mean Black Moon keeps the regular direction of the axis, stripped of its irregularities. It advances about forty degrees a year.
The True Black Moon follows the instantaneous state of the orbit. It advances, slows, stations, retrogrades, and can stray from the Mean by up to about thirty degrees.
The Corrected Black Moon follows the Moon's actual passages at apogee, from one to the next. Its curve is softer than the Mean's, calmer than the True's.
Most software offers one or two of them and lets you choose. I do not choose. I read all three, because they do not answer the same question, and that is the point I want to establish before going further. This history of the calculations does not go from an approximation toward an exactness finally reached: it separates three ways of questioning a single direction. The three calculations are explained without jargon on the page True, mean or corrected Black Moon.
Three faces: why
Here is the heart of my method, and I must explain it carefully. If the three calculations are three questions put to the same void, a number is no longer enough to read them. A position in degrees tells me where each Black Moon is; it does not tell me what each one asks. To read a question in a life, I need to give it a form I recognize. That is what a face does. I gave one to each calculation, and I did not choose it for its poetry: I chose it for what the calculation actually does.
The Alicorn, for the Mean Black Moon
The Mean holds the course. It indicates a direction, and nothing else: it does not advance, it has neither body nor breath. I named Alicorn the direction it releases. In Old French the word designated the unicorn's horn, and I chose it for its shape: a point cut off from the animal, which shows a goal without being able to reach it.
A horn points toward a goal; separated from the animal, it has neither legs nor weight nor breath with which to reach it, and that is precisely the situation of the Mean Black Moon. It points without advancing.
The Black Moon, the three faces of the Call, volume 1
This persistent direction I call an essence: the thread that links the successive forms of a being and makes of its changes a single story. Past detours do not become errors, for the Alicorn uncovers the thread that ran through them even when the path strayed from it. The Alicorn asks the question of the course.
Athena, for the True Black Moon
The True tests the instant. It follows an ellipse recalculated at every moment, a garment fitted to a body caught in mid-gesture, and its oscillations show how provisional every form becomes when it tries to grasp life. To the call of essence answers here what I name the call of life: needs, instincts, memories, everything that pushes from within and ends by opening the form that has grown too narrow. A seed gives the simplest image: its shell protects it for a season, but if the shell remained intact it would imprison what it was meant to keep.
The True Black Moon therefore does not cause the crisis: it reveals the form that no longer suffices, and life responds through desire, fear, anger, or the need to change. Nothing descends into the seed; something asks to emerge from it.
The Black Moon, the three faces of the Call, volume 1
Why Athena? Because she represents the intelligence capable of discerning, within a changing situation, what can no longer be postponed. In the Odyssey she comes to Telemachus in the guise of a stranger, lets him hear that a road exists outside of waiting, then disappears; the next day he calls the assembly and leaves. Athena shows what asks to be born; she is not born in our place. Athena asks the question of the instant.
The Unicorn, for the Corrected Black Moon
The Corrected seeks attunement. Its curve breathes between the course of the Mean and the departures of the True, and it asks, to my eyes, a single question: how can an orientation pass through the movements of life without ceasing to be itself? I gave this calculation to the Unicorn because it unites what the two other faces keep apart: the horn, which gathers the gaze into one direction, and the horse's body, breath, instinct and movement, four hooves in matter. Translation gives me another image: the translator does not reproduce every word, and yet carries meaning across without distorting it.
The sky indicates a direction and the earth supplies the energy, but neither chooses for us the form their meeting will take.
The Black Moon, the three faces of the Call, volume 1
The Unicorn asks the question of the response: the one a consciousness gives, through a choice, once it has listened to both.
A single void, three questions
I hold to this formula because it guards against two symmetrical errors. The first is to believe the True Black Moon is truer than the others: the word designates the instantaneous state of the orbit, not a higher degree of truth. The second is to read only one of them. The course without the push is an abstraction; the push without the course is a crisis without direction; attunement makes sense only between the two. Three calculations, then, but a single void, and each calculation receives a face because each asks a different question.
What this void asks, when it returns despite everything one does to appease it, I name the Call.
Desire arises from a gap between what is and what is not yet. In a chart, I read the Black Moon as the place where this gap is felt. We can try to soothe this lack with more effort, love, success, or knowledge; the relief lasts for a while, then the void returns.
The Black Moon, the three faces of the Call, volume 1
Reading the three Black Moons in a chart
The sign gives a quality to the Call: it shows me how the direction seeks to become recognizable, with the demand proper to each sign and the risk of mistaking it for an absolute to be reached perfectly. The house tells me in which area of life the Call makes itself heard. The aspects show me which forces it composes with. And I observe, chart after chart, that the three Black Moons are often in different signs, sometimes in different houses. Take a Mean in Taurus and a True in Gemini: the course asks for a form solid enough to last, and what pushes in the instant asks to connect, to name, to move. It is there, in that gap, that the reading begins.
Each Black Moon also unfolds a cross, four stations that go from lack to response. I have kept these repertoires, by sign and by house, for volume 2, and the application draws them on the chart. The pages of this site present an extract of them, sign by sign and house by house.
The Black Moon and the lunar Nodes
I am often asked whether Lilith and the lunar Nodes say the same thing, since they belong to the same orbit. They do not answer the same question.
The Black Moon and the nodes belong to the same orbit, but they do not answer the same question: the Black Moon tells us why and toward what the work calls; the Dragon shows how matter enters it.
The Black Moon, the three faces of the Call, volume 1
Frequently asked questions
Is the Black Moon a planet?
No. It is a calculated point, the second focus of the orbit the Moon describes around the Earth. No body is found there. I distinguish it from the asteroid 1181 Lilith, which is a real object and another point in the chart.
Are the Black Moon and Lilith the same thing?
In astrology, yes: Lilith is the mythological name given to the Black Moon. I qualify, however, the usual reading of Lilith as shadow or revolt: the Black Moon is first a void that calls for a response. It becomes a shadow zone, and Medusa dwells there, when that call is repressed.
Why three Black Moons and not one?
Because the Moon's orbit moves, and three calculations retain three different things from it: the underlying direction, what calls in the instant and in the body, the actual movement from one apogee to the next. Three questions, hence three faces, which I read together.
Which Black Moon should I use, true or mean?
All three. The mean gives the course, the true shows what calls in the instant, in the body, the corrected seeks attunement between the two. None is more exact than the others. The application displays all three.