THE ASTROLOGICAL SYMBOLISM OF THE LUNAR APOGEE-BLACK MOON

September 16, 2023

Introduction

The Black Moon, lunar apogee, or “empty focus” of the lunar orbit is an essential element of astrological and astronomical symbolism, but unfortunately it tends to be underestimated and there is great confusion among astrologers about how to calculate it.

The “Mean Apogee” is the most popular of the alternative “Black Moons”, mainly because it has been used for a much longer time than all the others, and also because astrologers often are not aware of the alternatives. It seems to have been introduced into astrological practice in France by Dom Néroman (Pierre Rougié, 1884-1953) in the mid 1930’s. He apparently was also the first to call it “Black Moon” (Dom Néroman, “Les présages à la lumière des lois de l’évolution”, 1937, chapter 99 “Lilith, le trouble sexuel” p.199 and chapter 100 “Le couple lunare occulte” pp.200-203).

Its circular, extremely regular, and uniform motion (like the hands of a clock) belongs to the world of solar symbolism. Such type of motion is alien to the lunar world and to the symbolism of the Black Moon.

The Osculating Apogee, on the other hand, swings as much as 30 degrees from the mean position and shows abrupt and irregular changes of velocity and direction; this erratic, obsessive, tantalizing, behavior makes it the best representative of the irrational, instinctive, and primal symbolism of the Black Moon.

This “true” Black Moon does not have the decades of astrological and interpretative elaboration that the Mean Black Moon has. It has been available only after 1992. You won’t find simplistic formulas to make its interpretation easy. It requires research and willingness to try the new. It needs not receive the conventional meanings given to the round and astronomically featureless “mean” Mean Black Moon; but, to the mind of this writer, is the best symbolical representative of the demonical, nocturnal, and primal Black Moon Lilith.

As long as we keep this “lunar complex” symbolism in mind and never go beyond the symbolical realm of the Moon, the “lunar domain”, we will be able to differentiate it from other astrological factors, and from Neptune and Pluto in particular, which unfortunately have “stolen” or invaded what has always been the sphere of the Moon, for the detriment of both.

NOTE: what follows is a general description and 37 astrological examples of the symbolism of the osculating or “true” Black Moon-lunar apogee. For a thorough discussion of the astronomical issues involved please go here.

Symbolism of the Empty Focus

The key to understand the Black Moon is to interpret it in terms of the realm to which it belongs: the dark aspects of the primitive lunar symbolism. It is purely lunar. We must think of it as one important and integral part of the “Moon complex” or “lunar structure” of an individual (i.e., the physical Moon together with its instantaneous orbit). Then we make our interpretation of the empty focus of the orbit, “the other Earth”, the “absent other” around which our lunar experiences revolve.

Let’s think for a moment on the ascending and descending nodes of the Moon. They are points where the lunar orbit and the Earth’s (the ecliptic) intersect, like a meeting, or a door from one level to another, a contact or confluence of 2 worlds (the lunar and the earth realms). But the lunar apogee and the empty focus of the lunar orbit is a purely lunar realm. It is not in contact with anything. It is only the Moon per se, in isolation from everything else.

The lunar apogee is the external manifestation in the natural world of the invisible and “ghostly” empty focus of the lunar orbit, i.e., there is an apogee because there is an empty focus and an ellipse: the apogee is its face reflected on the mirror, a cold, distant Moon.

When we look at the Moon at the time of its apogee, we are actually looking directly at this invisible empty focus of the “true” lunar orbit, a hollowness; there is nothing there, and all we see is the face of the Moon on the far side. This material nothingness is actually an astral and organic fullness, not the fullness of the present, but the dark fullness of the long-past or far-away pleroma of the womb.

It is hot and cold, fire and ice, never fully alive and awake, a place where there is never light, where it is always dreamy. For this reason it may be a point where consciousness and energy may concentrate, but it is a slumber type of consciousness, an entrance into a world where knowledge is acquired by dreaming, not by thinking: a symbolic, dream-like, artistic, imaginative world of primal wisdom that resists rationalization.

The symbolism of the Black Moon-Empty Focus cannot go beyond what the Moon represents: it is not the Moon but a ghost, a point that is isolated. It is not a planet in its orbit, but a reflection of it that is not there, a point that is empty, a no-Moon. It is the somber and oniric aspect of the lunar realm. Psychologically, it is a point that represents how we react to its emptiness, isolation, loneliness, and inaccessibility.

The Black Moon is like a womb, a receptacle, an accumulator, a point of emptiness. As part of the emptiness, this empty focus is also the place of dreams, the garden of desires, the pot at the end of the rainbow, the impossible dream, the primal mate, the twin-soul, etc., but this place is very, very dangerous… it can devour you like a whirlpool!!!

NOTE: A dramatic example is the case of Rudolf Hess, born exactly at apogee (Moon 16,19 Capricorn – Ascendant 17,16 Cancer – Black Moon 16,16 Capricorn). Also born at the lunar apogee is the poet Alfred Tennyson (Moon 13,21 Gem – Apogee 12,38 Gem). He was described by T. S. Eliot as ‘the saddest of all English poets’, whose technical mastery of verse and language provided a ‘surface’ to his poetry’s ‘depths, to the abyss of sorrow’. The french painter Odilon Redon (1840-1916) is a quintessential Black Moon artist (Moon 9,55 Sag – Apogee 10,13 Sag). The lunar apogee occurred 30 minutes after his birth. His paintings come out directly from the world of the Black Moon.

Roots, Blood, Atavisms

There is a dynamic between the 2 foci of the lunar orbit (the Earth and the empty focus): they face each other, like 2 twins; although one is physical and has weight and the other is absent and ghostly. The empty focus represents an absence, a ghost, an emptiness, like the emptiness of the womb or an unattainable ideal.

The Black Moon is an isolated point, a point of neglect, repression, fermentation, and fantasy that belongs to a phantasmal, nocturnal, instinctive, and erotic world. It contains the more instinctual of our energies… including atavistic wisdom and clairvoyance, which are dependent on bodily functions. They manifest themselves in fairy tales and in primitive lunar symbolism: the night, the dream, the mystery, the magic, the danger, the secret, the taboo.

The empty focus is the closest there is in Astrology to ourselves, or the Earth, so its primal symbolism is more directly related to the experience of sexuality and of our bodies, our skin, our blood. Seen dynamically, there will be important differences between men and women, which is part of the dynamics of the 2 foci seeing each other and becoming polarized, fighting against a ghost and against emptiness, or trying to attain their invisible and ideal counterpart.

The Black Moon is strongly related to a woman’s man inside, and man’s woman inside, and how one deals with that.

The unapproachable, unreachable, virginal mystery and power of the womb that Man fears and to which he compulsively wants to surrender (Siegfried in front of slumbering Brunhilde) that is denied to him, and the circle of castration, regressive reactions and never-ending fight for his solar indivividuality and waking consciousness goes on and on, possessed by its twilight, dreamy, alluring, and bluish glow, trapped like a moth to our instinctive desires and most primitive fantasies and childhood memories sedimented in our unconscious, like a devouring dragon… or “slaying the devouring dragon” by entering its groins and killing it, refusing to follow its somber light and turning our faces to the light of the Sun.

The word “magic” regarding the Black Moon is in the more traditional sense, related to occultism and ancient magicians like the legendary Merlin which we can see full-blown in legends, myths, and fairy tales. They all talk of things that are very real but not physical, or belonging to a time in the past when the Earth was not as physical as today, “when the Earth was young” and people had their consciousness in an imaginative world where things change shape constantly.

Today we misinterpret many of the ancient and medieval traditions and legends because we expect them to refer to a world like ours, but pre-enlightenment people had an atavistic clairvoyance and wisdom which in occultism is related to dark lunar and solar forces, and allowed them to perceive many things that people today do not perceive any more. The Black Moon, because of its astronomical symbolism, represents that level of reality that is at the other side of the mirror.

The presence of the second focus produces the imagination of a doppelgänger, and points to an imaginative location of the evil “eighth sphere”, but also of “the Old Moon” described by Rudolf Steiner in “Occult Science” as a “Cosmos of Wisdom”.

NOTE: In the case of H.P. Lovecraft (Sun 27,27 Leo, Apogee 0,06 Virgo) we see the Sun separated by the sign-line, with an orb of 2,39′. But if instead of thinking about orbs exclusively in terms of space we think in terms of time, we find that the moment of the Sun-Apogee conjunction was the day before at UT 9h34 in 26,19 Leo. This would mean that the “orb in time” of the Sun’s aspect is only 1,08′ and closer to the time of birth “from the opposite side” or the immediate past. The birth 2.39′ conjunction is a defining aspect that seems to be describing both Lovecraft’s literary production as well as his private life, and the relatively wider orb can be imagined as a big opening door rather than a conventional coordinate point and a conventional orb. Enrico Fermi, “the architect of the nuclear age”, was born at the exact moment of the lunar perigee (Moon 27,01 Aries, Apogee 27,01 Libra). He died of stomach cancer in 1954 at the age of 53. The terrifyingly evil reality of a nuclear chain reaction was shown by David Lynch in the Trinity explosion sequence in the last season of “Twin Peaks” (s3e8). In the actual trial explosion of July 16 1945 (UT 11:29:44), the Sun and the Apogee are forming a doubly-applying square (Sun 23,33 Cancer – Apogee 27,52 Libra) which became exact 2 days later on July 18th at UT 11:40 in 25,28 Cancer-Libra, so seen dynamically in terms of time the orb is 1,55′. Anyway, despite the relatively wider 4-degree orb, this aspect –as in the case of Lovecraft– “feels right”, but it is part of the Twin Peaks graphic description of the event while remaining “hidden” during the actual explosion in 1945.

The Inner child

The unconditioned innocence of childhood exists in the form of a dream inside of us that we project outside, like the empty focus is projected unto the apogee.

There can be no actual “going back” in the sense that the empty focus is not really there –there is nothing there from a material point of view, only mirrors and reflections, voices from the past or from other worlds. If an adult “goes back” and becomes a child again, it can only happen as a regression, or as a temporary recapitulation carried out by the healing forces of body and soul, after which we “emerge” renewed by the experience.

I feel that the Black Moon has this power. But if we attach ourselves to it, we will be “encroached by the present”, i.e., encroached by the real Moon, afraid of life, living inside the empty focus in fetal position inside the uterus of a spiritual bliss that we refuse to leave.

The empty focus lives inside the lunar orbit, yet untouchable or unreachable, very real but at the same time very elusive, like a ghost or like a fantasy that stems from something that is lost yet it lives inside and controls us right from our roots. These roots are Mother Earth, the other Earth, the lost Earth, lost in the darkness of our unconscious, of our childhood, of our womb.

This type of imagery points to that mysterious entity that lives inside of us like a living ghost from the past: our inner child, faithfully described by the symbolism of the empty focus. If this inner child is lost and neglected, it will control us, enslaving us as a cruel tyrant, and we will never become adults psychologically.

But not neglecting this inner child doesn’t mean becoming the child –that would destroy us, it means that we as adults must find him and embrace him, offering him or her the warmth, love and the protection that only an adult can offer, rescuing him or her from the abandonment of a fatherless and motherless desolated life.

A comparison with the Moon’s 0-90-180 aspects to Pluto (from a man’s point of view) can be instructive. Pluto tends to obliterate the Moon because it pushes too hard –like a very strong, domineering, invasive or overprotective mother. The mother image is hipertrophied at the expense of the father image, and the child has to protect himself against her; he becomes a survivor by withdrawing from “living”, by denying to himself the unconditional sensuality and proximity of others, especially women which become a menace to his masculinity. The result is that the inner child is denied or abandoned, suffering extremes of inner hunger that dominate the emotional life of the adult, alternating between periods of extreme denial and extreme exposure, incapable of enjoying the simple and lighter pleasures without feeling overshadowed by them. Eventually all intimate relationships become a question of life and death, and the result is an ever-recurrent desolation because “mother” in childhood was not “life” but an excessive protection against it: the excess of love and the radical feeling of abandonment coexisted in the child, so that “woman” and “mother” and “child” meant death instead of life. This extreme picture helps us see that the Black Moon, while dark and womb-like, does not have this excess of death that Pluto has. For example: the natal Black Moon can bring truly sexual satisfaction of the “soul-mate” type. The Black Moon works at the level of the body, it is “pure milk”: it can make you go back to Paradise for a while in order to enjoy its fruits… i.e., its “regressiveness” need not necessarily be negative or destructive. The problem is that if we surrender to it we become drunkards; without a strong Sun (its polar opposite), the Black Moon-empty focus can make a man a victim of his own fantasy.

What happens when we surrender to fantasy or to instinct? What happens to an adult that surrenders to the womb? Life becomes a drug, he refuses to take hold of his life and lives in his fantasy –which can be very creative and fertile– but becomes incapable of taking responsibility for his own individual life. Pluto is very different because Pluto is a brutal suppressor where the Black Moon is a cornucopia, Pluto torments you by denying you the most simple satisfactions of the Moon (a “real” relationship, a “real” family…), while the Black Moon can give you all today and evaporate it tomorrow. Most importantly, Pluto forces you to deal with your hunger, to go into your past, to your childhood relationships and traumas, it forces you to search for that child that you as an adult have abandoned or rejected, and to become that child’s “manly” father that he never had, providing him with the warmth that only a very intensified pain and inner work can make possible. The Black Moon on the other hand will produce anguish rather than pain, the anguish of knowing that you are living a dream from which youn can’t or don’t want to wake up. Pluto never, ever will let you stop or fall asleep, it will push you relentelessly toward the regeneration of your relationship with your inner child, and with the women and children in your real life. Pluto will never let you surrender, while the Black Moon pulls you toward surrendering completely to her, to the idealized paradise lost.

The difference between the neurotic regression to childhood and lovingly embracing this inner child as adults is the difference between the Sun and the Black Moon. Nevertheless, this inner child will always remain elusive; like the empty focus that simultaneously exists and doesn’ exist.

NOTE: Intense oedipal and devouring love characterizes the lyrics of popular spanish singer and songwriter Camilo Sesto (1946-2019). He was born very close to the time of the lunar perigee (Moon 27,11 Tau – Apogee 28,26 Sco). Little is known for sure about his inaccessible and secretive private life (i.e. his personal lunar side), except that he never married, never formed a family, lived in solitude, and at one time said that he had never been in love. In his later years, after a long series of plastic surgeries and procedures he had completely changed his face. All this points to a inner child that has chosen to protect himself and live in isolation. He had one son, now 40 in 2023, that has been in and out of the process of becoming a transgender woman. The inner child is not so hidden in the case of Michael Jackson, but the Black Moon can only be seen active or dominant at death. The actual moment of death is uncertain because he was unresponsive when the emergency call was made, but he was officially pronounced dead June 25 2009 at 2:26 p.m. PST (Sun 4,29 Can – Apogee 6,01 Cap). This opposition describes or “locks” the last years of his life. The stage play Peter Pan or “The Boy Who Wouldn’t Grow Up” by James Barrie premiered in London December 27 1904. This is when Peter Pan was born to the world. The publicity announcement reproduced by Wikipedia says that there were presentations every afternoon at 2 and every evening at 8. The Moon reached is apogee that day at UT 17:09 so it is tightly conjunct the Black Moon on both occasions.

The Psychological Realm of the Great Mother

The symbolism of the Black Moon belongs to the Mother Archetype, especially in its manifestations of the Terrible Mother. Let me make a few short quotes from Carl Jung in “Psychological aspects of the Mother Archetype“:

Evil symbols are the witch, the dragon (or any devouring and entwining animal, such as a large fish or a serpent), the grave, the sarcophagus, deep water, death, nightmares and bogies (Empusa, Lilith, etc.)…
On the negative side the mother archetype may connote anything secret, hidden, dark; the abyss, the world of the dead, anything that devours, seduces, and poisons, that is terrifying and inescapable like fate.
The effects of the mother complex on the son may be seen in the ideology of the Cybele and Attis type: self-castration, madness, and early death.

The level at which the Black Moon works is very primal and stems from sexuality and body energies; it is related to the past, to the origins, to the “Great Mother”. It is the unreachable and infinitely fertile “primal womb”, the uroborus, the “Mother Earth” or “Great Mother”, the great all-ecompassing womb from which we all came and to which we cannot return without being swallowed and destroyed by it.

The following quote from Eric Neumann in “The Origins and History of Consciousness” can almost be read as some modern astrological descriptions of the Black Moon:

Thus the Great Mother is uroboric: terrible and devouring, beneficent and creative; a helper, but also alluring and destructive; a maddening enchantress, yet a bringer of wisdom; bestial and divine, voluptuous harlot and inviolable virgin, immemorially old and eternally young…

Jung divided the “mother complex” as it manifests in women in 4 different types (which I always related to the 4 “big four” traditional asteroids). The Black Moon incarnates several aspects of what Jung calls “the overdeveloped eros”, which can manifest like, for example, a tendency toward “the unscrupulous wrecking of marriages”. It often is the reaction against the purely instinctive and all-devouring “thrall of nature” mother:

The reactive intensification of the daughter’s eros is aimed at some man who ought to be rescued from the preponderance of the female-maternal element in his life… (id.)

The Black Moon is a reactive point, never a point of integration. As such, it can cause strong identifications or very powerful projections of unconscious emotions, which may not be recognized as such. The Black Moon always works at this reactive level.

NOTE: “reaction formation” is defined as “an internal defense mechanism in which a no longer gratifiable motive (or one gratifiable only under threat of punishment) is replaced by a motive at the other end of the existing continuum” [ref.:“Dictionary of Psychology”, Vol. 2, p.907, ed. Eysenck, Arnold and Meili, Fontana/Collins, 1975])

Powerlessness and abuse suffered in early life can create very strong reaction formations that make people “hate” their own vulnerability and feelings, and this can manifest outwardly as feelings against those who show these traits. All this can be very complicated, “twisted”, and dark. Sexuality is often the playground of unconscious reactions of this type, and the more negative or demonic traits of the Black Moon can be explained this way (and are often, in literature).

NOTE: the case of the russian composer Pyotr Il’yich Tchaikovsky illustrates this (Sun 16,36 Taurus – Mars 15,59 Taurus – Black Moon 16,45 Scorpio). An opposition to the Sun signals to a fundamental split. This is dramatized in his “Swan Lake” ballet: the evil black magician (Baron von Rothbart) is the Black Moon, whose spell has enslaved Princess Odette and her maidens transforming them into a non-human form. Only at night (Black Moon) can Odette temporarily return to her human form. The spell blocks Odette’s womanhood, whose loneliness and innocent beauty is represented by the Swan-Unicorn (Black Moon). The fundamental healthy self-expression of the Sun is blocked by the spell of the Black Moon. This is an excellent description of a castrating mother complex. The terrible mother is a spider in whose web the self is trapped. This web can be seen as the region of the apogee-perigee; it is a pit where womanhood is all-powerful. She is no longer woman but either a goddess or a castrating witch, a seductress who swallows and devours. The apogee-perigee axis is like a vortex, the empty focus of the orbit “swallows” life, like the phallic mother. Mars appears in Tchaikovsky inverted. It has turned into its opposite: the refusal to act openly and express creatively the self-assertive anger of the solar hero (Prince Siegfried). This self-assertion happens only in Tchaikovsky’s music, full of sparks and colors, but the self always surrenders to the childhood melancholy, the lost maternal idyl, which is deadly for the adult and devours him. The Sun and Mars surrender, and instead of valiantness there is inaction. The heroic is reserved for the music, for the fight of Siegfried with the black magician… but he is fighting for death. Odette felt betrayed and was dying without hope, and Siegfried surrenders to the night in an embrace of love with the swan, his impossible love, the self-absorbent Unicorn. Woman (mother) swallowed man, who returns to the womb.

Lilith

Astrologers traditionally identify the Black Moon and empty focus with legendary Lilith of jewish and babylonian folklore. This legend is inextricably tied to the history of human consciousness and the Book of Genesis. It springs from the story of the creation of man and woman, which is the story of the primal and spiritual origins of sexuality as the fundamental experience out of which human consciousness evolved.

There are several versions of the origins of Lilith’s legend that need not be mentioned. But there are two figures or characters in the orthodox text of Genesis 1-2 that are consistently ignored even though they perfectly reflect the main themes (or the two polarities) of the symbolism of Lilith described in these pages: these characters are, literally, “Isha” and “Layla”.

The Hebrew text says that, when God separated woman from Adam’s side, Adam called her “Isha”, because it was taken from “Ish” (the creative spirit of man). Eve appears only much later, after man and woman are thrown out of Paradise. While in Paradise, woman was simply called “Isha”. We may think that this “Isha” is Lilith. But etymologically, besides the babylonian references to a demon, the word “Lilit” is related to the Hebrew “layla” (“LYLH”), which means “night”. The text mentions it explicitly when it says: “And God called the light “Yom” (day), and the darkness he called “Layla” (LYLH = Night).

Isha and Layla are polar aspects of the same principle, Isha belonging to the light in Paradise before the fall of man, which according to Genesis 2 was covered by a dense fog, and Layla incarnating the “Queen of the Night”, demoness or not. Isha as the primordial woman twin-soul of man (remember the 2 foci) that never left Paradise and is protected by the fire of the Cherubim, like Wagner’s Brunhilde is protected by the magic fire in the mountain peak.

The poem “Nocturno III” or “One Night”, by the colombian José Asunción Silva (27 Nov 1865 – 24 May 1896), describes the correct imagery of both “Layla” and “Isha” with majestic beauty, passion, and musicality. It was written after his sister Elvira died January 11 1891 at half past 12 in the night, at the age of 21. (Transiting Black Moon at that moment was squaring Silva’s natal Venus-Pluto “eros-thanatos” opposition). Heriberto Yépez words on the poem describe the Black Moon: “It is a chant to the night and to the obscure unity of a mysterious duality that does not lead to death, but is death itself”. José A. Silva shot himself in the heart sometime after midnight the night of May 23-24 1896, and was found dead in the morning by his family while the Moon was exactly at perigee (6:36 LMT).

Nocturno III

José Asunción Silva (1865-1896)
Translation by Luis Zalamea Borda

It was evening,
a night filled with perfumes, whispers, and the music of bird’ wings;
A night
when fantastic glowworms flickered in the nuptial, humid shadows,
at my side, ever so slowly, close to me, listless and silent
as if prey to premonition of the most stinging pain
that inflamed the deep secret of your fibers,
over the path filled with flowers that stretched across the plain,
you were walking;
and the full moon
in the sky, so infinite, so unfathomable, spread its light.
And your shadow,
lean and languid,
and my shadow,
by the moon’s rays silhouetted
on the path’s sorrowful gravel,
were united
and were one,
but one long and lonely shadow,
but one long and lonely shadow,
but one long and lonely shadow…
Tonight,
desolate; my soul
by your death so bitterly pained and anguished,
torn from you by time, distance and the grave
upon that infinite blackness
where our voice cannot be heard,
lone and mute,
on the path I kept on walking…
And dogs braying at the moon came to my ears,
at the pale face of the moon,
and the croaking of the frogs.
I felt cold; the same chill that in your chamber
numbed your precious cheeks, hands and brow
amidst the snow-white linens
of the funereal shroud.
It was frost out of the tomb, it was the ice of the dead,
and the chillness of the void…
And my shadow,
sketched out by the paleness of the moon,
walked alone
walked alone,
walked alone upon the prairie;
and your shadow, lean and graceful,
pure and languid,
as in that warm spring evening long ago,
as in that night filled with perfumes, whispers and the music of bird’ wings,
approached me and walked with mine,
approached me and walked with mine,
approached me and walked with mine… Oh embraced shadows!
Oh the shadows of the bodies mingling with the shadows of the souls!
Oh shadows that search each other in tear-filled and somber nights!

NOTE: Edgar Allan Poe’s short story “Ligeia” was published according to Wikipedia September 18 1838. If we use as reference UT 12:00 (Moon 21,09 Virgo – Sun 25,06 Virgo – Apogee 28,48 Virgo), we see the Moon approaching its apogee, but there was a New Moon just before. The New Moon was exact at UT 20:45 in 25,27 Virgo, and the exact moment of the lunar apogee was the next day at UT 9:26. Between the Sun and the Black Moon were Mercury and Jupiter (Mercury 26,58 Virgo rx. – Jupiter 28,17 Virgo). One can say that the Moon is collecting the light of the Sun, Mercury, and Jupiter and taking or “dragging” them into the Apogee. The late Axel Harvey’s suggestion to call the lunar apogee “Charybdis”, a whirlpool, comes to mind. This would explain the tendency of the Black Moon to demand wider orbs when dealing with the Sun’s critical aspects to it (0-90-180).

Haunting mythopoetic Black Moon lyrics in the song “Hijo de la Luna” by the spanish tecno-pop group “Mecano”. It was included as track #3 in the album “Entre el Cielo y el Suelo”, released according to Wikipedia June 17 1986 (Sun 26 Gem, Apogee 29 Gem).

The actress Helena Bonham Carter provides another Black Moon example but involving the Sun; she was born in London May 26 1966, birth time unknown, but it is not needed: at UT 0h May 26 the Sun and the Apogee were separated by 0,30′ from the perfect square, and at UT 0h the next day the separation was 2,02′ still within a narrow orb even in the extreme, unlikely case. One of the less known and best movies starred by her is “Till Human Voices Wake Us”, filmed and released in Australia December 12 2002 according to IMDB. That day there was an exact Sun-Black Moon opposition in the afternoon at 16:05 Sidney time in 20,08 Pisces-Virgo. The dream that is not a dream, the mysterious woman that exists but doesn’t exist, the pain, guilt, and shame, the otherworldly beauty and the love atonement, the film’s pace, acting, and photography are like a long slow song or poem or dream, like the singing of sirens as suggested by the title, taken from the last line of T.S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”. I will quote the whole last strophe:

I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.
I do not think that they will sing to me.
I have seen them riding seaward on the waves
Combing the white hair of the waves blown back
When the wind blows the water white and black.
We have lingered in the chambers of the sea
By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown
Till human voices wake us, and we drown.

Demons

The traditional Lilith is a nocturnal demoness. Its traditional negative associations are often rejected as being the result of the judeo-christian patriarcal and ego ideologies. But there are still many demons inside of both men and women, and the world of the night with all its mystery and magic still exists, although in areas and ways different from those of the past.

Demons, castration, darkness, vampirism, succubi and incubi, nocturnal animals like owls, bats, moths, and all the other “terrible mother” manifestations associated with the evil aspect of Lilith are all part of the psyche of men and women, appearing today in different guises, such as the experience known as “alien abduction”, and the Black Moon is an excellent astrological and astronomical symbol of them. All the modern psychological interpretations of this ancient demonical and magical lore are different faces of the same phenomenon.

NOTE: An example of a modern and familiar version of succubi is the case of Whitley Strieber, the author of “Communion” (Mars = 1,25 Tau – Apogee = 2,36 Sco – Moon 3,33 Leo). The moment of the exact square was 1h23m before birth in 2,48 Leo-Sco, so the temporal orb is 0,45′. A similar theme is found in the movie “The Fourth Kind”, released November 6 2009. The Moon reached apogee very late that day around midnight in Alaska where the action of the movie takes place (UT 7:34). In the movie we see owls becoming a defensive screen to protect the psyche against these ghastly creatures. This brings to mind the “screech owl” translation of Issaiah 34:14, the only direct mention of the term “Lilith” in the Bible. The tv and cinema producer and science fiction writer Rod Serling (Sun 3,17 Cap – Apogee 3,50 Cancer rx.) gained popularity as the host and main writer of “The Twilight Zone”. He provides strong abundant ilustration of the world of the Black Moon experienced from a solar perspective.

It is easy to see how the Black Moon symbolism is tied to sexual abuse and paedophilia, including the tendency to “close our eyes” to it, to keep it hidden or secret. The whole symbol of the empty focus can be visualized opening and closes periodically, during the 0-90-180 critical aspects of the Sun or at the times of lunar apogee and perigee. The open eye is like a door into a world of terror, but it can also bring disclosure, and it can strengthen the Sun making it more “awake”. In the most destructive cases we see the Sun destroyed, converted into an empty carcass. In those cases the Moon “spills over” or spreads like cancer, it has lost its form. Sexual abuse and solar disintegration is shown in the case of Ron Jeremy (Sun 21,30 Pisces – Apogee 22,02 Virgo). The case of father Marcel Maciel Degollado (=beheaded, slit throat – no pun intended), founder and head of the “Legionaries of Christ” and long time protégé of the Vatican makes all other cases look pale. He was born March 10, 1920 (Sun 19 Pisces, Apogee 19 Sag). Hugh Hefner (Moon 13,37 Pisces, Apogee 16,36 Virgo) shows lunar proliferation, dispersion, dissociation, a sort of Wagner’s Tannhäuser Venusberg (The exact lunar perigee occurred 4h18m after he was born in 16,15 Pisces-Virgo so the orb can be reduced to 0,22′).

The case of Stanley Kubrick (b. 26 July 1928 – d. 7 March 1999) is unorthodox because there is no time of birth, and he died in his sleep so there is no time of death, but there is something remarkable:

Moon reached apogee 26 July 1928 at UT 12:01 (early in the morning) in 23,49 Scorpio

Moon reached apogee 7 March 1999 at UT 5:05 (late in the night) in 23,44 Scorpio

His last film was “Eyes Wide Shot” (1999), a strong reference to the empty focus, and his first controversial film was “Lolita” (1962), 1-year away from the midpoint in time of his whole life; both are portals into the world of the Black Moon. According to IMDB the premiere of “Lolita” took place June 13 1962 in New York City. Using UT 22:00 as simple reference (Sun 22,26 Gem – Apogee 19,13 Virgo), we see a square with 3-degrees of separation that could be considered symbolical or descriptive. But if we look at the aspect from the temporal point of view, we find that the exact square happened less than a day before on June 12 at UT 22:03 in 21,26 Gem-Vir, reducing the orb to 1,00′.

NOTE: The Sun is looking squarely at the Black Moon in astrologer, psychologist, and writer Liz Greene (Sun 11,33 Virgo, Apogee 11,16 Sag). In my critique of archetypal and jungian astrology I mention that “Since she doesn’t use the osculating Black Moon –the primordial uroboric lunar uterus– which is in exact square with the Sun in her birth chart, she will look for its symbols somewhere else like in Neptune and Pluto, and her personal way of interpreting symbols will show a tendency to be “black-moonish”, encaved in the uterine depths of the primordial lunar unconscious”. In the case of singer David Cassidy (1950-2017) the Sun appears to be swallowed by the apogee (Sun 22,08 Aries – Apogee 22,43 Aries) but we see it standing-up at the end showing integrity and honesty despite the physical self-destruction. He died of liver and kidney failure due to a life-long abuse of alcohol. In the documentary David Cassidy: The Last Session, he is quoted just days before his death saying: “I lied about my drinking. I did this to myself to cover up the sadness and the emptiness”. Difficult to classify and comment is the actor Sean Penn (Moon 5,43 Cancer – Apogee 6,58 Cancer). The lunar apogee happened 2h45m (7,04 Cancer) after he was born. His direct and uncompromising involvement in social activism points to the sociological side of the Black Moon (see below). This is his personal passion, but often the Moon at apogee becomes inflated, absorbing, perturbing, polarizing, hostile, intolerant, pointing to reactive formations regarding vulnerability, weakness, femininity, abuse, etc., and the actor –though never formally accused– has not been free from this type of controversy in the course of his career.

Emancipation

The interpretative richness of the Black Moon comes from the symbolism of the empty focus (the kenofocus or “other” focus), not from the apogee, but this richness is heavily limited or impaired when we identify it exclusively with the “Lilith” character or archetype. This identification is an excess, an “abuse” of Lilith, because there is a lot more to the Black Moon than Lilith, and there is a lot more to Lilith that the Black Moon.

The Black Moon and the archetype Lilith are not the same thing. Lilith extends beyond the lunar realm and transcends it; it can manifest in different astrological factors, planets or asteroids. As long as we keep Lilith constrained to the Black Moon, she remains chained to the lunar realm. As long as Lilith is constrained to the Black Moon, she will be chained and enraged, because Lilith as an archetype extends to other planetary realms far beyond the lunar orbit, and being chained in the Black Moon makes her suffer without end.

One way of seeing its more negative manifestations, thinking on the neglect and emptiness of the empty focus, is that the Black Moon is a reaction against the reproductive and mothering role which chains women and leaves them empty as individuals. Lilith can be seen as the polar opposite of this kind of woman, which, in turn, is a reaction against all sorts of forces that try to castrate a person.

Lilith is related to the emancipation of women from their womb destiny, their sexual liberation. But the Black Moon is a reactive point astronomically, a point where a lot of energy can concentrate but cannot integrate or bring liberation by itself. It is more like a pot, or a pit… it cannot be an integrated woman. The Black Moon is not a dynamic point, It is only reactive, an accumulator or attractor. If it becomes too strong, or if a woman identifies with the Lilith archetype too much, then it becomes a point of rejection and negation, like a no-Moon, an anti-Moon.

Black Moon Lilith could be seen as the point where a woman’s destiny in chains consequence of her womb or of her enslaved sexuality is trying to engulf her, and the result may be either the acceptance of her own ancestral past and its creative transcendence by “jumping” into the more dynamic world of the dark asteroids like the centaurs, or the surrender to the neurotic identification with the Lilith archetype.

When Lilith liberates herself fom these chains, she leaves the Black Moon (the apogee-empty focus) behind, or in other words: when you liberate Lilith, it is no longer the Black Moon. Mythological archetypes tend to propagate throughout different planetary realms and are never contained by any single planet or point alone.

The astronomical counterpart of the earth is the Sun, not the empty focus of the lunar orbit. Integration is always in the direction of the Sun. The Black Moon is never fully alive and awake, that is the Sun. A person can become solar and liberate Lilith, but the Black Moon remains living forever with its ambiguity.

NOTE: A very strong but doomed Sun seems to be the case of Mariana Pineda (1804-1831). She is a national symbol of freedom in Spain. Her trial and public execution at the age of 26, plus her beauty, endurance and inteligence, made her a timeless heroine of mythical stature. She was executed early in the morning of May 26 1831 in Granada. If we use UT 7:00 a.m. as reference, we find Moon 0,10 Sag – Apogee 2,03 Sag – Sun 4,14 Gem. That day at UT 11:49 the exact lunar apogee occurred in 2,33 Sag while there was a full moon that was exact at UT 15:57 in 4,36 Sag. The Sun then, was in opposition to the Black Moon (temporal orb 1,02′) and the Moon was in conjuction with it, both happening during the full moon. There seems to be a fundamental split between Sun and Moon, one is against the other, she is at one time the Sun and at another time the Moon. The split Sun becomes all men, and the Moon becomes all women. The case of J. W. Goethe (Sun 5,17 Virgo – Apogee 4,58 Virgo) brings to mind his “Faust” as well as his theory of color that show the creative blending of light (Sun) and darkness (Apogee) (like Hahnemann below). Another powerful creative Sun is the case of Victor Hugo (Sun 7,39 Pisces – Apogee 6,27 Virgo). The Black Moon is showing here its identification with social injustice and the dispossessed (Les Misérables) –see “Sociological Aspects” below– but also with what the Britannica quotes as “his ‘panic contemplation’ of the universe, the numinous fear that penetrates his sombre poems ‘La Fin de Satan’ and ‘Dieu’”.

The Black Moon is permeating the work of painter Sulamith Wülfing (Sun 20,52 Cap – Apogee 18,04 Libra rx.). The square here seems to be giving a strong pull to the oherwise serene beauty of the Sun, as is evident in her paintings. The nocturnal motifs come clearly from the Black Moon, but they contain a spiritual melancholy, an inner radiance or glow coming from the Sun. Perhaps this is shown in the birth Sun disentangling itself from the Black Moon square. The orb is 2,48′ and the aspect is doubly separating, the exact square having occurred the day before at UT 15:47 in 19,45 Lib-Cap, which means that the orb is reduced dynamically to 1,07′, instead of 2,48′. A simple glance at her paintings shows that the Black Moon is more present than the purely spatial orb would suggest, but her work is an instructive ilustration of “luminous” unequivocal Black Moon themes that never surrender to the dark.

In the case of Samuel Hahnemann (Sun 20,43 Aries – Apogee 23,22 Aries), the orb is 2,39′ and the Apogee is moving fast, so the aspect is separating. However, the Moon is in 13,18 Aries indicating that a New Moon and the time of the lunar apogee are close to the moment of birth. We have:

april 9 UT 19:43 Sun-Apogee conjunction in 19,36 Aries

april 10 UT 23:05 Hahnemann is born

april 11 UT 15:32 New Moon in 21,23 Aries

april 12 UT 02:31 Moon reaches apogee in 27,10 Aries

The 4 events occurred in a lapse of 2.3 days. Birth occurred 27 hours after the solar conjunction and 27 hours before the time of apogee, which in turn coincided within half-a-day on both sides of the New Moon. All this gives weight and defining power to the solar conjunction, and shows how Hahnemann’s whole life-work can be seen as the dialectics between the health and integrity of the Sun and the dark forces of sickness that want to destroy that integrity. The “Similia Similibus Curentur” is literally the blending of the Sun and the Black Moon, the darkness cooperating with the light, while the darkness is reflected still today in the constant accusations of quackery by the medical establishment.

Sociological Aspects

Each astrological factor has its own scope, it belongs to its own sphere or realm. The “emancipation” of Lilith, symbolically, is Lilith being liberated from the realm of the Black Moon, which is its cage, and the traditional, habitual emphasis on the “lilithian” associations of the Black Moon has prevented astrologers from developing the social and collective meaning of this point, so accurately described by Jung’s “Great Mother” archetype: our ancestral and primal relationship with “Mother Earth”.

The Black Moon represents the black virgins of ancestral folklore, it is the primitive mass consciousness, the mass movements that stem from one’s primordial, telluric relationship with the nurturing and venerable “dark earth”, as well as with our ancestral mythical past. Sociologically, it speaks of our primitive relationship to the earth; it represents the peasants, the poor, the masses anchored to their past and depending directly on what the earth or a spiritual past can give them.

As the closest point there is to the Earth, the Black Moon-Empty focus shows what is more basic or fundamentally “raw” in humanity: grief, poverty, injustice, vulnerability, blood, sexuality. The Black Moon exists in a primitive ecological landscape, the foundational or mythical “dreamtime” of the womb or of a collective, ancestral past. It is the animistic, magical jungle where we re-unite with the womb, returning to the bosom of “Mother Earth”.

One of the best illustrations of this dimension of the Black Moon can be seen in the personality and struggle of the Mexican revolutionary Emiliano Zapata (b. Aug 8 1879 / d. April 10 1919): his birth Sun was less that 1-degree from the exact square to the apogee/perigee axis (Sun 15,32 Leo – Apogee 16,22 Tau). The Black Moon is also focal at his death (Sun 19,56 Aries – Apogee 21,29 Libra). Consider the following written by Alfredo Krauze in Biografía del Poder: Emiliano Zapata (Mexico, FCE, 1987):

“Zapata didn’t fight for ‘the little lands’ –as Villa used to say– but for Mother Earth, and from Her. His struggle takes roots because his struggle is roots. This is why none of his alliances remains. Zapata doesn’t want to go anywhere: he wants to remain. His purpose is not to open the doors of progress… but to close them: to reconstruct the mythical map of a human ecological system where each tree and each hill were there with a purpose; a world alien to any dynamism that is not the vital dialog with the earth.”

Here lies one of the most fundamental and most neglected aspects of Black Moon symbolism. Continue quoting Enrique Krauze:

“Zapata doesn’t come out of his land because he doesn’t know and fears ‘the other’: the central power is always perceived as an intruder, as ‘a prying nest of traitors and the greedy.’ His vision is not active or willed, like that of all religions marked by the father, but passive and animistic, marked by the mother. His war of resistance exhausts itself. During the truce of 1915, instead of gaining strength outwards, he goes inward in a search of the lost order, to the point of wanting to rebuild it with the memory of the elders. It is not a productive map what he is after, it is the bosom of Mother Earth and its constellation of symbols.”

This sociological aspect was brilliantly presented in the film “Viva Zapata” (1952) by Elia Kazan (b. 7 Sept 1909, Sun and Black Moon both in 14 Virgo), whose life and cinematic production “incarnates” the Black Moon-Sun dialectics of a very creative Sun. The script was written by John Steinbeck (Sun 8,26 Pisces, Apogee 6,48 Sag) who 10 years later was awarded the Nobel Prize. What the Britannica says of Steinbeck can be applied to both: “(his) reputation rests mostly on the naturalistic novels with proletarian themes… it is in these works that his building of rich symbolic structures and his attempts at conveying mythopoeic and archetypal qualities in his characters are most effective“. This is a reflection of a strengthened Sun giving voice to the Black Moon.

A strong Sun is found in the writings of Gabriel García Márquez (Sun 15,00 Pisces – Apogee 17,11 Virgo). His “fantastic realism” can be described as an organic amalgamation of Latin American socio-historical reality and the magical and mythical world of the ancestral past (Black Moon), experienced from a detached or dis-aggregating perspective of isolation. The exact solar opposition occurred that day at 11:18 p.m. in 15,38 Pisces so the orb can be reduced to 1,33′.

Another example is the Black Moon’s association with “Our Lady” or the Virgin Mary, as shown in the Inauguration of the Second Vatican Council the morning of October 11, 1962 (Sun 17,32 Libra – Apogee 17,21 Libra) and reflected in the official document “Gaudium et Spes” (‘Joy and Hope’: “The joys and the hopes, the griefs and the anxieties of the men of this age, especially those who are poor or in any way afflicted…”).

A different angle is provided by the so-called “Sibley” chart of July 4, 1776 (16:49 LMT). This chart is only 23 minutes short of the exact time of the lunar perigee, i.e., the Moon in the chart is in exact opposition to the true Black Moon (Moon 26,58 Aquarius, Black Moon 27,07 Leo), suggesting a core alignment constantly generating dissociation or systemic dispersion or contradiction of what the Black Moon and the Moon (“we the people”) represent.

We can observe here some consistent negative sociological manifestations of the Black Moon which are quite universal and easy to identify all over the world:

1-) black slavery, extermination of Indians, stealing of Indian land, systemic racism, the doctrine of “Manifest Destiny”
2-) the fear of Communism, exemplified in Elia Kazan’s biography (see above) or –more generally– fear of “aliens”
3-) the punishment of poor or weaker nations who dare to oppose them, the “Monroe Doctrine”
4-) the refusal to acknowledge evil inside, projecting all of it to others or to “outsiders” (i.e. “terrorism”)
5-) the denial of the Moon, their own poor and vulnerable (e.g. health care system –see “Gaudium et Spes”)

As is the norm in Mundane or Political Astrology, the negative manifestations come fast and easy. In all of these, the foundational Moon-Black Moon miss-alignment can be seen.

Juan Antonio Revilla

San José, Costa Rica. June 2003.

Revised and expanded Sep 2023

APPENDIX 1

Back in 1980 when I was 23, I once felt the visit or presence of a being that I knew was Lilith, it felt as if the whole room was filled with darkness, as if the momentary deep darkness was a being visiting briefly. I immediately wrote the following:

Lilith

Mensajera del miedo,

de corazones sangrantes,

de la penumbra colgados,

sin razón de ser.

Mensajera del tiempo,

nacida del océano,

surgida de las olas,

como medusa en el anochecer.

Mensajera del pasado,

habitante solitaria

de remotos mausoleos,

de la ruinas de campanas gigantescas

donde juegan los niños olvidados.

APPENDIX 2: data sources

19 charts from Astrodatabank (AA,A)

9 no time needed, only date is enough

8 explained in the text

Alfred Tennyson ADB-A apogee 0.43

Camilo Sesto ADB-AA perigee 1.15

David Cassidy ADB-A conjunct Sun 0.35

Elia Kazan no time needed (Sun) conjunct Sun —

Emiliano Zapata no time needed (Sun) square Sun —

Enrico Fermi ADB-AA perigee 0.00

Gabriel García Márquez ADB-B (Sun) opposition Sun 2.11 (1.33)

H.P. Lovecraft ADB-A conjunct Sun 2.39 (1.08)

Helena Bonham Carter no time needed square the Sun —

Hijo de la Luna no time needed (Sun) conjunct Sun —

Hugh Hefner ADB-AA perigee 2.59 (0.22)

J.W. Goethe ADB-AA conjunct Sun 0.19

John Steinbeck no time needed (Sun) square Sun —

José Asunción Silva in the text perigee —

Liz Greene ADB-A square Sun 0.17

Ligeia in the text apogee —

Lolita in the text square Sun —

Marcel Maciel no time needed (Sun) square Sun —

Mariana Pineda, death in the text apogee, opposition Sun

Michael Jackson in the text opposition Sun —

Odilon Redon ADB-AA apogee 0.18

Peter Pan in the text apogee —

Rod Serling ADB-AA opposition Sun 0.33

Ron Jeremy ADB-A opposition Sun 0.32

Rudolf Hess ADB-A apogee 0.03

Samuel Hahnemann ADB-A conjunct Sun —

Sean Penn ADB-AA apogee 1.15

Second Vatican Council no time needed (Sun) conjunct Sun 0.11

Sibley USA chart in the text perigee 0.09

Stanley Kubrick in the text apogee —

Sulamith Wülfing ADB-A square Sun 2.48 (1.07)

Tchaikovsky no time needed (Sun) opposition Sun —

The Fourth Kind in the text apogee —

Till Human Voices Wake Us no time needed opposition Sun —

Trinity Test ADB-AA square Sun 4.19 (1.55)

Victor Hugo ADB-AA opposition Sun 1.12

Whitley Strieber ADB-AA square Moon 0.57 (0.45)

conjunct Moon = time of lunar apogee

opposition Moon = time of lunar perigee

“—” means “not applicable”

orbs are degrees.minutes

temporal orb in parenthesis

The exact times of the lunar apogee and perigee, New Moons and Sun-Apogee aspects in some of the examples are calculated with Riyal. Only lunar and solar hard aspects are considered, and in the case of the Moon only the conjunctions or opposition alignments are considered. The lunar square is accepted only when it is part of a larger picture.

About us

this is the site of Juan Antonio Revilla, from San José, Costa Rica. You will find here a revised, updated, and expanded version of some of my contributions to Astrology from 1999 to 2013 that I value the most. New material will be posted as time and God permits.