Embracing Black Moon Lilith In Virgo

Batten down the hatches, because there’s a new power, and she’s going to blow this town apart. From October 4, 2023 through June 30, 2024, Lilith — the primeval archetype of exiled female sexuality, avenged gaslighting, and demonic retribution — enters Virgo, the sacred temple of the body and its boundaries. Woof. Wherever Lilith goes in your chart, she commands retribution and revenge, and as she enters the realm of perfection and judgment, she’s set to bring everyone down with her.

Lilith has roved and ravaged since at least the third millennium B.C.E, a dark phantasm wandering the back alleys and latrines of Sumerian, Hittite, Egyptian, and Israelite mythology. To some, she was a wind spirit, to others, like the ancient Israelites, she was known as a “wanton night hag,” stealing men’s seed to raise an army of demon spawn. Hell yes, girl.

In the age of what social scientist Riane Eisler describes as “dominator cultures,” every patriarchal society requires a female villain, an effigy of the unrestrained whore-fatale-crone-harpy to fear and condemn. That’s Lilith. Biblical mythology casts her as Adam’s first mate in the Garden of Eden, who demands parity with her male mate, only to be ejected from paradise and launched into the hostile wilderness.

Astrologers denote Black Moon Lilith as the farthest point of the moon’s orbit — or apogee — when the femme archetype is thrust into the outer reaches of the void. The moon reflects the light of the sun, and bears our history and emotions…but where does all that pain go? In the Zohar, the ur-text of Kabbalah, Lilith is said to bear “the resentment of the moon’s diminishment,” reflecting and refracting those abject feelings, forces, and histories which have been banished from the light of day.

VIRGO ESSENTIALS

Virgo gets its name from the virgin archetype, which dates back to the vestal virgins and high priestesses, women who acted as vessels of the divine, their bodies honored as sacrosanct temples of the gods. Even in our loaded contemporary context, virgins — and, really, all women — must still negotiate their value, based on gender, economics, and culture. Are you for sale? Who sets the terms? What is your value? Virgo reconciles our self-worth with the ideals and expectations of our society. Perfectionism looms, leading to oppressive standards, unforgivable self-recrimination, and, for those who can embrace an outsider identity, glorious retribution.

BLACK MOON LILITH IN VIRGO

If, say, you’re a living person with any sort of talent, service, or creative gift to offer the world, you have been taken advantage of. You have been thrown to the wolves of a gig economy. You’ve been forced to peddle your wares on social media, making yourself into a zoo animal for the specious promise of a following — whatever that means. You have been underpaid, overworked, and disregarded. You have sold yourself short while whoring yourself out.

If, say, you are a living person who wishes to claim autonomy over their body, you have been violated. Your gender, reproductive rights, and sexual expression are threats to the state. Your appearance is up for constant revision, under the delusive standards of a multibillion dollar wellness industry, which rephrases body fascism into capitalist self-care.

Lilith wants to know: How are you going to fight back? Virgo is a sign overflowing with complicated, often self-defeating icons, great talents who suffered like martyrs under the caprice of a cruel world, or under the lash of their own demons. (Think Amy Winehouse, Keith Flint, and Michael Jackson.) And yet, this is a sign of great mavericks, of hardasses who bore rejection and debasement which would only spur them on further: to set the terms of their power, to make the industry crawl on its knees for them, to erect boundaries which would become monuments.

Lilith’s Virgo incarnations include Fiona Apple, Shirley Manson, Aimee Mann, Joan Jett, and Florence Welch, elemental powerhouses who wield their imperfections as flaming swords, who rip their hair and twirl with madness and dance with agony. Lilith is Jada Pinkett Smith in Set It Off, a woman who chooses the truth of annihilation over the illusion of a happy ending. She is, rather delightfully, Ludacris, tearing through the streets with a crew of pink ladies in “Get Back,” demanding that his boundaries are respected — or else. Put her down, and she’ll bring you down with her, into the molten lava of the underworld. She can bear the heat of rage, and the bitter cold of rejection, readying herself for her next comeback, and her next. Can you?

YOUR WORK WITH LILITH

It’s time for an ugly accounting. How and where have you been sold into bondage, or sold for a fraction of your worth? How have you compromised your intrinsic, divine gifts for public consumption? As media further caves in and our social reality is further negotiated, only those who have restored power to their bodies will have the will and authority to endure. Do you understand that you’re an engine, a force, a work of art?

Saturn is in Pisces, inspiring conversations about boundaries. If you buy into the deluded wisdom from the current moment, then you are the victim, and anyone who dares cross a line is toxic, to be shunned and exorcised. But by indulging this reactivity, you make yourself into a judgmental God, and anyone deemed imperfect into a new Lilith. Don’t fall for it. None of us is a lamb to the slaughter — all of us consume as much as we are consumed. You will have to reckon with any contracts of self-betrayal which you willingly entered, and own the ways you’ve participated in mutual harm. What pain of your own — or of others — did you force down for the sake of productivity or perfectionism? This is where the complex musings of Fiona Apple and Florence Welch will be essential.

This isn’t something to be talked over. It demands a thrashing. Take the Prodigy’s Keith Flint, Garbage’s Shirley Manson, Oasis’ Liam Gallagher, and even Kim Petras, with her Halloween album Turn Off the Light, as your initiatory masters, and get your head banging. Feel the rage in your body, Virgo’s domain. Sweat it out, let it erupt, and don’t bother making it into a beautiful post for others to smile over. Give yourself permission to be abject.

If you embrace Lilith in Virgo, you’ll be able to claim responsibility for your part in the past, confront others for what they’ve done, step up to what you’re worth, and know you have the guts to bite back when they try to muzzle you. And you’ll be done playing along, acting perfect to win over approval. You’ll be real, unleashed, and we’ll all come to our knees to witness your power.