Dark Moon Lilith

Definition

Dark Moon Lilith is a hypothetical second moon of Earth — not the same thing as the more widely used Black Moon Lilith (the Moon's mean lunar apogee), and not the same thing as asteroid 1181 Lilith, discovered in 1927. The English astrologer Sepharial (Walter Gorn Old) gave this hypothetical body the name Lilith in his 1918 book *The Science of Foreknowledge*, reporting it as a moon a German astronomer had claimed to discover — a claim mainstream astronomy never confirmed. Holden (2006) records the case as a caution about hypothetical bodies in astrology.

In Tradition

Modern Western practice treats the three "Liliths" — Dark Moon Lilith, Black Moon Lilith, and asteroid 1181 Lilith — as entirely separate calculations that happen to share a name. James Holden puts it bluntly: "Plainly, these are two entirely different 'Liliths' with the same name." Dark Moon Lilith was popularised by Ivy M. Goldstein-Jacobson's constructed American ephemeris, which gives it a steady motion of 3°02' a day and a period of 118.68 days — a profile matching no body astronomy recognises.

In Practice

Astrologers who use Dark Moon Lilith find it either from Goldstein-Jacobson's ephemeris — the standard American convention — or from the European convention, which identifies Lilith with the lunar apogee (period about 3231.48 days, daily motion about 0°06'41"). The two conventions place the same point differently, so any practical use has to state which calculation it means. The body has no classical, Hellenistic, or medieval-Arabic precedent; it is a late-19th to early-20th-century Western hypothesis. Use of it varies: some astrologers read Dark Moon Lilith alongside Black Moon Lilith and asteroid 1181 as one "Lilith cluster" exploring shadow, refusal, and disowned material, while others set the hypothetical body aside entirely on observational grounds. Holden lists it next to the eight Hamburg-School trans-Neptunians as a case of the computer era turning out non-empirical chart points, and calls the Dark Moon "supposed" — posited, but never astronomically confirmed.

Historical Origin

Sepharial (Walter Gorn Old) first named the hypothetical second moon Lilith in *The Science of Foreknowledge* (1918). Ivy M. Goldstein-Jacobson's *The Dark Moon Lilith in Astrology* (1961) supplied an American ephemeris and interpretive treatment. James Herschel Holden's *A History of Horoscopic Astrology* (AFA 2nd ed. 2006), pp. 206-207, 214, 292, separates it from Black Moon Lilith — "two entirely different 'Liliths' with the same name" — and lists it among the late-20th-century hypothetical chart points. No classical or medieval precedent.

Etymology

Origin: Hebrew. Meaning: Lîlîṯ (לִילִית) — Hebrew apocryphal night-figure; in modern astrological usage the name was applied to a hypothetical second moon by Sepharial in 1918.

Further Reading

• James Herschel Holden, A History of Horoscopic Astrology
• Sepharial (Walter Gorn Old), The Science of Foreknowledge
• Kelley Hunter, Living Lilith