Black Moon Lilith: The Lunar Apogee

Black Moon Lilith is not a body. In its usual form it is the lunar apogee, the point at which the Moon's elliptical orbit carries it furthest from the Earth, or more precisely the empty second focus of that ellipse, which lies in the same direction. It completes a circuit of the zodiac in about nine years. There are several versions in use and they do not agree: the mean apogee follows a smoothed average motion, while the true or osculating apogee wobbles considerably and can appear to move backwards, and charts calculated with one can differ from the other by several degrees. A separate and unrelated Lilith is the asteroid 1181 Lilith, and there was also a claimed dark moon of the Earth named Lilith by Walter Gorn Old in the early twentieth century which does not exist. Anyone comparing readings should establish which Lilith is meant.

Walter Gorn Old, who wrote under the pen name Sepharial and was a prominent member of the Theosophical Society, proposed his hypothetical dark moon in the early twentieth century partly on the strength of unconfirmed nineteenth-century visual reports of a second body near the Moon, none of which has ever been substantiated by later observation; the object is now understood not to exist, and Sepharial's own later writings show him treating the point as a symbolic or hypothetical construction more than as a literal claim about an undiscovered body, a nuance often lost in later popular restatements of his work.