Name and Use

The lunar apogee is a standard feature of the Moon's orbit long known to astronomy; its use under the name Black Moon Lilith is a twentieth-century development in Western astrological practice, running in parallel with a French tradition that discussed the same point as the Lune Noire, attested in French astrological writing by the 1970s. The name Lilith itself entered astrology earlier still and by a stranger route: in the early twentieth century the astrologer Sepharial, the pen name of Walter Gorn Old, took up a claim by the astronomer Georg Waltemath that Earth possessed a hidden second moon, and gave that hypothetical body the name Lilith.

Waltemath's moon was never confirmed, and the observations behind it are now generally attributed to sunspots, but the name survived and was later transferred to the genuine, well documented lunar apogee point discussed here, a transfer that leaves the modern Black Moon Lilith carrying a name coined decades earlier for an entirely different, and nonexistent, object. Its glyph is a black or filled crescent set above a cross, an image that circulated in astrological texts through the later twentieth century before being formally added to the Unicode standard as its own character in 2016, cementing a single standard rendering across digital astrological software.