Lilith Enters Gemini
July 18, 2021
July 18, 2021 - April 14, 2022
Tomorrow, the spectral Black Moon Lilith moves into youthful, shapeshifting Gemini for the next nine months; jumping into, and out of, the pages of storybooks and fairy tales; moving between cartoon and caricature and something altogether more mischievous and sinister. In my imagination, I see our Lilith in the form of Peter Pan—guide, trafficker and captain of the lost boys, the babies who fall from their prams and disappear when their nurses are looking away. J.M. Barrie, his creator, describes Peter as “a free spirit, betwixt and between human and bird”, who comes in the night to visit sleeping children, and to recover his missing shadow. Lilith’s place of exile, then, is Neverland, the island of the child’s mind, mapped out “with astonishing splashes of color here and there, and coral reefs and rakish-looking craft in the offing, and savages and lonely lairs, and gnomes who are mostly tailors, and caves through which a river runs, and princes with six elder brothers, and a hut fast going to decay, and one very small old lady with a hooked nose.” In this place, we choose childhood over old age, boys over girls (with exceptions), eternity over endings, and cleverness over wisdom. Who wants to be tied down to life and love anyway? Forget the heart, forgo feelings—who needs ‘em.
We can also find Gemini Lilith in the magic mirror between Snow White and the Evil Queen, in the face of the innocent beauty that is so threatening to her stepmother. Or, in Cinderella, who manifests a Fairy Godmother, and with her, another version of herself and a life away from the ashes and the abuse. Lilith is at once alive, and dead, in Toni Morrison’s Sethe and Beloved: mother, daughter and the ghost that consumes them both. Lore, literature, and life itself, constellate this archetype wherever we find the dark twin, the outcast, or the scapegoat; the black sheep or the red-headed stepchild; the changeling switched by fairies, the child raised by wolves, or the baby delivered by the stork.
Lilith in Gemini is a champion of the misunderstood mind. She holds a space for lost, and found, children; for the gender non-conforming, the neurodivergent, the developmentally disabled, the adoptees, the non-native speakers, and the imaginary friends. Lilith asks us to look at—and when ready—to tell, our stories of grief, separation, rejection and abandonment and, given that she will be traveling with asteroid Ceres for much of this time, the particular traumas of childbirth, stillbirth, miscarriage and neonatal nightmares that so many silently live with.
Lilith in Gemini challenges us to think beyond the binary and accept a spectrum of multiple truths. She warns us not to reduce people to stock character tropes of heroes and villains, or to fall into dualistic thinking. She holds a mirror that will show us, should we look into it, where we have abandoned or rejected aspects of ourselves, relegated them to the hidden depths of our psyches, cast them out, or projected them onto others. Like Wendy reattaching Peter’s shadow, she offers us an opportunity to bring those fragments out of the closet and out from under the bed, and to make peace with the things that go bump in unconscious. The trolls, fairies, bogeymen, fairy godmothers and evil queens are all somewhere within. Hell is empty and all the devils are here—inside each one of us, asking to be seen, accepted, and loved.
