Astrologer Laura Craig

Lilith Enters Taurus

Frida Kahlo “The Wounded Deer”

October 22, 2020 - July 18, 2021

The Black Moon Lilith ingressed into Taurus last Wednesday, where she will remain until July of next year. The shift from Aries (a Mars-ruled fire sign where the Sun exalts) to Taurus (a Venus-ruled earth sign where the Moon exalts) is a dramatic one, in any case. And as the BML is not a planet itself but a phenomenon of our planet’s relationship to our Moon—the telltale heart of an unseen dark earthly twin—we are, with this transit, calling up some very old and shadowy stories indeed. We are entering the realm of the dark lunar Feminine, where the taproot extends deep into history, culture, and the fabric of our DNA, and has branches into the psyche, regardless of gender.

When I feel into Lilith in Taurus from a mythical perspective, I think of La Llorona, the wailing woman in white of Latin American lore, who roams the waterways in search of her lost children. Or, I think of the Welsh Rhiannon, falsely accused of infanticide and reduced to a beast of burden. Or, her cognate, the Irish Macha, who, abused while pregnant by her husband and the king, laid a curse upon the land for nine generations. Encoded in these myths is a vestigial memory of a time when sovereignty was bestowed on man by the Earth Goddess or the Moon Goddess, in animal form, not by the Solar mandate of a sky god. She was supplanted, and recast as villain, and the sound of her keening still echoes into the present day. 

Lilith in Taurus is asking us to look at our relationship to the land, and the ways we have betrayed the Earth Mother, or separated her from her divinity. It is the story of indigenous people, of enslaved people, of refugees and exiles, of witches and wisewomen—lost to their families, lost to history, consigned, and conscripted, to the shadows. It is mothers, fathers and children as the sacrificial bull. It is also a remembrance of our animal nature and our kinship to other species. In our forgetting, we have forced many to the brink of extinction, and the rest into the cruel life of the factory farm. Cows, like human mothers, mourn the loss of their calves, wailing sometimes for days, as most dairy farmers will tell you.

Astrologically, I interpret Black Moon Lilith as the exiled Feminine, as our internalized misogyny, as the pain that is weaponized against us, and as the monster that we create to avoid looking at ourselves. She is also a channel through which we may reclaim our personal power. In Taurus, she speaks to our relationship to labor, to greed, to exploitation, to poverty and scarcity, to our ancestral inheritance, to our possessions and to our values. She shows us the ways we have betrayed ourselves for money, or to survive, and she also shows us the way toward forgiveness of ourselves. She asks us the ways in which we stifle our voices, and encourages us to speak our truth, and to trust that we are loved. So much of our toil, so much of our grief, so much of our sorrow, is invisible to others, concealed behind stoic, ailing or angry exteriors, and this transit is an opportunity to show that pain, if and when we are ready. It is an opportunity to find the wailing woman within, and to let her tears fall, to seep into the soil and water the ancestral taproot, pouring new life into old stories, and allowing her finally to rest, in peace.


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