Lilith in the 5th House: The Lottery Winner

They say I’m a beast.

And feast on it.

When all along

I thought that’s what a woman was.

They say I’m a bitch.

Or witch. I’ve claimed

the same and never winced.

They say I’m a macha,

hell on wheels, viva-la-vulva,

fire and brimstone, man-hating, devastating,

boogey-woman lesbian.

Not necessarily,

but I like the compliment.

                                    -Excerpt from “Loose Woman” by Sandra Cisernos

Keywords for 5^th House Lilith

Miscarriages, abortions, adoption, infant death, Black Madonna, stage mothers, lullaby (word with the same root as “Lilith), beloved by demons, slave mothers, special gifts, unusual luck, sorrow through children, women are Eve, men are Adam, special knack for games or other creative pursuits

A Few Observations:

·         Incredible luck at least once

·         Eve is powerful here

·         Trust Issues – Suspicion and paranoia are part of the personality.  But so is a warm, outgoing, natural leadership style.

·         Gets a “black sheep” child

·         Accused of being phony

·         Boost for artists and writers

·         Good at games of many kinds

·         Physical appearance of Lilith

Luck

Some of these people get undeserved luck – they marry far above their station, or they inherit a property and never know what it is like to have to pay rent or a mortgage.  Frequently, these folks find a way to surround themselves with luxury, or at least a certain level of comfort, without having to work very hard for it.

Example:  George Washington

He got very lucky twice.  After his father and older brother died, he “became personally and professionally attached” to the powerful Lord Fairfax as a teenager.  At age 17, Fairfax helped him get appointed surveyor of Culpepper County, a well-paid position that allowed him to start purchasing land in Virginia.  Then, at age 27, he married a wealthy 28 year old widow, Martha Custis – the marriage instantly made him one of the most powerful planters in Virginia.

Eve

For women, this is the strongest position of Eve in the 12 Houses.  Many female natives marry dominant men and remain at least outwardly submissive in their marriages.  There is an attraction to partners who are possessive and controlling.  This can be a very co-dependent position for women.

Recall that mythic Eve needs a dominant husband, but still has a strong need for center-stage (natural energy of the 5^th House is Leo, and Leo needs attention and a stage on which to perform).  She also has trouble with her kids – her son Cain was forced to leave his family after killing his brother Abel.

“Trust Issues”

To varying degrees, an element of paranoia and suspicion shows up in the personality – what one might expect of a “lottery winner”.  This person finds it very hard to trust people outside the family, and he or she may not even trust certain family members.  They don’t encourage intimate friendships because of “trust issues”, but are frequently superb networkers with a very wide sphere of casual friends.

Lack of Authenticity

When Lilith “taints” the natural energy of the 5^th House, which is all about the pure expression of identity associated with the Sun, there is a perceived lack of authenticity.  The person gets called a “phony”, which may or may not be deserved.

Example:  Cat Stevens

He was “outed” for hypocrisy when he condoned a fatwa against Salman Rushdie for his book, “The Satanic Verses”.  He then backpedaled, saying his statement reflected his naivete as a “new Muslim”; at the time, he had only been practicing Islam for 11 years!

Men Attract Lilith Partners

This isn’t every guy with this placement.  But some men will have strong Lilith experiences, usually through a first wife or first serious girlfriend.

Example:  John Steinbeck

In the character of “Cathy”, he created one of the most chilling depictions of Lilith in his great American novel, “East of Eden”.  Many commentators suspect his first wife was the inspiration.

Example:  Keanu Reeves

His first child was stillborn, and his girlfriend died in a horrendous car accident just a few months later.

Example:  Hugh Jackman

After his wife had two miscarriages, the couple decided it was safer and easier to adopt their children.

Physical Appearance

Many natives have coloring that recalls Lilith (either very dark or red hair), no matter what sign is on the Ascendant or planets are in the 1^st House.  Many also tend to have the lithe bodies associated with Lilith.  Anne Frank had 5^th House true Lilith, and photos of her reveal the essence of Lilith as a young girl, in my opinion.

“Smoking Hot” Trophy Guys

There may be more sex symbols and “heart-throbs” among the men than in any other house in the zodiac.  5^th House BML hottys include:  George Clooney, Keanu Reeves, Hugh Jackman (People Magazine voted him “Sexiest Man Alive”), Bruce Lee, Ben Affleck, Antonio Banderas, Heath Ledger (a notable blond exception), Cat Stevens, Frank Zappa, Iggy Pop, Humphrey Bogart, Howard Stern, and Burt Reynolds.

Younger readers may need to go back and look at pictures of some of these men when they were young to see how gorgeous they were.

Artists and Writers

Artists and writers seem to get a boost from this placement.  In contrast to the 6^th House, where the artist often gets an early “Big Break” from a work with Lilith themes, the 5^th House artist or writer reveals Lilith in their mature or most widely remembered works.  Examples include Marc Chagall, Guy de Maupassant, Vladimir Nabakov, and John Steinbeck.

Problems with the Kids

A lot of 5^th House Lilith natives are natural leaders with warm, outgoing personalities who don’t really begin to experience the downside of Lilith until they are old enough to get feedback from their kids.

5^th House Lilith may get a child who strongly does not “fit in” with his siblings or the rest of the family – a “black sheep”.  Most often, this indicates that one child (not necessarily the first child) will be a real “problem kid” who does not outgrow his or her “issues” in adulthood.  More positively, I have seen this in the natal charts of people who adopt a child.  The child does not “fit” the family in terms of physical appearance, and may also embrace a world-view, behavioral pattern, communication style, or possibly a political orientation different from that of the adoptive family, but this does not mean that the adoption is a disaster, although it may be more of a challenge.

Another way that this manifests is that the parent manipulates their kids, and the kids quickly figure out how to manipulate the parent, sometimes out-doing the parent at his or her own game by the time they hit middle school.  The kids are quick to spot any “phony” attitudes in the 5^th House Lilith parent, and either point it out, or find a way to exploit it. 

Example:  Bill Gates

Bill Gates has a 5^th House BML, and one can only wonder about his stated belief in giving 97% of his fortune to charity, in order to minimize the amount inherited by his children.  His children are still pretty young, but it will be interesting to see if they make their views on the issue public as they emerge into early adulthood.

Or the person decides on no kids, no way!  Some 5^th House natives feel even more restlessness with regard to children than 11^th House Lilith typically does.

Example:  George Clooney

He has $20,000 bets with various friends that he will never have any children.

Interestingly, I have not seen this Lilith placement show up much in the natal charts of parents whose children have autism or Asperger’s Syndrome.  There seems to be something else going on, and Lilith does NOT appear to be a marker for these disorders.

 Lilith in the American Experience

Something must be said about the power of Lilith in the US Sibley horoscope, where Lilith is conjunct Chiron (the wound that doesn’t heal) by less than a degree in the 3^rd House.  The picture featured at the top of this article was chosen with this in mind.

Unfortunately, I do not know the artist who did Zhinni (Black Lilith).

Jewish sources on Lilith recall an amazingly fertile woman whose children were taken away from her and killed, causing her to have even more children who suffered the same fate.  The United States had the unique misfortune of bringing this myth to life when black women had their children taken away from them and “sold down the river” for over 150 years.  These children were not killed, but they were effectively dead to their parents who never saw them again.

The fact that this conjunction occurs in the 3^rd House, with its associations of siblings and neighbors, says something about how deeply the secretive Lilith permeates the fabric of American society.

Many people have commented that the United States has a greater problem with “missing children”, the majority of whom are found dead or never found at all, than any other modern Western nation.  The author can’t help but connect this tragedy to the collective karma from our past experience with slavery – Lilith has acquired some of Chiron’s famed immortality, and she will always be a potent force on American soil.

The Lottery Winner

As with Lilith in the 10^th House, 5^th House Lilith can be a real grab-bag.  Some of these folks have children.  Some make sure they don’t.  Eve shows up strongly, and makes a lousy mom.  Adam, the alpha male, arrives, but may not find the reception he expected.  Lilith can slither and twist in this house like nobody’s business.

This makes it hard to spot underlying themes.  I started wondering if there were any in this house.

Artists and writers get a boost from this placement, but many natives have no out-of-the-ordinary creativity.    Instead, there may be a knack for games, a bit of the card shark, a love of chess, a golf scholarship to college, or just a strong need to achieve the physical appearance of Lilith.

Having kids and raising them is how most people deal with this placement, but that experience is different for everyone.  If the native had undeserved luck early in life, his or her friends may be rather glad that at least he or she didn’t turn out to be the perfect parent as well. 5^th House Lilith often has a 6^th sense about other people’s envy; hence the paranoia or problems with trust.  And then there’s the perceived phony, fake quality that others find so annoying.

One recent President fits the bill on all of the above description:

George “Dubya” Bush

The 5^th House poster-child cruised through Yale on a “C” average, and had a blast flying planes for the Texas Air National Guard, despite his low pilot aptitude test scores and irregular attendance.  In this, he was like George Clooney, who chose baseball over school, and Bill Gates, who chose computers over Harvard.  5^th House BML will put their natural luck over academic performance, the same way that 9^th House Lilith gets bored quickly in school and tries to find more shrewd options for getting ahead.

Dubya lucked out with a total Eve when he picked Laura Welsh, a woman very unlike his mother, and he credited his quiet, polished wife with “smoothing out his rough edges”.  Laura was such an Eve that she helped catalyze her husband’s latent Adam.  She gave him two sweet girls, fraternal twins.  Bubbly, blonde Jenna is the “spitting image” of her mother.  The polished and very pretty Barbara has Laura’s temperament, but she does not look like either of her parents.  It didn’t take long for people to start whispering that neither child was Dubya’s.

At least once in their career or in their life, 5^th House Lilith gets a piece of incredible, life-changing luck.  Dubya got his in 2000 against Al Gore.  Even though he had lost the popular vote by more than a half a million votes, he won the Florida recount by 537 votes out of six million votes cast (talk about hitting the lottery)!  This handed him the Electoral College vote necessary to win the Presidency.

Let’s get back to Dubya’s kids for a moment.  An echo of the ancient Adam and Eve surfaces, because Cain did not really “fit” into his family of origin, and finally became so alienated that he killed his brother and fled the land where his parents and remaining brother, Seth, were living.

His daughter Barbara developed an ultra-liberal ideology at Yale, and began publicly opposing her father’s policies while he was still President.  The White House responded by isolating itself from her, and playing up media coverage of Jenna.  For years, it was whispered that Barbara was staying out of the public eye deliberately, but it is more likely that the White House simply wanted nothing to do with her.

Jenna married a man her father could totally approve of, and produced a daughter; Barbara has been involved with spectacularly unsuitable men, and at this point it seems unlikely that her parents would rejoice in a grandchild.

Dubya may have even had his own Lilith – see my mention of Condoleeza Rice in 8th House Lilith: The Elitist.

He has also had the most low-profile retirement of any recent President, and one can only imagine how this must hurt a 5^th House Lilith who loves the stage.  To pass the time, he took up oil painting, and some of his self-portraits are surprisingly good.  Even liberal commentators rather snidely remarked that his paintings reflect the self-reflection that was so little on display when he was President.  My own feeling is that Dubya’s paintings are a quiet rebuke of all the people who called him a not-so-bright phony over the years.

One More Note on 5^th House Lilith

Just a personal note about natives (mostly women, in my experience) with this position:

No one takes their luck for granted more than 5^th House Lilith.  Talk to these natives when they are young, and they will truthfully tell you that they have never received any special breaks.  As they get older, however, they do often receive a life-changing, lucky break, whether they recognize it or not.

This is the lady who spends less than five years as a self-supporting adult before getting married to a man who pays all the bills, but who will not acknowledge that her part-time job income is “pocket money”.  Or it is the lady who remarries a wonderful man who agrees to raise a posse of children who are not his.  When this luck is either not acknowledged, or presented in a way that says, "I'm better than you", the “spoiled” aspect of Eve is often perceived by others (mostly women, in my experience).  Word to the wise.

Nobody Writes Lilith Like a 5^th House Lilith...

East of Eden by John Steinbeck

Cathy, the wife of Adam Trask, is so famous she has her own Wikipedia entry.  Her creator, John Steinbeck, outdid himself with the sociopathic Cathy, who became his most well-known character.

Young Cathy frames two boys for an attempt to rape her.  She also robs the family safe and burns down the family home while her parents are still trapped inside, killing them.  She then takes off with a pimp, and when he beats her within an inch of her life, Adam Trask steps in to save her.  His brother Charles, who senses what Cathy is, tries to discourage Adam, but Adam ignores him.

Adam marries Cathy to get her out “of her situation”, and Cathy thanks him by drugging him into a deep sleep and then has sex with Charles.  Months later, she is pregnant (it isn’t clear by whom), and tries to give herself a primitive abortion with a knitting needle.  It fails, so she has the twins, Cal and Aron, and then promptly abandons the babies and her husband. 

“East of Eden” is a great tale of Lilith, but it was pretty racy stuff in 1952, when it was first published, and the book was continually banned from county and school libraries for decades afterwards.

Guy de Maupassant

When I was a teenager with no experience of boyfriends, I loved his short stories because there was always a “twist” at the end, and because there was a wealth of experience on display that I had no personal knowledge of, so naturally I was fascinated with it all.

There was a story about a young bride who glimpses her husband’s first wife in a café, and begins to understand for the first time that her husband is this woman’s “left-over”, and that it isn’t so hot being a second wife.

There was another story about a famous Parisian prostitute who ends up sitting with a bunch of bourgeois hypocrites in a coach, and they all refuse to share any food with her or even sit with her (the ultimate Lilith experience in food-mad France).

There was another story about a doctor who tells a young wife a tale about how he tricked a husband by helping him to carry his wife’s unconscious (actually dead) lover out of the house to his carriage.  The husband never figures it out, and neither does the lover’s family.  At the end of the story, the patient exclaims, “Why have you told me this terrible story?”  And the doctor bows gallantly, saying, “So that I may offer you my services, if necessary.”

If Steinbeck created one outstanding Lilith, de Maupassant wrote about hundreds of little Liliths, mostly engaged in the extra-curricular activity the French love most.

What's Next?

 Trickster Astrology:  Why Loki is a Leo

What Did I Miss?

Lilith in the 6th House:  The Executive

SOURCES:

You be the judge of Dubya’s talent.  This author thinks he’s pretty good.  He’s better than me, anyway:

http://www.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/post-politics/files/2013/02/Barney.jpg&imgrefurl=http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/post-politics/wp/2013/02/08/george-w-bush-not-the-first-presidential-painter/&h=2620&w=1968&sz=709&tbnid=SSdJiBjMR5pe-M:&tbnh=90&tbnw=68&prev=/search%3Fq%3DImages%2Bof%2BGeorge%2BW%2BBush's%2Bself-portraits%26tbm%3Disch%26tbo%3Du&zoom=1&q=Images+of+George+W+Bush's+self-portraits&usg=__YwgsTVPpJI14cIOpSZMT2wH6ZeQ=&docid=Ie3xyRVOmExcJM&sa=X&ei=HeSsUdjgNIfI4AOvr4CgAg&ved=0CFYQ9QEwDQ&dur=1676

http://www.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http://blogs.artinfo.com/artintheair/files/2013/02/bushart1.jpg&imgrefurl=http://blogs.artinfo.com/artintheair/2013/02/08/hacker-reveals-george-w-bushs-surprisingly-good-bathroom-self-portrait-paintings/&h=750&w=600&sz=75&tbnid=TbyLKl0LltcMSM:&tbnh=90&tbnw=72&prev=/search%3Fq%3DImages%2Bof%2BGeorge%2BW%2BBush's%2Bself-portraits%26tbm%3Disch%26tbo%3Du&zoom=1&q=Images+of+George+W+Bush's+self-portraits&usg=__KTQcOPCkkc0eGpzbtFZ2B38QcDY=&docid=1ak6p8WEUbp6MM&sa=X&ei=HeSsUdjgNIfI4AOvr4CgAg&ved=0CEYQ9QEwCA&dur=208

An article on Dubya’s daughter, Barbara, and her graffiti artist boyfriend:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2247596/Barbara-Bush-graffiti-artist-lover-The-pictures.html

Phony Internet photos of 16 year old Jennifer Gates, daughter of Bill Gates (with a little twist of Lilith):

http://kimbleslawofvictories.blogspot.com/2012/03/rumoured-daughter-real-daughter-of-bill.html

Two of Guy de Maupassant’s short stories that I mentioned are noted here:

http://melmoththelost.dreamwidth.org/40692.html

Many of de Maupassant’s short stories are now in the public domain.  The Australian website may be the better selection of the two.  Read them here:

http://www.gutenberg.org/files/3090/3090-h/3090-h.htm

http://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/m/maupassant/guy/index.html

Poem “Loose Woman” by Sandra Cisernos – the whole, over-the-top, 1980’s feminist poem is quoted here, and Lilith fans will love it:

http://mysticmedusa.com/2012/05/loose-woman/