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| "A Very Married Couple" by Scottish artist Jack Vettriano. Although his time of birth isn't known, he was born on Nov 17, 1951 with Uranus at 13 Cancer, Sirius at 14 Cancer, and BML at 15 Cancer. He became known as a BDSM painter - Uranus is masculine energy, and Lilith/Eve is a marginalized/submissive woman, although the issue of who really submits is up for debate sometimes. In this picture, he shows us a perfect tag-team of predators. |
The most common question about Lilith is, “What does Lilith mean in my horoscope?” Lilith is your “hidden gift” or “hidden talent”, and the house where Lilith resides is where you will often find this gift or talent. If Lilith is part of a tight aspect structure, this gift may extend to other houses as well.
Observations
- Debilitating health issues in old age.
- Moral ambiguity is a problem for these folks unless they have a solid set of core values.
- Remarkable sense of taste, and strong powers of discrimination.
- Marked talent for art or design, on occasion.
- Body issues – fad diets, or eating disorders.
- These people are very adamant about their values. Others are quick to spot their moral lapses, however.
- Sometimes, moral censure from others can be all out of proportion. Or an unfair amount of projection is focused on the native.
- A career “second wind” is common, if these folks work hard for it.
- Good business instinct and entrepreneurial spirit – rarely do these folks spend life in poverty.
- Intense focus, and ruthless behavior in the highly successful types - some fit the definition of functioning psychopath.
2nd House Lilith is a fascinating
creature – to some, she hands the ability to think in pictures, to others, she
gives beautiful images in words. To
some, she gives a career come-back, a later “second wind” after years of
mediocre work. To others, she gives
income from a number of sources – a hedge against any real poverty. To a few, she gives a Renaissance mind. To
many with this position, she gives ruthless focus. Others are iconoclasts, with incredible
powers of discrimination.
Lilith is a dark entity, however – almost every
native with this position pays some price or another. There is quite a bit of overlap with 3rd
House Lilith here – sporadic death of siblings, mental illness or atypical
mental functioning, serious illness in the later years (the 2nd
House is the house of the body). These
situations aren’t under the native’s control.
Remarkably, however, more people have a choice with
2nd House Lilith than with any other Lilith position. Lilith’s signature in this house is
frequently a twisted sense of ethics or a distorted view of the truth. And people do have a choice on ethical
action. When 2nd House Lilith does choose the ethical high road –
they do it with spectacular style – Henry David Thoreau (a byword for the
ethical thinker), actor Christopher Reeve (who stood up to Pinochet), Winston
Churchill (who faced down Hitler and drove him to his grave), Albert Schweitzer
(theologian, musician, and physician who did charitable care in Africa), and
the Polish Pope, John Paul II, who the state of Israel named “Righteous Among
the Nations”.
What I have noticed about the unethical 2nd
House Lilith types is that others around them always notice it, and criticize
them as liars, and whisper about their scandals to anyone who will listen. Lilith is often invisible, but in this house,
she somehow can’t escape notice. Often,
the public is right – the native has personal values that can’t be trusted. Sometimes, though, the native is perceived as
being “fake”, or something of a “phony”, and gets totally attacked beyond what
is reasonable or fair. There are rare
exceptions to this – 2nd House Lilith Jim Jones was one of
them. He had everyone fooled until he
showed his colors as a mass murderer.
“Re-Launching”
a Career
2nd House Lilith is often a “come-back
kid” in terms of career – he or she might suffer severe career setbacks but still
manages to stage a career re-boot after years of mediocrity. So it seems 3rd House True Lilith
F. Scott Fitzgerald wasn’t entirely correct when he wrote, “There are no second
acts in American lives.” Had he been a 2nd
House Lilith, he would have known better.
Sometimes, the re-boot fails, and the native is
fairly well finished. Other times, the
native goes on to greater success than he or she might have ever thought
possible.
Napoleon
Bonaparte
Born in 1769, Napoleon Bonaparte was the ruler of
France from 1799 to 1804, and the Emperor of France from 1804 to 1814. According to his biography on astrotheme.com,
“at the turn of the nineteenth century, over the course of little more than a
decade, the armies of France under his command fought almost every European
power and acquired control of most of continental Europe by conquest or
alliance.”
Nevertheless, France was sick of him by 1814, and forced him to
abdicate. In 1815, he was packed off to
Elba. This “come-back kid” didn’t wait very long to get his own back. He got out of Elba lickety-split and set the
stage for “Le Cent Jours” (The Hundred Days).
It was all over with the defeat at Waterloo on June 1815, however. This time he landed on St. Helena with no
chance of return, and spent his remaining six years cooling his heels in
bitterness until he died.
MY NOTE: A
birth time for Napoleon Bonaparte is speculative. His astrotheme.com nativity shows a 1st
House True Lilith that is right on the 2nd House cusp. Others have noted that Bonaparte’s short
physical stature may have led to a “Napoleonic complex”.
Steve
Jobs
Lilith was a powerhouse in the life of Steve Jobs –
his life demonstrates nearly every single attribute of 2nd House
Lilith.
He was given to fad diets, poor
hygiene, and borderline starvation, he had an ambivalent attitude towards money,
he had an incredible obsession with design (also true of his alter ego, 2nd
House True Lilith Leonardo da Vinci, with whom he shared some remarkable
similarities), he suffered incurable disease, and his personality matched a
textbook description of functioning psychopath – he was extremely persuasive,
ruthlessly focused, highly manipulative of others, and lacking in remorse. It is no accident that he named his company
“Apple”, and that the logo depicts an apple with a single bite – Lilith
practically owned Steve Jobs!
The teen-age Jobs had a profound insight into early
computers by the time he was 16. He
attended Reed College in Portland, the most expensive college in the country at
the time, but left after a semester because he didn’t want to waste his
father’s hard-earned money. Jobs moved
back home, and his adoptive parents let him live rent-free while he got a job
at Atari. (His parents spoiled and
enabled him repeatedly because of his genius).
At Atari, his body odor was overwhelming because he refused to use
deodorant (early sign of an active Lilith in the house of the body), so he worked
at night, when there were fewer other employees around to complain of the
smell.
He quit the job, and moved to India, supposedly in
search of spiritual enlightenment, before returning as a Buddhist with a shaved
head. Jobs was never able to achieve the calm temperament that Indian gurus pride
themselves on (but the religion did influence his values on simplicity – even
after he later made a fortune, he lived in a modest house and refused the
security of a gated compound). Once
again, Jobs moved backed in with his parents, and started Apple along with his
best friend, Steve Wozniak, in the basement of Jobs' house.
Sadly, one of his worst betrayals was of his closest
friend, Steve Wozniak. He and Steve were
working on a circuit board for Atari, with Wozniak doing most of the work,
because Jobs hated trying to minimize the number of chips in the design. Wozniak figured out a way to pack the
remaining chips so tightly that it could not be reproduced on an assembly
line. Atari offered a whopping $5000 for
the intricate design (a lot of money for two young adults in the mid 1970’s),
but Wozniak wasn’t present at the meeting, so Jobs lied, saying Atari had only
offered $700, and handed Wozniak $350.
Wozniak was stunned when he found out years later –
Jobs was living off his parents, and didn’t want for a thing. Jobs later turned around and screwed him for a lot
more money than that when Wozniak finally wised up and left to start his own
company.
Fast forward ten years, and Apple is now one of the
hottest tech companies in the 1980’s Silicon Valley. But his top managers can’t stand Jobs, and
many of his employees are either afraid of him or hate him. In 1985, he gets forced out of the company
that he conceived and built up from nothing.
What Jobs chose to do with this stunning, deserved
failure was characteristically brilliant. In 1986, he worked a deal with George Lucas
for the computer-animated graphics division of Lucas's company (later re-named
Pixar). He did not interfere with the
animators, but brought his incredible discrimination to bear on their creative
efforts. The result was “Toy Story”,
which was released to critical acclaim the following year. A string of hits followed, including the
famous animated films “Finding Nemo” and “Wall-E”. It was the sale of Pixar two decades later
that would make Jobs one of the wealthiest entrepreneurs in America.
Ten years after being forced out of Apple, Jobs was
invited back. With Jobs at the helm, Apple
moved into phones, tablets, and laptops, and made far more from these well-designed
products than it ever would earn on desktop computers. Apple remained the top computer company in
the world for more than three decades, even while its founder was slowly dying
of pancreatic cancer during the 1st decade of the 21st
century.
Woody
Allen
Like other entertainers, Allen cultivated a persona
– he presented a distorted version of his true self to the public. As with 2nd House Lilith Clint
Eastwood, he became more and more like his persona as he aged. For Woody Allen, his persona was the
“insecure, intellectual, fretful, nebbish”.
It didn’t entirely start out that way,
however. As a teenager, he excelled at
magic tricks, and developed strong upper body strength from playing
baseball. By the time he was 17 years
old, he earned more than both his parents combined.
As with other 2nd House Lilith
celebrities, he has his hand in a variety of pots, and income from a number of
different sources. He is a comedian, he
does Broadway, and he plays in a jazz band.
However, let’s face it, Woody Allen is known for his films, and his film
career has been rather hit-and-miss. I
loved “Hannah and Her Sisters”, but it was made in the mid-1980’s. Americans stopped watching his films at some
point in the 1990’s, although several people I spoke with thought “Mighty
Aphrodite”, made in the mid-1990’s, was at least decent. Allen’s way of putting it is that he
“survives on the European market”.
So a lot of us were pleasantly surprised when
“Midnight in Paris” was a sleeper hit in 2011, and subsequently earned him an
Oscar for Best Original Screenplay. It
turned out to be the most commercially successful film of his career, after
decades of films that people didn’t watch.
MY NOTE: 2nd House Lilith Clint Eastwood
did something similar with the 2003 blockbuster, “Mystic River”, over two
decades after the famous “Dirty Harry” series that made him a star. At the time, the media buzz was that Eastwood
was “chronically underappreciated” and had finally come into his own. The more likely truth is that Eastwood had
finally tapped a deep, hidden, late-in-life gift of making great
films.
Allen is one of those 2nd House Lilith
folks who really got roasted for what appeared to be incest with his lover’s
adopted daughter, Soon-Yi Previn. She
was the adopted daughter of Mia Farrow and Andre Previn, and there was a huge
uproar when Allen took nude photos of her when she was 20 years old. Farrow ditched him, and nearly every woman in
America supported her in disgust.
In fairness to Allen, he has now been married to
Previn for sixteen years, longer than either of his first two marriages (he was
never married to Farrow, with whom he supposedly had a son, Ronan Farrow, as
well as a 12 year relationship). After
spending over 37 years in psychoanalysis, he says he finally ended it around
the time he began his relationship with Previn, They have adopted two daughters
together.
The whole thing was back in the news recently, when
Farrow stated in a 2013 Vanity Fair
article that her son, Ronan Farrow, could “possibly” be the biological child of
her first husband, Frank Sinatra. In
other words, Ronan should only think of Allen as a dirty old goat who messed
with his sister, and not as anyone he is actually related to.
Nonetheless, Allen has hurt Farrow’s family deeply,
and most Americans will remember him for this, fairly or unfairly. In 2012,
Ronan tweeted sarcastically, “Happy Father’s Day – or as they call it in my
family, happy brother-in-law’s day.”
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| "Lunchtime Lovers" by Jack Vettriano. The guy looks quite a bit like my recent ex, and the prima donna is Olivia Pope on the TV show, Scandal, of course. |
Sinners
or Saints
Something more needs to be said about the 2nd
House Lilith native’s relationship with the truth. Some of these folks lie often, but they don’t
always necessarily lie to obtain an advantage.
There may be no real need to tell the truth, because they do such a
beautiful job of disguising it (The North
China Lover by Marguerite Duras and Winston Churchill’s memoirs demonstrate
this idea.) They may lie, and expect
their audience to infer the lie and never mention it (Winston Churchill lies to
protect his mother’s honor). Or they may
be not at all ashamed to tell the truth as they see it, and could care less if
others are offended (Winston Churchill and Prince Harry of Wales come to mind).
It goes a little deeper than lies, or brutal truths. With 2nd House Lilith, the issue
is values. One of my readers named Mikko
on astro.com explains it best in the quote below:
Mikko writes:
2nd House
Lilith, “seems to be a very
double-standard valued person to me. It goes very deep, and the deeper you dig,
the more new sides of her values you find. Some things [the person] would mention only to those he or she can
trust not to leave them, very private sort of ones…. There's [always] new sides to [the person] when
it comes to these things, like you'd never find a bottom of it, though you know
it's not far. Their values are important to them, that's for sure, and they’re adamant
about them. But there's also a side to them which casts aside all traditional
moral values and gives values [according to] how [the person] really sees
things themselves.”
There are a number of flamboyant archetypes in the 2nd
House – I selected an outrageous politician, a twisted psycho, and one of the
greatest recent Popes in the Catholic Church as examples. The important thing to remember, however, is
that the average 2nd House Lilith native is far less of a showboat,
and has more in common with Mikko’s description above.
Silvio
Berlusconi
Berlusconi was Prime Minister for nine years in
total, making him the longest-serving
post-war Prime Minister of Italy. He has
been influential in Italian politics even for even longer, and is a very
wealthy man. Yet Forbes Magazine ranks
him as far more powerful than wealthy, and this ambivalence towards money seems
to be a pattern with 2nd House Lilith people, who often mention that
the money simply isn’t that important to them.
Berlusconi is deservedly out of power for the time
being – the Italian Senate has barred him from serving in any legislative office for six years because they are so
tired of his antics. It remains to be
seen whether he will “re-boot” his career the way other 2nd House
Lilith power players have done.
Berlusconi is bad for business, and for the morale
of the Italian people. Outsiders view
him as a liability who is holding Italy back.
His never-ending escapades include tax fraud, soliciting sex from
minors, the taking of massive bribes, and the holding of salacious
parties. That said, there may be quite a
few Americans who chuckled privately when they found out that he hired a
prostitute dressed as Obama – he may be dastardly, but at least he’s got humor
and a sense of style!
In terms of the natal chart, Berlusconi has true
Lilith partile conjunct Spica, also known as “The Shining Jewel”, the luckiest
fixed star in the firmament. He also has
a warm relationship with Vladimir Putin, another world leader with a very
powerful Lilith right on his Mid-Heaven tightly conjunct Pluto.
Jim
Jones
This guy gave new meaning to the old adage, “The
road to hell is paved with good intentions.”
The public only figured out that he was a violent psychopath when it was
way too late.
Early on, his values appeared to be excellent – he
made his name as a civil rights activist in 1960’s Indiana. His Wikipedia entry has the following to say:
“After swastikas were painted on the homes of two African American families, Jones personally walked
the neighborhood comforting African Americans and counseling white families not
to move, in order to prevent white flight. He also set up stings to catch restaurants refusing to
serve African American customers, and wrote to American Nazi leaders, then leaked their responses
to the media. When Jones was accidentally placed in the black ward of a
hospital after a collapse in 1961, he refused to be moved and began to make the
beds, and empty the bed pans of black patients. Political pressures resulting
from Jones' actions caused hospital officials to desegregate the wards.”
Jones went on to start his own Rainbow Temple, which
embraced children and adults of all races.
Once he moved out to California, and shifted the headquarters of his
Temple to San Francisco, the Ground Zero for radical protest movements of the
era, his political influence took off.
He played a major role in the election of San Francisco mayor George
Moscone in 1975.
His Wikipedia entry
notes:
“Jones
and Moscone met privately with vice presidential candidate Walter Mondale on his campaign plane days before
the 1976 election, leading Mondale to publicly
praise the Temple. First Lady
Rosalynn Carter also personally met with Jones on
multiple occasions.”
This isn’t the sort of guy who one would suspect of
possibly having killed his pets when he was a kid, or for soliciting sex from a
male undercover police officer. It all
began to unravel when a San Francisco Chronicle reporter caught up with him,
and Jones found out about the reporter’s plan to publish an expose based on
allegations from those who had fled the Rainbow Temple, saying they had been
physically, emotionally, and sexually abused.
All of a sudden, the core temple members made a fast move to Guyana in
the summer of 1977.
Two days after the birth of my little sister, on Nov
18, 1978, Jones gave his henchmen the orders to murder the 900 inhabitants of
Jonestown if they did not willingly drink the kool-aid, including over 300
children. Only a handful of adults made it out alive. Jones was survived by three sons, who
happened not to be at the compound on the day of the slaughter, and a single
daughter who had fled the Temple earlier.
One son agreed to participate in a History
Channel documentary on his father, but has stated he will not watch it, and
wants nothing more to do with his memory.
In terms of the natal chart, Jones had 2nd House Lilith in a
tight trine with his 7th House Jupiter – Pluto conjunction. In myarticle on 9th House Lilith, I mention how Lilith is tainted in the
natural house of Jupiter. A tight
Jupiter – Lilith trine is also featured in the next profiles of Pope John Paul
II and President Harry Truman, however, with very different results.
Pope
John Paul II
Pope John Paul II lost every single member of his
immediate family by the time he was 20 years old. This is NOT a common feature of 2nd
House Lilith, but it may be a pattern of energy shared among great spiritual
leaders. Recall that 3rd
House Lilith Tenzin Gyatso, the 14th Dalai Lama, lost nine siblings
as a child.
The young future Pope was known as Karol Wojtyla,
and he was born in 1920. A gynecologist
told his mother that her pregnancy was in grave danger, and advised her to get
an abortion, but his mother could not bring herself to do it. The gynecologist’s warning was no idle threat;
she died during her next childbirth.
Karol had a brother, thirteen years his senior, who
became a doctor, and died from exposure to scarlet fever while Karol was still
a teen-ager. This death affected him
deeply, because Karol had looked up to him.
His father died of a heart attack a few years later.
His Wikipedia article notes his friendliness toward
school peers who were members of his community’s large Jewish population, and his
observation that “what struck me about them was their Polish patriotism”. It
also notes that his first and likely his only girlfriend was Jewish.
Eventually, the Gestapo decided to round up all the
young Poles in his town, as a deterrent against the sort of uprising that had recently
occurred in Warsaw (the Jews in his community had already fled or been sent to
slaughter). Karol managed to escape the
culling, although 8000 men and boys were taken.
Still in his early 20’s, it was around this time that he began
sporadically saving the lives of individual Jews. He becomes a priest at age 26.
Wojtyla’s biography points to a couple of other
Lilith features – his mean Lilith is close to the 3rd House cusp, and
he is said to have spoken ten European languages fluently or with near
fluency. His true Lilith is solidly in
the 2nd House of the body, and he suffered severe Parkinson’s
disease during the last years of his life, prompting speculation about a
possible vegetative state that disturbed many American Catholics.
Fast forward many years – Wojtyla becomes Pope on
October 16, 1978, about a month before the Jonestown massacre. Other
astrologers have already commented on his chart’s most obvious Jupiter –
Neptune conjunction on the Leo Mid-Heaven, and its square to a tight Venus-Ketu
conjunction (less than half a degree orb between Venus and Ketu). Most astrologers interpret his essentially
conservative message in this context. He
refused to approve contraception, and wanted nothing to do with the female
ordination of priests, even though he presided over the most liberal period in
the history of the Catholic Church, at least in America.
Few astrologers pay attention to the fact that
Wojtyla also had a tight grand trine involving true Lilith at 12
Sagittarius, which formed a nearly equilateral triangle with 6th House
Chiron at 9 Aries, and 10th House Jupiter at 11 Leo. I wasn’t sure how to interpret this myself,
until I noticed that President Truman had a similar tight Lilith-Jupiter trine,
and suddenly a light bulb turned on in my head.
Lilith is an ancient deity of the Jewish
people. The Pope’s trine brought about
tremendous healing (Chiron) in his relationship with the Jews (Lilith),
particularly when linked to his power of office (10th House Jupiter). His Wikipedia article notes that the chief
rabbi of Poland said that never in history did anyone do as much for
Christian-Jewish dialogue as Pope John Paul II, adding that many Jews had a
greater respect for the late pope than for some rabbis.
The connection was only made when I noticed that
Truman had 2nd House mean Lilith at 27 degrees Scorpio trine natal
10th House Jupiter at 28 degrees Cancer, and I remembered that he
was the President who first recognized the state of Israel! In private, Truman was deeply anti-Semitic
(his mean Lilith was in opposition to his Pluto-Mercury-Chiron triple
conjunction), but the trine carried the day on his public stance, and the
impact on history.
What's Next?
PART TWO - Lilith in the Second House: Genius, Sinner, Twisted Psycho, Saint
(To be published in early January, 2014)
(To be published in early January, 2014)
What Did I Miss?
GREAT
LILITH-LIKE QUOTES
“When Hitler invades hell I would at least make a
favorable reference to the devil in the House of Commons.” - Winston Churchill
“Adam and Eve must have been Russian – they had no
roof over their heads, nothing to wear, only one apple between them, and they
called it paradise.” -
Ronald Reagan, who has true Lilith tightly
conjunct the Ascendant
SOURCES
A major retrospective on Jack Vettriano’s work is at
the Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum in Glasgow through Feb, 2014. For more info on the exhibit, look for links
toward the bottom of his biography.
Napoleon Bonaparte’s bio:
For Steve Jobs, I used the excellent 2011 biography
by Walter Issacson, and referred to the astrotheme.com bio for important dates.
For Woody Allen, Jim Jones, Pope John Paul II, and
Madonna, I referred to Wikipedia.
Ronan Farrow, Mia Farrow's son, turned out to be an exceptionally high achiever, with little or no physical resemblance to Woody Allen. In a recent NY Times profile, he shares a little of his experience growing up as one of Farrow's fourteen children.
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/05/magazine/ronan-farrow-reluctant-tv-star.html?_r=0
