Lilith In The 2nd House: Genius, Sinner, Psycho, Saint

"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.

 

2^nd 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 3^rd House Lilith here – sporadic death of siblings, mental illness or atypical mental functioning, serious illness in the later years (the 2^nd House is the house of the body).  These situations aren’t under the native’s control.

Remarkably, however, more people have a choice with 2^nd 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 2^nd 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 2^nd 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 – 2^nd House Lilith Jim Jones was one of them.  He had everyone fooled until he showed his colors as a mass murderer.

Now, let’s explore some of the specific energy patterns behind 2^nd House True Lilith…
 

“Re-Launching” a Career

2^nd 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 3^rd 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 2^nd 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 1^st House True Lilith that is right on the 2^nd 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 2^nd 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, 2^nd 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 1^st decade of the 21^st century.

Woody Allen

Like other entertainers, Allen cultivated a persona – he presented a distorted version of his true self to the public.  As with 2^nd 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 2^nd 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:  2^nd 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 2^nd 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.”

"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 2^nd 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 2^nd House Lilith, the issue is values.  One of my readers named Mikko on astro.com explains it best in the quote below:

                Mikko writes: 

2^nd 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 2^nd 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 2^nd 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 2^nd 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 2^nd 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 7^th 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 2^nd House Lilith, but it may be a pattern of energy shared among great spiritual leaders.  Recall that 3^rd House Lilith Tenzin Gyatso, the 14^th 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 3^rd House cusp, and he is said to have spoken ten European languages fluently or with near fluency.  His true Lilith is solidly in the 2^nd 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 6^th House Chiron at 9 Aries, and 10^th 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 (10^th 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 2^nd House mean Lilith at 27 degrees Scorpio trine natal 10^th 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)

What Did I Miss?

 
PART TWO - Lilith in the Third House:  Karma Chameleon

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.

http://www.jackvettriano.com/biography/

Napoleon Bonaparte’s bio:

http://www.astrotheme.com/astrology/Napoleon_I#hbiographie

For Steve Jobs, I used the excellent 2011 biography by Walter Issacson, and referred to the astrotheme.com bio for important dates.

http://www.astrotheme.com/astrology/Steve_Jobs#hbiographie

For Woody Allen, Jim Jones, Pope John Paul II, and Madonna, I referred to Wikipedia.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Woody_Allen

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Jones

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pope_John_Paul_II

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Madonna_%28entertainer%29

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