One of
two things seems to happen here – either Lilith is totally insubstantial and
barely felt in the least visible house of the horoscope, or it is more
powerfully expressed here than anywhere else in the horoscope, harshly
impacting not only the childhood but lasting well into adulthood. When 4th House Lilith is apparent,
it typically has a life-long effect similar to the 11th House. It’s a toss-up over whether 4th
House or 11th House Lilith is the worst of the two, but I have come
to suspect that Lilith has a “fallen” quality in the 4th House, with
its natural energy of Cancer.
A
Few Observations:
·
Miserable
childhoods
·
Rejected
by a parent
·
Abandoned
by a parent, due to deployment, divorce, or death
·
Mixed
ethnicity, bilingual, early awareness of difference
·
“Rags-to-riches”
– not typical, but you do see it.
·
Death
of a child, parent, or sibling, or sometimes all three – also not typical.
·
As
an adult, highly engaged in a profession.
Spends a lot of time with peers.
·
Home
must be a sanctuary once they become adults.
If it is, creativity is fostered here.
·
Obsession
is a theme, either expressed positively as ambition, or negatively as, well,
obsession.
·
Detached,
Aquarian-like temperament as adults.
·
Contrast
between 10th House true Lilith and 4th House true Lilith: 10th House Lilith has an agile
body, a gift for manipulative and fluid motion, which sometimes emerges as a
talent for dance. 4th House Lilith
has an agile (tongue) or mouth, capable of manipulative and fluid
communication, making this a placement for gangsters, politicians, writers,
actors, lawyers, and anyone who relies on double-edged gestures or double-sided
words as a source of power.
Cancer’s
quality is nurturing, and strongly associated with recognition of motherhood,
while Lilith’s offspring are demons and her motherhood is horrible in the eyes
of man. In contrast, Lilith often does well in Capricorn, where the
restrictive, limiting, inflexible, rigid nature of Saturn channels the endless
manifestation of new forms that Lilith is known for into something useful. For example, the endless shape-shifting of 10th
House Lilith may manifest as dance – sinuous, illusory movement as an art form.
The
opposite occurs in the 4th House, where Lilith is either totally
invisible (a blessing!) or completely overwhelming, spreading everywhere, and
ruining the house. Lilith can be a witch
in this house, and not a good, white witch.
Lilith is known for out-of-bounds obsession, and one thing about the
experience of a pervasive Lilith in childhood is that the adult acquires
natural detachment as the only way to deal with Lilith’s evil. Often, I have noted an Aquarian-like quality
in 4th House Lilith adults, independent of natal planets in Aquarius
or in the 11th House.
Her
expression runs the gamut in childhood.
On the mild end, the child has a foreign, bilingual, or half-caste
background which makes him aware of being different from other children at a
very young age. A slightly deeper shade of Lilith results in a parent who
rejects the child, or a child who feels abandoned by the parent. Perhaps the worst expression of Lilith is a
child who ends up in an endless series of foster homes because the dysfunctional
parent or caregiver will not be persuaded to give him or her up. Another heartbreaker is the child who suffers
the frequent military deployment of the parent, and then ends up losing that
parent altogether due to divorce or death.
The very
worst expression of Lilith destroys the native’s entire family – one thinks of Abraham Lincoln, who lost his
beloved mother at age nine, and broke down in tears when his only sister died
in childbirth at age 18. At age 26, he
was devastated by the death of his alleged childhood love, Ann Rutledge. Like a cancer (pun intended), Lilith went
into remission, allowing Lincoln to soar to an incredible heights – the “rags
to riches” quality of 4th House Lilith is occasionally mentioned by
other astrologers. Then Lilith returned
with a vengeance, as Lincoln watched his three year old son, Eddie, die at age
forty. For Lincoln, the horror of Lilith
was never-ending. At age fifty-four, bowed
with grief at the premature death of so much of his family, he again watched
his twelve year old son Willie die, most likely of typhoid fever, which was
rampant in Washington DC during the Civil War.
Lincoln himself would be assassinated two years later. Even in death, Lilith wouldn’t quit. His youngest and favorite son Tad died six
years after Lincoln’s death at age 18, the same age that his beloved sister,
Sarah Lincoln, had died.
My Note: There was a partile
Sun-Chiron conjunction on the day that Lincoln was born, and this came to
signify a brutal relationship with his father that Lincoln could not heal from,
as well as his own agonizing experience as a parent of children who could not
heal themselves. 4th House
Lilith emphasized the power of this conjunction in a most cruel manner.
My Note: Abraham Lincoln has
no historically known birth time. His parents were dirt poor, and it is not
known who attended his birth, but it unlikely that anyone present would have
owned a watch. His chart is a
rectification. While I tend to be
skeptical of such nativities, I am willing to believe that Lincoln is indeed a
4th House Lilith – in fact, he is the consummate example of
one.
“Half-Caste” Status
During my research for this
article, I noticed an unusual number of natal 4th House Lilith
celebrities whose parents came from two different cultures, or who ended up
leaving behind the culture where they were raised. One common (and rather mild) manifestation of
Lilith turns out to be mixed ethnicity, a bilingual childhood, or simply
parents from two widely different cultures or social classes. There is something in the family that marks
the child as different from his earliest memories.
Cameron Diaz
She was born to an American
mother and a Cuban father. Lilith in the
lower houses of the natal wheel sometimes brings about a fast-acting twist of
fate that propels a child or young adult to his or her destiny. At age 16, Diaz was discovered by a
photographer at a Hollywood party who, within a week, helped her land a
contract with the Elite Modeling Agency.
She immediately took off for Japan, and began a five year relationship
with videographer Carlos de la Torre the same year she graduated from high
school.
Heidi Klum
Model, TV hostess, and
occasional actress, Klum became an American citizen but still managed to retain
her German citizenship.
Jake Gyllenhaal
His father is a descendent of
Swedish nobility, while his mother is from a Jewish family in New York
City. There’s got to be a joke here,
although I can never think of one when I need it.
J.K. Rowling
Rowling is bilingual – her mother
is a native French speaker. She was
working as a bilingual secretary for Amnesty International when she first
conceived the idea for Harry Potter on a delayed train from Manchester
to London at age 25. Rowling is another
4th House native with a “rags-to-riches” narrative, although her
experience of poverty could not compare to Abraham Lincoln’s.
Abraham Lincoln
Lincoln grew up under
conditions so wretched that his famous utterance, “I used to be a slave,” was
no exaggeration or plea for pity. After
his mother died, his father simply abandoned him and his ten year old sister,
leaving them to fend for themselves on a rural homestead for an entire year
while he went looking for a new wife.
When he returned, he hired the boy out and insisted on receiving his
entire wages. (His sister was luckier – neighbors took her in, mainly in order
to get her away from that home.)
For a whole decade, until age
21, Lincoln was not allowed to keep any of his wages. His father was quick with his fists and the
whip, as well, and Lincoln utterly detested him. When he died, Lincoln would not attend his
funeral.
Lincoln’s “half-caste” status
was a state of mind rather than an actual fact.
He ascribed his own positive traits to his maternal grandfather rather
than his father – his “power of analysis, his logic, his mental activity, and
his ambition” to a man who Lincoln said was a “nobleman of Virginia” who had
sired Lincoln’s mother out-of-wedlock.
Lincoln’s own father could barely read, but as a youth, Lincoln himself
was almost completely self-educated. He
was obsessed about education, and willing to pay any price in order to grasp
it. [Many of the anecdotes about Lincoln
in this article are from William Herndon, his law partner, friend, and most
well-known biographer.]
Monica Lewinsky
Lewinsky has true Lilith conjunct the IC with a five degree orb, and has been labeled a
“home-wrecker extraordinaire”, which isn’t entirely fair. Bill and Hillary Clinton have always had an
unconventional marriage; it merely became more obvious to the public in recent
years. The ironic truth is that Bill
Clinton flip-flopped on gay marriage when his own wife is bisexual, something
Lewinsky likely could not have known at the time of the affair. If anything, she was a pawn, and Hillary
Clinton had the last laugh, in more ways than one.
Obsession is a theme with 4th
House Lilith, and the public seemed most uncomfortable with the obsessive way
that Lewinsky pursued Clinton. In my
opinion, public disgust with her behavior had a lot to do with how
uncomfortable negative obsession makes onlookers feel.
Out of necessity, Lewinsky has
made her home in Europe for much of her adulthood, and one suspects that this
must have initially been a “fish-out-of-water” experience for her. This is also characteristic of 4th
House Lilith – one is never entirely comfortable or at ease in the culture
where one grows up, and this has a way of persisting into adulthood.
Freddie Mercury
Mercury, the lead singer of the
famous rock band, Queen, had an international background worthy of Barack
Obama's. His parents were
Parsi-Zorastrians from India, who emigrated to Africa and settled in Zanzibar,
where the young man known as Farrokh Bulsara was born and spent his earliest
years. For most of his childhood, however, he did time in a series of Catholic
boarding schools in India.
He returned to Zanzibar at age
17, just in time for he and his family to flee the 1967 Zanzibar Revolution for
England, where Mercury promptly found himself a British girlfriend, even though
he would later embrace a gay identity (Mercury died of AIDS in 1991). He kept his Indian descent a secret from most
of his fans, most likely because he did not believe it would fit well with his
rock music persona.
“Rags-to-Riches”
Although nowhere near as common
as a 5th House female true Lilith who “marries up”, this phenomenon does
occur often to be noticed. A rapid rise
is not a matter of luck, the way it is in the 5th House. 4th House Lilith typically works
hard for success, the way 6th House and 8th House Lilith does.
Tom Hanks
A descendent of Abraham
Lincoln's family through Lincoln's birth mother, Nancy Hanks, the actor Tom
Hanks was born to a father who was an itinerant cook and a mother who was a
hospital worker. His mother is of Portuguese
ancestry, and the young Hanks was a “Bible-toting evangelical teenager” with a
family background of Catholicism and Mormonism.
Hanks truly made good on the
“rags-to-riches” narrative. According to
Wikipedia, as of 2012, his films have grossed over 4.2 billion in the US, and
over 8.5 billion worldwide, making him the highest all-time box office star in
Hollywood.
Mike Tyson
Tyson came from a background as
impoverished and emotionally devastated as Lincoln's. His father was a street
thug who abandoned the family around the time of his birth, while his mother
died when Tyson was 16, leaving him in the care of his boxing manager and
trainer, Cus D'Amato.
Tyson had the same sort of
obsession with boxing that Lincoln had with education. Both men grieved the premature deaths of a
mother and a sister (Tyson's sister, Denise, died of a heart attack at age
25). Both men attracted Lilith, in terms
of the women they chose as wives. In
Tyson's case, he projected Lilith on to his women – he was divorced twice, beat
both of his ex-wives, had multiple out-of-wedlock children, and was convicted
of raping a beauty queen in 1992, for which he did three years in prison.
Al Capone
One of nine children born to
Italian immigrants, Capone was unquestionably more interested in power than riches. As head of the Mafia, he transformed the use
of power in the Italian-American community.
Capone was expelled from school
at age 14 for hitting a female teacher in the face, and promptly fell in with
small-time gangsters. By the time he was
age 17, he was on the rise in a major gang.
Capone did not attract a Lilith
in the home – he married his Irish-American sweetheart at age 19 just after she
gave birth to their first son. But he
had access to plenty of women outside the marriage, and suffered from syphilis
as an older man. As a young man, he was
slashed in the face three times after inadvertently insulting a woman in a
Brooklyn nightclub, from which he got his legendary nickname, “Scarface”.
Another “Lilith-like” twist
occurred in Capone's use of power. He
believed in brutal violence as a means to an end, and thoroughly understood the
use of intimidation as a basis for creating a powerful criminal
organization. Yet he also perceived the
power of a “Robin Hood” approach, and became known for generous, “anonymous”
donations to schools, churches, and hospitals in Italian-American communities.
After an assassination attempt
against him failed, he paid for the medical care of a young boy and his mother
who would have otherwise gone blind from injuries sustained in the blast. Acts like these transformed him from mere
gangster to celebrity, and also shaped the code of ethics in the
Italian-American Mafia. One is reminded
of the political instincts of Donald Trump, or even, dare it be said, Abraham
Lincoln.
Psychology of
Adulthood
Let me get directly to the
point – 4th House Lilith is often a hallmark of abuse, or at least
remarkable neglect in childhood. It
always makes me cringe when I suspect a client is not particularly maternal,
and then I see a child’s horoscope with Lilith in the 4th
House. This Lilith can be the most
miserable placement of all twelve houses, and survivors often deal with chronic
depression in adulthood.
This natal Lilith feels the
neglect keenly – they are frequently fated to develop under the care of the
worst possible parent(s), given their psychological needs and desires. DG Jay hints that the psychological
expectations of 4th House Lilith are exceptionally high. I think this is a key point.
6th House Lilith
also has a tendency to grow up in harsh circumstances, or at least less than
ideal ones, but the native identifies with the parent, and feels sorry for him
or her in adulthood. They are less
likely to see their childhoods as abusive, and more likely to say that mom or
dad did the best they could. This isn’t
true for 4th House Lilith, who knew they had a right to expect more,
often a lot more.
“Interpreting Lilith”
by D.G. Jay
Normally, I prefer to focus on
original ideas in my articles, without undue reliance on the work of other
astrologers. However, this is one house
where D.G. Jay should not be ignored. His view of 4th House Lilith
in adulthood is so “on the mark” that I will share a number of his excerpts
with readers. My own analysis simply
isn’t going to be as good.
***
DG Jay writes, “Early in life there are
frustrating emotional dead-ends where the usual family supports are concerned.
In a great many instances this is because of the absence, circumstances or the
temperament of the parent… There may have been an illness, removal (as in the case
of divorce), or the actual loss of that parent, which the child may have
selfishly resented with feelings of, "How could he/she do this to
me!"
My Note: My niece has
4th House Lilith, and I was the one who was stunned when my
sister-in-law took her to Ukraine when she was six months old to spend a few
weeks with her grandmother, and simply walked out on her and returned to the US
for more than six months. Ostensibly, my
niece was left behind so she could develop fluency in the language and a strong
bond with her Ukrainian grandmother and uncle, both which did happen. However, there is no way to explain this
reasoning to a child so young, and my feelings about my sister-in-law’s decision
making process shall be left unsaid.
DG Jay writes, “In the fourth, Lilith may
also represent a step-parent or conditions between the parents that made the
home barren or uncomfortable. Many times there is a broken home. Lilith here
may denote an orphan or living in a foster home.”
My Note: 4th House Lilith
does not necessarily denote an adopted child – in my experience, this is more
likely to be 5th House Lilith in the parent’s horoscope. Also,
the stepparent can be a positive influence in the child’s life – Abraham
Lincoln appreciated what his stepmother did for him, and remained cordial to
her for the rest of his life – see the New York Times article under “Sources”.
DG
Jay writes, “The first step toward growing out of emotional dependence occurs
when he substitutes a creative release, mental interests or a vocation from
which to get his satisfaction & discovers a delicious sense of independence
from or within family. He IS different from them, with different needs for his
further emotional maturing.”
Lincoln did this, as soon as he
left home at age 21. He found
sympathetic patrons who were willing to extend him credit so he could study
law. His experience in the 1832 Black
Hawk War at age 23 also transformed his belief in himself. He was “promptly chosen captain by his
comrades. Although he felt himself
unqualified for the office, he delighted in the honor. He wrote in 1860 that he “had not since had
any success in life which gave him so much satisfaction”.
DG Jay writes, “As adults, rather than live where they
feel uncomfortable, which does not take much…, they will prefer to live alone
or withdraw from the home as much as possible.”
He adds that, “As hosts/hostesses they are hospitable and see to your
comfort that belies the continuous effort behind it. Actually, there is talent
here, if the rest of the chart supports it, for professional work as a hotel
manager, host/hostess in a restaurant cocktail lounge or any commercial area
where people meet to relax & enjoy hospitality.”
Totally true of Lincoln, who lived for the
traveling circuit, where he was followed by admirers, and had friends to stay
with in every Illinois hamlet that required the services of a traveling
lawyer. No one made better use of his tight Mercury – Uranus trine than did
Lincoln, who was known for his wit, and now has whole books devoted to his
sayings and speeches.
DG Jay writes, “When Lilith is in the fourth house and
marriage is the problem, investigate this area as very possibly the eroding
factor between the couple. If a male, this one is not above having set up or
being drawn to another 'home' environment where he feels more comfortable, or
to one who is more conducive to providing him with what he wants. Many times
this will explain why he supposedly works later & later every day at the
office.”
Lincoln simply could not stay at home, because his
wife, Mary Todd, was a shrew with a temper, a Lilith in hoop-skirts, if there
ever was one, according to Herndon.
Herndon may have been biased, because Mary Todd hated him. The trouble is that other independent sources recalled her
tantrums, servants only stayed on because of their
respect for her husband, and her last remaining son, Robert, did have her
committed to a mental institution many years after Lincoln’s death.
DG
Jay writes, “If one has, or can establish for himself in the home, an
atmosphere in which he can express his artistic flair; music; a hobby or use it
as a studio, office or base for his/her studies or special interest; writing;
student or literary gatherings, he can indeed be happier here.”
Once his law practice was established, Lincoln
literally lived at the office in order to avoid catching a frying pan as he
came through his front door. He checked
in at home often, but never felt comfortable enough to stick around.
***
My Note: 4th House Lilith can be highly
creative, particularly in intimate, home-like settings. JK Rowling comes to mind. Harry
Potter was written in coffee shops, and at home while her children were in
school.
My Note: In fairness to Mary Todd, it is not easy
watching three of your four children die, and coming from a solidly
Confederate, slave-proud family when one is married to the most famous
abolitionist of all time could not have been much of a picnic either. Nonetheless, Todd was remembered as a White
House travesty, and later Presidential wives had to scale down the role in
order to avoid comparisons.
Other
Observations
·
4th House Lilith needs a private home without family around as
an adult. Sometimes, these folks enjoy a
communal home, and if there is a deep feeling among his peers, these people
will take the place of family – think of a monastery. But more often than not, roommates just get
on this person’s last nerve.
·
The home is a sanctuary for the 4th House Lilith adult. Even so, he or she won’t be found in it very
often. 4th House Lilith loves
to travel around and meet up with his or her mates for conversation and other
stimulation.
·
4th House Lilith may enjoy an “empty nest” for many years. He or she may choose not to have children
just so the nest can be feathered in peace.
·
Other 4th House Lilith people don’t have any issue with having
their kids around, but prefer the spouse not be there all the time. Getting the house after a divorce suits this
Lilith placement perfectly, and the new boyfriend or girlfriend should plan on
remaining at his or her own place.
·
Chronic depression in adulthood can be a hallmark of 4th House
Lilith, similar to a Moon-Saturn conjunction.
This is offset by natural detachment as the 4th House Lilith
matures – it can sometimes seems as if this native is playing a role around
intimates, particularly when a family member has personal problems or is in
need of emotional support.
·
4th House Lilith can be a marker for career achievement,
particularly in middle age. This can be
a highly ambitious placement.
Lilith in the 3rd House: Karma Chameleon
SOURCES:
Burlingame, Michael. The Inner World of Abraham Lincoln. University of Illinois Press. Urbana and Chicago. 1994.
For a look at Sarah Bush
Lincoln, Abraham Lincoln’s stepmother, and his relationship with her:
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