Lilith in the 7th House: The Jilted Bride

Jolene, Jolene, Jolene, Jolene
I’m begging of you please don't take my man
Jolene, Jolene, Jolene, Jolene
Please don't take him just because you can
Your beauty is beyond compare
With flaming locks of auburn hair
With ivory skin and eyes of emerald green
Your smile is like a breath of spring
Your voice is soft like summer rain
And I cannot compete with you, Jolene

-Dolly Parton’s “Jolene”

A Few Observations

·         Close to the Descendant (or the Ascendant) - the more fascinating and flirtatious to the opposite sex the person may be.  Barack Obama has mean Lilith tightly conjunct the Descendant.  MY NOTE:  In a conservative society, a woman with this Lilith may be viewed as a “slut” even if she is not sexually promiscuous – see “Mary Magdalene” below.

·         Close to the Descendant (or the Ascendant) - Learns new skills very easily (sports, languages, playing musical instruments, typing), but unless the natal Lilith is in strong aspect to Saturn, this person won't submit to a lengthy and demanding training.  Someone with less talent who has to work harder for results may end up surpassing the native with a tightly angular Lilith. (See below.)

·         Further into the 7th House - Either the person becomes Lilith, or looks for someone (often a spouse) to be Lilith for them – this can be a placement for home-wreckers, younger wives of wealthy men who divorced a wife their own age, or the older wife herself.

·        Further into the 7th House - Miserliness, or a refusal to share resources with others (the 7^th House has the natural energy of Venus).  Like 8^th House Lilith, the person may be secretive about financial resources.

·         Like 12^th House Lilith, this placement manipulates people with the best of intentions, getting them to “see the light” in an entertaining way.

·         Black Moon in the 7th attracts people with the qualities of Lilith: full-on passions and emotions, rebellious nature, dislike of patriarchal establishment and a need for absolute perfection.  Quoted from Tribe.net.

·         Preoccupied with relationships and marriage, even if there is a limited Libran signature in the horoscope.  This is suggested in Isaiah 34, the only place in the Old Testament where Lilith is mentioned.  “There shall the kites assemble; none shall be missing its mate.”  Isaiah 34:15

·         Gets an independent, strong-willed spouse, and the native needs quite a bit of independence in the marriage as well.

Eve and Lilith may appear to be at war in the 7^th House, but appearances are deceiving.  A woman may crave being a spouse, and her friends may point to her marriage orientation as the core of her identity, but make no mistake, this is an independent marriage – 7^th House Lilith insists on the perks of Lilith within the security of Eve’s brand name, so to speak.  This can be a real “have-it-all” placement for Lilith, if the native is lucky.

That said, 7^th House Lilith can be one of the most manipulative positions out there – the native “uses” people if he or she is not evolved, or ends up being “used”, if he or she is not discerning.  

As an astrologer who is single, I get a little nervous when I see Lilith in the 7^th of someone I am just getting to know – my question is whether the person has worked through the karma associated with this Lilith.  My decision to date or do business with a 7^th House Lilith native is always going to be more fraught with “issues” - these are people who take time to assess, because behavior in action is key to understanding character in these folks.

For those who do experience Lilith in terms of being rejected, the 7^th House can be a painful position for Lilith, almost as bad as the 11^th House, in my opinion.  The big difference seems to be that 11th House Lilith people often start the experience of Lilith in childhood, and it follows them to varying degrees in their adult lives.  7^th House Lilith people are typically spared the experience in childhood, and only begin to deal with her in the context of adult relationships – thus, Lilith can be more of a shock.

The other thing to remember is experiencing multiple rejections does not mean that one cannot eventually find his or her niche in a relationship that makes them feel like Adam or Eve.

Lilith on the Descendant (or Ascendant)
One thing I have noticed with a tight Lilith conjunction to the angles is that the native picks up new things very rapidly but may not develop the discipline to REALLY STUDY precisely because learning happens so naturally and easily for the native.  

I've seen this occur for natives who have Mean Lilith or True Lilith tightly conjunct either angle.  One person I know helped build her own home, breeds thoroughbreds, grows a spectacular garden, and teaches beginners to quilt, but her spelling is atrocious (she simply didn't want to put in the effort to learn), although she reports that reading came easily at an early age, and she does not have an obvious learning disability.

In the book, Story of the Lost Child, Elena Ferrante writes about this phenomenon.  Her protagonist, Lena, reflect on her lover Nino's attraction to her best friend Lila (Lilith):

•             Lila possessed intelligence and didn’t put it use but, rather, wasted it, like a great lady for whom all the riches of the world are merely a sign of vulgarity.  That was what must have beguiled Nino: the gratuitousness of Lila’s intelligence.  She stood out among so many because she, naturally, did not submit to any training, to any use, to any purpose.

Famous 7^th House Lilith Folks

In the descriptions which follow, we will see how 7^th House Lilith people either “become” Lilith themselves, or cast their intimates (business or sexual partners) in the role of Lilith.

Nicole Kidman

Kidman is a very private person, but her Wikipedia entry gives us enough suggestions of how the shadowy Lilith played out in her life. She was married to Tom Cruise for 11 years, and adopted two children with him, before the couple abruptly announced a divorce.   Her Wikipedia entry quotes an interview with the 2006 issue of Ladies Home Journal.  In it, she says she still loved Cruise: "He was huge; still is. To me, he was just Tom, but to everybody else, he is huge. But he was lovely to me and I loved him. I still love him." In addition, she has expressed shock about their divorce.  In a 2007 interview, Kidman revealed that she was secretly engaged to someone between her marriages to Cruise and her current husband, country music star Keith Urban, but did not identify who this was.

The shadow of Lilith was also felt with the loss of her two adopted children to Tom Cruise.  Kidman is a practicing Catholic, who has stated that she did not want their children being raised as Scientologists.  Since the divorce, she has stopped speaking publically about Scientology.

As an aside, I can’t help but notice Nicole’s naturally red hair, an occasional association with Mary Magdalene, who may retain a link to the ancient Lilith.  Her hair is frequently dyed blonde, but she has Scotch-Irish ancestry, and does appear to be a faint redhead.   Kidman has also had a history of infertility. Only her first child with Urban was conceived and delivered in the traditional manner.

Diana, Princess of Wales

I don’t think there is any question in most people’s minds that Diana cast Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall, in the role of Lilith during her marriage to Prince Charles.  Camilla waited a long time until Diana’s eventual death before finally reclaiming what belonged to her by rights.

In 1994, Diana gave an interview on a BBC program during which she was asked if she thought the relationship between Camilla and the Prince of Wales contributed to the breakdown of their marriage, to which she replied: "Well, there were three of us in this marriage, so it was a bit crowded.” 

Camilla was reportedly humiliated by this remark, but one can guess that she must have privately been thinking the same thing herself.

Demi Moore

Even a casual follower of the tabloid press knows how much trouble Moore had with much younger husband Ashton Kutcher, who had an apparent penchant for hanky-panky with women his own age.  This did not elicit much sympathy for Moore, who was perceived as having failed to grow up.  She is in her 50’s, but has a reputation for dancing on tables, hearty partying, and serial boy toys.  

Lilith shows up as a signature in Moore’s family history – prior to her birth, her biological father left her mother after a two month marriage (astrologically, I note the lord of both her 7^th House Lilith in Libra and 2^nd House Moon in Taurus is a debilitated 8^th House Venus which is hurt even further from being “burnt by the Sun” – it is a degree and a half away from her 8^th House Sun.)  For most of her childhood, Moore knew nothing about her real father.

Moore also recalls a darkly beautiful Lilith who embodies the role of Eve in her most famous 1990 film, Ghost. The love scene between Moore, with her black hair and cropped haircut, and Patrick Swayze that begins in front of a potter’s wheel as the song "Unchained Melody” plays has become an iconic moment in film history. 

Sandra Bullock

Bullock got more sympathy than Moore did when she was cast as Lilith by her husband, Jesse James, a motorcycle builder who hosted a show called “Monster Garage”.  She was married to James for five years, and he was apparently fooling around quite a bit toward the end.  James responded to the rumors of infidelity by issuing a public apology to Bullock. He stated, "The vast majority of the allegations reported are untrue and unfounded" and "Beyond that, I will not dignify these private matters with any further public comment.”  He also said that "There is only one person to blame for this whole situation, and that is me", and asked that his wife and children one day "find it in their hearts to forgive me" for their current "pain and embarrassment.”

Bullock filed for divorce anyway.  As with Kidman, it cost the relationship with the daughter she adopted with James, a little girl gained from a custody battle with her husband’s second wife, a porn actress.

Mark Zuckerberg

Zuckerberg has experienced both sides of Lilith in this house.   He is widely perceived as having screwed his early partners out of their fair share of his company, Facebook.   Screenwriter Aaron Sorkin decided to make this the major theme of his popular film, “The Social Network”.  The film is also based on a book called “The Accidental Billionaires”, by Ben Mezrich, an author who has been criticized for doing more storytelling than reporting.

After the film came out, Zuckerberg had a public experience of what it is like to be viewed as an “Eve” who turns others into “Lilith”.  Zuckerberg remained silent about his feelings, but he did agree to a Saturday Night Live appearance hosted by Jesse Eisenberg, and he allowed Eisenberg to do his talking for him, so to speak.  Eisenberg explains that he was "nervous to meet him [Zuckerberg], because I had now spent a year and a half thinking about him ..." He adds, "Mark has been so gracious about something that’s really so uncomfortable ... The fact that he would do SNL and make fun of the situation is so sweet and so generous. It’s the best possible way to handle something that, I think, could otherwise be very uncomfortable.”

Part Two

By the time I began writing a draft of this article in mid-May, I had written nearly half the Lilith cycle, and I was thinking about Lilith constantly.  Around this time, I started to have dreams of Jesus at night.  More precisely, I was dreaming of a lover who looked like Jesus (this sort of lover has never been a part of my life experience to date.)

It didn’t take much effort to realize that I was supposed to connect the dream-message to the context of my Lilith series, so I began to consider Mary Magdalene, the purported concubine of Jesus, a shadowy woman who is mentioned in all four books of the New Testament, but in such a fragmentary manner that it is almost as if she was deliberately erased.

Note to Christian Readers:

Hopefully, I do not cause offense by relating dreams of Jesus as a sexual being.  As a practicing Catholic, I do not intend to reinterpret the life of Jesus or the meaning of the New Testament.  At no point in the New Testament is the private life of Jesus, or a possible intimate relationship with Mary Magdalene, ever mentioned.  These dreams simply represent an attempt to cope with painful personal events occurring at the time I was writing 7^th House Lilith.

A Little Personal Background

Normally, I don’t discuss the astrology of my personal life on my blog in detail, because I don’t want to annoy my readers.  But the spring of 2013, with its Taurus eclipse season in May, presented some tough life lessons that formed the backdrop of this series on Lilith.

Readers of the forum at astro.com will recall my venting about a messy threesome that I was involved in around Thanksgiving, 2012, when Black Moon Lilith was tightly conjunct Jupiter and about to transit my Mid Heaven.  I was in love with a charming liar, the most manipulative partner I have ever had.  Meanwhile, he was in love with a statuesque, Muslim black woman, and I was bitterly resentful for being cast as Lilith, since I had fallen in love with him first, and all three of us knew it.  It probably did not help that the Sabian symbol for the degree of my Mid Heaven was 12 Gemini, “A Sassy Colored Girl Demands Her Rights From Her Mistress”.

Five months later, with Lilith still prominent in my 10^th House, Uranus crossed my 8^th House cusp for the first time.  It would help stir up my deep feelings for my Uranus-like trickster lover, who was now in an exclusive relationship with his girlfriend, but this wasn’t an immediate concern at the time.  In a shocking and devastating turn of fate, I suffered the completely unexpected loss of my “time twin”, a friend who was born the same day as I was in the same hospital some 43 years ago.  He left behind a six year old daughter, and unborn twins, children he would never get a chance to know.  They were delivered prematurely about a week after his death.  The little boy was given his name, and the little girl was given his name as her middle name.

My friend’s death overshadowed everything else that was occurring this spring.  He died nearly two weeks before Easter, so I began praying intensely for him all the way up to Easter as his soul transited the earliest phase of death.  Most of my prayers were directed to Mary, the mother of Jesus, because of her crucially important role as a slayer of demons.  I had no thought for that other Mary, Mary Magdalene.

My relationship with the charming liar resumed in mid-April.  Now he was looking at me with renewed interest, because his girlfriend had gone out of town for an extended period.  With Uranus churning energy in a brand new house, (after nearly eight years of passive dormancy in my 7^th House), and Lilith prominently exposed, I decided to fight for what was mine. The month of May allowed me to discover what I loved, and also how much I hated my trickster lover.  But one thing I was certain of was that I was not going to end up as Lilith, not again.  He and his girlfriend broke up, and truthfully, I had a big hand in it.

At the same time, Uranus was forming a sextile to my Mid Heaven at 11 Gemini – I had more freedom to do what I wanted than I have had in years, because I had lost my job on the same day that my “time twin” lost his life.  What I wanted was to write a series on Lilith; the urge to express astrology as a calling, if not a career, was powerfully felt at this time.

Instead my days were being wasted by the needs of a lover who I was beginning to detest.  By early May, he was still in love with his girlfriend (and simultaneously deeply angry with her), but he was sleeping in my car because he had nowhere else to go, and I didn’t have the heart to get rid of him.  By mid-May, Ceres had arrived at my natal Lilith, which is partile conjunct the fixed star Sirius.  Keywords for Sirius include, “Aspiration, self-importance, celebrity, leadership, emotional.”  Ceres can be quite powerful – she really helps deliver the harvest, good and bad, and it was her hour to deliver Lilith to my doorstep.  After I took back the lover who was “mine my rights”, I knew he would never truly love me.  Without a word to his ex-girlfriend, I gave him money and put him on a cross-country bus for home.  By the time she found out, he was gone.

Not surprisingly, in our final nights together, I dreamed of a lover who had every single good quality that I could not find in the charming liar who haunted my days with text messages.  This is why I was dreaming of a lover who looked like Jesus. Just as I began writing 7^th House Lilith, a little light bulb turned on in my head.  I understood that the dream was delivering the “message” of the deeply obscure Mary Magdalene, the woman who Jesus is said to have kissed more than he kissed his disciples. 

That same day, Lilith crossed my 11^th House cusp, heading for a nine year Lilith return on top of natal Sirius.  My lover would never be anything more than a faraway friend now, and at the same time, I wanted to reach out to the masses with Lilith.  Somehow she was connected to the 7^th House, even though a marriage to the historical Jesus seems unlikely.  Instead, I sensed her position as a possible concubine, a legal status with the long shadow of Lilith behind it. 

Yet, I would be the first to admit that I couldn’t find an obvious “Mary Magdalene signature” in people with 7^th House Lilith, only brief glimpses of it, here and there, in their horoscopes and in alternative material outside the Bible.  Note that I am not making any claims of historical accuracy – it is the mythical Mary Magdalene who captured my attention.  So I label what follows clearly as “My Intuition”, and the let the reader decide for himself.

My Intuition:  Mary Magdalene is the New Testament Lilith

Mermaid by Victor Nizovtsev

Her Wikipedia article notes that she stayed with Jesus while he died, when all the male disciples but one had fled the scene.  She was also the first person to witness the Resurrection, thus she was there at the "beginning of a movement that was going to transform the West".  Mary Magdalene is not mentioned in the Acts of the Apostles.  After the Resurrection, she disappears from the New Testament completely.

The Gospel of Luke mentions that Jesus cleansed her of demons.  This is normally interpreted as shameful character traits, or possibly various psychotic illnesses.  My own feeling is that Jesus drove out actual demons, because demonic possession was far more common in that era than in our own.  My feeling is that Mary Magdalene had exceptional “life-energy” that drew parasitic otherworldly entities.  She could not defend herself, so Jesus defended her.

Certainly Jesus could be said to have “full-on passions and emotions, rebellious nature, dislike of patriarchal establishment and a need for absolute perfection”.  This was the sort of partner that Mary attracted.

Mary is mentioned many times in the New Testament, but the references are cloudy like Neptune, and perhaps deliberately so.  Mary Magdalene, the intimate of Jesus, was easily conflated with unnamed sinners or sinful women with the same name, and from the time of the earliest church, she was remembered in connection with prostitution, adultery, or licentious behavior.  It may have been slander against her, or it may not have been.  Recall that Jesus himself had an “alter ego” named Jesus Barabas who was released in a prisoner exchange while Jesus himself was selected for crucifixion.  Overlapping names and the resulting confusion of identities was a common problem of the time.

Because of this, Mary was being depicted with red hair in the famous paintings of the middle ages, which she wears down over her shoulders, while other women in the New Testament are depicted with dark hair worn beneath a scarf, following the common conventions of propriety for all women.  It was also because of this association that Mary became the patroness of “wayward” or “homeless” women, and “Magdalene asylums” were established in her name – the equivalent of homeless shelters today.

Outside of the Bible, a tradition persisted that Mary Magdalene was the jilted bride of John the Evangelist, who abandoned her when he received his calling from Jesus, or for other more personal reasons.

The Eastern Orthodox tradition suggests that Mary Magdalene travelled to Emperor Tiberius after the death of Jesus, and gained an invitation to his banquet.  This suggests a woman of independent means, but also a woman who was quite independent in the context of her marriage, or concubinage.

Also outside the scope of the New Testament is the persistent tradition in southern France that Mary Magdalene and others were expelled by persecution in the Holy Land, and left for a different part of the Roman Empire.  Again, the suggestion is of a worldly woman, who had enough initiative to pick up and start over without a husband.

Reader Response

"They seem to like me but I always manage to do something to create discord in the end, just one thing is enough. Hate me, love me or distance yourself from me, that's how it always seems to turn out." - Mikko

A comment from a reader  who was following the BML discussion of this series on astro.com caught my eye, because she described herself almost as if Mary Magdalene had the power to speak on her behalf.  Mikko made the comment before this article was published.  She had read my article on 11^th House Lilith, and felt it described her, without realizing the extent to which she articulated the essence of 7^th House Lilith, which happens to be her natal placement.

What's Up Next?
Lilith in the 6th House:  The Executive

What Did I Miss?
Lilith in the 8th House: The Elitist

SOURCES

Cindy’s description of her husband’s 7^th House Lilith, and her own 3^rd House Lilith:

http://cindystubbs.blogspot.com/2009/07/lilith.html

Lilith expressed in words through the 12 zodiac signs:

http://soulgarden.me/group/lilith-goddess-boudoir/page/lilith-expressed-in-words-through-signs

How to find all Four Lilith points in your birth chart:

http://astrofix.net/2010/07/01/how-to-find-all-four-liliths-in-your-birth-chart/

Wikipedia article on Mary Magdalene:

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