On a sunny day in April, just as one retreat was coming to an end, astrologer and writer Eliza Robertson invited me to hang at her Airbnb rather than head to LAX and squander a full day in the airport. I sat in a canopy, enjoying my last moments in the sun in the back of someone’s garden. 

After three hours, I wished I had tacked on another night’s stay to our staff retreat so I could spend more time walking around sunny neighborhoods, admiring blossoming trees in Culver City.

I was fortunate because a month or so later Eliza came to me where I live in the Berkshires. We headed to the Green River, an astonishing cold and crystal clear stream not far from my house that flows over a bed of smooth stones. Again, it was so easy to talk to Eliza about topics ranging from transits to how we find time to write. She is magic without undisciplined woo, and applies rigor to astrology that I would say comes from her background in academia, but it’s also innate to her to litmus test any assumption or idea that so many others in the field take for granted. 

I’ve seen her do this in her interpretation of Chiron or Mercury in a chart — raising flat meanings to a more rounded, nuanced understanding enriched by mythology, literature and history. She has done the same with Black Moon Lilith. It would be far too easy to pin “dark feminine” to the astrological point in a chart and call it a day. Her work on this titled, “Lilith: an Unfruitful Darkness” for Archai Journal investigates the concept of the rejected, defiant, the wretched, and the succubus.

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THEA: So, we’re colleagues at the CHANI app, but I feel as though I’ve gotten to know you as a friend. Partially through the wonders of team communication channels, but also due to our tendencies to stick our heads in the other’s virtual office. And, then being able to meet you in person affirmed our connection. Seeing another astrologer “in human” always has a sort of grounding effect. 

So I’m really excited to talk about Lilith. 

Lilith has been called such apt names like night creature, screech owl, and my favorite night hag. What is it about Lilith that has people over centuries so terrified? What do you think is Lilith’s power?

ELIZA: Maybe we should start with an introduction. Lilith is ancient. Her earliest mention in text, to my knowledge, is in the poems to Inanna written around 2000 BCE. In all of her subsequent cameos (in the bible, in folklore, in a medieval text called the Alphabet of Ben Sira), Lilith aligns with the dark, the wild, and the exiled. Hebrew stories have pitched Lilith as the feminine night demon who kills the fetuses of pregnant women. She was said to cause all stillbirths, and expectant mothers wore amulets to ward her off. 

In her most famous role — as Adam’s first wife — Lilith refuses to lay under him in sex, because she perceives herself as his equal. In the end, she chooses her sovereignty over life as the good wife in Paradise, and she splits. 

Lilith is a scapegoat. She’s every femme person ever hated for being beautiful, or sexual, or powerful. She’s every femme person ever pathologized for their rage, or their resistance. In the Inanna poems, she’s banished to the “wild and uninhabited places” — a stark contrast with fecund “Cradle of Civilization” that characterized much of ancient Sumer. Lilith is not “cultivated” or “fertile” in the traditional senses. We can’t feed off or profit from her. 

Her name comes from the Akkadian word that means “female night demon.” Her association with the night is one reason people have been terrified of her. It’s primal to be afraid of the dark. As an archetype that represents the “wild,” she’s as dangerous and unpredictable as the natural world. And of course, there’s her sexual power. I don’t think every culture has been afraid of women, or women who have sex for pleasure, but that fear has pervaded many dominant social narratives for the last millennium or two. 

If Lilith isn’t having sex for procreation, what is she channeling that power for? What could we channel that power for? And yes, that’s terrifying to some. 

THEA: Black Moon Lilith in astrology is a point of much fascination for astrologers — particularly modern astrologers. Personally, I have yet to explore Black Moon Lilith in client or event charts. What was your journey, as a ‘traditional’ astrologer to using Lilith in a chart? 

ELIZA: I’m not puritanical about my astrologies. While modern psychological astrology can be made more robust by including traditional research, theory, and technique, the reverse is also true. When practicing electional astrology (that is, when choosing astrologically auspicious dates), I don’t ignore more recently discovered planets like Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto (though I’d often like to). So why not include Black Moon? That’s my thinking anyway, though I started sitting with Lilith before I began studying traditional astrology. 

My first reading was with Demetra George, one of the astrologers who rebirthed traditional astrology in recent years. She’s also the astrologer who popularized the so-called asteroid goddesses, another modern phenomenon. So, Demetra George normalized that approach for me: that you don’t have to throw any goddesses out with the bathwater. With client charts, I only look at Black Moon if she’s tethered to a prominent planet or angle. Personally, I have her on my ascendant, so it’s always been a point of intrigue for me. 

I should say too, for people newer to working with Lilith in astrology — there are a few Liliths. The most popular one is Black Moon, which we’re discussing here. That’s a geometrically calculated point in space — not a physical body. However, there’s also an asteroid called Lilith, which is different (and which I don’t tend to use, personally.) 

THEA: Is astrology the Lilith of the sciences? I’m asking with a wink. But, can we know things by trusting our gut, instinct? 

ELIZA: Ha, I would say so, yes — though there are many “Liliths” of the sciences, like psychology, or any subject that thinks seriously about mental health. Because Lilith has come to correspond with the dark, feral feminine — which defies thought considered to be “enlightened” and “cultivated,” there’s a real divide here between reason and emotion or intuition. But there doesn’t have to be. In fact, Lilith argued very rationally to Adam when she said, “hey, we’re both made of dirt,” (the name Adam comes from “adamah,” or earth), “so you’re not superior to me. We’re equal.” For me personally, my biggest decisions have been made on instinct, rather than “logic” per se. But different strokes for different folks.

THEA: I just watched the Billie Elish documentary, The World’s a Little Blurry with my daughter Willow. There is heavy Lilith energy coursing through and in the end Billie takes her depression, fear and teenage angst and puts it in public discourse with her first album. I think that’s what garnered her all those teenage fans in the first place. But it had me thinking about how Lilith — as both fertility and infertility — is so intricately linked to creativity. How does Lilith show up for you in your own creative process?

ELIZA: Yeah, that’s a really interesting question. For me, Lilith is fertile — tremendously so. Yet it’s not a fertility that’s directed toward birthing human progeny. Creativity is very linked to eros in my mind — that erotic drive can be channeled in a literal sense, through sex or other erotic acts, but it can also be channeled toward intellectual and artistic creation. I find Lilith themes often turn up in my fiction, which I don’t ever plan, but there they are anyway. My novel had a lot to do with desire, especially desire that was a bit subversive, taboo, and embarrassing to talk about. That’s where Lilith lives — in the “wild and uninhabited” places we prefer to shut away.

THEA: That. Lately, I’ve been pulling the Lust card in the Thoth tarot deck and the eros that you speak of is on my mind in terms of writing what I want. A lot of the time, I think about what everyone would be freed up to create if they did not have  the burden of being pleasing, likable, marketable if you will. The concept of a writing workshop or thinking is always about the reader even. Like it seems antithetical to art. As a writer of both fiction and non-fiction, is it important to give Lilith a place in your work?

ELIZA: I love the Thoth version of that card (aka Strength in Rider-Waite-Smith inspired decks), because the holy whore isn’t trying to tame the lion — she’s riding the lion in ecstasy. There’s a lot to read into that image when it comes to embracing our wild parts at the expense of “civilized” society or table manners. As far as writing goes… yeah — marketing is, almost by definition, “people-pleasing.” Lilith couldn’t care less about that. It’s really hard to make interesting art if you’re too focused on what the readers or buyers will think. Such art might be palatable, but it’s often pretty milquetoast. And you know — there’s a place for that. And a market for that. But personally, I would find it stymying to write fiction with that kind of censorship in mind. To answer your question, it’s important for me to give Lilith a place in my work (and by extension, to not give as many shits about other people’s opinions), but that’s also not something I’m good at a lot of the time. Also, I think you can go too far the other way as an artist and be elitist or precious about your work. That’s not the solution either. 

THEA: To take it back to astrology, right now, Black Moon Lilith is at 19 Gemini — so it’s apt that we’re discussing what you term as “earth’s ghostly double, or shadow” since Gemini is the since of the twins. It’s got doppelganger energy. How do we invite the “exiled one” into the discourse? How do you see Lilith showing up in current events?
ELIZA: Lilith is all over current events at the moment. As discussed, old stories actually blamed Lilith for stillbirths (not to mention the modern association with Lilith and nonprocreative sex). It’s not a far stretch to connect her with abortion. In my opinion, Lilith aligns with anyone on the margins, or anyone in a situation of exile — which includes any person carrying a fetus who doesn’t want to give birth, and who can’t access the care that should be their human right. The grief, rage, and refusal a lot of us are feeling right now — Lilith presides over those feelings. Or at least, I imagine her in the corner, spurring us on. How do we invite the exiled one into the discourse? I think she’s already here.