When the moon comes back around…

I have been accused more than once, due to the degree of focus I put on study, and because I am generally reticent to share my personal gnosis in significant detail, of armchairing. Certainly a lot of people are more forthcoming with their personal experiences than I am.

But I’ll tell you why I focus so much on study.

In approximately 900 AD, a Chinese astrologer began recognizing the lunar apogee, said to be the passage site of a hidden comet, as an entity they named Yuebei. They learned of Yuebei’s importance from an unknown, respected astrologer from Iran — Lilith’s home turf — during the height of Arabic astrology.

Yuebei is quite a maleific placement. She is said to symbolize a house of no sons, the death of children, the taboo-breaking, sexual feminine, with scarlet-red accoutrements, and when aspected with Jupiter, a rebel against the state. Yuebei rides a dragon, naked, with long disheveled hair, wielding a bloodied sword.

Sounds quite familiar, doesn’t it?

Yuebei hangs around, but remains in the shadows of Chinese astrology, being primarily the purview of only the most deeply invested by the time we arrive at the modern era.

Another thousand years later, something interesting happens.

Black Moon Lilith comes to represent the lunar apogee in Western astrology, by some strange coincidence.

And this occurs, seemingly, with no knowledge on anyone’s part of Yuebei. Rather, in the West, it seems inspired by the ironically misogynist trappings of Jung’s anima concept.

Lilith travels East, taking her mantle as a mysterious lunar gravitational void tugging at the threads of the fates, and then travels back to the West, claiming the same dark throne in our culture.

Sometimes study is not simply the dry shuffling of old, dead documents from bygone writers. Sometimes study is how we come to see divinity as the hand that reaches down into the world, in a way that is so large and improbable that we struggle to explain it elsewise.

Lilith tells her story as much through the history books as through your personal gnosis in meditation. Forgive me my preciousness with my practice. But there is already such an illustrious story that I could spend the rest of my life telling it, laying right out in the open waiting to be found.