What they actually are

The Moon does not go about the Earth in a clean ring. Her path is an ellipse, so in every circuit there is a point where she is furthest from us — the apogee, some four hundred and five thousand kilometres out — and a point where she is nearest, the perigee, about three hundred and sixty-three thousand. Draw a line from the one to the other and it passes through the Earth. The astronomers call it the line of apsides.

That line does not hold still. The Sun keeps pulling at it, so the whole ellipse turns slowly in its own plane, coming all the way round the zodiac in about eight years and ten months.

Black Moon Lilith is the far end of that line: the empty focus of the Moon's ellipse, the place she withdraws to. Selena, the White Moon, is the near end — the perigee, the place she returns to. Nothing is there. Neither point is a body you could photograph, and that is precisely what makes them useful, for they mark the furthest and the nearest a thing may go and still belong to you.

Lilith, the Black Moon

The far point — what would not be made small

The myth

Lilith comes into the written record as a night-spirit of Mesopotamia, and arrives in medieval Jewish folklore — most famously in the Alphabet of Ben Sira, a text of about the tenth century — as Adam's first wife, made of the same earth as he was rather than out of his rib. She refuses to lie beneath him, on the ground that they were made alike and equal. She speaks the Name, and she goes out of the garden. Note that carefully: she is not driven out. She leaves.

Everything that was afterwards done to her in the telling — demon, stealer of children, danger to sleeping men — grew out of that single refusal, and grew fast.

The step past the line

Consider what becomes of anything a person, or a whole people, cannot permit. It is sent away — and what is sent away does not stop existing. It waits outside the door, and it grows strange out there, and in time it comes back wearing a monster's face, because a monster is what we make of whatever we have refused to look at. A culture unable to tolerate a woman's autonomy, her appetite, or her plain refusal did not abolish those things by calling them a demon. It only put them out of doors.

What she brings

Wherever your Lilith stands, you are not able to be made small. Some compromise that everyone around you managed was never available to you, and you likely discovered this early, and were likely punished a little for it.

She gives a fierce honesty about your own wanting, a refusal of rules you were handed rather than chose, and a real resistance to being managed. Her house and sign carry more current than their neighbours: more desire there, more shame there, and more capacity to act without waiting for permission. If you have ever been the one who said the thing everybody in the room was avoiding, that was your Lilith, and the room needed you.

Precautions

Do not let refusing become the whole of you. A door held shut with your whole body is still a door that governs your day. If a life is organised entirely around what is being declined, the one declining is quite as ruled as the one obeying — only more tired.

Look honestly at the leavings. Much of what feels like rejection turns out, told slowly and to someone kind, to be a departure you made first and grieved afterwards. Leaving is often right, and it was right when you did it. But it will go on hurting in the wrong way as long as it is remembered as banishment.

Let the shame have air. This point governs what you were taught to hide, and hidden things do not lie still; they act from where you cannot watch them. Said aloud once, to one person who has earned it, nearly all of it turns out to be quite ordinary, and quite human, and much lighter than it was.

Selena, the White Moon

The near point — what was given, and never had to be earned

The myth

Selena has a shorter history than her sister, and honesty serves better here than dressing it up. She is not an ancient figure. The White Moon is a point of the last century, worked out deliberately as the counterweight to the Black Moon: if one end of the line shows where a person cannot be governed, there ought to be another showing where she is sheltered.

Her name borrows the Greek Selene, the moon goddess who drives the chariot of the night, and who loved the sleeping Endymion — a love that asked him for nothing at all and was given anyway. For what this point does, that is exactly the right association.

The face the world meets

What she brings

Here is where grace arrives. Where things go well for reasons you cannot entirely account for, where the help turns up, where you are forgiven more readily than you had any right to expect. If Lilith is the part of you that was sent away, Selena is the part that was never disowned at all — blessed early, by someone or something, and left whole.

By her sign and house she shows the quarter of life in which you are quietly lucky: where your instincts may be trusted, where you do the right thing without having to reason it out, and where other people find you easy to help. Most natives, shown this, recognise it at once and say they had simply thought everyone had that.

Precautions

Notice it. Selena's whole loss is that she goes unremarked. Shelter that has always been overhead is not experienced as shelter; it is experienced as weather. Say thank you, even under your breath, even to nobody in particular. Grace that is noticed tends to go on arriving.

Do not spend her as permission. The place of ease is also the place where you can get away with things, and the getting away was never the gift. Treat the protection as money held in trust for other people rather than as a licence made out in your own name.

Pass it on in the same coin. Whatever your Selena governs is the exact quarter in which your help costs you least and lands hardest. That is not an accident, and it is the whole of the instruction.

Why they belong on one line

Because they are the two ends of a single line, Selena and Lilith always stand exactly opposite in this calculator: the same degree, the opposite sign. That is geometry rather than doctrine — but it carries a reading worth having.

No one becomes whole by choosing the good half and disowning the other. Wholeness comes of holding both ends of a contradiction at once, and holding them long enough that something grows in the middle which neither end could have produced alone. The alternative is worth knowing too: any quality pressed to its extreme and never balanced will turn at last into its own opposite, usually without warning and usually at the worst hour. A goodness that admits no shadow goes bad. A refusal with no shelter standing behind it becomes the very smallness it was refusing.

So read your two Moons together, always. Wherever your life will not be governed, your shelter stands in the opposite house. Lilith in the tenth with Selena in the fourth: work you will not be told how to do, and a home that holds you while you are not being told. Lilith in the seventh with Selena in the first: partnerships that will not be tamed, and a self that is nonetheless looked after.

Neither half means very much alone. Taken together they are usually a more accurate portrait of a person than either point could give.

Two sisters, and the scales they hold

From Our Sidereal World — the author's own reading

This is where the novel comes from, and it belongs to the novel rather than to astrology. No tradition will tell you the following. It is what I see when I look at the two ends of that one line, and it is why the book bears both their names.

The geometry is what first suggested it to me. One line, one orbit, one Moon — and two ends to it, set as far apart as two things can be and still belong to the same body. That is not a bad description of a soul, nor of a pair of sisters.

Read practically, it means the reading of either is half-finished until you have looked across the chart at her sister. Weigh them together. What the far sister costs you, the near one very often pays.

In Our Sidereal World the two are not points on a chart at all but persons, walking the roads of Taura with faces and tempers and purposes of their own — and the balance they keep between them is the thing the whole world of the book turns upon. Meet them there →

Two ways to place Selena, and which this calculator uses

Here is where two astrologers will hand you different answers for the same birth, and it is worth knowing why before you set your chart beside anyone else's and worry.

This calculator uses the astronomical method throughout, for one reason. Everything else it shows you — the planets, the angles, the fixed stars carried back to your birth year — is computed rather than looked up, and may be checked against any ephemeris in the world. Selena is held to the same standard. Where the tradition offers a choice, we take the one you are able to verify.

In short

The author's own reading, plainly put — not traditional astrology

Everything in this closing section is mine rather than the tradition's. It is the reading Our Sidereal World is written out of, set down as plainly as I can put it.

Lilith is the step past the line. Every culture draws a taboo line, and every child is handed it before she can ask who drew it. Lilith is where you stepped over — inwardly first, quietly, perhaps without telling anyone. That step is not a fault. It is the beginning of genius, because nothing new was ever made inside the ground already mapped.

Her house shows where your primal passion lives — the raw wanting that can harden into genius, and that sours if it is never allowed to harden into anything.

Selena is conscientiousness. She is your most blessed-looking face, the closest to the world, the one the world meets openly. Because it was never forbidden you, it was never made heavy — and so this is the part of yourself you can give away most easily, and do, often without noticing.

They are two sisters — and this is the novel's own claim, not astrology's. Two halves of the Moon's soul, standing at opposite ends of her one path, holding the balance scales of the world between them. Lilith holds the pan that will not be made light. Selena holds the pan that was never weighted. Neither is the good sister. A scale with one pan is not a scale.

These are the two the novel is named for. In Our Sidereal World they are not points on a chart but persons — with faces, tempers and purposes of their own — and the balance they keep between them is what the whole world of the book turns upon. Meet them there →