How to Find Your Lilith Sign: A Checked Step-by-Step Lookup

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Calculator note: Astrologist.com does not currently calculate Lilith placements. Neither the free birth chart nor Ask the Astrologist calculates Lilith, so this guide uses an outside source. It is educational; once you have a position and know its convention, the sign and house guides can help you explore it.

Finding your Lilith sign takes four things: your birth date, your birth time if you know it, the place (to get the right time zone), and a decision about which kind of Lilith you want. The last one matters more than people expect. Mean and Osculating Black Moon Lilith are two different calculations, and they can land in different signs. Mean Lilith vs True Lilith explains the difference; this page is the practical lookup.

Step 1: choose a source that names its convention

Use a source that tells you exactly which point it is giving you. If a website or app just says "Lilith", look in its settings or help pages for the words mean, true, osculating or interpolated. If you cannot find out, write the source down as "convention unknown" rather than guessing.

The worked examples below use the Swiss Ephemeris test page that Astrodienst publishes at astro.com/swisseph/swetest.htm. It is a plain form in front of the Swiss Ephemeris calculation program, it is free, and its output labels each point explicitly. Its own help text lists the three lunar apogee codes:

• A: mean lunar apogee (Lilith, Black Moon)
• B: osculating lunar apogee
• c: interpolated lunar apogee

By default it gives Tropical, geocentric positions. Sidereal, heliocentric and topocentric positions only appear if you add options for them, so leave those out.

Step 2: turn your birth date and time into Universal Time

The test page takes the time in Universal Time (UT) when you use its -ut option, so convert your local date and clock time together first. Use the time zone and the daylight-saving rule that applied at your birthplace on that date, not today's rule. That is the only job the birthplace does here. For a geocentric position at a fixed moment, the place does not shift the Lilith longitude; the Swiss Ephemeris documentation describes topocentric positions of mean elements as meaningless.

If you are not sure about the clock change on your birth date, look it up for that year. Getting the hour wrong matters little for Mean Lilith on most dates, but it can matter a great deal for Osculating Lilith, and it always matters for houses.

The conversion can change the date as well as the hour. For example, 15 March 1990 at 00:30 Central European Time (UTC+1) becomes 14 March 1990 at 23:30 UT. Use the resulting UT date in the next step, not the local one.

Step 3: run the lookup

On the test page, fill in:

1. Start date (d.m.y): the UT calendar date from Step 2, for example 15.3.1990.
2. Planet selection: AB for Mean and Osculating together (add c for the interpolated version).
3. Output format: PZ, which prints the point's name and its longitude as degrees, a two-letter sign and minutes.
4. Other options: -ut followed by your UT birth time, for example -ut13:30. Adding -roundmin rounds the output to the nearest minute of arc.

Leave the ephemeris on default or choose Swiss Ephemeris (compressed DE441); both gave the same results below. Keep one step. The sign abbreviations are ar, ta, ge, cn, le, vi, li, sc, sa, cp, aq and pi, from Aries to Pisces.

Step 4: write down what you got

Record five things together: the longitude, the sign, the convention label, the source, and the time you entered in UT. "Mean Lilith 14°39' Scorpio, Swiss Ephemeris test page, 15.3.1990 13:30 UT" is a usable note. "Lilith in Scorpio" on its own is not, because it hides the convention and the time.

Worked example 1: a known birth time

Ilse was born in Amsterdam on 15 March 1990 at 14:30. In the Netherlands that date was still on Central European Time (UTC+1); summer time began on 25 March that year. So the UT time is 13:30.

Entering 15.3.1990, AB, PZ and -ut13:30 -roundmin gives:

Both conventions agree on Scorpio and sit almost five degrees apart. Running the same query with the uncompressed JPL DE441 ephemeris option gave the same values to within a fraction of a second of arc, so the minute figures are solid. Ilse can use the Scorpio section of Lilith in the water signs and note that the reading holds under either convention.

Worked example 2: no birth time

Joris was born in London on 3 January 1990 and has no time. London was on GMT, so his local birth date happens to run from 00:00 to 24:00 UT. Elsewhere, convert both ends of the local calendar day to UT: in Amsterdam on Central European Time, the same local day runs from 23:00 UT on 2 January to 23:00 UT on 3 January. Instead of one moment, check the whole day. Enter 3.1.1990, AB, steps 25, step size 60m, output format TPZ and -ut00:00. That lists both points every hour from midnight to midnight.

• Mean Lilith runs from 6°38' Scorpio at 00:00 to 6°45' Scorpio at 24:00. It moves only seven minutes of arc in the day and is nowhere near a sign boundary, so Scorpio holds for any time that day.
• Osculating Lilith runs from 28°42' Scorpio to 2°04' Sagittarius. The hourly list shows it moving forward the whole day and crossing 0° Sagittarius once. A five-minute run around the crossing puts it at about 07:40 UT. Born before then, Joris has Osculating Lilith in Scorpio; after then, in Sagittarius; within a few minutes of 07:40, it is too close to call.

So Joris can settle his Mean Lilith sign without a time but not his Osculating Lilith sign. Two cautions come with this. First, the end values alone are not proof. The osculating point can stop and turn back: in the same lookup it slowed to a halt around 5 January, drifted backwards and re-entered Scorpio shortly before 03:00 UT on 10 January. Always check the steps in between, and if the point turns round, check more closely. Second, Mean Lilith is not always settled either. It moves about a tenth of a degree a day, so on a date when it sits within that distance of a sign boundary, the time matters for it too.

When two sources disagree

Work through the differences in this order:

1. Convention. Mean against Osculating is the commonest cause and can mean a gap of many degrees. Check both labels.
2. Time. Check the UT conversion, the daylight-saving rule for that year, and whether one source assumed noon.
3. Zodiac. A sidereal setting shifts every position by more than twenty degrees for modern birth dates under the usual sidereal options. This site uses the Tropical zodiac.
4. Different ephemerides. Small differences of minutes of arc can come from the underlying data. The Swiss Ephemeris documentation reports gaps of up to about 20 minutes between some published "true Lilith" tables and its own osculating apogee.

If the sources still disagree after that because they use different conventions, keep both, clearly labelled, and read each sign page separately. Do not settle the question by picking the sign you like.

What about the house?

The house needs a reliable birth time, the same as every other house placement, plus the house system you are using. The sign lookup above does not give you a house. If you have a house from a chart source, the twelve house guides start with Black Moon Lilith in the 1st house.

For what the point means, see Black Moon Lilith in astrology. For the placements Astrologist.com does calculate, open the free birth chart.

Related articles

• Mean Lilith vs True Lilith
• Lilith in Aries, Leo or Sagittarius
• Lilith in Taurus, Virgo or Capricorn
• Lilith in Gemini, Libra or Aquarius
• How to Find Your North Node