Lunar nodes: the axis between the familiar and the new

Your chart holds more than planets. Between them, two small symbols turn up that look like a horseshoe with two dots – one the right way up, one upside down. These are the ascending and the descending lunar node. Big words have grown up around them: fate, karma, life’s task. Before you go along with any of it, it is worth taking a sober look at what these two places actually are.

Two points you cannot see in the sky

The Moon travels its orbit around the Earth, and the Earth travels its own around the Sun. The two orbits do not lie in the same plane; they are tilted against each other by a good five degrees. Where two tilted planes cut across each other, a line appears – and the nodes lie exactly where the Moon crosses the plane of the Earth’s orbit. There is nothing to see there: no body, no mass, no light. It is pure geometry, worked out and entered on the drawing like a mark on a map.

Even so, this geometry is not without consequences. Eclipses only occur when a new moon or a full moon falls close to one of the two crossing points; otherwise the Moon passes above or below the Sun and nothing happens. That is also where the old name “dragon points” comes from – in many cultures people told each other that at an eclipse a dragon swallowed the light.

Dragon’s head and dragon’s tail

The place where the Moon crosses to the north is called the ascending or north lunar node, the dragon’s head in older usage. The opposite point, where it goes south, is the descending or south lunar node, the dragon’s tail. In many chart drawings you will find only one of the two marked in, usually the ascending node. That is quite enough, because the second one follows of its own accord.

The two always stand exactly opposite each other, with half the zodiac between them. Find one of them in Aries and the other is bound to sit in Libra; Scorpio calls for Taurus, Gemini calls for Sagittarius. In practice, then, hardly anyone names just one end. People usually speak of the nodal axis, and it takes its name from the pair of signs it falls in – Leo to Aquarius, Virgo to Pisces, Cancer to Capricorn. Anyone who names the axis has always meant both ends by it.

An axis that runs backwards

The nodes move slowly, and against the usual direction, through the zodiac signs. A full round takes them about 18.6 years, which is roughly a year and a half per sign. That yields a simple piece of arithmetic: at about 18 or 19, then again around 37 and around 56, the axis returns to where it stood at your birth. Many people remember exactly those ages as times when a direction was settled. Whether that is down to the sky or simply to the course of a life, each person may answer for themselves.

What interpretation makes of it

Read astrologically, the descending end stands for the familiar: abilities that come to you without effort, patterns you slide back into under pressure, the comfortable side of the axis. The ascending end shows the far shore – a sign and a house where you feel unpractised and a little awkward at first, and where something is waiting for you all the same. Some schools dress this up in terms like karma, old burdens and life’s task. You do not have to take that language on. As a pair of opposites made of “I can do that already” and “I still do not dare go there”, the axis stays usable without any assumption about earlier lives.

No planet, no force of its own

A point does not act, it only marks a place. Unlike the planets, the lunar axis brings nothing of its own. It gains meaning only through what stands next to it: if your Sun, your Mars or your Venus sits close by, that theme gains weight. If not a single aspect falls on it, you may safely deal with the nodes in a line or two and turn instead to positions that speak more clearly. Encounters are often read through the axis as well: if another person’s planet touches your node, the connection is said to carry weight. A pretty thought – only it should not be turned into the explanation for everything.

How to look it up yourself

For the position you need the date, time and place of birth; any clean calculation of a horoscope gives the nodes along with the rest. Check first which signs the axis falls in, then which houses, and only right at the end whether a planet stands nearby. Anyone who has once grasped how signs, houses and the ascendant hang together reads the axis in a few minutes – and finds along the way that it is far less mysterious than its reputation, and remarkably down to earth instead.