North Node

Meaning

The North Node is not a body but a point: the place where the Moon’s orbit, tilted about 5° to the ecliptic, crosses the Sun’s path going north. Its partner, the South Node, lies exactly opposite. Eclipses happen only when a new or full Moon falls near this axis, which is why the nodes have been watched since antiquity.

The nodes slide backwards through the zodiac, completing a round in about 18.6 years and spending some eighteen months in each sign, so people born within a year or so of each other often share them.

Modern astrologers read the North Node as a direction of growth: qualities and experiences that feel unfamiliar, even awkward, yet nourishing when pursued, set against the habits and ready-made skills of the South Node. Tradition, which called it the Dragon’s Head, read it more simply as a point that increases whatever it touches, of the nature of the benefics, Jupiter and Venus.

It is no verdict on a past or a fate: it describes an axis to balance, with one end that comes easily and one that asks for effort.

In practice

• The axis by house: the North Node in the 1st, with the South Node in the 7th, often describes someone used to leaning on partners who grows by deciding alone; the reverse places the growth in partnership.
• Nodal returns, when the nodes come back to their birth places around 19, 37, 56 and 74, are read as times when the direction of a life comes into focus; around 9, 28 and 46 the axis is reversed.
• Planets close to the nodes are read as tied to that direction, and an eclipse falling near a natal planet or angle as a turning point in its area of life.

Across traditions

• Indian astrology counts it as Rahu, one of the nine grahas: in myth the head of a demon who swallows the Sun or the Moon at an eclipse. Its other half, Ketu, is the South Node.
• Chinese astronomy received the nodes from India in the eighth century, under the Indian names written Luóhóu and Jìdū.
• Human Design places both nodes among its thirteen bodies and reads the North Node as the setting and direction of the second half of life, from about forty; their tones give two of the four arrows of Variable.

Origin and history

Babylonian astronomers learned to predict eclipses from their cycles, including the eighteen-year cycle later called the saros, which brings the Sun, the Moon and the nodes back into nearly the same arrangement. Greek astrologers spoke of the ascending and descending nodes; the image of a dragon that swallows the lights at eclipses reached medieval astrology through Persian and Arabic authors, and Latin writers called the two points Caput and Cauda Draconis. William Lilly, in 1647, gave the Head the nature of Jupiter and Venus and the Tail that of Saturn and Mars. In the twentieth century, Martin Schulman’s Karmic Astrology of 1975 popularised the reading of the nodal axis as a soul’s path from the familiar towards the new.

How Ulune calculates it

Ulune uses the true node from the Swiss Ephemeris, worked out from the Moon’s actual orbit, in natal charts, transits and progressions and in the Human Design bodygraph alike; the South Node is placed exactly opposite. The true node wobbles around the smooth mean node by up to about 1.9°, so a chart made elsewhere with the mean node can differ by that much, and it sometimes moves forwards for a while: Ulune marks it retrograde only when it is actually moving backwards.

No aspect is listed between the two nodes, which are always opposite. The calendar dates the North Node’s sign changes and transits to a birth chart, but no stations, and finds eclipses with the Swiss Ephemeris’s own eclipse search.