The Lunar Nodes in Astrology: Part One

Hello reader! Every Wednesday, I post the notes from this week’s episode of Maria Luz’s Conscious Curiosities podcast. The direct links to my different Substack sections are in the footer, along with a link to instructions on how to unsubscribe. 

In this two part series, I explain the Lunar Nodes, aka the North and South Nodes. What are they? What do they tell you about past lives, this life, and your soul's intentions? 
I walk through what the North Node placement means by house and sign, and provide an example using my own North Node placement.

If you are newer to astrology, and you are just getting the gist of your Sun, Moon, Ascendant, and attitude of the planets in your chart, the North and South Nodes of the Moon will provide the big picture context for all of those juicy details. (In your birth chart, the North Node glyph looks like a pair of headphones and the South Node, a horseshoe.)

Technically, the nodes are not physical bodies, rather they are points in the sky formed by the Moon’s orbit around the Earth as it intersects with the Earth’s path around the Sun. They are always 180° apart from one another, and change signs every 18 months and move in a retrograde manner relative to the Earth’s motion. For example, at present in August 2024, the nodes are in Aries and Libra, and will move “backwards” into Pisces and Virgo in January 2025. The nodes are also where eclipses occur.

The lunar nodes offer a glimpse at your soul’s plan for this life and how it fits into the larger plan for its evolution. However, they are not a hack or a cheat code for moving up an evolutionary rung. If only it were so easy, likely Bezos and Musk would be all over them. Remember that we are all part of a collective creation that I think of as a never ending experiment for how we can evolve if we are all sincerely acting in the interest of our best and highest good individually and collectively.

We cannot do our soul’s work in a vacuum. Life will present us with conditions through other people and circumstances, and it is through our chosen response to each iteration that we cumulatively evolve individually and collectively. These conditions will feel familiar and we will be tempted to simply react rather than respond.

In the oldie but goodie book, Karmic Astrology, by Martin Schulman, he puts the relationship between chosen response and evolution this way:

Two different individuals confronted with the same events or circumstances handle themselves differently; one running away from the event and the other coping and rising with it to the highest karmic possibility. The first individual has to repeat the event again and again while the second individual is ready to move on to new lessons. As the days pass into months and years and lifetimes, the second individual will be rising into higher levels of karma more rapidly while the first individual could very easily be dealing with the same basic elemental karmic lessons for an eternity of lifetimes.

Note that I believe the soul (with input) decides on how many lifetimes to pursue evolution through human incarnation, and most astrologers explain that the South Node is associated with our past life habitual emotional patterns, the outcome of which have resulted in past choices. Because we tend to want to remain in the realm of the known, we have continually assigned the same meanings to emotions and have therefore made these same choices again and again. Therefore the beliefs and behaviors inherent in the South Node’s astrology have become our nature. 

And even if we become aware of these patterns and seek to investigate them in order to understand them, we often get sort of hypnotized back into the old schema and forget that we only meant to delve into the patterns for understanding, Instead we find ourselves reliving it as if it were the actual purpose of our existence. I think relationships are a prime area where many have experienced that deja vu sensation. Different person, place, and different time, yet we have fallen into our same unsatisfying way of being in relationship.

There is a common misconception that we are meant to forget our South Node tendencies completely and master our North Node in our lives. If we accept that our soul wishes to evolve through human experiences, then we can see we wouldn’t want to ‘waste’ all the accumulated experience, rather, we wish to experience conditions with the old knowledge acting as simply information and not a predisposed belief or behavior pattern. We can then respond differently faced with a similar condition and acquire new knowledge and skills to integrate with the old.

Pay close attention to the signs (via patterns and cycles) in your life! Photo by Austin Chan on Unsplash

The nodes describe the predominant condition or pattern of experiences the individual will face in this life. While I won’t get into it here, astrologers look also to the placement of the planetary rulers of the nodes to understand the actual evolutionary aims which lie beneath the condition or experiences. They help us know why our soul would set us up with this nodal aspect. However, the full picture can really only be seen by looking at the birth chart in its entirety, and assessing it in the context of the level of individual consciousness (awareness to what is greater than oneself).

If you are feeling enticed to explore the nodes in your chart, I am going to provide some basics here by house and sign in order for you to begin your exploration. I will include the books which are specific to the nodes and which I have worked with in the references/show notes. In full disclosure, as I practice the Jeffrey Wolf Green lineage of evolutionary astrology, the nodes for me are only part of a complex paradigm which centers around Pluto in the birth chart, and cannot be used solely to get at the soul’s intent. Of course, as a Scorpio rising, I would be drawn to such a method, being firmly in camp Pluto (the modern ruler of Scorpio) and in love with the intricacies of human psychology and transformation (also Pluto and Scorpio themes).

Let’s look at the house in which your North Node resides. Generally, this tells you which area of life you will be prompted to behave in a way that will contribute greatly to your soul’s evolution. You also need to fully grasp the house in which your South Node resides. Yes, they are opposite on the wheel, however, they have a prominent theme in common. If you work at this theme in a heart centered way over your lifetime, you will experience tremendous growth, perhaps even a dramatic transformation (raising my hand here!). 

To some degree, you can extrapolate to the sign of your North Node, by looking at the sign naturally associated with the house discussed below (e.g. First House and Aries) in thinking of the sign as an attitude or approach you are being asked to gain experience with, if not mastery of, in this life. However, the depth comes when the signs and houses of your nodes are synthesized. I will give an example of this from my own life when we get to the Fourth House. As this is a huge topic, I will break up the content into two installments.

In this first installment, I will go through the First through the Fourth Houses.

First House/Aries North Node.

You may find yourself easily in relationships of a certain dynamic. You have experienced your identity only as something relative to another person. Or at least dependent on receiving their love or engagement when you behave a certain way, therefore pleasing other people is an unconscious motivation. This may have led to you holding resentment at the people you are in relationship with while at the same time, not being able to disengage for fear of losing yourself. 

The North Node here pushes you to be confident that your own desires will bring you love and a life worth living. You may repel people if you start doing your own thing, and that will scare the crap out of you. But would you rather be an accessory for others to put on when you match them, or would you rather create your own style and way of doing your life’s work, even if it’s scary? Ironically, when you are transparent about your own desires, you will experience more harmony in relationships.

Second House/Taurus North Node.

You are adept with the messy human condition: crisis, trauma, gossip. Dare I say, you may enjoy being a spectator, if not a player, in arenas where the stakes require losing big, whether it be money or power or people. While in this mode, you do not have to face your own source of security because it comes through status via others.

With the North Node here, your attention is needed on your own assets and being your own source of comfort and security. The prerequisite is to understand why you value what you do. If push comes to shove, can you stand on your own two feet and provide for yourself, and feel that you have enough without grasping outside of yourself?

Third House/Gemini North Node.

You are being asked to zoom in, to get curious about your immediate neighborhood. To stop feeling that what you are seeking is out there somewhere far away or in a higher philosophy and instead listening to the person in front of you and seeing what is happening on your street. After lives in which your position gave you the freedom to intuit what was morally true for others, or were spent endlessly seeking the capital T Truth, now you must come to enjoy life as a boots-on-the-ground participant in the practical conversations.

Be on the lookout for opportunities to mingle with the ‘common folk’, as that is where your growth will come.

Fourth House/Cancer North Node.

Something will force you to have to examine why you are always the responsible one, why you are unable to express (or even to feel!) your true feelings, and tend to equate acknowledgement of achievements with love.

Maybe your dysfunctional family of origin causes you to escape that out of control feeling and seek solace in less emotionally vulnerable environments. The lack of fluency in feelings will keep you focused on the cold objectives of the group rather than how the group feels about those objectives. If you stay in this pattern, you will never experience the care and security that can be derived from family, although you may need to expand your definition of family and be vulnerable.

You are now empowered to be consciously curious about the lunar nodes! To be continued…

Books I recommend on the lunar nodes:
Karmic Astrology: The Moon’s Nodes and Reincarnation, by Martin Schulman
North Node Astrology, by Elizabeth Spring
Astrology for the Soul, by Jan Spiller

Before you go

Did you know that while I provide astrological analysis for free on this Substack newsletter, I make my living doing astrological consultations, hypnosis, and mediumship? I offer affordable services (and a sliding scale (email me about it) and digital products over at my website (20% off with “SUBSTACK24”), which I am frequently updating with useful info and to make it easier to understand which service fits what you are seeking. 

Astrology, hypnosis, and mediumship helped me get unstuck and transform in a magical way, and I know you have the same opportunity. I would appreciate your consideration of my services when you wish to do some personal discovery. It’s for you, but it benefits the collective in so many ways!

Here is the link to my podcast, Maria Luz’s Conscious Curiosities, where you can learn about astrology (I also share free hypnotic tracks) wherever you listen, as well as my YouTube channel, where I post a video forecast weekly.