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In astrology, the South Node represents your “past” – past-life karma, innate talents, and habitual comfort zones. It reveals the skills you naturally excel at because you have already mastered them in previous incarnations, but it can also indicate the psychological baggage or stagnation you need to overcome.

Once again, I found a great article my Master Astrologer Steven Forrest of ForrestAstrology.com that provides a fun yet undeniably astute and helpful explanation of the Tail of the Dragon and we mere mortals:

Why Does The Moon’s South Node Point To The Past?

My online school, The Forrest Center for Evolutionary Astrology, is blessed to have Mister Sagittarius himself, Ryan Evans, as one of our tutors. True to his Sun Sign, Ryan is an ace at asking the really big questions. A few months ago, I got the following email from him. In it, he raised an issue that could not possibly lie any closer to the heart of evolutionary astrology:

I have a question regarding the astronomical understanding of the south node. Do we consider it to be “the past” primarily due to the notion that south equals “down” equals “past” or is there more of an astronomical correlation than just that? I’ve got a scientist here asking astronomy questions.

I should start by saying as clearly as possible that I have no definitive answer for Ryan. Why should the place where the Moon’s orbit crosses the ecliptic heading south pull us toward old, outworn attitudes and behaviors? All I know for sure is that the observation is robust. It works reliably.

But why?

Ryan’s suggestion that maybe it all derives from the fact that “south equals down” is pretty obviously a northern hemisphere cultural prejudice. Even in Australia, everyone is accustomed to drawing their maps with north pointing “up.” Does “south” automatically equate with “bad?” That doesn’t seem plausible, but everybody in business hates it when the sales trends are down – that is to say, “heading south.” It’s also worth referencing the common notion that the “south side of town” is often less prestigious than the north side.

Still, most of what underlies all of that north versus south language is just cultural mythology. It’s all about as objective or scientific as defining Greenwich Observatory in the U.K. as the place where the map of the world begins and ends. It’s only people talking. It’s just history and folklore tricking us into thinking that they represent some kind of ultimate reality.

Once more we’re back to our basic question: is there some deeper reason behind the way that the south node of the Moon always tempts us to “get on with the past?” Gathering evidence in support of the idea is easy – the principle never fails in practice. But that does nothing to explain it. We are kind of like modern physicists who have ample evidence that gravity works, but they still can’t explain exactly how or why.

DEFINITIONS

The astronomical definition of the Moon’s south node is that it is the point where the plane of the Moon’s orbit crosses the ecliptic heading south.It’s helpful to remember that the Moon itself might be nowhere near that point at the moment of your birth – you might have your south node in Gemini while your natal Moon lies in Capricorn. It’s mix-and-match. All the combinations are possible. The Moon hits all twelve signs every month and the nodes cycle through them all every eighteen years. Spin two roulette wheels long enough and sooner or later every combination will come up.

By the way, all the planets have nodes. That’s a big subject, one that we don’t need to explore here. Suffice to say that those planetary south nodes resonate with the past too. The Sun is the only exception. Because it never crosses the ecliptic, it has no nodes at all. The underlying reason is that the Sun, along with Earth, is what defines the ecliptic, which is simply the plane of Earth’s orbit around the Sun. By definition the Sun is always exactly on the ecliptic.

We are still no closer to answering our glaring question: what links south with the past? And of course, there’s the obvious bookend: if south points to history, north must point to tomorrow: our evolutionary future and the aspirations that drive it.

But, once again, why?

SOME ASTRONOMICAL BACKGROUND

Get ready for a long, but necessary, detour through some astronomical history, not to mention some pure astronomy.

Since the beginning of human time, stargazers have been aware of a few fuzzy little clouds that stood out slightly against the dark backdrop of space. Along came the Renaissance and the invention of telescopes and a lot more of those fuzzy patches came to light. That telescopic discovery probably didn’t surprise those early astronomers since the new ones looked a lot like the ones that had actually been known since prehistory. If you know the night sky at all, you’ve probably gazed at a dimly glowing patch of grayish light in Orion’s sword. That’s M42 – the Great Nebula in Orion. It’s actually a thin cloud of gas slowly condensing into newborn stars, and very much a part of our own Milky Way galaxy.

You may also have gazed at a very similar fuzzy patch in the constellation Andromeda. To the naked eye, it looks almost exactly the same as the Orion nebula, but it’s an entirely different beast. That’s M31 – the Andromeda galaxy, the Milky Way’s big sister. It’s almost incomprehensibly bigger than M42 – big enough in fact that it contains a great number of its own “M42s,” along with about a trillion stars, and probably a number of civilizations gazing right back at us.

For our purposes, the point is that through almost all of history no one could tell these two fuzzy patches apart. They looked exactly the same. All them were called nebulas, which is just the Latin word for “clouds.”

At the opening of the 20th century, here’s the picture of the universe that astronomers held: it was basically a vast homogenous space full of stars interspersed with occasional clouds of “something.”

In 1917 that image shifted dramatically. An exploding star was observed in M31. It was so dim that the astronomers realized that it had to lie at a then-incomprehensible distance from Earth. That single observation changed everything. Suddenly the idea of “island universes” was born. That “nebula” that we called M31 had to be further away from us than anyone had ever imagined. It was at that point in time that they realized that Earth was inside a galaxy much like the Andromeda galaxy – which lay on the other side of two and a half million light years of mostly empty space. Instead of that homogenous space full of stars, we had a far vaster universe populated with “island universes” – galaxies.

That epochal realization about the actual structure of the universe happened just one year before my own father was born, which puts it sometime around “yesterday afternoon” on history’s timeline.

Naturally astrologers had no inkling of any of this until the astronomers figured it out. Even today, with the exception of a few siderealists and aficionados of “fixed stars,” astrology is anchored very directly in our home solar system. The larger cosmic framework is basically ignored.

The reason I am recounting this astronomical breakthrough – the realization that we live inside a galaxy that floats in a sea of galaxies – is that it may possibly hold the key to answering our pressing question about why the south node points to the past.

MY HYPOTHESIS

What I am about to propose is only a hypothesis – a plausible guess, in other words. It may have absolutely nothing to do with what actually lies behind the mysteries of the nodal axis. I could easily be wrong about everything I say here. Something entirely different might be going on.

Understanding what I am about to present is a lot easier visually than verbally, so have a look at this daunting diagram.

Image from Forrestastrology.com

Welcome to science class. Let me help you unravel what you are looking at.

First, ignore all the words and diagrams and just concentrate on the starry background. That’s our Milky Way galaxy. The thick bulge of light on the left is the galactic center. What’s missing is the fact that if the image were wider, you would see “the galactic plane” continuing further to the left. The galaxy is symmetrical that way – the big bulge of stars you see on the left of the diagram is actually the middle. What you see on the right exists on the left as well in much the same form.

A point that is critical to my hypothesis is that this central bulge of the Milky Way is where we find much of the mass of the galaxy. In fact, right in the center of it all there’s a hyper-massive Black Hole around which everything orbits. It has a mass of over four million Suns. Defining where the galaxy’s central bulge ends and the rest of the galactic disc starts is arbitrary, but our point is that the galactic center contains up to one-third of the total stellar mass of the galaxy. It’s heavy, so its gravitational pull is enormous. And it is by far the brightest part of our galaxy.

The big white dot in the diagram represents our Sun. It’s grossly exaggerated in size, but accurately represented in terms of our position out in one of the galactic arms. We’re about 26,000 light years from “downtown.” You can also pick out Earth’s orbit around the Sun. That’s what defines the ecliptic.

Look up and to the right of the white dot that represents the Sun, and you see Earth itself, with the Moon orbiting it. Studying the diagram, you can see that the plane of the Moon’s orbit is tilted relative to the ecliptic, so sometimes the Moon crosses the ecliptic heading south or heading north. As we saw earlier, those points are the Moon’s nodes.

Note that when the Moon crosses the ecliptic heading north, it is getting a bit nearer the galactic center. Meanwhile, when it crosses again going south, it’s heading more in the direction of the empty space outside our galaxy. (That, as you will see, is the key.)

Let me add one more wrinkle to all of this. Just as Earth orbits the Sun, similarly the Sun orbits the galactic center. The difference is that it takes roughly 250 million years for the Sun to complete one orbit. In a sense, that is the Sun’s “year.” We might think of the massive galactic center as “the Sun of the Sun.”

Notice how the phrase “the Sun of the Sun” gives the galactic center an air of divinity? We orbit the Sun, but what does the Sun itself orbit and what transcendent mystery can it signify?

Back to folklore for a moment. There’s a widespread human tendency to equate light with goodness and darkness with the opposite. I get emails all the time from spiritually-oriented people who sign them, “Love and Light.” Light has often been seen as a metaphor for God – and many religions posit a God who loves us and is beckoning us.

Is this why the north node can be understood as our spiritual goal? Its gravity pulls us. As we move toward it, we are moving “into the Light.”
Meanwhile, the south node points toward the cold, empty darkness of outer space. If we head in that direction, we are literally heading away from the Light.

Could that be the answer to our question?

All I know is that these ideas resonate very well metaphorically. In astrology, we read the sky the way we read a poem or interpret a dream. That’s how it works. Still, wrong interpretations are possible. We need to be careful. We always need to check our theories against the message of reality.

Is what I am suggesting here about the nodes in relation to the galactic center actually true? Is that why “south” points to the dead hand of the past while north points to a more liberated, energized future? In science, a hypothesis is only truly useful if we can test it – prove it right or prove it wrong, in other words. I have no idea how we might accomplish that aim in this case.

There is something that feels sacred about the human drive to understand things. I want to honor that drive. Just possibly all that I’ve written here might be the key to understanding a question that has always loomed unanswered at the heart of evolutionary astrology: what gives meaning to south and north? Or maybe everything I’ve written here is nothing but a seductive dead end.

Either way, our daily practice goes on – we know that the north node beckons us to the higher ground, just as the great Light that we call “God” does. We know the “cold, empty darkness” of being caught in the endless repetition of old patterns that the south node represents. Our work goes on, whether or not we understand the ultimate mechanisms behind it.

Steven Forrest – https://www.forrestastrology.com/blogs/astrology/why-does-the-moons-south-node-point-to-the-past

Posted for informational/educational purposes only.