Lunar nodes

What they are

The Moon’s orbit is tilted slightly against the Sun’s path across the sky. The two points where those paths cross are the lunar nodes. The North Node is where the Moon climbs north across the Sun’s path, the South Node where it drops south, and the two are always exactly opposite each other. They are not objects you can see, just a geometry, but a meaningful one, because eclipses can only happen when the Sun and Moon line up near a node.

What astrologers make of them

The nodes are usually read as an axis of growth. The South Node is cast as the familiar, the things that come easily and can be leaned on too hard, and the North Node as the less comfortable direction worth growing toward.

That reading is modern. Medieval astrologers, Lilly among them, called the nodes the Dragon’s Head and the Dragon’s Tail and treated the Head as adding to whatever it touched and the Tail as taking away. In Indian astrology they are Rahu and Ketu, and they count as two of the nine grahas, the bodies read in a chart.

How Hali computes them

There are two common ways to define the nodes, a smoothed average and the exact, wobbling true position. Hali uses the True Node by default, calculated from the real orientation of the Moon’s orbit at your moment of birth, with the Mean Node available only as a setting. The nodes normally drift backward through the zodiac, so Hali will often mark them retrograde. In Hali’s aspect list the nodes form only conjunctions and oppositions with the planets, never trines, squares or sextiles.

How to find yours

Because the nodes move slowly, everyone born within the same stretch of about a year and a half shares a node sign. The North Node entered Aquarius on 27 July 2026 and moves into Capricorn on 27 March 2028, by Hali’s calculation, so anyone born in that window has a North Node in Aquarius and a South Node in Leo. The house of the nodes needs a birth time. The North Node calculator finds yours, and each sign has a guide, such as North Node in Aries.

Common confusions

The North Node is not a fate you must meet, and the South Node is not a past life you have to escape, whatever popular books say. Both are descriptions. The nodes are also not the same as the Moon’s sign, which changes every two or three days. A nodal return, the node coming back to its birth position, happens around ages 18, 37 and 56.