Greetings from the height of Eclipse Season. Perhaps the most confusing of all Astrological phenomena: Sun and Moon’s dance on the Nodes of Fate.
These Nodes are the Nodes of the Moon, and they don’t exist outside of our imaginations. They’re calculations that Astrologers in the Indian tradition call Shadow Grabbers. Ghost points in the sky that grab one’s attention. They’re impossible to see and difficult to explain, and that’s kind of the vibe.
The Sun disappears. The Moon disappears. Things come. Things pass. In some parts of the world, people greet the eclipse event by taking shelter and praying—finding safety submerged in water. You can prepare for an eclipse, but you can’t control it. You certainly can’t predict where it will take you.
And they will never take you to the same place twice. In the same way you can never visit any place twice. Because “Everything is always changing, Man.”
Technically speaking, however, the Nodes return to the same point in the sky roughly every 18/19 years. This is called a Nodal Return. When the Nodes return to the place where they were at your birth, it can be a time of revelation: “This is where I was headed the whole time…”
These Nodes travel in opposition, weaving together the contrary meanings of the signs they occupy. The same pushing and pulling that has some Astrologers stating that there are not twelve signs of the Zodiac, but six—each with two faces. Right now the Nodes are traveling through the signs of Gemini and Sagittarius. A dialogue between Trickster and Guru, unfolding in each of our charts and lives.
Eclipse Season is a time of watching, waiting—and hoping you’re making the right decisions, as you squint in the dark. Because six months from now, you’ll look back at this period and sigh “that’s where it all began.” Or maybe where it ended—but is there even a difference?
“In my beginning is my end,” writes TS Eliot in his poem “Four Quartets,”
Through the dark cold and the empty desolation,
The wave cry, the wind cry, the vast waters
Of the petrel and the porpoise. In my end is my beginning.
“Welcome to the Dragon Hole,” as my teacher, Adam Sommer says. Rahu. Ketu. Two halves of a severed dragon, sprawled across the Cosmos. Rahu, the dragon’s head—always reaching, always striving, always hungry for more. Ketu, the dragon’s tail—a leaky faucet, a steady defecation to fertilize the soils of new, new, new. Antithetical deities in eternal conversation.
A dragon chasing its tail, chasing its mouth, in search of reconciliation—"In my end is my beginning."
These Shadow Grabbers, mark the coordinates of our dragon in the sky: Upon the North Node lies Rahu, the head. Upon the South Node lies Ketu, the tail. They move backwards through the Zodiac, inviting us to retrace our steps through time. One by one, they take out the lights of the sky: Sun, then Moon, then Sun, then Moon—as Luna steadily waxes and wanes and waxes and….
Waves crashing against the shores of the Cosmos, stretched to a point of crisis, falling back and making their way again once more. The choppy lullaby of advance and retreat.
Eclipse Season isn’t a time of endings and beginnings—it's a time of revealing the murky boundary between endings and beginnings. A time of exhalation and surrender, of setting out on celestial rafts across milky seas: eyes to the sky, trusting that whichever way the Winds of Fate drift our raft is exactly where we’ve always been headed. Even if, floating in the endless night, we can’t distinguish North from South, insight from delusion, construction from destruction...
Less “You’re exactly where you need to be,” and more “Where are we anyway? What am I doing? What is the sea? What is the raft? What the what what what?”
But if we listen closely, if we can tune into the primordial static, we can sometimes find a voice of clarity. From the waters of unconscious a single message arises and you know, you just know—
CV Henriette is a writer, maker of Cosmic Apothecary, and consulting Astrologer at ART of the ZODIAC. Follow her on Instagram at art_of_the_zodiac.
