South Node

What this is

The South Node is the other crossing — where the Moon's path cuts back down through the Sun's, exactly opposite the North Node and never anywhere else. The two are one axis and one measurement: give the engine the Moon's orbit and both fall out of the same arithmetic. Europe drew it as the Dragon's Tail, Cauda Draconis. India calls it Ketu, the headless body, and counts it as the ninth of the grahas.

What it governs

It has no day, no hour and no sphere on the Tree, being a point rather than a body. It governs outflow — endings, release, and what a life already knows how to do and therefore does too easily. Lilly gives the Dragon's Tail the nature of Saturn and Mars and calls it unfortunate: where the Head takes in, the Tail lets out. Indian practice makes Ketu the ascetic among the grahas, and credits it with liberation for that reason.

Its properties

Like the Head it has no metal, no number and no card, because those tables were made for bodies. Its colours are dark red and ash; Indian practice gives Ketu cat's eye chrysoberyl, which the Mineral Kingdom does not hold, so it is named rather than linked. Its arithmetic is the Head's exactly — three arcminutes a day, backwards on the whole, one circuit in eighteen years and seven months — always a hundred and eighty degrees away. Upright it is clean release and the freedom of having finished. Its shadow is the rut: the old skill run on repeat because it is the easy one.

Where else it appears

Ketu is what was left when the demon was beheaded at the churning of the ocean — the body without a head, which is why an eclipse ends: the swallowed light falls straight out again. The image travelled. Persian and Arab astronomers drew the descending node as the dragon's tail and medieval European tables kept it; Chinese astronomy took the pair from India through the Buddhist canon and called them Luohou and Jidu; geomancy gives it the figure Cauda Draconis, the gate you cross on the way out. Every one of them is describing the same instant from a different room: the moment the light is let go of and the sky brightens again.

Where you meet it on the Oracle

The South Node sits on your wheel and in the chart table on the Astrology page, opposite the North Node to the degree and moving with it, turn for turn. It draws no aspect lines and takes no daily card, for the same reason the Head does not: it is derived from the Moon, so aspecting it to the Moon would be aspecting a thing to itself. Where it counts is Harmony, which weighs a South Node contact between two charts as the familiar one, and the eclipse table, half of whose eclipses happen here. When it comes up, ask what you are doing purely out of habit.

Why it matters

It is so because nothing new gets any room until something old has been put down, and the Tail is where the wheel turns toward rest. Its karmic reading in the West came late, borrowed from Indian astrology by the theosophists, and is better held as an image than a verdict. What it asks is that you notice which of your own strengths has quietly become a hiding place.

Correspondences

planet

Moon

colour

Dark red, ash