The north node (Rahu) in Taurus

the north lunar node in tropical Taurus, read in the Western evolutionary tradition, and the Vedic tradition's reading of Rahu in the sidereal sign of the same name

What the tradition reads

With the north node in Taurus, Cafe Astrology's own reading of the placement sets the south node in Scorpio and describes a habit of defining one's own worth through significant others, of being wrapped up in another person's needs at the expense of one's own, and of being drawn to confusing, intense situations rather than plain comfort. Growth, by this reading, lies in Taurus's own territory: discovering one's own values, building self worth through one's own patient effort rather than through another person, and learning to enjoy life's quieter, more serene moments without an unconscious need to manufacture a crisis. This Vedic reading is for Rahu in sidereal Taurus, not the tropical Taurus above: a north node in tropical Taurus usually falls, sidereally, in the sign before it, so this may not be this chart's own Vedic placement. Rahu in that sidereal sign, a sign the classical texts give to Venus, is described as amplifying that planet's own love of comfort, beauty and possession past its ordinary measure. Brihat Parashara Hora Shastra reads Rahu's effect in any sign through the condition of that sign's own lord, so a well placed Venus lets this Rahu express itself as considerable, if unconventional, material and sensory fortune, while a weak or afflicted Venus lets the same placement tip into acquisitiveness or a restless dissatisfaction no comfort actually settles.

The story

The lunar nodes are not bodies but the two points where the Moon's tilted orbit crosses the plane of the Earth's own path around the Sun, a slow retrograde cycle of about eighteen years and seven months known since antiquity chiefly because it governs when eclipses can occur. Medieval Arabic and Latin astrology pictured the Moon's path and the Sun's path as two great circles bitten through by a dragon at these two crossing points, naming the northern, ascending point the dragon's head, while India's account, as Wikipedia's Rahu page tells it, holds that Vishnu's female form Mohini was giving the gods their amrita when the asura Svarbhanu joined their row and drank some himself; the Sun and Moon spotted him and warned Mohini, but by then he had already become immortal, so Vishnu's discus severed his head from his body, the head surviving on as Rahu and the body as Ketu. That the same appetite the myth gives Rahu, a hunger that outlives the body that felt it, should surface in Taurus as a lesson about the difference between possessing and being satisfied is a resemblance the honest telling notes rather than resolves.

Written from

Corpus key node:north:sign:Taurus.