South Node in Scorpio: Are You Afraid of the Dark?
The south node of the moon was transiting Scorpio in 2022 and the first half of 2023. I have the south node in Scorpio in my natal chart, so I am deeply familiar with this placement. In this article, I’d like to give you an insider’s tour of what it means to have the south node in Scorpio and go through a south node in Scorpio transit.
We’ll talk about:
What is the south node? (And what does it have to do with dragons and ghost stories?)
What are south node transits?
What happens during a south node in Scorpio transit?
What is it like to live with the south node in Scorpio? What are the pros and cons?
What does it mean for a person with the south node in Scorpio to heal and move on?
What Is the South Node?
In Indian mythology, the north and south nodes are two halves of a dragon. The story goes that the gods and demons were working together to retrieve an elixir of immortality from deep in the ocean. According to the terms of the deal, only the gods would drink it, but one of the demons wanted to be immortal, so he disguised himself as a god and joined the line to drink the elixir. Just as the demon was drinking the elixir, the sun and moon saw through the demon’s disguise and alerted the gods, and the god Vishnu cut the demon in half. Because the demon had drunk the elixir, he was immortal and could not die. Instead, he was condemned to go through eternity in two halves: the head of the dragon, Rahu, and the tail of the dragon, Ketu.
Rahu is head of the dragon and the north node of the moon, and it represents a part of us that experiences an insatiable hunger. Without a belly, Rahu eats and eats and is never satisfied. The north node represents something we long for, the path that our soul’s evolution wants to take.
Ketu is the south node of the moon, and it is the tail of the dragon. It represents the past, the part of our lives that is dead but not dead, something that haunts us like a ghost. Some astrologers that the south node represents material left over from past lives. Just like a ghost hangs around the place where they were wronged, there is a part of you that is emotionally stuck, lingering on an unhealed wound.
In ghost stories, the ghost needs something to be done to resolve their torment, so they can move on. Usually, they need someone to hear their story and do something about an injustice that wronged them.
We are all like that in some way. We have all suffered injustices. It doesn’t matter if you look to your childhood for injustice or do past life regression to find it. The south node tells you something about the place where you are stuck and need help moving on.
As an astrologer, past life astrology is one of my specialties. If your inner ghost would like help moving on, I offer past life readings and reports that can help you find peace.
South Node in Scorpio Transits
The south node in your natal chart tells you where to look for your inner ghosts, but the south node didn’t freeze the moment you were born. It is always moving through the sky, making an initial impression on people born during that time and highlighting the traumas of people who were born with the nodes in those signs.
As the south node moves, it connects with planets and signs. These movements and the resulting connections are called transits.
Every 18 years, the south node makes a complete circuit and returns to the place it was in the sky when you were born. It is as if the entire world is playing ghost busters during that time, uncovering your traumas—and the traumas of the other people who have the south node that sign.
Nodal returns, as these seasons are called, are special times because the world’s focus on your south node sign has the potential to help you do your own detective work and uncover the truths you need acknowledgement and healing for.
What Does It Mean When the Transiting South Node Is in Scorpio?
When the south node is in Scorpio, the whole world is focused on helping Scorpio people deal with their baggage by digging through the dark attics of scorpionic traumas, bringing secrets to light, and telling the truth.
Having the south node in Scorpio is kind of redundant because the south node is fundamentally about uncovering secret traumas, and Scorpio is the sign of secret traumas.
When you read descriptions of the south node in other signs, you might read about the trauma of sacrificing for family or the trauma of being left to your own devices as an orphan on the street. When you read about the south node in Scorpio, things suddenly get much less specific. You read things like, “Something unbelievably bad happened.”
At first blush, this might seem very unhelpful, but when you’re experiencing a south node in Scorpio transit, you realize that more of a description isn’t necessary because the traumas in question are painfully obvious.
The last time the south node was in Scorpio was in 2022 and 2023. Millions of people had died in the pandemic. Billions lost loved ones, their homes, livelihoods, their favorite businesses, and sense of taste and smell. Families were isolated from each other. All the children of the world had been, essentially, grounded for two straight years. Simple pleasures like going out for coffee and watching the rain fall outside of the coffeeshop had been canceled.
With other signs, uncovering the trauma of the south node often requires a bit of detective work. With the south node in Scorpio, you don’t need to guess if there was a murder in the house because there is blood on the walls and a skeleton in the corner.
The challenge of the south node in Scorpio is looking into the face of that horror and acknowledging that it happened. With all of the trauma so blindingly obvious, this can be more difficult than it seems.
Some places on the internet insist that you put your painful stories under a trigger warning, so that you don’t risk harming others with your story, but the south node in Scorpio asks us to put the trigger warnings aside.
Often the stories behind the south node in Scorpio are so bad there are few places outside of a therapist’s office where you can talk about them honestly without making everyone extraordinarily awkward. The work of the south node in Scorpio is finding your people and the contexts that can have the strength to hear about your painful experiences and allowing them to hear and hold you.
Living With the South Node in Scorpio in a Natal Chart
My first encounter with the south node in Scorpio was dramatic. It was my first evolutionary astrology reading. The astrologer looked at my chart, looked at me, raised his eyebrows and said, “In a past life, you were burned at the stake. You were probably a witch.”
I laughed darkly and said, “Sounds legit.”
I didn’t have any past life memories. I had no reason to believe that I had been a witch, but my present life was difficult, and it was easy to believe that my past lives had been difficult, too.
Scorpio is the sign of secrets. I wanted more than anything to hide, and I couldn’t. I have the south node in the 4th house, and my childhood was a constant unveiling of dark family secrets I was too young to handle. My south node is conjunct Saturn, the planet that rules bones and knees, and I was born with Ehlers-Danlos syndrome. My knees regularly failed in a way that displayed for everyone around me the spectacularly dramatic ways the human body can break at any moment.
Scorpio has the tendency to look at the world through dirt colored glasses, refusing to trust the appearance of goodness, being unable or unwilling to accept pleasure. I grew up in fundamentalist Christianity, and the most frequently quoted Bible verse in my house was Jeremiah 17:9: “The heart is deceitful above all things and desperately wicked. Who can know it?” In retrospect, I know that verse was advising against trusting people who are untrustworthy, but, taken out of context, it says that all desires of the heart are wicked. No one is trustworthy. People are always trying to hide how wicked they are, and wisdom is seeing through supposed good intentions to the evil heart within.
In short, living with the south node in Scorpio, has given me a crash in the dark side of the human experience.
If you’re curious to hear more of my story, I’ve written an article about living with the south node in Scorpio.
The Brighter Side of the South Node
Some astrologers would say there is nothing good about the south node, but evolutionary astrologer Mark Jones says that it’s dangerous to teach people that there is nothing good about the south node, and I agree. Having the south node in Scorpio is hard, but here are things about it that have been beneficial to me and represent sides of myself that I’m proud of.
I have an intuitive understanding of how people think. I am able to face horror without flinching. The Saturn-south node conjunction that goes along with having EDS has given me an unshakable discipline when it comes to addressing hard things. I am tenacious and resilient, and, if the situation requires it, I can work until I break.
There is always something about the south node that needs to be left behind, and the positive sides of the south node makes acknowledging that there is something that needs to be left behind both difficult and important. But living with the south node in Scorpio for decades has eroded any romance I’ve had about this placement.
As I was writing this article, a neighbor raised her voice loudly from the other side of the fence, and said, “All you can do is take an axe to those roots,” which is a perfect description of how I feel about my past most days. While I’m grateful for the positive Saturn/Scorpio things I have in the present, the south node still fundamentally represents dysfunction in my past, dysfunction I would be delighted to get rid of.
After the South Node, The North Node: Turning Toward the Light
My writerly instincts are aching to turn away from the shadows and turn this into a story of redemption, and every ghost story with a happy ending ends with the ghost turning toward the light.
Fortunately, the south node never appears in a chart without the north node. The dark secrets of the past never appear without the insatiable longing for the thing that will counteract and balance the mistakes and pain of the past.
If you have the south node in Scorpio, it means you have the north node in Taurus. Taurus balances the depth and darkness of Scorpio with simple trust. Taurus believes what it sees. It trusts goodness when it sees it. It believes that things are naturally pretty decent. The world has beautiful things in it, and Taurus has no qualms about enjoying them. Taurus carries with it the love and passion and peace of its ruler, Venus.
I find Taurus challenging. For a long time, I disliked astrology because I didn’t identify with my Taurus sun. Eventually, I realized that my dislike of Taurus was sour grapes. I couldn’t relax, so I resented anyone who could. Slowly, slowly that is changing.
I’m eating chocolate while I write this.
You have no idea how big a victory that is.
If you are struggling with the south node in Scorpio, I would love to help you make a plan to work with it in an astrology reading.
