Astrology of Midlife and Aging by Erin Sullivan

Author:Erin Sullivan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2010-03-01T00:00:00+00:00

Age Thirty-eight—Second Return of the Lunar Nodes: Renegotiating Life’s Purpose

While the core of your life purpose and your ultimate destiny do not change, the manner in which they are lived out most certainly will.

Symbolically, the nodes “recall” our soul’s history (south node) and “remind” us of our life purpose now (north node).32 The return of the natal nodes, for the second time, opens a door to renew our commitment to our core life-path, our destiny, if you like, and explicates a bit more of our core self into that life-path.

The lunar nodes are associated with the Saros cycle, that of the Sun and the Moon and the Moon’s nodes. That cyclic return is the eclipse cycle—an eclipse occurs in the exact same position every nineteen or so years. Thus, we have a “nodal return” every nineteen years, and an inversion of the nodes about every nine and a half years.33 The south node is a pointer to our vast repository of soul memory, while the north node points to where that archetypal knowledge is best directed in one’s life today. The north and south nodes of the Moon are exactly opposite each other, thus the “nodal axis.” That axis is in retrograde motion, that is, they move backward against the Zodiac.

The Moon’s nodes are the points in space where the orbit of the Moon around Earth intersects the orbit of Earth around the Sun. The nodes are frequently associated with incarnation—literally, entering the flesh. The Moon is the symbol of the mother as the container and, as such, its orbit’s link to the earthly orbit around the Sun. These points in space symbolize our life on Earth as we move around the center of the solar system—the Sun, the focus, as it is connected to the Moon and our mother, our past, and perhaps even our soul memory of previous experience.

The return of the nodes every nineteen years engenders a spiritual, almost magical, element to the quality of time, and the fact that a nodal return occurs at the initiation to midlife simply adds to the urgency and feelings of “destiny” that irrupt. Often a major component in the midlife “crisis” is a spiritual dilemma, not a psychological collapse or breakdown! The spirit calls from within to express more of itself; the rushing early years of living—the ages from the Saturn return at twenty-nine to the midlife advent at thirty-nine—may have passed with either no spiritual focus or one that is inappropriate to the next phase of life. Hence the ensuing spiritual quest at midlife.

There is some validity to this idea of birth being an ending of one way of existence and the beginning of a new one. Certainly any new parents will attest to the innate wisdom and agelessness of their new infant, and the already powerful “personality” of the new baby. We don’t arrive a tabula rasa, but with a history of sorts. The ancient Greek philosopher Socrates called the incarnated life a state of anamnesia, that is, one of constant recollection.

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