LEARNING ABOUT THE NODES OF THE MOON THROUGH LITERATURE

The sign placement of the moon’s nodes can sometimes reveal as much as the sun or moon or ascendant signs. One way to see how node signs operate is in literature. The issues symbolized by the authors' nodes are found in the themes, characters and even the titles of their work, as well as events in their real lives.

Achieving ones’ potential--alone or in a relationship-- is a theme of the North Node Libra/South Node Libra group. 

George Eliot was a successful writer and head of a literary business.  She lived openly with her ‘husband’ who was married to someone else but in a wide open relationship--his wife even had children with other men.  Due to a legal technicality, he couldn’t divorce.   Adultery was common but Eliot was not the typical hidden mistress and as a result they were shunned and shunned others.

The heroine of Eliot’s masterpiece Middlemarch is strong and accomplished  before her marriage.  Her husband presents himself as a great scholar but after years of frustrating attempts to share a rich intellectual life with him, she discovers his lifetime of research was labyrinthine and pointless.

In the group with North Node Taurus/South Node Scorpio, the Scorpio issues are more apparent with the issues being money and mortality, but mostly sex. 

An obscenity trial resulted from the U.S. publication of Henry Miller's graphic masterpiece, Tropic of Cancer.

Two renowned masochist authors--Algernon Swinburne and Leopold von Sacher-Masoch--have both Saturn as well as the south node in Scorpio. The term 'mashochism' was named for Sacher-Masoch.   His fantasy--to be dominated in more and more degrading ways by a woman wearing fur--became the plot of  his novel Venus in Furs.

Swinburne is the poet who wrote “if you were the queen of pleasure and I were the king of pain” but according to Oscar Wilde, he was only "a braggart in matters of vice, who had done everything he could to convince his fellow citizens of his homosexuality and bestiality without being in the slightest degree a homosexual or a bestializer”1

Writers with North Node Gemini/South Node Sagittarius deal with Sagittarian subjects and locales: travel, religion, philosophy, politics and government, with a few in rural settings like the American west.

Agatha Christie’s fictional Belgian detective Hercule Poirot appears in almost 100 books and stories.  Her travels contributed to novels like Murder on the Orient Express.  The hotel room in Turkey, where she wrote it, is called the Agatha Christie room.  Religious and politically conservative, she petitioned Pope Paul VI to retain the Latin mass and when the pope saw her name, it’s said he shrugged and agreed to the request.  

Science fiction writer H.P. Lovecraft was an atheist by age 7 and invented his own godless philosophy "cosmicism".  "If religion were true, its followers would not try to bludgeon their young into an artificial conformity; but would merely insist on their unbending quest for truth” 2   Truth is especially important to this node group.

North Node Cancer/South Node Capricorn is ambitious and pragmatic.  A painter who stages his own death to increase the value of his paintings was the basis of a play based on Jean Francois Millet, who was born with these nodes.

Anthony Trollope wrote dozens of books while traveling for his job in the post office, "with the custom to write with my watch before me, and to require from myself 250 words every quarter of an hour."

Family, homes and advancing in the world are Cancer/Capricorn themes.   His own motivation to become a writer was due, in part, to the availability of publishing connections made by his mother, already a successful author.

In this group, relationships often have a purpose.  Marcel Proust's  In Search of Lost Time was the fortuitous result of successful social climbing and familiarity with the French upper classes combined with his precise and witty rendering.  He also nails the simplest toddler memories--like eating a cookie.  (His true nodes are Cancer/Capricorn and mean nodes in Gemini/Sagittarius. In my opinion, the true node is more apparent.) 

For people with the North Node Leo/South Node Aquarius, friendship is often the start, the result, or the cause of a glitch in romance.  In William Styron’s Sophie’s Choice a friend is drawn into the lives of lovers, leading to unjust accusations and tragedy. 

Jane Austen writes in Northanger Abbey "Friendship is certainly the finest balm for the pangs of disappointed love". 4  Truman Capote epitomized the Aquarian south node ability to make friends from every walk of life.  He befriended a convicted murderer, the subject of In Cold Blood.   And  although he once had many high society friends, he lost every one of them by spilling their beans in Answered Prayers. 

In North Node Virgo/South Node Pisces literature, Charles Dickens’ heart-tugging Piscean characters and settings defined a genre.  His own father was in debtor’s prison.  Dickensian literature--including Thackeray’s Vanity Fair and all John Irving novels-- is populated by orphans, widows and the (usually unjustly) imprisoned, all of whom ultimately prevail

Virgo/Pisces form a health axis, physical and psychological.  “To write really well, one must be somewhat poisoned by emotion” according to Edna Ferber. 5  In accord are

Rodney ‘no respect’ Dangerfield and Charles Schultz, creator of Charlie Brown--“I've developed a new philosophy... I only dread one day at a time”.   6

Virgo activity--a daily routine, such as health and hygiene-- is said to balance the woeful subjective tendency, with greater or lesser success.  “She had the colossal courage to wash her face…and push back her cuticle, brushing her hair bravely….‘What‘s the use!’ and hurled her brush”  7  Edna Ferber wrote in The Frog and the Puddle, of one of the many  Virgoan characters--seamstresses, cooks, janitors and clerks--who populate her work

Objectivity and subjectivity are Virgo/ Pisces concepts--Ayn Rand called her philosophy ‘Objectivism”.  In a review of her biography, Objectivism was characterized as a “rational program retrofitted to cancel the nightmare of a terrifying childhood” 8  but it sure beats Sartre’s Being and Nothingness. 

Anne Stevenson poet who went deaf

"On Going Deaf"

I’ve lost a sense. Why should I care?

Searching myself, I find a spare.
I keep that sixth sense in repair,
And set it deftly, like a snare.

An individual’s power and autonomy--alone or in a relationship--is a South Node Aries/ North Node Libra  theme.   James Brooks created the Mary Tyler Moore Show, the first to feature an independent, working woman, who was not reliant on a man.    And Neil Diamond’s songs  “'I am' , I said…to no one there” 9  and Solitary Man “I’ll be what I am/ A solitary man” 10 also convey the Aries message.

Henrik Ibsen portrays Aries/Libra issues vividly in his plays Doll's House--about a wife whose husband treats her like a child until she finally leaves--and Hedda Gabler about  an unhappily married woman who takes it out on everyone around her.  In Peer Gynt, a mother and her impractical son are in debt and abandoned and then even the son must flee to escape imprisonment.  His fantastic experiences all result in the one question: What is the self?   'Be true to yourself-ish’ 11 becomes his motto.  But at the end of his life when he meets his maker, his soul is at stake unless he can account for what he’s accomplished by being himself.

North Node Scorpio/South Node Taurus is a financial axis.  Earning enough money and attracting alternative financial resources concern and sometimes fixate them. Photographer Ansel Adams’s assistant said “when it came to money, he was just like a homing pigeon” 12  He also attracted a patron at a young age and three Guggenheim Fellowships. 

Charles Bukowski wrote  "I have one of two choices — stay in the post office and go crazy or stay out here and play at writer and starve. I have decided to starve". 13  Fortunately, later on, a wealthy publisher supported him while he wrote. 

Writer Nicolai Gogol was so desperate, he embezzled money his mother sent him to pay her mortgage and then got a poorly paid job in the government when he ran out of money.  His story The Overcoat is about a poor clerk with a threadbare overcoat who’s the object of derision everywhere.  He scrimps and saves and buys a fabulous new overcoat and finally gets some positive attention.  But his overcoat is stolen and his life again descends. 

Kafka’s The Metamorphosis tells of a man who works at a job he hates to support his parents and assume their debts.  One day he wakes up to find he’s now a cockroach.  His family, once loving and caring, is indifferent to him since he became a bug with no paycheck.

James Fennimore Cooper became rich with Last of the Mohegans but inherited the responsibility of supporting an indebted extended family at a bad economic time.  Tarnishing his reputation, he stirred the pot himself with lawsuits and his non-fiction  Public Finance Controversy comparing the USA unfavorably to Europe.

Writers abound in the North Node Sagittarius/South Node Gemini group, due to the Gemini association with the conveyance of information.   As with its  polar opposite  Gemini/Sagittarian group--government, politics, religion, philosophy and foreign locales are common settings and themes. 

Satires on travel, social and political issues characterized the work of Jonathan Swift.  Gulliver’s Travels was a parody of "travelers' tales" which were popular at the time, and in A Modest Proposal, he suggests selling children to end poverty.   The church was the object of the satirical novels of Anatole France: Penguin Island is about a Christian monk with bad eyesight who mistakes penguins for people and baptizes them and in Thais a courtesan becomes a saint.  (Anatole France started working in his father's bookstore and eventually became the French Senate Librarian, also a Sag/Gemini job.)

A British diplomat in Afghanistan survives an airplane in the Himalayas and finds shelter and inner peace at a monastery in an isolated land where people stay youthful after 100 is the story in James Hilton’s Lost Horizon. 

Ernest Hemingway epitomizes the group.  An expatriate himself, he traveled as a reporter and set his novels and short stories in Europe, Cuba and Africa. 

Nietzche was a philogist, defined as the science which concerns itself with everything that has been transmitted from antiquity in the Greek or Latin language. 

North Node Capricorn/South Node Cancer literature often centers on family issues.  In the work of Henry James, the conflict between a devoted daughter and her domineering father is the story in Washington Square; in The Turn of the Screw, children who lose their parents are left to the care of an uncle who instructs their new governess never to bother him and in The Golden Bowl a father and daughter spend more time together than with their respective spouses. 

William Shakespeare’s creation Hamlet wants revenge on his uncle--who’d murdered his father, married his mother and taken the throne.  King Lear wants to retire and divide the kingdom among his three daughters, offering largest share to the one who loves him best.  But he trusted the wrong daughters and they reneged on their promises to which Lear says: “How sharper than a serpent's tooth it is, To have a thankless child!” 14  And  in Von Geothe’s Faust, Faust loves a woman who first murders her mother and then their child.

                                                                  

Relationships rooted in friendships appear in North Node Aquarius/South Node Leo writings.  F. Scott Fitzgerald‘s The Great Gatsby uses a friendship to facilitate a romance.  Poet A.E. Housman wrote of suppressing romantic love for a friend rather than lose the friendship in essays 'De Amicitia' (On Friendship) and also in poetry:  “Because I liked you better …Than suits a man to say …It irked you, and I promised ..To throw the thought away”. 15

Leo is associated with the theater and entertainment.  This group includes great playwrights--Thornton Wilder, Henry Miller and Anton Chekov.  Wilder plays used the inner workings of the theater as character and plot devices.   The Stage Manager is a character in Our Town as well as in The Skin of our Teeth, in which he announces to the audience that the cast is sick and he needs to rehearse the replacements.  Even writers like William Faulkner and F. Scott Fitzgerald who were better known for more serious literature, also wrote for theater or movies.

North Node Virgo/South Node Virgo literature shows these signs working separately and together.  Some are set in Piscean environments such as the sea or in prison.   Joseph Conrad was a sailor who wrote nautical novels and even Popeye’s creator had the Pisces north node.

In his real life, Victor Hugo was a giant in the history of prisons--he got Queen Victoria to spare six convicted terrorists and got the death penalty removed from the constitutions of Geneva, Portugal and Columbia.  His prison books inspired Camus, Dostoevsky and Dickens-- all wrote about prisons and all have north or south node in Pisces.

Pisces/Virgo is the health axis, physical and mental.  William Burroughs’ novels parody doctors in but he wrote seriously of his addiction and treatment and belief that his drug abuse was metabolic.  Sylvia Plath’s nervous breakdown and hospital experiences supplied the autobiographical material for The Bell Jar.  She was also influenced by the success of  The Snake Pit--whose author Mary Ward had the opposite Virgo/Pisces nodes. 

Psychotherapy was a big influence.  Portnoy's Complaint by Phillip Roth is a monologue to a psychoanalyst.   Herman Hesse used Jung’s typology in earlier works such as Demian and  later novels like Steppenwolf were influenced by Freud and fascination with dreams.  Poet John Berryman won a Pulitzer Prize for his Dream Songs.

Compartmentalizing is Virgoan, like Suze Orman’s 12 Steps to Financial Freedom and  John Grey’s Men are from Mars Woman are from Venus.  Their preference for that which is  black and white is also conveyed in this quote by Stendhal about why he loves math: "Mathematics...allows for no hypocrisy and no vagueness" 16

Intricacy is Virgoan.  I, In My Intricate Image is a Dylan Thomas title; in another work, he writes “He intricately rhymes, to the music of crwth and pibgorn, all night long." 17  And his biography is called The Intricate Image.  

Intricate organization is Virgoan.   Camus wrote two triptychs, each comprised of a novel, essay, and play.  Thomas Hardy divided his work into 3 classes: Novels of Character and Environment, Romances and Fantasies and Novels of Ingenuity.   Umberto Eco’s  Name of the Rose is divided into 7 days with each day structured by the canonical hours.

Scholars studying Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment observe that it’s symmetrical  A rational man becomes irrational with the change occurring exactly in the middle of the book, “a perfect compositional balance…organized according to a mirror-like principle.” 18

Virgo/Pisces are in synch in the works of William Burroughs and Andre Breton.  Burroughs wrote with ‘crystalline clarity’ but the text could be read in any order.  He used a method to cut up and randomly rearrange text in an elaborate but non linear structure-- much like Surrealism--also highly formal and non-linear.  In Surrealist Manifesto, Breton introduces a technique he called  ‘pure psychic automatism”--automatic writing.

Virgo/Pisces also synch in Mary Baker Eddy’s Science and Heath. “Jesus was the most scientific man--he plunged beneath the material surface and found the spiritual cause.” 19

But Virgo and Pisces can be at odds.  Breton also said "Subjectivity and objectivity commit a series of assaults on each…the first one suffers the worse beating." 20

A logical man trying to understand the universe in Dostoyevsky’s Brothers Karamazov, is so constricted by the confines of logic, that he can’t even enjoy beauty: “Beauty is terrible…because it never can be fathomed, for God sets us nothing but riddles…the boundaries meet and all contradictions exist side by side”