Exploring the Nodes in New Signs: Pisces and Virgo

Hey, everyone. This is Adam Elenbaas from Nightlight Astrology (https://nightlightastrology.com/). Happy Friday, everybody. Today, we're going to take a look at the nodes of the moon changing signs. They are moving from the Aries-Libra axis into the Pisces-Virgo axis. We are going to look at five themes that come up along the lines of the Pisces-Virgo axis that we will all be dealing with in one way or another as eclipses come through these signs and as the nodes transit a new set of houses in our birth charts.

So I figured this is a good idea because we're getting closer to eclipse season, and the nodes of the moon will be changing signs. They're just about to change signs here at the end of this month. So why not get out ahead of it a little bit and start talking about what new evolutionary themes might be coming through along the Virgo-Pisces axis pretty shortly here. So that will be our goal for today.

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I want to take you over there to plug two things very quickly. If you go over to nightlightastrology.com and you click on our events tab, you're going to see that we have a seasonal speaker series. The seasonal Speaker Series is coming up. We have the first of the series coming this weekend with Ramundo giving a talk. Ramundo is our horary course director at Nightlight, and he is giving a talk on annual perfections from the text of Vettius Valens, which is an ancient astrological timing technique. That's really cool. If you've never learned about it, check that out.

Then on the first and second, Stormy Grace and Timothy Desmond will be with us giving a talk on the moon's phase and lunar phases in love and then near-death experiences in astrology, alongside things like string theory and Jungian psychology. So that should be a really interesting series of talks. We have great astrologers that come out. These are free, so if you register now, you can attend them for free. The Kickstarter supports this free series. We pay these speakers very well. Coming straight from the Kickstarter, you create this series, so take advantage of it. You get the recording if you can't attend live.

Under the Events page, you'll also see live talks. These are the monthly webinars that I do. These webinars are once monthly, and in February, I'm doing a talk on Venus through the fire. This is unlocking the mysteries of the Venus retrograde cycle. We have Venus retrograde coming up in March in Aries. So this will also prep you for that Venus retrograde by giving you a deeper understanding of what those Venus retrograde cycles are all about. So check those things out. Hope to see you there at some of our upcoming events.

As always, if you have a good story to share, hashtag #grabbed in the comment section. Tell us the transit, tell us your story. Some of these transits and eclipses coming up, we want to gather some good stories for another storytelling episode. I've got one in queue that I'm making right now that'll be coming out probably next week or two.

Okay, so let's first look at the real-time clock and take a look at what's happening with the nodes of the moon. So here we are, Friday, January 24. Now I'm going to eliminate everything from our perspective, except for the nodes of the moon. We're going to do that just to sort of demonstrate they are at zero degrees right now. They move retrograde through the Zodiac and so constantly. And we have different measurement systems. We have the mean node measurement or the true node measurement. I use the mean node. You can make a case for using the true node. Either way, the mean nodes are about to change signs.

You can see here, January 29, middle of next week, they change signs into Pisces and Virgo. North node will be in Pisces, south node will be in Virgo. So that's the end of January 2025. How long does that last? So you can see they're retrograding through the signs, and then for about a year and a half, they will be creating eclipses in these signs. And we don't see them changing by mean node measurement into the next signs until about August of 2026. So it's about a year and a half. So from now, approximately, as you're watching this at the end of January 2025, all the way until August of 2026, we are now having the nodes of the Moon in Pisces and Virgo.

Now, in another episode, I will spend time looking at the difference between the North Node in Pisces and the South Node in Virgo more specifically. Today, what I want to do is bring up five major themes of the Pisces-Virgo axis, regardless of whether the North Node was in Pisces or Virgo or the South Node in either sign as well. The reason for this is that it often helps when you're exploring the archetypal symbolism of a planet or planetary combination. In this case, the nodes to start with simple, basic things and then build into more complex, nuanced levels of interpretation. Otherwise, we often get lost.

So what we're going to do today is purely focus on themes that we know are going to come up because we're dealing with Pisces and Virgo. These themes will come up regardless of which nodes are in which signs, and then in a future episode, probably closer to the time of the eclipses, I'll spend some time talking about North Node in Pisces specifically and South Node in Virgo specifically.

I would also like to, at this point, have Ari Moshe Wolf come back on, an evolutionary astrologer, and talk about the evolutionary perspective on the nodes of the moon moving into these two new signs. Because the Hellenistic perspective is one, is the perspective that I use. But I think there's a fair amount of people in our audience who probably listen to EA as well. And so I think, you know, just because Ari is also someone I just love working with, he's a good friend, I will probably have him on, and we could get his perspective as well, because that would be really interesting to sit and chat about the different perspectives. Like we could just create a really fun conversation around that, I think. So maybe we'll do that later as well.

Anyhow, let's talk about five major themes of the Pisces-Virgo axis. Now, there are some explanations that are going to be required as we go along, but I'll try to make sure they're easy enough for anyone to follow. Some of the explanations, I don't just like telling people this, you know, this is what it'll mean. This is what it'll do. I like to make sure we explain the why, so that students or practitioners, people who are learning and studying Astrology, can learn how delineations are crafted. That we have a kind of responsibility as astrologers to do that when we know that a portion of our audience, or the person you're reading for, knows astrology and wants to understand something of the Logos, the Astro logos. That's our study. Astrology comes from Astro logos, so we want to make sure that people understand the logos behind what we're doing.

Now let's take a look at this first theme, escaping upward and resisting downward. There's an interesting dichotomy that's present in both of these signs with upward and downward movement, and the basic reason for this is where the signs sit within the solar year. Now, all of this is symbolically oriented from the standpoint of the Northern Hemisphere, but remember, it's a symbolic divinatory language, like the Tao or the I Ching. You don't have to take the orientation literally. You don't have to flip the zodiac. I'm also completely fine if people want to do that kind of stuff from hemisphere to hemisphere. Whatever. But I don't take it all literally, and so for me, the symbolic divinatory value is a part of the symbolic orientation in the northern hemisphere. Okay, I had to say that just to get out of the way, because otherwise, I get like, 20 comments asking questions about it.

Okay, so from the standpoint of our solar year, in Pisces season, we're in a double-bodied sign, which means we are in a transitional space coming out of a previous solid or Fixed sign and moving toward a cardinal or tropical sign in front of us. That liminal space is the space in which all of the double-bodied signs take place, and they transition us toward the point of another Equinox or Solstice. So what's happening in Pisces is we're moving out of winter, and the Fixed sign of Aquarius, where the winter is most solid, and the power of the light, and that's this part of the year, is starting to transform and lose that solidness, because it's becoming something different. And that new thing that it's becoming takes place in Aries, the cardinal sign, or tropical sign, in front of Pisces, where the light now takes over and for the rest of the year, or for the next six months, approximately, we are now on the light half of the year where there's more light than darkness.

And so the transition from dark to light in the solar year occurs in this kind of liminal space that is Pisces, and that's an upward movement toward the light, because the arc of the sun in the sky is raising upward and now reaches a threshold where, once it crosses that celestial equator marker at the Spring Equinox, we now have more light than darkness, and the ascent of the light is going up, up, up, up, up.

So there's a movement upward that's really powerful and important and has a lot of nuanced double meanings. And so we'll come back to that with Pisces in Virgo. We have a sign that's trending downward into darkness, because it comes just after the solid sign of summer in Leo and just prior to the tropical or cardinal sign of autumn in Libra. And so we're moving into the darkness. We're moving into the solar underworld, where for the next six signs, six months, there'll be more darkness than light in the 24-hour day. And so that takes Virgo moving it downward. The arc of the Sun crossing the celestial equator, again, is now moving into the basement of the solar year. So the movement downward is really important.

There's a way in which the symbolism of these two signs is so intimately tied, not only to the quality of light and dark, but also to things like deconstruction versus construction, or taking things apart versus putting things together. This is why the planets Jupiter and Mercury traditionally ruled these signs. When you're coming out of the darkness, there's a way in which coherence is being built. So Jupiter-ruled sign in Pisces, as the light is rising out of darkness. When you're moving into darkness from light, you're thinking about the deconstructive quality of the Yin coming and taking apart the Yang. The Yang. Is it Yang? Or is it. Yang, everyone tells me something different about that. Hmm. Anyway, so Mercury, a double ruler of a double-bodied sign, a deconstructive planet that takes things apart, is also associated with Gemini, where the light starts sinking in the midst of the summer, taking things apart again. Jupiter at Sagittarius, where we're moving into the return of light, putting things together again.

So these two signs have a lot to do with upward and downward movement, deconstruction versus reconstruction or analysis, and deconstruction versus something like wholeness and unity. And so when we take all of that together, one of the things that comes with it is that we have this trend toward wanting to escape upward or resist downward. So let me explain. Think about the movement in Pisces of the light coming and rising out of the darkness. Let's apply that to a few basic life situations, some that might be very healthy, some very unhealthy.

Let's say, for example, that you are an alcoholic and you hit rock bottom, and you need a way of transcending the addictive issue in your life. And so what happens, very simply, is you go to rehab and you start, maybe you start a 12-step program, and you're starting to get your life back on track, through faith, through surrender, through the acceptance of, you know, forgiveness for yourself from the universe, you are putting your life back together, and you are escaping a downward pull from the demons in the basement that just wants you to drink, to deal with the pain. And you're moving upward. You're moving into the light, health, clarity, surrender to divinity. You got a sponsor. You've done some rehab. That is very much like the upward movement we need to escape upward out of the entanglements of the world that are pulling us down into the worst parts of ourself. Fair, right? That's a good description of Pisces, the redemptive, upward, spiritual, redeeming, healing impulse of Pisces is to pull us out of darkness and into light, and often in a way that's emotional and very healing, compassionate, wonderful. This is why Pisceans can be so magical to be around, because there's something about them that's very healing.

Now, on the other hand, let's think of another exact same situation, archetypally, that could be actually maybe toxic or negative. I This world is painful. I'm in a lot of pain. I need to escape out of the pain and find a transcendent space. So I'm gonna, I'm gonna use heroin, right? It's the same kind of impulse that a person might find the alcoholic in the previous example, might find themselves in the situation of alcoholism because they're in pain and they're trying to find a way out of it, a way upward, a way to escape the downward pull of pain, depressiveness, boredom, hurt, trauma, all of the things that are most complicated and we might describe as the most entangling and dark elements of human experience. I want to transcend them, but rather than finding my sponsor or whatever that desire to escape upward is, we reach for something that's actually illusory. It's not actually the real solution. It's an escapist fantasy. I'm going to shoot up heroin. I don't I don't judge people, right? I'm not trying to act like I'm on a high horse here, because I have worked with people throughout my whole life, and in my early 20s, had about two years of my life where I had opiate addiction. So believe me, I don't stand in judgment of anyone for any of these kinds of things, but you can see the difference in the upward impulse, sometimes it's escapist in Pisces, and sometimes it's actually redemptive. And that's a big part of what we mean when we say that the Pisces part of the nodal story coming up here will have to do with how we escape upward and what is the healthy version of that? How do we redeem? How do we heal? How do we restore? How do we move out of the chaos and pain and hurt of life into a compassionate, peaceful, happier state of existence that is a deep part of the sign of Pisces.

Now, on the other hand, excuse me, when we think about Virgo, we have some of the almost like identical symbolism, although it's very different. We're now in an earth sign that's about moving down into the underworld. And there can be a way in which Virgo helps us to resist the downward pull, or there's a way in which Virgo will be pulled down, but we'll work with that pull downward in really interesting ways, and often one of the ways will be through resistance. Now let me explain what I mean by this. And there's a there's slightly different ways that we could phrase this that might work even better, and you might even think of them, but with Virgo, the pull into the underworld, it's an earthy sign. It's an analytical, meticulous, careful, conscientious sign ruled by Mercury. The harvest maiden is the image. And here we have the impending moment of the entrance of the sun into the underworld, which is also seen as the moment of harvest, the moment of judgment, the moment of your actions and results being judged. It's like the How well did you grow your crops? That's the kind of harvest you'll get. The entrance into the underworld is a place that Virgo senses, you could say, as a place of judgment and evaluation. And so understanding, I will be judged, I will be entering the underworld. I'm going to resist the I'm going to resist the tendency within myself to do things that will result in bad consequences or poor evaluations or harsh judgments. So there's a conscientiousness in Virgo that says I'm going to pass the test, I'm going to stay pure, I'm going to do the right thing, and with that impending judgment, my results will be judged as good. My actions will be fruitful. I will be shown to be pure and good, and I will resist the disintegrative pull of the underworld, where souls might be judged against their results and like, annihilated, right? It's a it's it's that kind of like the the fear of the judgment of God in the afterlife, or you're going to heaven or hell. It's not like that, really, in the ancient world, in the in the Hellenistic world, it's not quite like that. But the point is that Virgo has this keen awareness of evaluation, judgment and results. And so the resisting of the downward pull would be the resisting of laziness, the resist the resisting of any kind of tendency, any kind of unconscious tendency that might be impure, that could render a judgment against us. So there's this, and that's a brilliant part of Virgo, don't get me wrong.

So let's give an example. Let's say that you are 18 years old, and you are preparing for college, and you have your SAT. You know, Virgo will be the sign that will often result in us preparing, you know, taking the tutoring class, reading the books, taking example tests, you know, just being conscientious and ready to pass that test and then get a good grade. And, you know, right? We all recognize like, oh, we need that. We need that kind of Virgo quality to keep us from the worst in us, by staying prepared, by staying conscious, by staying aware, our results matter. I have to be pure, I have to be good. I have to know the right thing and do the right thing, and that resists the downward pull within us. See how Pisces is trying to reach out of the downward pull of darkness, and Virgo is also dealing with the descent into it. So that conscientiousness is great with Virgo.

However, there is a really important let's give a similar example. Let's say that, you know, give another example. Let's say that someone goes to school and they have always been a good boy, a good girl, like I'm I've I've got my ducks in a row. I'm conscientious. I'm doing the best I can. I'm trying to avoid that downward pull by staying above it. They remember the the harvest maiden has little angel wings or a bird on the shoulder. She's hovering slightly above the ground, feet not touching. It's like I'm trying to stay above that downward, earthy pull that could kill me or render me impure, or give a bad result or put me in put me in hell, right? So okay, but there's an anxiety that comes with it, and the anxiety the perfectionism, can actually be corrosive. And so one of the things that can happen for a Virgo is so back to the college example, the young person in college, the good boy, the good girl, really wants to avoid having sex. That's not meaningful, right? But, but one night, you drink a little bit too much, not something you usually do. Whoa. Out of control here, and you end up going home with someone. You sleep with them, you have fun. You wake up in the morning and oh my god, you're wrecked. Your purity is lost. You have this deep gnawing sense of guilt and shame. What have I done? Why did you I'm better than this, right? But all of a sudden, a couple days later, you realize, oh, that, that that person we're not dating, but they're my friend. Nothing bad came from it. I had a little bit of fun. I did something I've never done before, and as far as I can tell, my schoolwork still going okay, and all of a sudden we learn that there's more room and space and grace and kind of like there's there's, there's more room for imperfection and for exploration and for learning in this world, in the material world, I. Don't have to try to stay above it by being so conscientious and perfect that we never get entangled with it. Entanglement isn't the problem with the material world. It's getting lost in it. It's getting completely taken over by it. And we also have to learn then that resisting the downward pull can itself be problematic and can create nothing but anxiety and perfectionism within us, when actually what we need to do is learn how to walk within it without getting overly entangled in it. It's okay once in a while, to have a little bit of fun. It's okay to let your hair down. It's okay to make out with a boy, you know, just smooch faces. You do it. We gotta, we gotta let go. So the resisting of the downward pull into the materiality is something that Virgo sometimes needs to let go of. Whereas you can see that there's kind of a weird mirror image happening in Pisces with the desire to escape upward out of the entanglement. This is also why we have in the dignity scheme, Venus exalted in Pisces in its fall in Virgo. Virgo exalting mercury and Pisces in the fall of Mercury, the rational and the sensual qualities that are at play and how we walk through this world, and what constitutes entanglement and what constitutes a healthy middle path within this world. So this is one way of framing it, the escaping upward and the resisting downward that these two signs will bring in make it really interesting.

Number two is initiation and redemption. So closely following this explanation, we then have the theme of life will initiate us at you will the best you try to be good and hover above the fray. Life will pull you in. It will pull you into the dark, into the matter, into the world, into relationships, into complexity, into the play of shadow and light. You will get pulled into it, only to find that you never lost your wholeness, that you you were, you were always okay, you were always loved. There's no hell that isn't, at the very least, a temporary hell. It's a hell space you move through, but it's not nothing is eternal, but love, right? So all other spaces are temporary. Love is eternal, and you have to be, you have to be dragged into things unconsciously this, and then you find that that process always brings redemption and oh yeah, I'm okay. I'm loved. I'm a part of God. I'm a part of the universe. Everything is ultimately okay. So you see how the Virgo Pisces access also brings us through the process of descent and ascent, or into this in the solar year, into the darkness, back up into the light. That Valley of the year is not evil, it's not hell, it's not darkness. Unconsciousness is not an enemy. There's some pretty terrific things down there. I mean, holy shit, right. Look around at the world. I mean, pretty horrifying. It's, I mean, even like you guys have heard me say this a million times, but occasionally, in our family, we watch nature documentaries. Because, you know what? Sometimes we just need to chill out. There's, it's good to sometimes just watch elephants walking around, spraying each other with water and rolling around in dirt. How is it you can't take yourself that seriously. If you watch these things, you go like, Oh, yeah, I'm like, we're all kind of animals so well, I mean, that's the thing, though, is that there's, there's something about this material universe that we're that we're in, that we can try so hard to not get entangled with that we we forget that it is the the entanglement and the angelic, redemptive higher nature are all together. There's no actual major the separations between those realms are in our minds, so to speak, so, initiation and redemption are part of a process that we remember and we enter into and come out of with these signs, evaluation, judgment, grace, compassion. There is a way in which we need to be conscientious of our actions. We need to evaluate the results. We need to pass tests. We need to be aware of the fact that there is a kind of karmic calculus. There is a Karma Yoga that is at play. You want a happy life, you better act virtuously. That's a real thing, not a fake thing. However, it's not the only thing. There's also a strange and mysterious way in which grace and compassion and paradox just rule supreme and you can it's never as simple as your actions lead to. You know, all results are dictated purely by your actions. There's the way in which, in spite of our best efforts, to completely everything up. I. We remain recipients of grace and beauty and mystery, and when those moments happen, there's nothing you can say, but Well, thank you. I'm not sure I can see how I deserve that, but I'm really relieved that it's not just based on merit, that there's it's not just a school in which the more things, the more A pluses I get, the better life is. There's one level at which that is true, and there's another level at which that is so simple, and there's so much more going on here. So this sign axis of Pisces, Virgo, brings us into a very deep contemplation of the existence of evaluation, judgment, karma, virtue, morality, ethics, right and wrong choices, as well as grace, compassion and the mystery and magic of life that is exists in the law of the Spirit, not in the letter of the law.

Number Four are romantic, Central and practical, rational energies. Again, we've got the access in which the exaltation of Venus and Mercury take place and their falls. And so rational versus sensual energies is another way of putting it. Earth versus water would be another way of putting it. These things will also be on display. And finally, deconstruction and wholeness, faith and doubt, there is a way in which analysis, careful, concerned, meticulous, reasoning and sort of faithful, rational, imaginative, romantic energies. They have to figure out how to coexist, and this is a signed dichotomy that will help us with that. If you're someone who's just, you know, I don't know you got crystals in your pants, I here. Oh, my God, that was a funny image. Okay, so if you're, if you're someone who flies around, you know, on moon beams and magic, this is, this is a nodal transit that will help you if you need to get a little bit more grounded and and like reasonable.

And if you are someone who exists in scrutiny, faith, doubt and feeling like you need to be in control of everything, there may be a way in which magic and enchantment is just the medicine that you need. Um, there's also just a way in which our faith is always made deeper and more profound by the spaces of doubt that we go through, and our doubt is made more profound in our capacity to ask questions and to be in in the question mark somehow not filled with self righteous faith, but something deeper than that happens because we we give more room For doubt and allow doubt to play a role in the existence of our faith, right? The two things actually go together. So that's it. I hope you have magical Friday, and we'll see you again. Monday. Bye, everyone.