by Jan Spiller
South Node Conjunct Neptune
Neptune shows, by house and by sign, the area where we have special access to spiritual guidance that we can use to help navigate our lives. It’s a sensitive, psychic attunement, which rules the lofty aspects of poetry, music, art, and mysticism. Wherever Neptune is found in our charts, we seek the fulfillment of a spiritual ideal.
If you are the SOUTH NODE person:
Until you achieve consciousness in this relationship, you will discount your Neptune partner’s spirituality. Trust is an issue here, and you may inadvertently offer disparaging words or display behaviors that undermine their trust in their own judgment. This can invalidate their vision of how things can be. Every time they do something that reflects their spiritual beliefs, you may give them the feedback that it’s unrealistic. Your instinctive reaction is to discredit their idealism.
For example, the South Node sister of one of my clients was with her at a family seder. My client went through all the dinner preparations and was performing the ceremony, which requires that the food not be eaten until a specific time. Her sister was sneaking pieces of matzo and giggling, thereby demeaning and invalidating my client’s spiritual experience.
Sometimes your partner may want to see life through rose-colored glasses, while your instinct will be to invalidate their innate trust in Life’s goodness. The very area in which they feel the most trust is where you try to limit their beliefs to tangible reality. In this way, you may unknowingly be short-circuiting your partner’s internal navigational system and robbing them of their ability to maneuver safely through life.
Especially if you also have a planet conjoining your own South Node, this is a payback lifetime—in a past incarnation, you may have abused this person’s trust for your own benefit. Perhaps you urged them to look up to you and then deceived them, causing them to lose confidence altogether in trusting others. So now on an unconscious level you are seeking to restore their trust in their own internal guidance first, before looking to any outer authority.
As the South Node person, you hold the power to determine the outcome in this area of the relationship. In order to create success, make sure you don’t throw a wet blanket on their dreams when they share their idealistic or spiritual vision with you. If you feel there’s a realistic piece of advice that you could add that would truly benefit them, suggest it gently in a way that supports their aspirations.
If you are the NEPTUNE person:
You are likely to feel a tremendous amount of trust for this person and view them in an idealistic way. And yet if you allow yourself to trust them more than you trust your own instincts, you are certain to be disappointed.
It is likely that in a past life, the South Node person offered you some sort of an “escape” from the daily humdrum. It may have been through spiritual affinity, romance, art, or some other avenue. Together you shared a “private world” that had an aspect of unreality to it, not unlike the “high” produced by a narcotic substance. In this lifetime this person is here to restimulate your dependency needs, and then give you the gift of connecting more deeply with your inner self and reestablishing your trust in your own spiritual self-reliance.
Here’s one example of how this might work. Perhaps you put all your faith and trust in someone, even following them onto the path of alcoholism (a negative consequence of trusting this person more than your own judgment). Yet the end result is that you eventually join Alcoholics Anonymous, and working the 12-step program helps you learn to live at a higher level of spirituality than ever before. Even though it may be in a seemingly negative way, your association with this person can give you the gift of spiritual independence.
If this person is in your inner circle, and if they also have a planet conjoining their own South Node, they have a contract with you from a past life to heal an injustice. The most likely scenario is that they were a spiritual teacher in a past incarnation who convinced you that their judgment and knowledge of Truth was greater than your own. In this way, they robbed you of your trust in your own internal guidance system. In this lifetime they replay the drama in order to pay their debt to you. In the beginning, you may buy into their whole notion of how they are more spiritual and know the answers to everything. Then they deceive you or betray your trust to such an extent that you are forced to let go and begin to rebuild your trust in yourself. At some point you achieve enough inner strength to not need the South Node person’s advice and guidance anymore. In this way, they are an influence that can strengthen and restore your trust in your own spiritual autonomy.
South Node Conjunct Pluto
Pluto rules power and shows—by the house and sign of its placement in our birthchart—where we have agreed to experience total transformation in this lifetime. This process involves surrendering our self-centered ideas of reality and our preconceived concepts concerning the use of power. In the choice between “change vs. the status quo,” it is absolutely in our best interests to choose change that leads to positive growth wherever Pluto rests in the chart. If we resist, life will make the choice for us—usually through a dramatic unfolding of events.
If you are the SOUTH NODE person:
Until you become conscious of the dynamics of this conjunction in your relationship, your influence on the Pluto person is likely to disempower them. You will instinctively discourage them from experiences that would allow them to grow stronger through using their power. You may also tend to indulge their fears rather than encouraging them to take risks that could help conquer them.
What is happening is that their style of making changes that result in positive transformation for them is not designed to work for you in this lifetime. However, as the South Node person you hold the power in this area of the relationship and can choose to create a successful outcome by pulling back and becoming more aware of your own separate identity. Deliberately go out of your way to support your Pluto partner in making changes and taking risks that they feel will lead to greater personal potency. By supporting them in using their power correctly you will clear any past life karmic residue from incarnations when you may have abused power in your relationship with this Soul.
If you also have a planet conjoining your own South Node, you have a major past life incompletion with this person and have met again in order to help them heal and repay your debt. If this is the case, the Pluto person will likely activate the passion in your nature. You may feel an obsessive attraction to them—possibly an urge to absorb their energy or even possess them in some manner. One way these dynamics can play out is that—if they are your mate or lover—you will likely feel compulsively linked and bonded; the intensity may be overwhelmingly irresistible for both of you.
However, after a while you will notice that they are becoming weaker as your connection drains their power, making them ever more dependent on you. If they don’t become aware and disrupt this dynamic soon enough, they may lose so much of their potency that they are unable to break this unhealthy bond with you, and more karmic debt will be created. To prevent this and to repay your debt, you must be willing to let go of your desire to possess them and not allow them to become dependent on you.
As the South Node person, the outcome will be up to you. Integrity is an important issue. It will take tremendous discipline on your part to overcome your obsessive urges and consciously seek to empower them by helping them acknowledge their vulnerable areas and support them in growing stronger. This will also involve not indulging them in the ways they abuse power. You will be uniquely aware of when this is occurring since you originally helped instill these patterns. Don’t encourage their weaknesses. Instead, support them in gaining the confidence to make their own choices. Your purpose in their life is to help them be reborn at a level of greater personal strength and empowerment.
If you are the PLUTO person:
The South Node person is in your life to help you reclaim your potency and purify the manner in which
you use power to reach your goals. However, this may occur in a less than positive way in situations where you have no choice. What is happening is that in a past life you may have combined energy with this Soul in order to reach a common goal. There was a mutual feeling of “you and me against the world.” However, you became enmeshed with them and dependent on their energy for your own sense of potency. An unhealthy co-dependency was created, and now they are in your life to give you back your independent power.
How this tends to work is that every time you try to rely on them to support you, they let you down. When you share your ideas about directions that will give you a greater sense of personal empowerment, they are likely to discourage you. And if you begin to demonstrate your potency, they unconsciously pull away. Over time, their responses to you slowly drain your power until you become aware of the situation and vow to make your own choices and reclaim your potency.
If this person also has a planet conjoining their own South Node, they have a contract with you to resolve a debt. In a past incarnation they may have deliberately instigated or supported your misuse of power and personal charisma for their own gain. An example is if they were your pimp and used your charms to make money. Or they may have urged you to channel your power into supporting a corrupt cause, such as an unjust war. In some way they influenced you to use your power in a less than honorable way that was not in alignment with your inner Truth. These misconceptions have carried over into this lifetime and you may still be subconsciously abusing power in these ways.
When you first meet the South Node person you will probably feel quite receptive to them because their energy is so familiar. You may even feel a strange, intense attraction and become intimately involved on some level. This can be a compulsive sexual relationship that has the potential to degenerate into forms of enslavement and bondage. The initial attraction on your part comes from your unconscious recognition that this Soul brings you the opportunity to break the bonds of co-dependency and reclaim your power. If you do break the bond with them, there will be a huge disruption of energy. By allowing this disruption to occur, it can blast away shadows in your unconscious that have been preventing you from growing stronger. You will discover where you have been abusing power in your relationships in a way that allows you to finally release these patterns. Then you can emerge purified, childlike, and innocent. From this position, you will at last be able to create the healthy, successful, and deeply satisfying relationships you have been longing for.
South Node Conjunct Chiron
The position of the asteroid Chiron (often called “The Wounded Healer”) in your birthchart shows—by house and by sign—the area where a deep wound occurred in a past life. As a result, you avoid expressing that part of yourself in this lifetime. This situation can be remedied by acknowledging the wound and revisiting the pain in order to heal it. Once healed, that aspect of yourself can become reintegrated into your personality. Then you will also gain the ability to help others heal in that area.
If you are the SOUTH NODE person:
This is a heavily karmic relationship. Events that occurred between the two of you in a past life resulted in your inflicting a wound on the Chiron person unfairly. This left you with a karmic debt to repay, which is why you have come together again in this lifetime.
Most likely, through your interactions with this person, they will become uncomfortably aware of a part of themselves they have been suppressing. At first they will unconsciously look to you to dictate how to use this energy. However, through the process of feeling constricted and co-dependent it will become all too obvious to them that they are crippled in that area. Then their inner strength will begin to build, eventually allowing them to reclaim that part of themselves and begin expressing it. This will add a dimension to their life that wasn’t fully activated without your influence.
If a planet in your natal chart also conjoins your own South Node, then you may have wounded this Soul for your own gain. In this case, your connection in this lifetime could be quite an intense experience for both of you. If this is an important relationship, enlisting the counsel of a third party could be to your mutual advantage. Your highest action is to support any areas where they show an urge to change and/or to express themselves more fully. If there is a part of them that you notice is repressed, go out of your way to encourage their strength and confidence in that area. As you help them to heal, you free yourself of the subconscious guilt of having caused injury and you regain a part of yourself that was hidden from you as karmic punishment for that misdeed.
If you are the CHIRON person:
The South Node individual has entered your life to activate an old fear that lies dormant within you. They make you aware of a part of yourself you have avoided bringing to the surface due to unconscious past life memories of suffering dire consequences for having expressed it. It’s like having a pebble in your shoe; you are walking through life differently because you are favoring that vulnerable area in hope of avoiding the pain.
This person was present in the lifetime when the original wound occurred. As a result, they have the unique ability to stimulate that memory in exactly the right way so you can reexperience the initial pain and grow strong where, until now, you have felt weak and afraid.
This wound was unexpected and was not caused by any misconduct on your part—it just happened in the process of going through experiences on planet Earth. However, your response to that wound most likely included decisions and actions that then resulted in negative karmic consequences for you. For example, perhaps you were raped and decided to kill the perpetrator rather than taking a Higher Road (pursuing it through the legal system, starting a victims’ support group, etc.).
If this person also has a planet conjoining their own South Node, they were probably the sole perpetrator of the wound and have a contract with you to repay this debt. If you enter into a close relationship with the South Node person in this lifetime, their presence will activate your wounded area and bring it to the surface so you can deal with it. They will most likely draw your attention to that part of yourself by unconsciously constricting your expression in that area again. You will be required to muster your energy in order to prevent this person from dominating you, and this will begin the healing process. Eventually, it will become apparent what you must do in order to become strong enough to express that part of yourself in a new and healthier way.
The Double Conjunction
A Double Conjunction occurs when one person has a planetary opposition in their chart that conjoins the nodal axis of another: for example, their North Node is conjunct one of your planets, and their South Node is conjunct another.
There is a specific past life contract at work here. In a past incarnation, the nodal person’s influence prompted a split within the psyche of the planetary person. For example, if you are the planetary person and have Mars opposing Venus in your natal chart, you may feel that the people you fall in love with (Venus) are not the same people you are sexually attracted to (Mars). Then this Soul from your past enters your life and their North Node falls on your Mars, their South Node on your Venus. In some way, in a past life they caused the current rupture in your psyche that now prevents you from successfully combining love and sex in a relationship.
One possible scenario is that in the past life they enslaved you in a love relationship that created co-dependency and thus deprived you of your personal initiative. Now their job is to help you heal, so this time they don’t allow you to become co-dependent on them romantically, and they openly support you when you exhibit boldness and initiative to advance your goals.
In the payback period, sometimes it happens that the nodal person actually gives back more to the planetary person than what was initially taken from them. When both partners become aware of these dynamics, they can make a conscious effort to equalize the energy so that balance is created.
For North Node conjunct North Node a
nd North Node conjunct South Node, see the aspects “North Node Conjunctions,” Part III
The Composite Chart
Introduction
A composite chart is a common astrological tool used to provide insights into the inner workings of a relationship. This type of chart is created from the natal charts of the two people involved using the mid-point between their planets. For instance, the mid-point between each of their Sun’s positions would be the Sun position in the composite chart; mid-point between their Moons would be the Moon position, and so forth. This would be true for the Midheaven and house cusps as well. It’s a chart of the relationship itself—an entity in its own right.
I’ve worked extensively with the nodal axis in composite charts and find it to be very helpful in understanding the issues both people are likely to face as a couple. It shows the joys and challenges that are most likely to arise in the relationship, and also points the way to successful conflict resolution. Most importantly, I find the composite chart very helpful in seeing the purpose behind the relationship—why the two Souls have come together. In fact, planetary conjunctions to either Node in the composite chart show that there is a past life contract to be resolved.
My research has shown that if a couple honors the direction of the composite North Node—by sign and by house—as the goal in their relationship, negative issues tend to ease. You can also maximize the positive flow of energy in your relationship by recognizing—and aiming toward—its highest potential.
This work is focused on the nodal axis, but naturally, much is to be gained by considering the composite chart in its entirety. Due to space considerations, this section is brief. Further research on this topic will be expanded into a future book on aspects to the nodes.
The best way to utilize this section of the book is to first read the information about the House in which the composite North Node is found. With that knowledge, you can more easily develop and express the qualities of the Sign of the composite North Node. If you don’t have a composite chart with your partner, go to www.cosmiclove.com and the information will be calculated for you free of charge. For an accurate composite chart, you will need the birth time of both individuals.