North Node Libra
Libra North Node, South Node Aries
Achieving “serenity” is a soul aspiration for you in this lifetime, although the thrill of the hero’s journey and the grand quest is strong for you with these Nodes. Your South Node is ruled by the mythical hero, Mars, who embodies the ideal of the spiritual warrior and the one who breaks new ground. However, with your North Node in Libra, ruled by Venus, it is through the more feminine side of yourself that you come home to yourself. Venus compensates for the excesses of Mars, and yet she can be a demanding muse or irritation, depending on how you treat the masculine/feminine polarity within yourself.
With this Nodal axis it will be important for you to find ways to calm down, release tension, and allow all forms of beauty and harmony to heal you. Like a finely turned violin, you need to catch stress and pressure before it causes something to snap. There may have been something exhausting earlier in this life or in a previous life experience where you placed great emphasis on personal achievement, self-sacrifice and courageous action. Now it’s time to release the singular survival urge and ambitious mentality to develop your North Node’s Soul's yearning for deep serenity. For you, this suggests nurturing co-operative relationships and finding release from the mental/emotional “tension of the opposites.”
The symbol of your Venus ruled Libra North Node is the ancient image of Athena holding the Scales. This mental weighing and balancing of the ‘great opposites” in life is exhausting, yet the challenge of knowing what is “right and fair and true” is too delicious not to embrace. You delight in having had the courage (South Node Aries) to go where others have not, to endure, and to bring home the “golden fleece”. Yet it is ultimately about the learning of “right relationship” that is one of the main tasks for you in this life. It will require a relaxing of some old ways of thinking and being, as you create win/win situations with others and relax the urge to engage in victim-rescuer scenarios.
As your understanding of human nature grows, you acquire a tolerance for paradox and ambiguity and for the many different ways people perceive reality. As this increasing acceptance of the complexities of life and people grow you may find yourself in positions of peace-keeping or as a counselor or mediator.
You can excel in the Venusian fields of art, entertainment, and beauty, if you choose to develop this side of your nature. Home, heart, and hearth can take on increasing importance—one could say that these Venus ruled areas are good compensatory medicine for you. As you grow into a more balanced focus on inter-dependence rather than too much dependence or independence, you'll finally find a way to assert yourself with more confidence and without creating conflict. Your compassionate objectivity can bring a deep contentment into your life and into the lives of anyone you touch.
Earlier in this life, or in a previous life, chances are that you were engaged in “a serious battle” of some sort. It could have been a war, or it may be a vague emotional memory of trauma. However, those left-over default patterns, or shadow qualities of Mars—the feeling of needing to know, to be right, and in your place of power, only increase the dramatic, intense and overly emotional backdrop of your past life that your Soul longs to move away from. Your unconscious knows the horror of trauma and drama, yet you also know how to numb the effects of battle, and how to create the soothing rush of the adrenaline high with a new beginning. You can dare to slow down. The war is over; you’ve won.
As you move to redeem the “gold in the shadow of Aries” in mid-life you may need to become less self-centered to find the serenity and co-operation with others you desire—and how many and varied the ways you may consciously and unconsciously do this! No matter how accommodating you may see yourself, you may occasionally need to dip back into this gold in the shadow, and tap into that Martian/ Aries assertiveness again. Yes, Libra is about balance, justice and beauty, but without a good dose of the Martian courageousness and sense of adventure, Libra can be ineffective and indecisive. As you continue to learn to tolerate the complexities and paradoxes in life (an on-going Libran task!) you discover a new sense of equanimity, and you may notice that life comes to you, rather than you having to go to it. Allow yourself time to not rush into making decisions--you need to weigh and balance all the different ways you perceive and think about things.
In the latter part of your life you’re more likely to seek the comfort of love rather than the drama of love earned through effort and ambition. Where there is no war, there is also greater beauty.
Soul Purpose: To cultivate a willingness to see all sides of a question and be able to forgive. Release the addiction to passion, ambition, and anger as personal fuel, and replace it with the Venusian nurturing qualities inherent in all things beautiful—music, nature, and art are all healing for you.
Shadow: Having to be right and to righteously defend a cause while causing a lot of inner and outer disturbance. Too much emphasis on the powers of the ego and not enough on the Self, and/or Self in relationship to others.
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William Butler Yeats, Irish poet, dramatist, astrologer and occultist, was one of the foremost figures of 20th century literature. Yeats had his North Node in Libra, South Node in Aries, and despite (or because of) his many literary accomplishments, he is often looked at curiously for his unusual love life and his passionate quest for a direct experience of Spirit. His many relationships with women were tumultuous, and the Venusian muse was particularly hard on him. He was refused in marriage multiple times by Maud Gonne, the love of his life, and again by his proposal of marriage to her daughter.
Yeats was in love with Maud Gonne for 28 years (a full Saturn cycle) and claimed to have a spiritual marriage with her—perhaps providing Yeats with the emotional suffering necessary for an alchemical breakdown to take place. It seems significant that Yeats’ life long desire to channel spirit information came to him, not by the excesses of his passion, but through his later life marriage to his wife, Georgie. One cannot know if he found the “serenity” that is the hallmark for Libra, but one could hope that in accepting the responsibility of their marriage and two children, Yeats may have turned the base metal of everyday human life into the gold he so yearned for in his spiritual quest.
As a member of the occult society of the Golden Dawn it became necessary for Yeats to grasp the unity of opposition over and over again, and the necessity of alchemical healing through suffering and purification. His magical name in that society: Demon Est Deus Inversus (the Devil is God inverted) underlines that opposition.
Yeats knew that in Vedic Indian astrology, his “head of the dragon, Rahu,” was in Libra, and the “tail of the dragon, Ketu,” was in Aries. C.G. Jung wrote in his book, Mysterium Coniunctionis.“ ...in the image of the uroboros (the serpent or dragon swallowing its own tail) lies the thought of devouring oneself and turning oneself into a circulatory process. The uroboros is a dramatic symbol for the integration and assimilation of the opposite, i.e., of the shadow...”
It is interesting to note that the South Node shadow for Yeats was in Aries, with it’s polar opposite, in compensatory Venus ruled Libra, while the opposite is true for two other men who pioneered in the area of the unconscious—Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung. They both had the opposite polarity of North Node being in Mars ruled Aries, and South Node in Libra. All three men shared the passionate Venus/Mars polarity with its intense interest/disinterest in sexuality, love, and the life of the spirit.
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As you see, all North Node descriptions are similar to sun sign descriptions, without the South Node opposition. Any North Node Libras out there with more to add? As a Sun sign Libra I find I'm only indecisive on the big issues of life, and the little decisions are quickly done.....
