North Node in Scorpio Meaning
The North Node in Scorpio, with the South Node necessarily in Taurus, sets the life's direction of growth toward Scorpio's business, shared resources, intimacy, crisis, loss, and transformation, and away from Taurus's, personal possessions, comfort, and the security of what is already held. The person is drawn back by habit to holding on and is asked by the chart to let go, to merge, and to pass through what cannot be kept. The Nodes are always opposite; the pair is read as one axis.
What the Nodes are
The lunar Nodes are the two points where the Moon's orbit crosses the ecliptic, the Sun's path; eclipses happen when the Sun and Moon meet near them. They are points, not bodies, and they move backward through the zodiac, taking about eighteen and a half years for a circuit and about a year and a half to cross a sign.
In the traditional Western reading, given in Bonatti and in Lilly's Christian Astrology, the North Node, the Dragon's Head, is of the nature of Jupiter and Venus and increases what it touches; the South Node, the Dragon's Tail, is of the nature of Saturn and Mars and diminishes. A benefic conjunct the North Node is strengthened, a malefic conjunct it is made worse, and the South Node weakens either. The modern reading, set out in Martin Schulman's Karmic Astrology and Jan Spiller's Astrology for the Soul, takes the South Node as what the person has already mastered and overuses, and the North Node as the unfamiliar direction the life is meant to take. Both readings are alive, and a full delineation gives both.
The Scorpio and Taurus axis
Taurus, fixed earth ruled by Venus, holds; Scorpio, fixed water ruled by Mars and in the modern scheme by Pluto, releases and transforms. The South Node in Taurus describes a person whose default is the known: security through what is owned, pleasure through the senses, steadiness, a slow refusal to change. These are real capacities, and the South Node's problem is not that they are bad but that they are exhausted; relied on past their use, they become stubbornness, hoarding, and a comfort that has turned into stagnation.
The North Node in Scorpio describes the direction: joint finances rather than one's own, inheritance and debt, sexual intimacy in which something is risked, the deaths of others and the person's own confrontation with mortality, psychological depth, the occult, and the crises that strip away what was being held. The tradition does not describe this as pleasant. Scorpio's matters are the eighth house's matters, and the person with the North Node here meets loss, betrayal, or a collapse of security at some point in the life, and finds afterward that what remains is what the chart was after.
By house and by ruler
The house holding the North Node says where the direction is taken. In the second house, the person's own money and values are where transformation happens, and the South Node in the eighth means that others' resources have been the comfort. In the eighth, the axis is doubled and the themes are literal: inheritance, the partner's money, sex, death. In the seventh, intimacy in marriage is the work and self-reliance in the first house the habit. In the twelfth, the transformation happens in seclusion or through illness and loss.
The ruler of Scorpio is then read. Mars's sign, house, and aspects show how the person actually goes about the Node's business. Mars in dignity, in Aries, Scorpio, or Capricorn, gives the courage the axis calls for; Mars in Cancer, Libra, or Taurus, its fall and detriment, gives a person who approaches Scorpio's demands reluctantly and late. Planets conjunct either Node are the strongest testimony of all: Venus on the South Node in Taurus deepens the attachment to comfort, and Pluto or Saturn on the North Node in Scorpio makes the transformations forced rather than chosen.
The North Node was last in tropical Scorpio from late 2012 to early 2014, before that from early 1994 to the middle of 1995, and before that in the mid 1970s and the late 1950s.
Rahu in Scorpio
In Jyotisha the North Node is Rahu, the head of the severed demon, and the South Node is Ketu, its body. Rahu is the graha of appetite, obsession, the foreign and the unorthodox; Ketu is the graha of detachment, the past, and liberation. Rahu in Vrishchika, sidereal Scorpio, is held by most texts to be debilitated, this being the sign of the Moon's fall and Rahu the Moon's shadow; a minority of texts give Sagittarius instead. Rahu here gives an appetite for secrets, for occult knowledge, and for what is hidden in others, and its results depend on the lord of Scorpio, Mars, and on the house Rahu occupies in the rashi chart.
The Vedic reading is by house and by dasha rather than by direction of growth: Rahu's mahadasha runs eighteen years and delivers the results of the house it occupies and of its dispositor. Because the sidereal zodiac lies about twenty-four degrees behind the tropical, a tropical North Node in early Scorpio is a sidereal Rahu in Libra, and the two systems then read different signs for the same point.