Welcome to Ghost of a Podcast. I’m your host, Jessica Lanyadoo. I’m an astrologer, psychic medium, and animal communicator, and I’m going to give you your weekly horoscope and no bullshit, mystical advice for living your very best life.

I’m finally offering transcriptions of Ghost of a Podcast, not once but twice weekly—yeah that’s right, transcriptions twice weekly over at Ghostofapodcast.com. Very slowly but surely, I will also transcribe past episodes, so be patient, be excited, and keep on keeping on, darlings.

Welcome to another Astrology Hot Take. I don’t know if you’ve heard of this thing called the North Node or the Nodes or the North and South Node. The Nodes refer to your spiritual journey in this life. They refer to kind of like, I guess, your destiny is the best way to put it. I kind of don’t like talking in those terms because I think the concept of destiny is a little tricky. For a lot of us, what it does is it make us feel like, oh, I should be doing something, or I should be something or somewhere.

People often also kind of confuse destiny or spiritual calling or a spiritual path with capitalism. It’s not your job. I mean, for some people, it’s their job, but that’s not what your life’s path or your destiny is necessarily meant to be—something that tidily fits into capitalism. So I want to just really say before I get into this that if you find yourself getting anxious or over thinking this, slow it down. Because here’s the thing, if you can conceive of and agree with the concept of a Soul, right—so let’s start with that. The Soul is not this thing that lives inside of your physical body, instead, your body lives inside of your Soul. Your Soul is bigger than this body. And the word Soul or Spirit refers to something that is larger than this physical life, and it is directly connected to your previous incarnations and, potentially, your future ones. So what I have said requires a belief in reincarnation or some version of that and of the lifespan of a Soul.

Now, if you don’t really buy into that stuff, then you’re really not going to like this episode, and you’re not going to want to work a whole lot with the Nodes in the way that I work with them, and I think that most astrologers work in them.

The Nodes are not planets. What most astrologers do is we focus on the North Node, and wherever the North Node is, the South Node is always exactly opposite it. So, if you have a North Node at 11 degrees of Aries, then you can know automatically that your South Node is at 11 degrees of Libra—the opposite sign of Aries. So, basically, we focus on the North Node partially because, as I’ve said before in the podcast, with astrology there’s a lot of things that once you learn them you understand that other parts of them are not written or verbally named, but they are implied.

So the North Node refers to what you have come here on a Soul level to journey towards and, hopefully, come to varied levels of achievement around. Your South Node is where you’ve come from. It’s what you have most recently—on a spiritual level, not on a material level—come to embodiment around.

So here’s the shtick with the Nodes. We all come here with a South Node, and the South Node is what we remember having worked on and dealt with and embodied. But we’ve done it. We’re not supposed to do it in this lifetime. It’s not the lesson we’re here to learn. The lesson that we are here to learn is our North Node. And, so, as you grow and evolve, having a North Node in a particular sign and a particular house is going to mean something different to you experientially because the embodiment of our Soul, the relationship that we have to our sense of purpose—these things evolve and grow as we evolve and grow. And in many ways what I’ve found is that the North Node functions like the integration point of the whole birth chart.

And, so, you can look at your spider web, your mess of aspects in your birth chart and see all kinds of push and pull and all that kind of good stuff. But then let’s say we look at your North Node, and your North Node, let’s say, is Pieces; now we know that on a Soul level you’ve come here to find ways of centering your spiritual and mental health in such a way that it supports you in having faith in yourself and faith in something larger and understanding that faith in yourself and faith in something larger are kind of the same thing. You can call it a potato; you can call it a potato—is that a tomato and a tomato. You get what I’m saying. Call it what you want but having faith in oneself is having faith in one’s connection to purpose, meaning, destiny, truth, whatever it is. That, right there, that’s some Soul work.

So we can focus on all the challenging aspects within the chart—and we should—but, also, what we can understand that is that the North Node is telling us what your Soul wants to do, and, so, the style within which the Soul wants you to do your damn thing.

Now, charts are not that simple, just like people and lives. And, so, sometimes you’ll have really—a South Node conjunction to the Sun. You’ll have things in your birth chart that pull you back to your South Node. That doesn’t mean you’re doomed or destined for struggles. What it means is that you’re not totally done with that lesson.

Our North Node wants us to come to embodiment—that’s it. And the way we are going to embody our destiny and our relationship to our Soul before the age of 40 and after the age of 40—it’s different, and it’s supposed to be different. And, so, if you are a younger person, you’re in your teens, your twenties, your thirties, and you’re scared of ageing—first of all, that’s fair. That’s normal. Things are scary. Life’s hard. Okay. But the other thing is that ageing is a fucking gift. Getting older, that’s a gift, and not everyone gets that gift. And I, personally, am profoundly burdened by life, “Oh, this mortal coil. What a pain in the ass.” However, it is a present. It is a gift, and it is also a duty. And that duty is to yourself as much as it is to others.

My relationship to the concept of the Soul is that it reinforces our interconnectedness. If you’re living in accordance with your Soul, with your real Truth, then you are doing right—not just by yourself but by others. And that doesn’t mean that everyone doing Soul work is doing social justice work or spiritual work. There’s a multitude of ways of participating in the world and with yourself and in private with others that reflect a respect and consideration of our inalienable dignities and our wholeness.

When we talk about the Nodes, we are talking spiritual concepts and not material concepts. And, so, I want to say before I run through the Nodes in the signs and houses, I want to just acknowledge that you are not meant to—in the same way when I talk about, let’s say, Saturn or Mercury or any of the other planets—this is not planetary movement; this is spiritual movement. So when we’re talking about the embodiment of your spiritual Truth, that is different than even talking about Neptune, the most spiritual of all the planets because the Nodes represent kind of like, I guess, the path that you’re meant to be on internally—the journey you are inevitably engaged in with yourself, with your Soul. And that journey is what you’re engaged in. Whether you chose to sit down, close your eyes, close your ears, and not participate. Whether you chose to screw it up spectacularly, or you do the work, and you make the best of it—regardless of how you engage with the path, the North Node references the path your Soul has pointed you to be on in this incarnation. Kind of cool, eh? I think so.

Okay. So here’s the thing—I’m going to go through North Nodes in the signs and houses. But I’m not writing a book right here. This is a cheat sheet. This is a cheat sheet. So two words you should be hearing: cheat and sheet. It’s not comprehensive. If you’re really interested in this topic, there are some great books out there. Notably there’s Jan Spiller’s book on the Nodes. It’s a fantastic, comprehensive book. There’s also a much smaller book by a much meaner astrologer named Martin Schulman. He has a book on the Nodes. It’s really good but low-key mean, and he was nobody’s idea of a feminist, so read with caution. Read with caution.

But I am going to refer to the signs slash houses. In astrology, the placement of your Nodes or the placement of a planet in house is just as important as the placement of it in zodiac sign. So I’m going to in this little cheat sheet be like, Aries slash first house. And the reason why I’m saying Aries slash first house is because Aries rules the first house. So I’m going to basically go through this in a way that tells you to look at if you have the North Node in either the sign of Aries or in the first house—one liner. I’m going to give you a one liner. Same thing for Taurus or the second house, okay.

If you want to know more about the basics of astrology and what signs govern which houses, you can pick up my book, Astrology for Real Relationships: Understanding You, Me, and How We All Get Along or any number of excellent books that are out there. So what you’re basically going to do is you’re going to think about this, and you’re going to be like, “Well, I know because I’ve had my birth chart cast by a professional astrologer or because I’ve used a chart drawing tool, I know that I have my North Node in the sign of Leo but in the ninth house. So what you would do then is listen to when I talk about the sign Leo, and I also talk about Sagittarius slash the ninth house.

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So here we begin. People who have a North Node in Aries or the first house have come here in a meaningful way to embody themselves, to figure out who you are and to live in the wholeness of that. And this is in contrast to the South Node in Libra or the seventh house, which is really relational. The South Node in Libra indicates that you have already figured out how to orient yourself in reaction to others. You kind of abandon yourself to do that, and, so, learning to not abandon yourself but instead to really inhabit and be yourself, that is the lesson of North Node in Aries and slash or the first house.

Now, North Node in the second house and/or Taurus. So people who have this Nodal placement have come here to determine what they truly value—what is of utmost and authentic value to you. Generally people born with this placement have come into this life with a lot of ambiguity about what they actually care about. So this is not about your attitudes and opinions; it’s about what is whole and authentic for you. And that is because of that Scorpio slash eighth house South Node that is about kind of like going into the privacy of what is authentic to you. And people with that North Node in Taurus or the second house, you’ve really come here to figure out how to live by what you value. And when you fail to do that, you don’t tend to like what happens.

When you have a Gemini North Node or North Node in the third house, communication is a huge theme for you. But it’s not just about communication in the traditional sense that you’d think of it. That North Node wants you to be flexible, to be open to learning not just the Truth, but to be learning different perspectives and to be kind of flexible and open with that information so that you can be responsive to it. Because of the South Node in Sagittarius and/or the ninth house, there is a tendency when you fall back on that South Node to kind of be a generalist, to never really pick a side, to never really make a decision. And that’s not what your North Node in Gemini slash also or the third house wants.

We go to the North Node in the sign of Cancer or/and the fourth house. When you are born with your North Node in this placement, it’s so much about coming into this life to cultivate family, to cultivate a sense of connection with your roots. Which might look like your ancestors but also with your family of origin and also, for many people, the family that you build—whatever that looks like. I want to be really clear; the family that you build could be you and bunch of goats—it doesn’t have to be human babies. But that North Node in Cancer slash also the fourth house really is a call to deprioritize and deemphasize external accomplishments and capitalism and even control with that South Node in Capricorn and instead to come into embodiment of what is heartfelt and nurturing for you.

People born with the North Node in the fifth house and/or the sign of Leo have come here—I think it was Martin Schulman who said something to the effect of this, “To be an orchid in a field of roses.” It’s to stand out. It’s to shine your own bright light. That North Node in the fifth house and/or Leo is all about owning and accessing your creativity and your specialness and allowing others to actually see you—to be seen for the ways in which you are creative and unique. And the South Node in Aquarius and/or also the eleventh house, that is the tendency to want to fall back on partnership or collaboration as a way to kind of abate responsibility or power. The North Node in Aries is creative.

Now, I’m going to take a pause to say, nobody comes into this lifetime—not fucking one of us comes into this lifetime having a super easy and chilled relationship to our North Node. You’re not supposed to. You’re supposed to have a difficult time with your North Node. And not a difficult time like it’s hard; it’s bad. But, if we’re being honest with ourselves about our North Node—the complexity of it, not just this cheat sheet I’m giving you—if we’re honest with ourselves about it, we can see this is a place where we need to grow, and grow into ourselves. This is not about external growth; it’s about internal growth. It’s expanding our capacity to embody the themes that I’m very briefly naming here.

And, hopefully, if you’re interested, you’ll do some more research because your North Node is what you are meant to spend your whole life working towards. You come to a place of achievement and embodiment and that’s great because now there’s a next level and then a next level and then a next level. Your work isn’t done. If you’re less of an earth sign kind of person, then maybe I’ll reframe that to say your capacity to grow and expand and become more whole is never done. And that is fucking gorgeous. It’s a pain in your ass. It’s a pain in my ass, but it’s also fucking gorgeous.

Okay. Back to the Nodal placements. So, if you’ve come here into this life with the North Node in the sixth house or the sign of Virgo, you have come here in many meaningful ways to figure out how to be in a damn body, how to manage material time, material habits. A really commonly used word in astrology is mundane, and it’s used in lots of contexts. But in this context, mundane reality is like day-to-day body stuff, day-to-day work stuff, day-to-day health stuff. The North Node in this sign indicates that you’ve come here to embody and embrace these things. And when you slip into that twelfth house, South Node, Pieces South Node vibe of just giving everything away to Spirit and devolving into thoughts without plans, then it kind of catches up with you and bites you in your sweet little ass.

Now, I want to be really clear; the things I’m naming about the South Nodes—I’m about to start naming the North Node qualities of them. Every sign, every planet, every aspect, everything, everything has a positive and a negative side. Don’t freak out, okay.

Now, I’m going to name the North Node in Libra. People who have the North Node in Libra or the seventh house have come here to learn how to truly show up for partnership. These people have already mastered their South Node in Aries where they figure out who the fuck they are, and now they’ve come into this life to figure out how to truly reveal themselves to others. And this is a tricky thing because that North Node in the seventh house or in Libra can incline you to phone in partnership and just go through the motions of it. Now, I want to acknowledge you could have the North Node in Aries in the seventh house. Life, my friends, is full of contradictions, and this is only a cheat sheet.

Okay. Back to you North Node in Scorpio slash or the eighth house. These people have come here to dive into the depths, and that means so many different things for different people. That North Node in the eighth house or in Scorpio is so much about being willing to go into the messy parts of the human experience, whether that is sexually or spiritually or even around money and kind of sharing resources and assets. It is about cultivating your willingness and ability to have faith in your values and to go into places where things aren’t black and white, all or nothing. And when North Node in Scorpio or in the eighth house people fall back on their second house slash Taurean nature and do this thing where they’re like, “Well, this is what I believe, and this is what is true for me. These are my values, and, therefore, this is the way it has to be,” then things don’t flow for them. It doesn’t work. That’s not what they’ve come here to do; they’ve already done that. And, so, it’s really about not losing yourself and your center without needing to hold onto it tightly.

People who have the North Node in Sagittarius or the ninth house have come here to find big Truths. Where they get into trouble is when they devolve into the Gemini quality of gossip or any shit talking whatsoever is bad news for anyone with North Node in Sagittarius or the ninth house. When you have the North Node in Sag, you are meant to embody the philosophies and beliefs that you hold and to continue to learn and grow. But the Sagittarius slash ninth house North Node person needs to learn an allegiance to the Truth. This is all about cultivating a strong sense of individual identity that reflects your beliefs, your convictions and not just being like the eternal student who’s collecting data or the eternal traveler who’s just going from place to place and having experiences that aren’t integrated and owned by the unique identity. No big deal—just your life’s path.

People with the North Node in Capricorn or the tenth house have come here to grow up. Please don’t be sad by that one; I think it’s great. You’ve come here to figure out how to embody responsibility to the self and others and, of course, to recognize that there’s not really a difference. In some ways you might think that this is very much a Nodal placement that is about career and work, and it may be. But it’s not necessarily about career and work. It is truly about taking responsibility for where you point your life and how you do it.

When a North Node in the tenth house or Capricorn person devolves into over-reliance on family, especially family of origin, there’s a lack of wellness within the Soul. This is not where you’re going to thrive. You’ve already figured out on a Soul level how to be dependent on others in a way that is nurturing; now it’s time to become independent—not in a way that excludes others or pushes them away, but instead in a way that honors what you know and what you’re capable of.

Now, Aquarius North Node slash eleventh house North Node people have come here to be a part of the whole. Whether it’s through literal eleventh house interpretations or querying interpretations of being a part of groups or even technology, the creation and maintenance of technology, it could be that. But it’s actually—we’re talking about Soul stuff instead of material stuff, so it is a much larger thing than all that. Coming into this lifetime with that Nodal placement is really an affirmation of the ways in which you are a part of something much larger. You are a part of the environment. You’re a part of whatever demographics you come from and you align with, and you’re also just part of the human Goddamned race. And being willing and able to embrace your humanness and to not devolve into that South Node in Leo where you have to be better than others or you have to get attention in order to see your value, your worth, and even the work that you’re called to do—that’s what the North Node in the eleventh and/or Aquarius really means. Finding ways to make a difference or to participate in the world that don’t require you to be at the center. Right there, that right there—North Node in Aquarius or the eleventh house.

And that brings me to the final Nodal placement. And that is the North Node in Pieces slash also the twelfth house. And this is very much a placement where you are called in this life to grow beyond the rigidity and the structure of the South Node in the sixth house or the South Node in Virgo. This placement is about stepping into your spirituality and honoring your mental as well as your spiritual health. If you’ve come into this life with this placement, you’ve come in in a no small way to cultivate faith. To have a real faith-based relationship to yourself and to life in general. This is not as an escape from the material world, but, instead, a support. Think of it as like a light through the material world. North Node in pieces or the twelfth house requires you to honor your need for space and alone time. You’ve come here to not just be a product and to be productive but to really cultivate your inner world.

Now, my loves, I know I’m repeating this a lot, but I really want to re-affirm this is not conclusive and complete data. Part of me really hates putting out astrology content that just kind of like wets your whistle because I don’t want you to run with a fraction of data and call it the solid singular Truth. But the only way to learn is to start with little bits of data, so here we go.

If you heard what I said, and you’re like, “Oh, I’ve got my North Node in the fifth house in Aries. But the thing that Jessica said about the fifth house made sense, but the thing about Aries didn’t make sense.” It was only a sentence or two. My friends, if you’re interested, if you’re excited, learn more by reading books. Blog posts are cool, but books are the bees Goddamned knees. Bees have knees; they’re bendy; they’re cute. Go get a Goddamned book. Don’t cha? won’t cha? Please do it.

Okay. So I want to thank you for joining me for another week of Ghost of a Podcast. The podcast where I talk about bees and knees, and I tell you to think critically and independently while I also tell you about your Soul’s journey—ha, ha, ha.

As always, I invite you to be a kind and generous person with yourself and others, to have healthy boundaries with yourself and others.

And I want to invite you to please register to vote. Register to vote. If you can register to vote absentee, that’s ideal, and then you can pop it in the mail. Or, if you don’t trust the mail, which would make sense, you can also just walk it on over to your polling place come election time. Please do register to vote.

And, if you don’t agree with voting, I respect you. I’m a damn Capricorn, so, of course, I’m for voting. This is my attitude; it is not the most you can do—it’s not the most you can do by a long shot, but it’s for sure the least you could do. Is it an act in futility? I don’t know, maybe. But do you like posts on Twitter or TikTok or Instagram? Because that is less impactful than fucking voting. So, if you’ve ever liked a post on social media, I invite you to vote. We’re all in this together, and we all have a spiritual duty to do at least the least we can do.