North Node in Libra/South Node in Aries - This Nodal position requires much learning about self-sacrifice and the needs of other people. All the lifetimes of work spent on building self-confidence and esteem must now be transferred to others. The Libra North Node keeps the individual from adding to his sense of self-identity any further. He must guard against strong ego influencing his current life actions. His long standing me-first attitude now brings him sharp and painful experiences as he is learning the lessons of cooperation. He must slow down and make sure that all he works for is meaningful, in his marriage and close partnerships as well as all his relations with others. He has to learn to take the sharp edges out of his life and start to balance. While the center road seems less attractive to him, it is still the only path he can have towards happiness. Ultimately he must learn the very subtle lesson that his strong pioneering individualism isn't actually meant for himself at all, but rather to equip him better so that he can provide other with a more harmonious life. Many individuals with these Nodes have a tendency to be contrary. The experience of listening to other people is a new one which they find objectionable when they feel it hampers their forward motion. In past incarnations, progress was all important, and getting there first was part of the highly competitive Arien drive. This carries over into a definite closed-mindedness which the Libra North Node will ultimately open, showing to the individual the other side of the coin which he had never before thought was important enough to recognize. Selfishness and vanity of all sorts must be curbed unless the individual wishes to find himself alone. Usually he feels himself being driven towards something, yet he doesn't understand what or why. Through the Libra North Node he is now to reconsider his goals and objectives so that his Arien energy is put to some useful purpose. He changes his mind often and allegiance to a single cause is not one of his finer attributes. Past incarnations have made him accustomed to a constant impatient restlessness that still has a tendency to keep him on the move. He knows that he is to give rather than to receive in the current life, yet he finds it difficult to cope with such karma with his full heart. The Martian quality of the South Node impatiently pushes him in new directions. Upon arrival at each destination, however, he finds the gossamer cloud of Libra in the middle of the seesaw, and is surprised to see that the goal was not the goal at all, nor was the destination the end of the journey. Puzzled and confused, he sits in the middle, trying to evaluate the circumstances which he hopes will point the way towards his next successful drive. And yet each goal, each ambition, each sprint of running and striving brings him to Libra -- the half-way point! Finally, out of sheer exhaustion he makes the amazing realization that the second half of the journey involves other people. He has to learn the karmic lesson that he is not alone. Until he learns to share, something always comes up to put the brakes on his efforts. Eventually he is brought to the realization that winning or losing the game is much less important than the fairness with which it is played.

Many individuals with these Nodes are highly opinionated as a result of selfish or bigoted past-life attitudes. Now it is time for the shoe to be worn on the other foot. Much of the current life's events are painful blows to the ego. The individual has to guard against becoming embittered as he sees many of his own wants and desires being taken away from him and given to others. At first his natural tendency is to be jealous. He wants to fight back for all those things he feels he has lost; yet the more he fights the more he loses. Eventually, drained of much of his inner resources, he must surrender his selfish ego and accept living in a world built on sharing. Until he overcomes his South Node, his biggest frustration is the witnessing of other people receiving all that he himself has wished for. He doesn't quite yet understand how this works, and is puzzled at why all the things he has ever wanted are coming to people around him and yet not to himself. He hardly realizes that all his desires, wants and wishes are actually designed for others. He is mentally energizing the wishes of people around him so that he can ultimately be an instrument for their fulfillment. In actuality he is earning himself a new place in the world by living through the karma of selflessness. Still, the insistent urges of the South Node keep pulling him backward, often making him feel that this is a lesson he would rather not yet learn. He must try to resist past-life tendencies to make waves for he is now capable of witnessing disharmonies between people without taking sides. Often he is thrown into the position of referee, whereby in helping others to become more objective, he in fact helps himself. The more he can get others to cooperate, the more he can learn to do it himself. Underneath all the hustle and bustle, this individual is learning to see the consequences of his actions before taking them. In effect, he must learn to look before he leaps! For many with this Nodal position, there is a deep-seated anger coming out of the past-life memories of frustrations which block the self-expression. In this life, there is usually a very pleasing physical appearance, which is part of the karmic lesson in vanity that the aries South Node is here to overcome. Any narcissistic residue also causes difficulty in marriage as this is the battleground where the war between love of another and needs of the self must be fought. The balance between Aries/Mars and Libra/Venus is a difficult one to achieve. The Aries South Node constantly seeks to assert its needs, while the Libra North Node seeks nothing for itself but to love others, regardless of their demands. This individual can feel love for others best only after his own needs are fulfilled. Until the desires of past incarnations are left behind, the incessant pulling of his subconscious demands continues to be so strong that he has a tendency to drain energy from other people, actually putting them to sleep. In effect he is a walking anaesthetic, constantly wondering why people avoid talking with him for more than a few minutes. He would like to talk for hours, if only to continue the focus of attention on himself. But in his private moments, he is deeply saddened by a sense of loneliness and the knowledge that his relationships with others are so far short of what he would like them to be. There is nothing subtle about this Nodal polarity. Happiness comes only after he is forced to re-evaluate his desires and truly discovers that they involve other people. The ego-self must be abandoned and with it a heightened sensitivity to the needs of others acquired. The Libra North Node is one of the most difficult to achieve because the Aries self-love looms as such a large hurdle to overcome. Still the individual must overcome if there is to be a new cycle for him, and he will find the key to this new cycle as he begins to reflect back upon himself through the eyes of others.

The house position of the South Node indicates the area where insatiable desires of past incarnations are still demanding priority. The house position of the North Node shows how fulfillment can be reached through self-sacrifice, cooperation and the expression of unselfish love to others.

from: Schulman, Martin, Karmic Astrology - Volume 1, 1975, Samuel Weiser, Inc., New York

North Node in the 11th House/South Node in the 5th House -- Here the individual comes into the current life remembering a style of living in which he was the sole creator. Now he keeps trying to take the bull by the horns in order to recreate the manner of living to which he was accustomed. Yet everything he tries to do bears a tinge of being slightly inappropriate insofar as fitting his current life circumstances. He is prone to love affairs, finding them a comfort to the continuation of his past-life ego. What he often fails to realize is that through his love affairs he makes himself weaker, and rather than gaining strength from compliments and encouragements he develops a dependency where each compliment creates the need for another. Eventually he makes himself so helpless that his behavior becomes hopelessly childlike. He wants to be loved desperately, but the residue of past-life sexual tensions are so great that he often confuses what is really important to him. He has great difficulty understanding reality for his life is a stage of players and his dreams are so romantic in nature that he becomes a veritable Don Quixote chasing windmills. He believes in chivalry and can easily be fooled by glamor. Wanting to be constantly reassured that his arrival in life does not go unnoticed, he is unable to accept the role of just being a member of the audience. To those who appreciate him he can be extremely generous, but the moment he feels ignored he will run into his gossamer dream world trying to create a Seventeenth Century romantic adventure in which he will be the central character. Constantly in search of self-fulfillment through amorous adventures, he can too easily lose his way. He would like others to think of him as sacrificial and when he does involve himself with a love affair it is almost certain that he will force himself into a position of having to give up everything. Like the “Martyr King’ who sacrificed his throne so that he might fulfill his love, this individual would like his affairs to be honored, sanctioned and even admired. His past-life sense of dignity is so great that he is not particularly pleased with even the thought of an illicit love affair; yet from time to time he finds himself in the midst of one if for no other reason than to express his ability to sacrifice a principle for what he believes at the moment to be the world’s greatest love. Basically he is a good person and it would take severe chart afflictions for him to have a malicious bone in his body. Throughout all the zodiac his creative talents with children are unsurpassed, for at heart he is a child himself. Regardless of the Sun sign he will at one time in this life need to lean on someone with more strength than himself. Through his eleventh house North Node he is to learn the value of friendship. He must transcend the physically possessive relationships of his past incarnations and cherish with equal fervor the new impersonal relationships he is now forming. In this life he is learning how to pay more attention to the meaning of his dreams rather than trying to force his own will against the flowing tide. His dreams bring him messages from his higher guidance through which he is telepathically brought to understand the reasons for all his actions, but his will is often so great that he refuses to accept what he knows is true. If he is realistically asked to abdicate anything at all in this life, it would only be his powerful self-will for here in the pride of ego he actually blocks all that he so desperately desires. Truly, he is his own worst enemy. The individual with these Nodes suffers from a built-in discontent for whatever he creates though his South Node only leaves him free to dream of more he is missing. He would like to be free of entanglements, but he is constantly jumping out of the frying pan into the fire. Before any growth at all can be made he must learn to overcome the monstrous dragon ego which he has allowed to become his self-generating instrument of destruction. He must learn how to see himself impersonally, with the understanding that his life is like a river flowing beneath the bridge from whose vantage point he may watch it! His most difficult tests always revolve around the temptation to control the flow of that river, yet his greatest happiness occurs when he can appreciate its beauty without tampering. It is almost certain that he will go through at least one major experience in which he will be required to sacrifice his personal ego for the sake of fairness to another; for only when he has learned how to rid himself of every biased thought can he reach his higher purpose. So long as he retains the slightest tinge of self-pride all the power in his chart will be denied him. Even the possibilities of a harmonious marriage loom beyond his reach until he becomes impersonal. The fifth house South Node uses so much energy in trying to achieve self-sympathy that the individual has difficulty finding the strength to give complete fulfillment to a marriage mate. Many with these Nodes experience divorce, but this is neither destiny nor necessity. It is simply an outgrowth of misusing the South Node energies. Through so much focusing on the self the individual does not see or fully appreciate all the blessings he has. Again the answer is the same. He must relinquish the grip on “self” and dedicate his life to impersonal service rather than expect others to wait on him. If he can learn to become less romantic and more scientific, he will start to see the truth for what it is. He must never allow the fires of passion to cloud his vision for his happiness will be achieved only when he can look at life from a dispassionate viewpoint. His karma is in learning how to become non-involved and yet always available when needed by others.

Ultimately, he is destined to become the impersonal servant of humanity. He will at one time in this life do much to further the career of another. Friendships, clubs and societies become important to him for it is through such associations with others that he ultimately comes to sense his own identity. Through the ways that others value him he comes to value himself. Then he is able to see himself as a part of others as well as a part of a higher cause to which he is dedicated. The more he can do this the more he will rise off the plane of self-consciousness, and the demanding needs to gratify his own ego will become submerged in the collective ego of the cause to which he has dedicated his identity. When he completes this lesson, his strength of character and sense of direction become no weaker nor less purposeful than the cause of which he becomes a part.

The sign which contains the South Node shows the ways in which this individual allows too much past-life residue of passion and desire to pressure his current life. The sign which contains the North Node indicates the ways in which he can develop enough detachment so that he frees his personal self, enabling him to dedicate his energies toward more universal causes.

from: Schulman, Martin, Karmic Astrology - Volume 1, 1975, Samuel Weiser, Inc., New York