As July opens, the Moon’s north node lies at just under 20 degrees of Taurus. By the end of the month, it has retrograded (the Mean nodes are always retrograde) to just over 18 degrees of Taurus. That’s a swing of about 1 degree 35 minutes.

Do you have any particular astrological sensitivity to those degree areas – say, the Sun in 19 degrees of Scorpio (an opposition) or the Moon in 19 degrees of Aquarius (the square)? If so, is the karmic wave about to break for you? Is something huge and fated about to happen?

Maybe. Maybe not. Read on.

Every 18.5997 years – that is just a little over every eighteen years, seven months –  the  transiting nodal axis completes one cycle through the Zodiac. The south node returns to zero degrees of Aries, in other words. Another way to express this is that the lunar nodes spend about a year and half passing through each sign. 

In my experience, don’t count on these nodal transits to correlate reliably with anything big. Sometimes they do, sometimes they don’t. I’ve seen them pass pretty much unnoticed and I’ve seen them rock people’s’ worlds. For an example of the latter, Will Smith’s natal Moon lies in 21 degrees 8 minutes of Scorpio. When he lost his temper and hit Chris Rock at the Oscars last March, the transiting south node was in 22 degrees 2 minutes Scorpio – bull’s eye, in other words, smack on his Moon. The south node was conjunct it and north node opposed it – in that very emotional moment. What kind of unresolved Scorpionic karma was welling up from his psychic depths? Was he hitting Chris Rock or some ghostly figure from the past?

Whatever the answer, that edgy, Scorpionic moment will mark his public image for the rest of his life.