The Nodes of the Moon and the dance of balance

Photo Barbie Robinson

For those of us who are interested in archetypal movements of astrology, the recent shift of the North and South Nodes of the Moon offers an interesting inquiry and reflection. These Nodes are called Rahu and Ketu in Indian Jyotisha astrology and they have an ancient association with dance. Indeed, one of the earliest mentions of the legend of Rahu and Ketu is found in the dance text, the Natya Shastra (circa 500 BCE to 500 CE).

In the Natya Shastra, the revelation of dance is set in the context of the first “performance” of theatre which was the Churning of the Ocean. In this story, the Deities and the non-Deities decide on a collaboration to churn the mythical ocean for the nectar of immortality. (The non-Deities are traditionally referred to as Demons. They could, in my view, equally refer to humans who are caught in the throes of Hubris. So, I find non-Deities a better term.)

The deal is that the nectar will be shared equally amongst the two groups. The Deities have no intention of fulfilling the deal because they consider that, while the might of the non-Deities is necessary for the churning, they are unfit for immortality.

Once the nectar emerges from the ocean, the Deities call upon Vishnu, the divine maintainer of manifest Reality, to help them trick the non-Deities. Vishnu transforms into an Apsara, the archetypal dancer. In this beauteous form, He distracts the non-Deities, while, through the trickery of dance, pouring the nectar into the mouths of the Deities.

Vishnu manages to trick all the non-Deities except Svarbhanu. Svarbhanu means self-illumined. In some legends, his splendour is supposedly greater than that of the sun. He places himself amongst the Deities and receives a share of the nectar of immortality. This cannot be allowed. Non-Deities (humans) cannot be permitted to be immortal.

Vishnu discovers this trickery and cuts Svarbhanu’s head with his discus. Svarbhanu, who is by now immortal, becomes eternal as Rahu, the head, and Ketu, the body. In astrology these become the “Nodes” which are always moving in retreat. Rahu-Ketu are simplistically interpreted as malefic and oppositional energies. For example, Rahu is considered as the material aspirations of power, ambition, success and gain, and Ketu as the underworld realms of desires, unconscious beliefs, dark addictions, and escapism. We can see how this is reflects the negative ideologies of Mind and Body as the dichotomy between soaring, external focused expression, and contracting, destructive realms of sensation and feeling.

The appearance of this story in the Natya Shastra is significant in illumining the role of dance as an inquiry and intelligence. Dance renders immortality both a trickery and a gift in the same moment. It all depends on our intelligence about dance itself. The physicality of the Deities in dance is a poetic expression—nonlinear, meandering, and intimate in its focus. The non-Deities are muscular, thrusting and dominating. These could also be approached as feminine and masculine energies, or as Body-led and mind-led intelligences. A collaboration is required for excavating the nectar from the depths. However, in the end, it is the poetic intelligence that can contend with Vishnu’s trickery of dance because dance is of that same poetic intelligence. Svarbhanu is one of those exceptional non-Deities who held the poetic intelligence and was able to match Vishnu’s trickery with his own.

When non-Deities match the trickery of divine dance, a disintegration of what has been is inevitable. Svarbhanu cannot simply “add” immortality to his bag of skills or acquisitions. Immortality shatters everything that one has been and what one has known, and explodes as another manifestation. As Rahu-Ketu Svarbhanu becomes the eternal teaching of balance, exactly the balance that was needed to churn the ocean in the first place.

Rahu-Ketu is the dance of the energies of untethered immortality that seems always thrusting into the future, and the more unknowable immortality as the deep past or ancient depths. In the second, the realms of Ketu, we may hide or lose ourselves. Or we may completely avoid this descent as we are intoxicated by Rahu’s promise of eternity as a futuristic movement.

I am intrigued by the many revelations that have come to light in recent times of ancient ruins that hold mysteries which belie our modern intelligence. This is the Ketu realm where mystery is a descending movement into Earth where the depths of our primordial origins are located. Just as we excavate ancient civilisations, so also, we excavate our ancient “self” from within the Body’s depths. And when we simply apply our usual known and mind-led knowledge to what is revealed, we are in fact ignoring the Ketu intelligence and simply attending to Rahu’s valuing of knowledge as accumulative and progressive with no connection to the long ancestry of life itself as intelligence.

In other words, just as Rahu’s realm is self-referential and about itself, so also Ketu’s realm is about itself. Balance is not about subsuming the one within the other, rather it is a dance. And the dance, like that of Vishnu, is also about itself and not about Rahu or Ketu.

Trickery is a common modality of wisdom revelation in many ancient traditions. It is an invitation to consider what is not apparent, and to assume that what is apparent may well be a delusion. In Rahu-Ketu, this complex wisdom manifests as the balancing of our Hubristic tendency to assume what we are now and what we know now is the benchmark of intelligence, with the long arc of time that has birthed our expression, as individuals and as lifeforms, in this time. The present, and future which is projected based on the present, must be held with the primordiality of Body which is not mind-created.

Dance as the language of Body-led intelligence is at the heart of this balancing movement. Indeed, ancient dance centralised movements of finding presence within chaos rather than controlling chaos with dominating muscularity. The dance of Rahu-Ketu is the dance of the wild chariot that must be deftly yoked without restraining the magnificent horses so much so that they stumble and bring upon us a fatal accident.