Astrology, Past Lives and the Present Moment

Most books on karma and reincarnation in western astrology look to the natal chart for clues about what baggage we lugged into our present journey on earth.

In the natal chart, as many astrologers have pointed out, the Moon’s North Node signals a karmic calling in this life: what the native is here to accomplish. It’s normally not an easy task (why would we be sent here to live out an easy life?). But while the North Node is the lodestar, it is not the whole journey. For that, astrological psychology pioneers Bruno and Louise Huber have developed a different tool: an entirely new chart covering the whole sweeping scope of past lives. It’s called the Moon Node chart.

(For the astrologers in the audience, the chart is created by exchanging the sign placements of the North Node and the Ascendant, making every house 30 degrees and reversing the direction of the zodiac wheel. See the examples of Carl Jung’s nodal and natal charts below.)

In keeping with the Hubers’ rigorous psycho-spiritual development model, the Moon Node chart does not exist for the ego’s purpose of finding out whether we were Cleopatra or Genghis Khan in a previous life. Instead, its purpose is to understand the present through the lens of the past in order to transform current problems — so we can better fulfill our karmic destiny in this lifetime. The Moon Node chart helps with that process by providing not which job titles we held in former lives but, more importantly, information about the kinds of activities, habits and relationship dynamics we have engaged in over the millennia. This information indicates the deep ruts we’ve dug ourselves into, from which we must now emerge in order to evolve.

The Moon Node chart integrates the idea of karma with the Jungian concept of psychic compensation, by which our psyche creates mirror images of our thoughts, feelings and habits in order to balance out our behavior. For example, a person who spent a former life manipulating and cheating others (a behavior that could be identified in the Moon Node chart) may, in this lifetime, find himself repeatedly playing the patsy to other nefarious folk. Similarly, someone who was formerly a slave may now find herself faced with great power over the lives of others. This “compensatory karma,” as I like to call it, is meant to lift the native out of the instinctive recycling of old energies and toward the compass-point of the present moment, the call of the current life.

In my view, it almost doesn’t matter whether you believe in reincarnation or not. The Hubers cast the Moon Node chart through this lens, and it is a very useful lens, not least because it gives us strong archetypal images on which to hang our self-understanding and self-development. But even if you cannot grasp the idea of past lives, it is clear that each of us comes into the world with a certain temperament, with propensities toward particular behaviors and with compulsions to habits or feelings whose roots we just don’t understand; and even contemporary psychotherapy cannot explain them all.

The Hubers, in their book Moon-Node Astrology, also provide a list of “archetypal stimulus words” — words like nomad, artist, merchant, thief, snob, matrimony, dictator, celebrity, inquisition, cardinal’s hat, abbess, isolation and many, many more — that can help chart natives intuitively tap into their past life dynamics with the aid of their Moon Node chart. Connecting with the individually relevant images may be the beginning of a journey back through time that allows each of us to come to terms with the past — however we perceive that term — so we may move forward into the present moment to fulfill our purpose in the now.

Image: qthomasbower