Mars Square the Lunar Nodes: Drive at the Bendings

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Mars square the Lunar Nodes means that, at your birth, Mars and the North Node were between 82° and 98° apart. Any point that far from one Node is just as far from the other, so Mars squares both, and the free chart draws two solid red lines from ♂, one to N.Node and one to S.Node. Mars is not on the side of old habits or of new growth here. It stands out to one side, level with the middle of the line.

There are two such points, so the square is about twice as common as either conjunction. Our 73,049 daily Greenwich noon charts for 1900 to 2099 showed it on 6,862 dates (9.4%, roughly one date in every 10.6), in 252 windows, on average one every nine or ten months. A forward pass lasted 19 to 45 days, 22 at the median. The 20 windows that held a retrograde Mars ran from 14 to 185 days.

The bendings

Older astrology called these two points the bendings. The Moon's orbit is tilted against the Sun's path, and at the bendings the Moon reaches its greatest distance north or south of that path and starts to come back. Counting 90° on in zodiac order from the North Node gives the northern bending; 90° on from the South Node gives the southern. In the sample, Mars occupied the northern one on 50.2% of square dates and the southern one on the rest.

Early texts saw a planet in that position as unsettled. Modern evolutionary astrologers often speak of a skipped step, something that was left half done between the old habit and the new direction and keeps returning until it gets attention. With Mars there, the unfinished business is usually framed as action: what to fight for, when to push and when to stop.

How it may show up

Pushing in two directions. Going forward and holding the line can both feel like the right move, so effort gets split. Some people describe bursts of energy that change target before they land.

Conflict as the crossroads. Arguments may arrive at the moments of decision. In this reading the friction is where the choice is actually made, not a sign that something has gone wrong.

The one who acts first. A more constructive reading sees Mars as the planet that breaks the deadlock. When neither end of the axis offers an answer, doing something concrete can.

These are possibilities, not outcomes. The Nodes usually count for less than the planets, and the sign, house and other aspects of Mars tend to say more.

Eclipse seasons depend on Mars's distance from the Sun

For Mercury and Venus a square to the Nodes rules out an eclipse, because both planets stay near the Sun. Mars can stand anywhere, so the answer depends on its angle to the Sun. With Mars within 60° of the Sun (52.0% of square dates) the Sun stayed 22° or more from both Nodes, outside the 18.6° eclipse limit. With Mars 60° to 120° from the Sun (30.5%), the Sun was inside the limit on 62.0% of those dates. With Mars 120° or more from the Sun, never; and on retrograde square dates the Sun was always at least 34° from both Nodes, because a retrograde Mars is roughly opposite the Sun, which puts the Sun on the far side of the sky, toward the other bending. 21.8% of the windows held an eclipse date.

August 1999: Mars at the bending, the Sun on the Node

The window of 20 July to 17 August 1999 held both a partial lunar eclipse on 28 July and the total solar eclipse of 11 August. Mars was exact on 4 August: the calculator has it at 13°07' Scorpio against the North Node at 12°59' Leo, 0.13° from a square, at the northern bending. At London noon on the day of the eclipse, Mars at 16°50' Scorpio was still 4.2° from exact, while the Sun at 18°21' Leo and the Moon at 18°16' Leo were near the North Node and the Sun squared Mars within 1.5°. Scorpio has Pluto as its modern ruler and Mars as its traditional ruler. Sun conjunct North Node covers the eclipse from the Sun's side.

Retrograde at the bending: 1965, 2012 and 2029

Twenty of the 94 Mars retrograde periods in the sample reached the square. The longest window of all ran 185 days, from 8 December 1964 to 10 June 1965, with three passes. On 10 March 1965 the calculator has Mars retrograde at 18°20' Virgo and the North Node at 18°21' Gemini, 0.01° from exact, and the Sun at 19°42' Pisces at the southern bending, opposite Mars. The two eclipses inside that window, the total lunar eclipse of 19 December 1964 and the total solar eclipse of 30 May 1965, came while Mars was moving forward, about 98° from the Sun.

Eight Mars cycles of about 780 days come to almost exactly 18 eclipse years, so a retrograde square can return about 17 years later. Mars crossed the southern bending moving forward on 12 December 2011 (14°00' Virgo against the North Node at 14°00' Sagittarius), two days after a total lunar eclipse, then turned retrograde and crossed it twice more in a 98-day window: backwards on 15 March 2012 and forward on 5 May 2012 (6°13' Virgo against 6°19' Sagittarius). Seventeen years on, 2029 repeats the sequence at the southern bending in Libra: forward on 29 January, retrograde on 9 March (10°31' Libra against 10°33' Capricorn, 0.04° apart), and forward again on 19 June, in a window that holds the total lunar eclipse of 26 June 2029. Libra is ruled by Venus and Capricorn by Saturn.

The softer angles

A sextile to one Node is always a trine to the other, since the Nodes sit 180° apart, so these births show one blue dashed line and one blue solid line from Mars. In the noon sample Mars stood 60° from the North Node on 6.5% of dates and 120° from it on 8.5%. Astrologers tend to read the pair as a working channel: drive learned on the familiar side can be put to use on the growth side without much friction. Because they weigh less than the conjunctions and the square, they get this paragraph instead of pages of their own.

Seeing it on your chart

A square shows as a solid red line, and this contact gives Mars two of them, ending at N.Node and S.Node. To confirm, subtract the degrees in the planet table: ♂ and ☊ need to be 82° to 98° apart. Mars and the Nodes are normally in signs of the same modality (cardinal, fixed or mutable), yet 14.1% of sampled square dates broke that rule because one of them sat near a sign boundary, so go by the numbers. If Mars is about 90° past the North Node in zodiac order, it is at the northern bending.

When the birth time is not known, Mars and the Nodes are computed for local noon purely as a reference, and noon is not treated as your birth time. Interpolating between noon charts suggests that on roughly 3.7% of square dates the hour could add or remove the lines. House positions for Mars and the Nodes depend on a known time. The free birth chart will show whether you have them.

Related

• Mars conjunct North Node, Mars on the growth end
• Mars conjunct South Node, Mars on the familiar end
• Sun square the Lunar Nodes, why the Sun at the bendings never coincides with an eclipse
• The full aspects library

To weigh this square against the rest of your Mars picture, bring the chart to Ask the Astrologist.