RFKjr., the Nodes, Psychopathy & Narcissism in the Natal Chart

4/24/2025

A significant area of research for me has been the study of evil. After years of reading books on abnormal psychology, sociopathy/psychopathy (both labels are now gone in the DSM), and personality disorders, I then spent several years combing through natal charts of murderers, deviants, and serial killers. For years, I had vanquished the North & South Nodes to the sidelines due to the lack of clarity I encountered in Western astrology. My teachers said simply, “The North Node is where you are going, and the South Node is where you are coming from.” They knew the nodes told a story about past lives. They had a rudimentary understanding of them. The South Node represents the lives you have lived, and the North Node represents where you are headed in this lifetime. They had no further elucidation on the matter. They emphasized the South Node being a negative pattern that one was breaking out of by moving toward the North Node, but they had no real insight into what that meant.

Frankly, they also got the nodes right and wrong simultaneously. The South Node, Saturn, and the Moon, along with their house placements, tell a story about one’s past lives. Vedic astrology offers a clearer picture of the Nodes. This is especially true when looking at murderers, deviants, and serial killers’ natal charts. Although I am not a Vedic astrologer, I found their interpretation of the Nodes to be more helpful, insightful, nuanced, and accurate. Perhaps this is because they come from a religious tradition that views reincarnation as a universal truth, unlike Western astrology, which tends to avoid exploring past lives in depth due to its practitioners’ Judeo-Christian roots.

In Vedic astrology, both North & South nodes are considered malefic. Ironically, the North Node more so than the South Node, which didn’t make much sense to me at first when I thought about it through the lens of Western astrology. If the North Node was where one was headed in this lifetime, then why would it be more negative than the place one came from?

It took a lot of thinking to figure out how and why they worked, and what they meant in the natal chart, in terms that I could (and most Westerners) understand. So here is the basic idea. The North Node (malignant Saturn) is the thing that the individual is most afraid of in this lifetime. The thing that must be overcome, faced, and conquered to level up in this lifetime. Hence, the rather lame explanation, “it’s where you’re going.” The South Node represents what the soul is most comfortable doing (malignant Mars). Patterns to be overcome from past lives are interwoven in the combination of the SN & NN. The NN counterbalances the tendencies of the SN. The Nodes can not be separated. They operate as one body, which is why they are referred to in lore as the head of the dragon (NN) and the tail of the dragon (SN). The houses they fall in are the areas of life where these lessons will play out. (For information on your nodes and their placements, I have included links to two pieces I wrote at the end of this article that will help you understand your karmic journey.)

After looking at hundreds of murderers/serial killers/deviants’ natal charts, there was an apparent pattern, something so obvious and repetitive that it was undeniable. It occurred in 85-95% of the natal charts I examined, depending on the sample. There was a nodal conjunction with a planet. In many serial killer charts, there was often a node (south or north) embedded in a stellium (a collection of more than 3 planets in conjunction with each other). There is nothing else like this in astrology.