Sign Pisces, four degrees
Phase Full Moon
Condition Peregrine
The word to know today
The nodes
The nodes are the two points where the Moon’s orbital path crosses the ecliptic, which is the apparent path of the Sun. They hold no bodies and nothing occupies them, but an eclipse is only possible when a new or full Moon falls close to one. The tradition named them the Dragon’s Head and the Dragon’s Tail, and read the first as swelling whatever it touched and the second as thinning it.
Caput Draconis and Cauda Draconis, the Dragon’s Head and the Dragon’s Tail, are the old Latin names for the two points where the Moon’s path crosses the Sun’s. An eclipse happens only when a lunation falls near one of them, and tonight one does: the Moon is full in Pisces, opposite the Sun in Virgo, and passing into the shadow of the Earth. It is a partial eclipse, deep enough that most of her disc goes dark. The opposition was exact at 04:19 UTC, at just under five degrees of Pisces.
Nothing physical sits at either node. They are intersections, geometry rather than substance, which did not stop the tradition from treating them as though they had an appetite. The dragon in the name is the older layer, swallowing the light and giving it back. Eclipse doctrine took up long stretches of the surviving material, and Ptolemy, writing in second century Alexandria, worked it out chiefly as a method for judging the fortunes of countries and cities rather than of a single person. That is where most of the tradition kept it for the next thousand years.
Pisces gives her no office. It is not the sign the Moon rules, not her exaltation, not her detriment, not her fall, and a planet holding no essential dignity in the sign it occupies was called peregrine, from the Latin for foreigner. So the record tonight reads full, peregrine, and eclipsed. The partial phase runs a little over three hours. An eclipse is the one lunar event that arrives on a published schedule and can be checked against that schedule afterward, which is why the eclipse tables outlasted almost everything else the old astronomers wrote down.
From the shelf
Ptolemy, Tetrabiblos
Second century Alexandria, where eclipse doctrine was set down as a matter for nations and regions rather than for individuals.

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