Names and Glyph

In the West the South Node is the Dragon's Tail, or Cauda Draconis, the counterpart to the Latin Caput Draconis and part of the same medieval translation of Arabic dragon imagery into European astrological vocabulary. In Indian astrology it is Ketu, the immortal tail severed from the demon Svarbhanu in the Vedic myth of the nectar of immortality, treated in Hindu astronomy as one of the nine navagrahas alongside the Sun, Moon and five visible planets rather than as a mere geometric point, a status the nodes never fully acquired in Western practice. Its glyph is the North Node's figure inverted, and the two symbols are consistently drawn as mirror images of one another across the medieval Byzantine manuscripts and later printed ephemerides that preserve them, a pairing that has held constant even as the artistic style of astrological glyphs has otherwise shifted considerably between antiquity and the present.

Where Hindu astronomy folded Ketu into a working system of nine grahas with its own dignities and periods, Western and medieval Islamicate sources generally kept both nodes as calculation points tied specifically to eclipse forecasting, a narrower role that the shared dragon symbolism nonetheless carried across all three traditions largely intact.