From His Arms There Sprang a Hundred Dragons’ Heads: Typhon and Eclipses

The north and south nodes of the moon are two opposite points on the ecliptic that indicate the possibility of an eclipse (if a new or full moon happens within 17 degrees of the nodes, there will be an eclipse). They are often referred to as “the head and the tail of the dragon” after Rahu and Ketu from Hindu mythology—two dragons born from the decapitated head and body of a demon who eat the sun and moon during eclipses. The north node or mouth of the dragon, a disembodied head, consumes insatiably, while the south node or tail (what Judith Hill calls “the great anus of the zodiac”) endlessly purges and releases. 

There can be a tendency toward splitting with the nodes, either treating the north node as a benefic (since it brings increase) and the south node as a malefic (because of the pain of loss), or inversely casting the north node as materialist and suspect, but the south node as a necessary (if painful) lesson in non-attachment. I tend to look at the increase and decrease that each node brings about on a case-by-case basis and see how both can help us change our relationship to attachment and clinging—whether by loosening our attachment to the gains of the north node or our suffering in the face of south node dissolution and loss. 

I had never come across a figure in Greek mythology that resembles the draconic imagery of the eclipses before this morning when I was reading about Typhon in Apollodorus’ Library of Greek Mythology, a kind of ancient encyclopedia that was likely written in the Hellenistic period (by someone who was not in fact the well-known scholar Apollodorus of Athens, but more likely a compiler using the name as a pseudonym). In the first section of the book (“theogony,” or genealogy of the gods), we learn that Ge and Ouronos gave birth to the various divine beings of the universe: first the “Hundred-Handers” (each with one hundred hands and 50 heads), then the cyclopses, and finally the Titans who would go on to parent the Olympian gods. After creating the Titans, Ouranos chains the Hundred-Handers and cyclopses, and casts them down to Tartaros, “a place of eternal darkness in Hades, as distant from the earth as the earth is from the sky” (27). Ge is appalled by Ouranos’ rejection of their children, and conspires with Cronos, the youngest of the Titans, to overthrow him by freeing his younger, monstrous siblings. The coup succeeds, but Cronos repeats the same cycle as his father, ultimately binding Ge’s oldest children and returning them to their prison in Tartaros. To sustain his rule, Cronos proceeds to eat each of his children as they are born to prevent them from usurping him—first Hestia, then Demeter, Hera, Pluto, and Poseidon. Like her mother Ge before her, Rhea (Cronos’ wife and the mother of the Olympian gods) is repulsed by her partner’s filicide and plots a coup with their son Zeus, secretly keeping him from being swallowed so he can kill Cronos and extract his siblings from the guts of their father. 

The plan is successful, and the Olympian gods triumph over the Titans in a long and gruesome war. But as we know, the cycle of violence and revenge begets itself; Ge was enraged by the brutality of these new gods, and in a fascinating act of geophilia, “had intercourse with Tartaros” itself “and gave birth to Typhon.” Here’s where the eclipse imagery comes in: 

“He was part man and part beast…Down to his thighs, he was human form, but of such immense size that he rose higher than the mountains and often scraped the stars with his head. With arms outstretched he could reach the west on one side and the east on the other; and from his arms there sprang a hundred dragons’ heads.” 

Rather than two dragons, their bodily functions divided, Typhon is a hybrid, world-spanning monstrosity, an agglomeration of hundreds of dragon heads and mouths, driven to consume all the new gods. Typhon’s dragon-arms stretch from the eastern to western horizon—a single body that connects the day (eastern horizon) to the night (western horizon). Typhon defies the order of the cosmos in much the same way that an eclipse does, introducing a physical continuity between two otherwise mutually exclusive states, the day and night. The north node and south node are themselves always in opposition in the zodiac, like the eastern and western horizon, and the signs of Saturn i.e. Cronos (Capricorn and Aquarius), stand in opposition to the signs of the moon and sun (Cancer and Leo). 

In Typhon we have many of the interpretive themes of Rahu and Ketu without splitting one from the other. Rahu and Ketu too are beings of vengeance who represent an alternative or rejected order of divine beings; they were originally a single demon, split in two by Vishnu for stealing a sip of immortality. We also see that attachment—clinging to power with a paranoid compulsion to suppress the undesirable and avert cosmic revolution—is at the very heart of the Typhon myth. Even when the Olympians eventually slay the dragon, the violent force they use to defeat him leaves permanent scars all across the earth in the form of volcanos: wounds that seep the fire of Tartaros and might erupt at any moment, reducing even the most stable and thriving cities to magma. 

The cycle of suffering caused by clinging and attachment—called samsara in Buddhism and Hinduism—is the grounds for most contemporary readings of the astrological nodes, so it’s fascinating to see such a similar expression of the idea in the figure of the dragon-armed Typhon, himself profoundly reminiscent of an eclipse. Apollodorus’ theogony can be read as a parable of the ways that repression, resentment, and revenge lock us into interminable cycles of suffering, propelled forward by clinging, attachment, and fear. This is as true of the personal as it is of the political. The reversals, surprises, and collapses we anticipate during eclipses (whether embodied by the dragons of Rahu, Ketu, or Typhon), can show us the places where we—as individuals and as a society—hold on so tightly to stability and control that we smother life and prevent necessary change. 

Who are the giants, cyclopses, and hundred-armed monsters who you’ve locked in the pits of Tartaros? What iterations of suffering in your life are in fact cries from Tartaros begging for the freedom to change? What would it mean to refrain from continuing the cycle of repression and suppression, to let go of control and power (over others and parts of ourselves) rather than force a false stability that is itself the seed of instability and destruction? 

There’s so much richness to using the Typhon myth as a paradigm for interpreting eclipses because of the deep sociopolitical context of the story, the way it centers the cyclical violence of disowning, binding, and disappearing the undesirable. We can’t forget that historical eclipses have a political dimension, that they are omens which threaten the dominance of rulers and kings. The personal and political are inseparable here; the ways that we suppress and disown parts of ourselves that we find ugly or threatening is part of a direct continuum with the violence enacted on marginalized people in society. Taking up Typhon as an eclipse archetype is one way we can practice observing our own tendencies to disown the abject or unfamiliar, and learn how we use violence and control (on both micro- and macro- scales) to reestablish the illusion of stability in an inherently unstable world.