On November 1, 1977, Chiron, the little heavenly body that packs a planet-sized punch, was discovered by astronomer James Kowal orbiting between the massive planets Saturn and Uranus and on the 4th degree of the sign Taurus at the time of his discovery, very close to where Uranus is today. At that time, when I was in my early days studying astrology, Kowal called Chiron an asteroid and, therefore, so did I, joining the scientists and my fellow astrologers. As it turns out, in the late 1980’s it was realized that the scientists were wrong (impossible!) and that Chiron is actually a comet(!) but like no comet anyone’s ever seen before or since.
For one thing, it is more than 50,000 times the size, by volume, of a typical comet, which is why it was first thought to be a minor planet and then an asteroid. It was also very bright, sometimes being brighter when further from the Sun then when it was closer to the Sun, and it’s orbit is VERY eccentric.
But what, you have every right to ask, does this have to do with y/our lives here on Earth? Plenty, I have come to believe, and if you believe that I know a bit about astrology, come with me on the journey to Chiron and I will show you why knowing about it is sort of kind of essential to knowing where in your being your hidden psychological “buttons” are waiting to be pushed, causing you to time-travel back to traumas long buried, long forgotten, even those long thought dealt with. Or, scroll away to the cute cat pictures - I’ve proudly got a lot of my own for your enjoyment and mine - if you don’t want to do the work for which we are all born, i.e., growing in understanding and the wisdom about how to apply that understanding.
To understand the significance of centaur Chiron in one’s astrology chart, we must harken back to Greek Mythology, where the myth of Chiron was that he was a son of Saturn, who must have really liked horses a bit too much, but Saturn rejected him and so Apollo, the god of the Sun, adopted him and taught him to be a great healer and a teacher to men of what Apollo had taught him. While teaching the hero Achilles, of Achilles heal fame, Chiron was struck by one of Hercules’ poisoned arrows but couldn’t die because he was immortal and so he got his nickname, “The Wounded Healer.” Chiron was quite altruistic and gifted his immortality to Prometheus, who taught man about Fire, and so he eventually died and, in our time, his name lives on in the gigantic and brighter than bright comet.
When I read a chart, I must admit that I often look at Chiron’s position before I look at anything else. Why? Because it shows the where, when and how of childhood traumas and if we are all united by one thing, it is that we are all dealing with one or more of them. Conversely, we are all separated by how well or how poorly we are dealing with childhood and later traumas into generalized teams, cohorts, whatever you want to call the striated parfait of humanity cooked by the energy level of our experiences.
Chiron means something different in each of the 12 signs of the Zodiac. Further helping me to understand the person I’m reading for, if Chiron is next to (conjunct) a planet, the nature of a character defining trauma will be revealed to me by my understanding of that planet and the sign it and Chiron are in - they are not always the same sign. Then there’s the “house” of the chart Chiron’s in, one of twelve. And the angles made by Chiron to any planets.
The bottom line is that in my four going on to five decades of astrological study, practice, and innovation, I’ve found that adding Chiron to a chart explains things that the ten traditional astrological planets otherwise fail to explain or at least fail to explain to me. I’m not alone in this, of course, and Chiron is now found routinely in the charts erected by most astrologers. What I believe is different about readings regarding Chiron is my unique understanding of its effects and how to deal with it. For the astrologers reading this, my “bone fides,” my astro license for my affinity with and ability to be a mouthpiece for Chiron is that I have a less than one degree off exact trine of Pluto in Leo on my Ascendant to Chiron in Sagittarius (the centaur, get it?) with Chiron able to be read for both my fourth and fifth house. I worked hard to transform myself through relentlessly pursuing a quest to understand the nature of personal reality and mine in particular and channel the compulsive nature of this aspect into something more useful and entertaining than manic depression, which it can also indicate.
Chiron takes around 51 years to go around the Sun and so it has not made a full fun circuit of the Zodiac since its discovery in 1977. Chiron has been in the sign of Pisces since April of 2010 and entered the sign of Aries on the 19th of April, 2018, where it will be for about nine years. And this brings us - finally! - to how Chiron is affecting y/our life.
During the time of Chiron in the sign of Pisces, we watched as the world was plunged into a time when feelings were more important than facts. Pisces is the sign of the Idealist with Boundless Compassion, Self-Sacrifice, and an actual experience of the one-ness of all beings and all things. It is the sign of E=MC2, all matter is composed of the same energy, All Is One, E Pluribis Unum, One Love. Pisces is like the ocean and cannot be contained by artificial boundaries for long. The mass migrations and the desire of so many to help, even to the detriment of their own nations’s welfare and their own well-being, was a typically super brightly shining reveal of how the Chiron-ese world wide trauma of that time was playing out.
Change happened like a wave on the ocean, ruled by Pisces, in turn ruled by Neptune and symbolized by the god of the sea’s trident. This change was so profound and on such a Piscean emotional level that it was easier to feel than it was to actually see what was going on. And Chiron being in the sign of Pisces made this world wide event subject to a little discussed but widely known aspect of the Piscean desire to make things better than they are now: Acting as if it is so, even when one knows it is not so. This can range from Quantum Affirming the reality of the goal you’re trying to bring into your experience of reality all the way down the slippery slope of the Piscean bell curve into the realm of lying because you want it to be true and it’s been said (by evil people) that if you repeat a lie strongly and long enough, it becomes true, and even further into the lower realms of lying because you want to trick people.
Children born while Chiron was in Pisces, and it was last there before its recent journey, from March 26, 1960, until January 30, 1969, are idealistic to a degree unknowable by those born with other Chiron placements. Those born in the more recent time have obviously not been exposed to the hyper-idealistic vibrations permeating western culture during The Sixties and the hippy, communal, make love not war era, but they will be quite idealistic, having absorbed the put-yourself interest-second energies of recent years.
