Chiron in Astrology

Think of the thing you are most sensitive about, the place where an old hurt still aches when someone touches it. Now think of the people who come to you for help. Often they come with exactly that hurt. You understand it from the inside, so you can help them in a way no textbook could. That is Chiron in your chart: the wound that becomes your medicine.

Chiron is a modern addition to astrology, and one of the most loved, because it describes something everyone recognises: the gift that grows out of pain.

What Chiron stands for

Chiron represents:

• The wound: a place of early hurt, inadequacy or sensitivity.
• The healer: the wisdom and compassion that grow from living with that wound.
• The teacher and mentor: passing on what you learnt the hard way.
• The bridge: between the personal and the larger, between body and spirit.

Chiron is a small body, a centaur, that orbits between Saturn and Uranus on a very stretched path. It takes about 50 years to go round the zodiac, spending as little as about a year and a half in some signs and as long as about eight years in others.

The centaur who could heal everyone but himself

The name comes from Greek myth. Most centaurs were wild, but Chiron was wise: a healer, a musician and the teacher of heroes, among them the great physician Asclepius. Then he was struck by a poisoned arrow, by accident. Being immortal, he could not die, and being wounded, he could not heal, though he could heal everyone else. In the end he gave up his immortality to be free of the pain, and was placed among the stars.

That is the heart of Chiron in a chart. The wound may never fully disappear. But the person who has lived with it becomes the one who can help others carry theirs. Chiron was discovered in 1977, as the healing professions and psychology were booming, and astrologers took the timing as fitting.

Where is this planet in your chart?

Its sign says how it works, its house says where. See both, with the aspects that shape it.

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