Chiron

Meaning

Chiron is a small icy body, a couple of hundred kilometres across, found in 1977 on an orbit that runs mostly between Saturn and Uranus. The orbit is so stretched that Chiron takes about 50 years to go round the zodiac, spending two years or less in Virgo or Libra but eight or nine in Pisces or Aries, and it is retrograde for about five months a year.

It is named after the wise centaur of Greek myth, healer and teacher of heroes, who was wounded by a poisoned arrow and, being immortal, could neither die of the wound nor cure it. Astrologers read it as a lasting sore spot, often met early in life, and the understanding, gentleness and skill that grow from living with it, which can later help others. It describes a sensitivity and what someone makes of it, not a sentence.

Because its path links Saturn’s orbit to Uranus’s, it is often read as a bridge between the known, ordered world and the call to change. Some astrologers give it a sign of its own, Virgo or Sagittarius most often, but there is no agreement, and tradition, which never knew it, gives it no dignity.

In practice

• The Chiron return, around 50, is often read as a time to make peace with an old hurt and to pass on what it taught.
• Its house shows where the sore spot and the gift tend to sit: in the 10th, for example, unease about one’s place in the world may turn into a vocation of care or teaching.
• Its aspects to the Sun, the Moon or an angle make it personal; its sign, shared by everyone born over several years, says less.
• Its transits last many months and often bring an old sensitivity back into view, with a chance to meet it more wisely.

Origin and history

Charles Kowal found Chiron at Palomar Observatory on 1 November 1977, on photographs taken in October. Its discovery brought to light the centaurs, a family of small icy bodies that wander among the giant planets, and when it grew a faint coma in 1988 and 1989 it was counted as a comet too, 95P/Chiron. Astrologers took it up within a few years; Barbara Hand Clow in 1987 and Melanie Reinhart in 1989 shaped the reading of Chiron as the wounded healer. It has no place in traditional astrology, Indian or Chinese astrology, or Human Design.

How Ulune calculates it

Ulune takes Chiron from the Swiss Ephemeris’s asteroid files. Swiss Ephemeris computes it only from about AD 675, because a close approach to Saturn in 720 makes its earlier orbit impossible to trace; for an earlier birth, the chart leaves Chiron out and says so.

Chiron is marked retrograde when its daily motion runs backwards and stationary within about seven days of a station, and it is aspected with the same orbs as the planets. It is the only small body that Ulune lets into aspect patterns such as the T-square, the grand trine or the yod, and the only one whose stations, sign changes and transits the calendar dates.