Chiron in Love - The Astrology of Envy, Rage, Compassion and Wisdom
by Liz Greene
Chiron’s story is most clearly and poignantly enacted, not on the global stage by armies, health organisations, politicians, and politically motivated groups, but in our most personal exchanges with the people closest to us.
– Liz Greene
The astrological Chiron seems to be as much an enigma today as it was at the time of its discovery in 1977. Some excellent books have been published since then which explore Chiron’s meaning in the natal chart, and no doubt more will appear in the years to come. Gathering insight into Chiron is an ongoing process. It takes a long time after the discovery of any new planet (or in this case, a planetoid-comet) for astrologers to develop a perspective on the psychological dynamics the astrological symbol represents, and an even longer time for those dynamics to make sense on a broader collective level. Uranus was discovered by Sir William Herschel in 1781, an event sandwiched between the American Revolution in 1776 and the French Revolution in 1789. Yet the successful expression of a nation built on the revolutionary democratic principles declared so eloquently during those great 18th century upheavals still eludes much of the world two-and-a-half centuries later. Even in nations that have espoused the ideals of democracy, we still struggle with how we might best navigate its challenges. As Winston Churchill once said:
Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time. (1)
And if we’re still trying to work out how to cope with Uranus, it’s more than likely we will be slow in understanding many dimensions of Chiron for a long time to come.
The theme of Chiron in relationships has intrigued me for many years because of the large number of close relationships I have seen in my astrological counselling work, not only romantic but also familial, in which close Chiron synastry aspects occur with surprising frequency. In these relationships, people keep hurting each other deeply yet find it hard to fathom the underlying reasons or implement genuinely helpful ways of dealing with their unhappiness. The seminar that forms the core of this book was first given in 2005. It was recorded and transcribed but never edited, and it lay untouched in my files for fifteen years. In the autumn of 2020, I gave three online seminars on Chiron for students from both the Centre for Psychological Astrology and MISPA, the Mercury Internet School of Psychological Astrology created and run by John Green. At that time, I felt Chiron was a disturbingly relevant symbol because in early 2020 the world had begun to experience the full impact of the Covid pandemic, with all the collective bewilderment, anxiety, and anger that erupted as a result. In the global outpourings of helplessness, fear, rage, polarisation, and determination to find scapegoats, I could discern the tracks of the mythic Centaur’s responses to his unmerited poisoned wound.
Part of the reason why I felt Chiron was so relevant at the time was that I could see around me everywhere a constant and often extreme expression of the astrological Chiron displayed by the media, by governments, and among individuals in every country. One of the most important among the many threads of Chiron’s story is compassion for the suffering of others. But another, equally important thread is the sense of feeling unfairly victimised, and the resulting rage and impetus to hunt down any culprit who, fairly or unfairly, can be held accountable for the suffering.
I don’t believe that any specific planet or planetary configuration can be equated with external events such as pandemics, wars, economic crises, and natural disasters. These kinds of happenings can occur under any planetary combination. But our human responses to such events are characterised by the planetary lens through which we perceive them, and our perceptions lead to choices and actions that have consequences. Certain kinds of events bring out certain kinds of responses. In an article in The Telegraph published in February 2023, the author, Anita Singh, reviewing a podcast by Megan Phelps-Roper, discussed the idea that the kind of “witch trial frenzy” currently infecting social media tends to occur at times of political and social dislocation, when people feel anxious and insecure. (2) When we become convinced that life has arbitrarily and unjustifiably made ugly faces at us, personally and as a collective, we tend to see and react to these experiences through Chiron’s eyes.
Covid has ceased to be the major topic of discussion in the majority of countries. Virtually all the draconian rules and regulations instituted to combat Covid have been abandoned, and the full psychological, physical, and economic costs of the pandemic and the ways it was dealt with are only now being evaluated. But the experience of unfair wounding, central to Chiron’s myth, hadn’t fully revealed itself during the three years of the pandemic. Yet another chapter had yet to unfold. In the spring of 2022, Russia invaded Ukraine, and as a direct consequence many countries have been experiencing drastic increases in the cost of fuel, energy, and food, along with skyrocketing interest rates and higher taxes: a ‘cost of living’ crisis that has had severe repercussions on every level of society and has resulted in yet more victims of life’s unfairness.
It seems we’re in the throes of an ongoing struggle that increasingly resembles the nine-headed Lernaean Hydra of myth: cut off one head and three more grow in its place. Official responses tend to be hopelessly inadequate because they deal with external facts while ignoring inner psychological states. Individuals in positions of power who make major political and economic decisions for the rest of us, regardless of their political persuasion, all have Chiron somewhere in their birth charts and a personal agenda to match. The expression of Chiron’s characteristic depression, rage, self-pity, and scapegoat-hunting as a knee-jerk response to a sense of unfair injury and victimisation is erupting everywhere in the media, in politics, in religious institutions, in education, on social media, and in everyday conversation. After many years of relative peace and prosperity in the West, we have forgotten how to deal with humanity’s endemic tendency, when under pressure, to display its least attractive face.
Astrology is a subject to which people often turn when all other avenues have failed. Even the most hardened rationalist can be found secretly trawling astrological websites to make some sense of a world that increasingly resembles the lines from William Butler Yeats’ great prophetic poem, The Second Coming, written in 1939:
The centre cannot hold; mere anarchy is loosed upon the world. (3)
And astrologers are expected to provide solutions to questions they may be unable to answer, like why people suffer unnecessarily and unfairly, why victims so often turn into persecutors, and why it seems that any balanced and reasonable dialogue has become increasingly impossible as the collective polarises over issues linked to personal and ancestral wounds that have not healed. The material in this volume on Chiron seems to me increasingly relevant for any astrological practitioner or student because I feel there is something the astrological community is still failing to understand about this mysterious heavenly body and the psychological dynamics it symbolises.
Most astrologers are familiar with the myth of the wise King of the Centaurs, who is accidentally wounded by an arrow dipped in the poisonous blood of the Lernaean Hydra, and who can’t heal his injury despite all his knowledge and skill. Chiron has become the archetypal figure of the Wounded Healer who develops compassion and the power to help the suffering of others because of his own poisoned wound. But in the original myth, which emerged in preclassical Greece, Chiron doesn’t learn to heal because of his wound. He is a healer already, and the incurable injury destroys both his calling and his future. When all his remedies and skills have failed, he can only lie in his cave howling in pain. The only escape from his suffering is to relinquish his divinity and die like any mortal being.
It’s this difficult mythic theme that forms the focus of the book. Ways of permanently healing Chiron’s wound and saving the world are not included. But a deeper understanding of Chiron’s nature and its implications in our everyday lives and our close relationships might be a more helpful way each of us as individuals can work with this paradoxical and challenging astrological symbol. The book is called Chiron in Love – the title of the original seminar – because Chiron’s story is most clearly and poignantly enacted, not on the global stage by armies, health organisations, politicians, and politically motivated groups, but in our most personal exchanges with the people closest to us. Unlike some astrologers, I don’t believe that Chiron’s wound can ever be entirely healed, because it’s related to our experience of being mortal, flawed humans, and to the collision between our ideals of a perfect world and the reality of the world as it is and may continue to be. This may be an unpopular view in some circles because it asks each individual to honestly face inner conflicts that are usually projected onto other people and the outside world. Projection, and the divisive polarisation that often results from it, might initially promise to make Chiron’s hurt easier to bear, but ultimately it does little except generate more wounding. Healing Chiron’s wound, in my understanding, doesn’t lie in trying to create a perfect society or never experiencing suffering again, but in each of us coming to terms with the roots and nature of our own individual pain, bitterness, and sense of victimisation, and finding ways of working with these experiences creatively rather than trying to make them go away or finding someone or something to blame. Jung put it succinctly when he said:
If things go wrong in the world, this is because something is wrong with the individual, because something is wrong with me. Therefore, if I am sensible, I shall put myself right first. For this I need – because outside authority no longer means anything to me – a knowledge of the innermost foundations of my being, in order that I may base myself firmly on the eternal facts of the human psyche. (4)
Endnotes:
(1) Winston Churchill, 11 November 1947, at winstonchurchill.org/resources/quotes/the-worst-form-of-government/.
(2) The Witch Trials of JK Rowling, review: a podcast that promises to add more flames to the fire’, Anita Singh, The Telegraph, 21 February 2023.
(3) William Butler Yeats, The Second Coming (1919), first published in Michael Robartes and the Dancer (Cuala Press, 1920).
(4) C. G. Jung, ‘The Meaning of Psychology for Modern Man’, in Civilisation in Transition, CW10 (Routledge, 1964), p. 329.
This extract is taken from Chiron in Love: The Astrology of Envy, Rage, Compassion and Wisdom, published by The Wessex Astrologer on 20 September 2023.
Published by: The Astrological Journal, Jul/Aug 2023
Author:
Liz Greene is the author of several books including A New Look at an Old Devil, Relating, Astrology for Lovers, The Astrology of Fate, The Mythic Tarot (with Juliet Sharman-Burke), and The Astrological Neptune and the Quest for Redemption. She founded the Centre for Psychological Astrology in 1983 with Howard Sasportas and continues to be a director. She holds a doctorate in psychology and is a qualified Jungian analyst. In 1985 she began collaborating with Dr Alois Treindl of Astrodienst (astro.com), and created the first of several computer-generated horoscope interpretations, enabled by artificial intelligence. More information on Liz Greene can be found at cpalondon.com.
© Liz Greene, Astrological Journal, 2023
