Astrology Urania & Astrology Chiron - Astrology of the Heavens; Astrology of the Hands
By Chris Skidmore
A few years ago a woman named Anna came for a consultation. She was in her late 50s, in the midst of her second Saturn Return. Australian, of Chinese descent, she was the mother of a student of mine who was learning Craniosacral Therapy. Anna had just come back from Peru where she’d been participating in ceremonies using plant medicines such as Peyote and Ayahuasca.
As we sat down to read her chart together, she told me that in Peru she had been using these medicines to create a direct line to the energies underlying each of the planets. For her, when I mentioned Saturn, it was not an abstract concept, a list of keywords and phrases. It wasn’t even simply an ‘archetype’ or a ‘primordial form’. Saturn was a real being with definitive (and changeable) characteristics, just like her, you and me.
I’ll never forget how potent that session was. Rather than talking about Saturn we were able to talk with him (or her as the case may be). Suddenly the chart was alive in a whole new way. We were not so much reading her chart as communing with it.
In our modern Western consensus reality we would look at this as an example of anthropomorphising: giving human characteristics to non-human forms. It would be obvious to the logical, literal Western mind that the planet Saturn is simply made up of rocks and gases and has no sentience whatsoever. As far as Saturn, the Titan Cronus in Greek mythology, he’s a figment of human imagination, a character in a story. He isn’t real.
Maybe that’s what the medicines of the Amazon do for those who ingest them: turn off this linear, logical mind that can come in almost like an overlord of consciousness. Much like a friend of mine who felt so betrayed when she found out that Santa wasn’t real. As an adult, to protect her son, she told him from the start that there was no such thing. This saved him from that sense of betrayal that she herself had felt. But did she not perhaps also strip from him a sense of wonder? Is there value in a child imagining elves creating toys at the North Pole, flying reindeer and a generous philanthropist in a big red suit? She assumed that, for her son, the Truth was more important than a good, functional story.
The Planets as Living Beings
Eventually, all of us as astrologers have to answer this question: “Do you really believe in astrology?” Do we really think that the placement of the planets on the backdrop of stars millions of miles away has anything to do with life on Earth? Most of us will have well-prepared and rehearsed answers to this question. Perhaps we focus on the impact of the Moon’s gravitational pull on the tides of the planet and relate that to humans being 70% water. Or perhaps we speak of synchronicity being the underlying principle of reality, “As above, so below”, with astrology working via correspondences.
As we engage in these conversations we strengthen the mind that needs to argue its way into relevance. We try to give astrology a decent place in society, for it to find its way into University curriculums and be taught as a science where it belongs. As we do this, we are engaging in what I have begun to refer to as Astrology Urania: Astrology of the Heavens, an Aquarian science. This is a fine way to use astrology, and I encourage those of us who are drawn to this method, who have strong indicators of it in their chart like a prominent Uranus, planets in Aquarius, strong fixed planets and 11th house signatures, to continue the good fight.
Anna's chart, data withheld
It should be easy to see, however, that that’s not the kind of astrology Anna was engaging in when she sat in the jungle conversing with Saturn. The word ‘anthropomorphic’ is often used to denigrate those who give human characteristics to the non-human world. But if we break the word down it comes from two Greek words: anthropos (human) and morphē. Morphic is typically used to refer to changing shapes or forms. Morpheus, in Ancient Greece, was the god of dreams. If we flip the words around, maybe anthropomorphic refers to the use of the human dreaming mind.
Does this dreaming mind ‘make up’ the characteristics of Saturn? Or is it that by accessing the dreaming mind we are able to attune to Saturn as a reality, albeit a reality that lies underneath what can be perceived by the surface mind?
Astrology Chiron
What would we call this kind of astrology that Anna brought into my office that day and that I then got the chance to engage in? The astrology where we drop underneath the logical layer of reality and into the morphic dream world - where planets come alive complete with their own attitudes and preferences. Where we might need to coax a Pisces Moon out from its hiding place in the corner of the room or ask a Mercury in Leo to please let the others have a turn at speaking. To argue with a Mars in Capricorn on where it wants our life to go or negotiate with a Venus in Taurus who doesn’t want to risk her comforts and securities by changing jobs or leaving an unhealthy relationship.
For me, the link to this way of engaging with the inherent reality of astrology is the centaur, Chiron. Astronomically, Chiron traverses the space between Saturn and Uranus, sometimes even travelling within Saturn’s orbit. He is therefore able to bridge the gulf between the earthly (Saturn) and the celestial (Uranus). As Chiron is half horse it’s as though he’s never lost that inherent connection to his primal, animal self; the knowledge of how to live within the circle of life. As half human he is able to make use of the benefits of civilization, including the advances in technology and medicine.
Chiron’s home is a cave on Mount Pelion. Geographically speaking, Pelion is on the ‘other side’ of Mount Olympus. We can see here that Chiron doesn’t care too much about the glitz and glamour of godhood, even though he is a demi-god himself. He’s happier in his cave, tinkering with his potions and remedies, herbs and medicines. The sick somehow find their way to him, and he’s often able to help them in ways not easy to explain.
One of the words associated with Chiron is the word Therapeia; where we derive our modern word therapy. The Australian Jungian analyst David Russell defines Therapeia as ‘preparing one to enter the temple’. Chiron, as half god himself, knows that so much of the time the root cause of human illness comes down to having ‘offended one of the gods’. As James Hillman so aptly titled his speech to Astrologers in 1997, “Heaven Retains Within Its Sphere Half of All Bodies and Maladies” (1).
The type of astrology I’m referring to here is very much ‘hands on’. The planets don’t remain up there in the sky, so many countless miles away, daunting and taunting. They arrive here in the room for us to converse with. With their appearance we can easily sense which of these figures we get along with and who casts us a sideways glance. We can feel in real time which of our planets are friendly to each other and which are hostile. Our felt sense prevents us from assuming that trines will get along and squares won’t. Instead we trust the reality of our experience. In this way the chart is truly animated by our dreaming mind.
In juxtaposition to Astrology Urania, I’m calling this Astrology Chiron. The Greek root of Chiron is cheir, which simply means hands - Chiron is handy with his hands. The information that is useful to him comes from the bottom up rather than the top down. He teaches us to trust our instincts, to not be afraid to experiment, to see the rightness in the mistake, and follow the natural rhythm of the emergent symptoms towards their healing conclusions.
Chiron & Virgo
A growing number of professional astrologers are beginning to see Chiron’s connection to Virgo, even going so far as to call him Virgo’s modern ruler. Some astrologers feel uncomfortable with this assertion, likely none more so than Chiron himself, who is little interested in ruling or controlling. Perhaps then, instead of the word ‘rulership’, we can think of Chiron as a guide or magical helper. Deeper still, perhaps Chiron is the ‘Elder’ of Virgo
Virgo is an earth sign ruled by the messenger and psychopomp, Mercury. The fourth largest constellation of the modern 88, she is depicted as a Virgin Goddess tending to the crops. As Safron Rossi points out in her book The Kore Goddess (2), the archetype of the ‘virgin’ is in need of some mythic rehabilitation. The modern mind is quick to link the virgin to purity, innocence, naivety and the absence of sexual relations. The Ancient Greeks had something else in mind with this archetype. Their virginal Goddesses such as Artemis (of the wild beast), Hestia (of the hearth), Athena (of strategic war) and Persephone (Queen of the Underworld) can help us dream into the potency of this sign and its links to wildness, maintenance of internal lifeforce, warcraft, and death and rebirth, all of which relate closely to Chiron’s realm.
Virgo’s opposition to Pisces also aligns with Chiron’s maternal lineage; Philyra the Oceanid. Interestingly, it was Chiron’s student Asclepius who emphasised the connection between dreaming and healing in Greece; something that would be recollected a few millennia later by Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung and many other modern-day Asclepiads.
The Pisces opposition permits Chiron to move us into altered states and drop us down into the oceanic ‘dreambody’. Through Virgo he is able to sift and sort that Piscean information, bring it into sensory-grounded reality, perform the necessary rituals and rites of healing and follow the process through to its completion.
The Virgo-Aquarius Quincunx
If Virgo is the archetypal underpinning of Astrology Chiron and Aquarius of Astrology Urania, then it is the quincunx that holds the two of them together. I often think of a quincunx as two different channels on the television; you can’t watch them both at once. It’s unlike the oppositions and squares where you can hold the tension until the magical third thing arises. It’s also unlike the trines and sextiles that harmonize energies. Signs quincunx are in each other's blind spots and can have the tendency to split off from each other.
This suggests, in psychological language, a complex between these two approaches to astrology. Underpinning Astrology Urania is the fixed air of Aquarius. It wants to create stable philosophical and archetypal structures for astrologers to adhere to, a coherent system of logically linked parts. Meanwhile, Astrology Chiron with the mutable earth of Virgo, requires a certain malleability to the symbols so that they can change according to each unique individual who requires the medicine.
And yet, there is also a secret affinity between two signs quincunx each other. In the case of Virgo and Aquarius, what links them together is that they each represent a certain form of individuality. For Aquarius, that’s the freedom to move away from the pack and go one's own unique way. For Virgo, that’s the self-containment to remain archetypally ‘unmarried’, as Safron puts it, and therefore dedicated to one's true self and calling.
In the collective, much like in the individual, when working with a quincunx, we do well to see that secret affinity and allow the ‘other side’ to go on with its work, even if we don’t fully understand it. Chiron does his best to avoid the bright lights of Mount Olympus. Olympians do whatever they can to avoid the caves. And yet, solar heroes sometimes seek out Chiron for guidance, and Chiron once officiated at a wedding where a hero married a goddess. Mutual respect, perhaps even admiration, goes a long way. If we can’t get that then at the very least, let’s have acknowledgement and tolerance.
Process Oriented Astrology
When Chiron was discovered in 1977, Arnold Mindell (3) was busily weaving together his background in theoretical physics with his time at the Jung Institute, under the analysis of Marie Louise von Franz. His synthesis became known as Process Work or Process Oriented Psychotherapy. He coined the term ‘dreambody’, pulling on wisdom from Indigenous cultures still very much connected to the dreaming of the planet.
It’s Mindell’s Process Work that Anna and I were doing that day, two years before I would go to school to learn it officially. Chiron work breaches the bounds of time. By using Astrology Chiron we dreamed into the chart and it came alive, complete with its own compliments and grievances for how Anna was living her life.
Perhaps it was Anna’s Chiron in Aquarius 9th house, squaring her SN Taurus 12th and NN Scorpio 6th, opposing Uranus 3rd, that was assisting her in the jungle of Peru. Chiron’s influence in that fixed grand cross, connected to the nodal shamanic healing axis of Taurus-Scorpio, was re-membering the innate ability of the human animal to commune with nature.
In the jungle, Anna found those medicines that Chiron had left behind. In so doing she was able to turn off, even briefly, the cultured side of her consciousness and reconnect to her animal self. By responding to that side of herself, it was a matter of course that she could talk to other living things in nature, including and especially the planets themselves.
References:
1. The title of Hillman's article is a quote from Paracelsus: “The physician must have knowledge of man's other half, the half of his nature which is bound up with astronomical philosophy; otherwise he will be in no true sense man's physician, since Heaven retains within its sphere half of all bodies and maladies. What is a physician who knows nothing of cosmography?” – see James Hillman, A Blue Fire, edited by Thomas Moore, Harper Perennial, New York: 1990, p. 147.
2. Safron Rossi, The Kore Goddess, A Mythology & Psychology, Winter Press, Arroyo Grande, CA: 2021.
3. For more information on Mindell and his wife Amy go to http://www.aamindell.net/
First published in: FAA Journal, March 2023.
Author:
Chris Skidmore is a PACFA registered psychotherapist and counselor, practicing in Bali, Indonesia. His work weaves together the threads of astrology and biodynamic craniosacral therapy using the intermediary of process-oriented psychotherapy. His podcast, On the Soul’s Terms, explores Greek Mythology and folklore to bring the morphic world of Psyche to life, whilst highlighting healers, therapists, yogis and astrologers straddling the worlds of the mystic and mundane through lesser-heard conversations. www.onthesoulsterms.com
The Federation of Australian Astrologers is a non-profit organization that unites our Australian astrological community. The Federation of Australian Astrologers was founded on July 8, 1970 and has been the unifying structure for the practice, profession, education and participation in astrology ever since. So much so we often call the FAA the Family of Australian Astrologers. Besides our well-respected journal the FAA has an ongoing exam system which leads to the FAA Diploma, international conferences and affiliate associations which provide monthly meetings, webinars, newsletters and friendly interactions amongst members.
