0:00 CHRIS BRENNAN: Hi, my name is Chris Brennan, and this is The Astrology Podcast. Today, I’m going to be talking with Melanie Reinhart about the astrology of Chiron. So this is Episode 271, and I’m recording it on Monday, September 14, 2020, starting at 11:04 AM, in Denver, Colorado. Hi, Melanie. Welcome to the show. MELANIE REINHART: Hi, Chris, and thanks so much for inviting me to have a conversation with you. CB: Thank you. I’m excited to do this episode. It’s been one I’ve been meaning to do for a long time, and a lot of listeners have asked me to do an episode Chiron. I did an episode, just in general, on the asteroids, earlier this year, finally, with Demetra George. MR: I saw that. It was lovely. CB: Yeah, I was glad to have
0:48 that discussion. But one of the points that came up, that was interesting that we noted, is that she had focused more on Ceres and Vesta and Juno and didn’t cover Chiron as much in her book, but yours was one of the first books that really set the stage. And early in my studies, in the early 2000s, there were two major books on Chiron that were out there, and yours was really one of the main ones, and it seems like it’s been one of the most influential ones in establishing Chiron as something that a lot of modern astrologers use in practice. And really quickly, the title of your book is Chiron and the Healing Journey, which was published in 1989, right? MR: Yes, and then there was a revision I did under my own imprint. It came out in 2010. CB: Okay.
1:36 MR: The first one was published by Penguin. CB: Right. Yeah, it was part of the Penguin Arkana series, which was a really amazing series at the time. MR: Oh, it was really wonderful. Really wonderful. CB: It had Geoffrey Cornelius’ The Moment of Astrology and your book, and a few other really major books at the time. MR: Yes. The series editor was Howard Sasportas. CB: Oh, wow, okay. I think by the time of the second edition of your book, it was Erin Sullivan? MR: Correct. CB: Okay. MR: Yes, after Howard died. She had been working with him on it, but she took over that and fought very hard to keep the thing going. Penguin basically abandoned it...
2:22 CB: Okay. I was wondering what happened. MR: ...which was a pity because, actually, when the series began, they had a marvelous, overall editor called Robin Watefield. He was a classic scholar and very much astrology-friendly. CB: He was a really notable classic scholar. MR: Oh, absolutely, yes--and a really nice bloke and very astrology-friendly. And he went onto greater things and basically left a big vacuum in the overall editorship. And apart from his shepherding of it, really, Penguin wasn’t really equipped with the subject material. CB: Sure. MR: And they just kind of abandoned it and just didn’t reprint stuff. Bit by bit, the whole series went out of print. It was very sad.
3:10 CB: Yeah. Well, this was back when major publishers, like Penguin, were still doing astrology books, which it seems like many have moved away. MR: Correct. CB: And Howard Sasportas’ The Gods of Change was one of the books in that series which was also an amazing book. MR: That’s right. CB: But let’s talk about your work. So, first, I wanted to introduce you to my audience and talk a little bit about your background and some of the things that you’ve done, just to give some context for your work. So in your bio, on your website, it says that you’ve been practicing astrology since 1975? MR: Yeah. Well, that was when I did my first piece of paid-for work. I’d been reading charts already for a few years before that. CB: Okay. So that was the first time you did a paid consultation. MR: Yeah. CB: I always ask people, what do you consider the moment that you started being a practicing
3:59 astrologer? And, for you, it’s the first time somebody paid you for a consultation? MR: No, because I was already reading lots of charts actually before that, for a few years, and I took that equally seriously. CB: Right. MR: But certainly, the first paid-for consultation, that felt like some little watershed. Also, very significant was that was the very month that I actually met Dane Rudhyar. CB: Wow. MR: So I was living in the States at that time, in Massachusetts, and he did a weekend workshop in The Astrology Center, I believe it was called, in New York City. And I traveled down to New York
4:49 for this and had a weekend in heaven meeting Dane Rudhyar and so on. He was quite wonderful. He was the one who really gave me the shove to encourage me to start charging and start thinking of myself as a professional, which I wasn’t really before. I was taking it seriously, but that was very special. CB: Was Rudhyar one of your primary influences early on in astrology? MR: Absolutely, yes. Astrology had come into my life when I was 10-years-old under very interesting circumstances, in light of what I focused on later. I fell and broke my arm rather badly, up near the shoulder,
5:39 and I had a lot of time off school because I had to be in this huge plaster cast. CB: Wow. MR: So movement was difficult and getting around and all that. But the local library was at the end of our street. So instead of going to school, I would kind of waddle down the road, this big, plastic cast thing, and spend my day in the library. Now, this was back in Rhodesia as it was--Zimbabwe, as it’s become--basically, an agrarian economy. And so, there was one shelf, about yea wide, I kid you not, called Philosophy, Psychology, and Religion. That was it. This was the national library of Rhodesia.
6:26 However, even a small bookshelf like that, if you really read the stuff and really think about it, you can get years of inquiry and thinking and wondering and being philosophically-stimulated. And there was one little book on astrology--I wish I remembered the title and the author, but I don’t--and my memory of that is so vivid. I remember, because I had my arm in this big cast out here, so I propped the book on the cast and I was reading like this; and I absolutely knew that there was way more to astrology than was in this little book. So I was left feeling really frustrated--it
7:13 was the only one on astrology--and I just absolutely knew that there was so much more to it. And in that moment, the passion to find out and to learn more was ignited. So lacking classes or books--because it was war-time and sanctions and all that--I simply memorized all the Sun signs. And then I would ask every single person I met their birthday, and I would think and write notes and see how it checked out with this little book, and ponder and wonder and so forth; and I did that for years and years,
7:58 just thinking about it, mulling it over. I remember, also, my father showing me some of the constellations at night; vivid memories of that against a beautiful, black, African sky. CB: You were born in Zimbabwe, and you spent the first part of your life there. MR: Yes. CB: How did that come about? MR: So my father was born in South Africa--his father was from Yorkshire--and my mother was born in Dublin, and they actually met out in Zimbabwe. CB: Okay. Did you find astrology definitely at the age of 10, or was it around 10? MR: Yeah, it was 10. CB: That’s a beautiful story. So that started your lifelong interest in it.
8:49 MR: Yeah. CB: You said you were in New York by the time you met Rudhyar, when you were living in the US. MR: Yes. CB: At what point did your studies really accelerate, or was it really just full-on from there? MR: They accelerated when I left school and went down to Cape Town, to university. CB: Okay. MR: And compared to Zimbabwe, Cape Town was this major metropolis and it was possible to get astrology books and things like that. CB: What was the timeframe? And what was the astrological community like there in South Africa at that point? MR: I didn’t connect with it at all, which is really interesting because I have a dear astrological friend,
9:34 Darby Costello, and she actually arrived in Africa the year that I left. So we were like ships passing in the night and never met there, but met back in London, so that step there. A friend gave me a book by Dane Rudhyar called The Pulse of Life for my 20th or my 19th birthday, and I just had this epiphany when I read it. I wept. I had just like an absolute ecstasy of connecting with the way this man thought and recognizing myself in the astrology. And it was like, this was what I’d been looking for;
10:22 I was so inspired. And that connection was part of the reason why I left Africa. I didn’t really know anything about the astrological community in England and how rich it was, but I knew, at least, I’ll be able to get more of Rudhyar’s books and so forth. So I did leave, and I lived, for many years, either directly in or connected to a spiritual community in the Sufi tradition. And when I arrived there to take up my residence, it turned out that the man--the teacher who was focalizing this community--he
11:08 was only the publisher of Dane Rudhyar’s work. So there was the complete first edition, hardback, original publications of Rudhyar, which took up a big amount of the community bookshelf. CB: Wow. MR: And it was through him that I first met Rudhyar, and then the second time was when I went down to New York, to the workshop. CB: And so, the Sufi community was in the UK? MR: Yes. CB: Okay, got it. So then, eventually, you make that personal connection with Rudhyar. He encourages you to dive into the practice of astrology, which must have been really compelling at that point, if he was your main person... MR: Oh, yeah. It was like God on high had
11:56 given me this crucial bit of encouragement. CB: Sure. Let’s see. Why don’t we jump into our main topic, which is Chiron was discovered on November 1, 1977 by an astronomer named Charles Kowal. MR: Yes. CB: And this began a period, in the late ‘70s and early 1980s, when it seemed like astrologers started slowly getting interested in studying minor planetary bodies and asteroids, like Ceres and Vesta and Juno, and then, eventually, some astrologers started studying Chiron. At what point did you get interested in it, or start researching it?
12:44 MR: Immediately--when I heard about its discovery. Unusually, it was immediately named by the person who discovered it. Usually, a whole, big numbering and naming process can go on, which can take years for a name to be confirmed; and it has to be agreed upon by a committee, which is the International Astronomical Union. But in this case, the astronomer who discovered Chiron knew some background mythology, and he could see that there was a relationship between Saturn and Uranus. So, in that sense, that is part of the
13:34 genealogy behind Chiron’s legacy and so forth. So he named it Chiron and the name stuck; it was named immediately. Sometimes, it’s only named a long time after; and it was only six months before ephemerises came out. CB: Oh, wow. Okay, that’s quick. So he named it... MR: Very quickly. CB: ...because it orbits between the orbits of Saturn and Uranus. MR: Of Saturn and Uranus, yes. And the other thing was that in the first ephemerises--Tony Joseph was the name, I believe--came out within six months. And there was an excellent introductory essay, just two or three pages, and I was very excited because it was exactly along the same lines that I had already been thinking.
14:24 So I was interested immediately for entirely personal reasons because I knew the mythology of Chiron and the whole notion of the Wounded Healer was already meaningful in my life. CB: Had you already studied mythology extensively up to that point, or was that a major piece of your... MR: I wouldn’t say extensively, but I had studied quite a lot, in a way, using the planets as my base and kind of digging around from that. But I’m not a proper student of mythology like some in our community are. CB: Okay. Let’s see. So Chiron was the first of a new class of bodies, called centaurs, that were discovered, which are bodies orbiting between the asteroid belt and the Kuiper Belt, which is really far out there.
15:14 MR: No. In the beginning, when this group of Kuiper Belt objects--or let me put that differently. Objects that were said to have originated in the Kuiper Belt were discovered, the whole group was called centaurs. There was a flurry of attempts to define these little beasts. And in the beginning, it seemed quite straightforward, to me, and it was logical and made sense and was kind of obvious. In other words, there were a few distinguishing characteristics of these objects; one, was they all have very elliptical orbits; two, was that the orbits are very steeply-inclined
15:59 to the ecliptic; and three, they all, with one exception I’ll mention maybe later, cross over the orbit of at least one of the classical planets. CB: Okay. MR: But the ‘centaur’ zone, if you like, is in between Jupiter and Pluto. CB: Okay. MR: So if they go in closer, into the asteroid belt, they’re not centaurs anymore, and if they go further out than Pluto, they’re not centaurs anymore. So they’re kind of in this zone which links the outer part of the visible planets to the invisible planets; and, to me, that symbolism absolutely speaks volumes.
16:46 CB: Yeah. MR: Do you want me to say a bit more about that? CB: I want to get into that. I like that actually because that’s one of the access points--that’s really interesting to me--in your work for understanding Chiron as not just a mythology, but also, the astronomical properties. MR: The astronomy--it’s so, so eloquent. Oh, I love it. CB: Yeah. MR: Astronomy, I mean. CB: So let me throw out a few other preliminary things really quickly. So Chiron has been variously classified as an asteroid, a minor planet, a dwarf planet, or even a comet. MR: Yeah. CB: Some astrologers quickly became interested in researching it. I tried to compile a quick bibliography -- and you can let me know if this is correct or not. But one of the early astrologers--or one of the first that I’ve been told--who started working with
17:33 Chiron was an astrologer named Zane Stein. MR: Correct. CB: Then there was another book by Erminie Lantero... MR: Oh, yes. Now, I did read that. CB: ...titled The Continuing Discovery of Chiron, that came out in 1984. MR: Fantastic book, yes. CB: Okay, you like that. And then Demetra’s book, Asteroid Goddesses, came out in June of 1986. There was another book by Barbara Hand Clow that came out on Chiron in 1987. Your book, Chiron and the Healing Journey, was first published in 1989. MR: Yeah. CB: And then there were other subsequent books, for example, by Martha Lang-Wescott that also dealt with both asteroids, as well as hypothetical planets. Is there anybody else that I should mention? MR: Two more -- Richard Nolle. This is an early
18:23 one; I think it was just called Chiron. CB: Okay. MR: There were some great insights in there. And then, much more recently, Adam Gainsburg, Chiron and the Wisdom of a Deep -- something about the wisdom of the heart. Beautiful book. CB: Okay. Brilliant. MR: Adam’s is really recent and Richard Nolle is like way back; one of the first people. CB: Okay. Yeah, Adam’s book is Chiron: The Wisdom of a Deeply Open Heart. MR: That’s it. CB: September 2006. All right, so that’s some of the early history, and that places you, in terms of when your book came out, and also showing that there was a lot of early interest. So your book was published 12 years after Chiron was first discovered; and so, you’d been working with
19:15 it for at least over a decade at that point. MR: Yeah, I got into it immediately. And also, in my own chart, I have Chiron in Sagittarius opposite my Sun in Gemini; it visually stands out in the chart. So I sort of casually thought, well, if this little unknown object is going to be relevant for me, it should be fairly easy to see, in terms of life events and transits. And then, about six months later, I realized, oh, my god, by transit, Chiron was about to make conjunctions with every single one of my personal planets. So it was discovered in Taurus, and I have a whole band of planets in Taurus and Gemini.
20:07 And I thought, oh, look at that. I thought, oh, well, if there is something in this for me or others, then my life should turn into a ring-side seat for the Chiron show because of about 10 years’ worth of conjunctions. My god, I had no idea what was coming down the tracks for me, I tell you. And I learned everything that I learned about Chiron from this inner journey and then later from working with clients, and I feel that the journey I went on equipped me to do that work. There was an entire cosmology
21:02 which rolled itself out as a result of my journey, and it went into areas of psychological work that were unheard of back then and are now not exactly ‘Top of the Pops’, but more and more people are understanding these themes and writing about them. So amongst others, those include transgenerational trauma, and by the same token, transgenerational healing, and also, healing the historical wounds that are embedded in that ancestry;
21:50 even including things that aren’t direct, personal wounds, things like cultural injustices and so forth. Obviously, coming from Rhodesia, there was really a lot to process, in terms of the colonial history that went on in Africa. My god, just unbelievable. CB: Right. MR: And that was not really considered back then, even in the more enlightened versions of psychological treatments and all the rest of it, and so, I wrote about all of that kind of stuff in my book. And it’s lovely now to see that lots and lots of people
22:35 are doing all kinds of really amazing work in exactly those areas, but at the time, I was very much on my own with that. Even though I wasn’t a Jungian analyst, that framework, at least in the practice of it, I didn’t really feel met by it in the way that I was experiencing this process. I hesitate to use the word because I don’t want to be claiming anything, but it felt like a kind of process of shamanic initiation, which went on from 1983 until past 1989; and that period included the writing of the book,
23:28 which felt to me like a thread--like an Ariadne’s thread type of thing. In terms of the personal transits that I was watching from Chiron onto my chart--now, you might be able to talk yourself into lots of things interpretively in astrology, but you cannot fake transits that absolutely demonstrate the symbolism and the process. CB: Right. MR: It was like a lifeline for me. So pretty soon, I began to get clients where it was the same; they were like walking, symbolic compendiums of the story of Chiron. And this actually pings me onto
24:18 one of the questions that you wrote here, a listener question. CB: Okay. MR: The question is, “When do you feel you need to talk about Chiron?” CB: Right, that came from a listener. MR: Yes, from Zamboni. CB: Yeah, Zamboni Funk. MR: Yeah, there’s a very particular answer to that. First of all, I don’t feel I need to talk about Chiron, and I almost never try to interpret it; all I do is listen. And if what I’m hearing from my client who’s speaking is basically telling me a story--which is so obviously within the territory
25:12 of Chiron--and there I hesitated because I now very much think of all the centaurs as a group. And when I say ‘all’, I should clarify I don’t use them all. I forgot the number; I think it’s around 400 centaurs now. CB: Okay. MR: There’s only about 20 of them which have actually been named, and of those even fewer have been researched. Me, I don’t think of myself as a researcher. I can only work with something that absolutely speaks to me and I can’t make that happen. So once that energy connection, almost like a full-body, energy connection has occurred then I do the so-called research;
26:07 but all I’m doing is containing--like if you were painting. You might have a vision first and then you get out the paints and the oils and the brush. So that’s what I try to do with words; try to paint a picture of what I’d already experienced--not just me, but hundreds and hundreds of clients. It got so bizarre that I sometimes thought, “My god, this really feels like these clients are coming to teach me about how Chiron works.” Unbelievable. CB: Sure. So part of your process though was an empirical process of understanding what this new body meant, partially through paying attention to it in your own chart, and also,
26:57 paying attention to it in the charts of clients. MR: Indeed. So just to go back to Zamboni’s question, I really don’t feel like I need to talk about Chiron, I guess, maybe because I’ve worked so much with it. Mostly, I do end up talking about Chiron, and mostly, that’s because I can hear the story in what people are telling me. One time, a man walked in limping, and he had fallen off a horse and injured his leg. Chiron was injured in his leg, and he was a centaur, so his horse ‘half’. And of course, he had a big Chiron transit, and I’m sitting there almost speechless because I don’t even know what to say.
27:46 CB: Sure. Well, let’s go back to square one. Let’s assume that anybody listening to this doesn’t have any idea what Chiron means or anything about the mythology. Let’s introduce the starting point. You started studying it empirically, but also, there was a heavy use of mythology and a presumption that many astrologers were making, from the 1970s and ‘80s forward, that the name that was chosen for Chiron and the Greek myths associated with that actually had some deeper, symbolic significance that actually related to what it meant in astrology, right? MR: Yeah, I think that’s true. CB: I mean, is that true? I don’t want
28:34 to put words in your mouth. MR: Well, I don’t know about the assumption. I never really assumed that. It was just that everything seemed to fit. CB: Right. I mean, do you think that the mythology of Chiron is relevant for its interpretation and meaning in astrology? MR: Yes, I do. CB: Okay. MR: I do. And do you know, when I was actually writing the book--collected up these massive boxes of notes and so forth--I actually never even thought of writing a book; I was just working to try and understand it myself. It was Howard who made that suggestion, bless him. So he had Chiron in Scorpio, on the Midheaven, and he was the one who gave me the shove, gave me the prompt. CB: Nice. MR: Yeah, very nice.
29:22 CB: What is the myth associated with Chiron, or what parts of the myth are relevant for somebody that’s new to understanding Chiron mythology? MR: Yeah, I would say that there’s a very important reflection for us astrologers of the meaning of Chiron. If you just studied the astronomy a little bit, it’s very graphic, and I love that. So, to me, if the name and the mythology and the astronomy check out with the astrology that you’re actually seeing, well, that’s good enough for me. That’s why I said I’m not really a researcher; I just kind of put stuff together.
30:12 Initially, that would be a resonance in my own process, and I don’t automatically assume it’s going to be of interest to anybody else. It’s usually a really long time before I have researched it and then begin to share and so forth. Essentially, the other centaurs that I work with--I don’t work with all 400-or-something of them--I only work with four, but each of them I learned about in the same way and ongoingly. CB: Right. MR: Yeah, let me answer your question more directly. So we see that Chiron and the centaurs occupy the zone
31:03 in the solar system that goes between Jupiter and Pluto. That zone includes the outer edges of the easily-visible planets and the ones that can’t be seen with the naked eye, but were discovered with massive technology, so it really is like two different worlds. They cross, to and fro, between these two worlds, the visible and the invisible. Now that absolutely speaks volumes because we all know what the visible world is, at least, at the level of the senses. And the notion of the invisible worlds, well, that contains so much.
31:54 It’s our own internal experience. It’s what’s known as the unconscious in some systems of psychology. It’s the spirit world; that’s a more ancient and indigenous kind of a cosmology. But it’s totally a part of the human experience. It’s just been pushed out and derided and oppressed for so long that people don’t believe it, don’t believe in it. Regardless of the fact that many, many people do have experiences of the spirit world--through their dreams, through reveries, through spirit visitations, etc.--but they probably don’t speak about it, afraid that people will think they’re mad.
32:40 Likewise, people can communicate with animals. This is a natural thing that, like any gift, can be more developed in some people than others; but actually, it’s natural to be able to communicate with animals, and this is a very, very ancient thing. Communicating with plants, same thing. Flower healing, essences, all over the world, people are reviving the way of using plant essences, and the way it’s done is through a communion where you speak to the spirit
33:27 of the plant, or more accurately, they speak to you. Now, you see, it’s that kind of consciousness that Chiron brings to us. Some people are very at home in that and others are, frankly, terrified and don’t want to know. Fair enough. So this notion of crossing the borders and connecting different dimensions of experience--between the living and the dead, between the animals and the human, between the past and the future, whatever--and making that bridge, in Barbara Hand Clow’s lovely book, she calls Chiron the ‘rainbow bridge’. I think, partly, it’s this astronomical symbolism that evokes that. CB: So Chiron acting as a bridge and bridging two worlds or two seemingly unconnected areas, and
34:20 that partially is also reflected in the astronomy, as you described, as well as in the mythology of Chiron being half-human and half-animal. MR: Exactly. In his image, in his very form is exactly that dilemma. CB: Okay. For those that don’t know what that means in terms of Chiron being half-human and half-animal, what is the myth associated with that? MR: Well, in the myth of his origins, Chiron’s father was Kronos, or Saturn, and his mother was a nymph called Philyra.
35:15 Saturn was a god, a member of the Olympian gang and Philyra was a nymph. But gods and demigods often can shapeshift, so both of them had shapeshifted into being in their horse form and they were like that when Chiron was conceived. When Chiron was born to Philyra, when he came out of the womb as half-horse, she was completely horrified and prayed to the gods to be made into anything other than she was, namely, the mother of a monster, as she saw it. So Chiron was abandoned,
36:05 and in the time-honored manner of myth and legend, was found by a shepherd and rescued from certain death and taken to the great god, Apollo, who became his foster father. So he was mentored and fostered by Apollo himself who taught him numerous skills; Apollo was also associated with healing. Very significantly, both he and his sister were said to both send and cure plagues. Chiron was taught all kinds of survival skills, and in a sense,
36:54 he had almost like--one can imagine--the kind of initiation rites appropriate for a young man, young hero, whatever. And there was an incident with some of the more unruly centaurs, the ones that don’t have any Olympian ancestors. They’re more like a seething, uncontrollable mob that used to rampage through towns and take wine and steal it, or take brides and steal them. They’re an image of just a raw, unbridled, vital force.
37:46 So those are the centaurs without any particular Olympian legacy or ancestry, and they often used to fight. In one of those fights, Chiron got wounded by an arrow from Hercules. There’s a lot of friezes, statues in the British Museum, some of them from the Parthenon, depicting the battle between Lapiths and the centaurs, and Hercules was often involved in those battles; it’s the time-honored battle between the so-called civilized and the so-called primitive. So, so evocative because, of course, a lot of that description rests on projection.
38:38 Anyway, Chiron was wounded in the leg; it depends on which version as to where, but it’s either the thigh or the knee. Another centaur was wounded in the foot, but that’s another story. And because the wound was poisoned, he couldn’t heal it; and as a demigod, he couldn’t die, so he lived. I think it’s either Apollodorus or Hesiod who gives the figure of 900-and-something years that he lived in mortal agony, unable to heal his own wound, but becoming a great mentor and wise man and healer himself in the process. And then, eventually,
39:26 he changed places with Prometheus. Prometheus--you might know the story--he was chained on a rock because he had mocked Zeus; probably not a very good idea, but that’s what he did. CB: Sure. MR: It’s a really interesting story, but too long to go into here. Prometheus is mainly known as the fellow who stole the fire from the gods. That’s like a comic strip version of it; there’s a whole background thing which is really thought-provoking, very interesting, and that part is in my book. But anyway, the notion of changing places
40:13 with somebody, that’s like the phrase, “walking a mile in someone’s moccasins;” it's an awakening of compassion when you can really, really do that. And so, this was what freed both of them from their suffering and Chiron was able to die, meaning become immortalized, in this context, in the constellation of Centaurus, or some say, Sagittarius. There’s some scholarly discussion about which of those two constellations best portrays the storylines, and it does seem that Centaurus looks more like the insignia, or the story around Pholus.
41:07 But what is very interesting is that the two centaurs, they’re not that far away from each other. I mean, in sky terms, of course, it’s miles. If you look on a star map, the two centaurs actually look or point their arrows towards the Scorpion. And above the Scorpion is the so-called 13th sign, Ophiuchus, that psychically gets reported in the news and causes alarm and despondency because everybody thinks their zodiac signs are wrong and everything. CB: Right. MR: But anyway, it’s a beautiful picture because both the centaurs, and also, Ophiuchus, are concerned with illness, sickness, and healing as well. And the Scorpion
42:04 is also associated with poison and the power of transformation partly through the Pluto connection. When we look at Chiron and the centaurs, what we can see immediately is that Pluto and Chiron and the centaurs, to me, belong in the same category because of the astronomy. So before Chiron and the centaurs were discovered, Pluto was the only orbit-crossing planet at such a steep angle to the ecliptic, and it was Dane Rudhyar who waxed lyrical about that decades before Chiron was discovered. He spoke about orbit-crossing in a similar way that
42:51 he spoke about comets; that it was like the intrusion of new energy into an old system, or the bringing in of the light from out of the dark. Also, the purification--he spoke about the sense of something coming into the solar system, almost like an intervention and bringing new energy, new impulses of energy and so forth. Now Rudolf Steiner--very interesting on the subject of comets; he spoke about a process of astral purification. So what we see is the comet’s tail getting brighter and brighter and brighter; he describes that as astral debris
43:41 being burnt up, purifying the solar system as it goes. Very interesting. Temporarily, in 1987-88, or maybe a bit later, there was just a short period where Chiron got a comet classification because they thought they saw a tail that was brightening, but it didn’t really come to much. Now what’s so interesting about Chiron, it keeps on being reclassified. I think it’s now settled because he’s now the chief centaur of the centaur gang. But before that, he has an asteroid number,
44:28 a comet number, and of course, a minor planet appellation. The first name was a planetoid. Planetoid, asteroid, comet, then minor planet, and then this subcategory of centaur. The point is he’s kept all of those classifications. He hasn’t gone, “Oh, no, I’m not that.” It all fits; it all kind of works. So a beautiful image of a process of transformation of our own core identity really. When we’re changing from who we thought we were into who we are becoming,
45:18 we might move from planetoid to asteroid to comet, etc. And it’s not that any of those are wrong, and should be therefore thrown away, they’re all fine. It’s all part of the journey, and to me, that’s a very powerful symbol. CB: Yeah, looks like on the Wikipedia entry, it still has the dual-classification. It says: “Although it was initially called an asteroid and classified only as a minor planet with the designation ”2060 Chiron”, it was later found to exhibit behavior typical of a comet. Today it is classified as both a minor planet and a comet, and is accordingly also known by the cometary designation 95P/Chiron.” So it still has this dual-astronomical role, which is really
46:04 interesting in terms of tying back with the mythology of being half-human and half-animal. MR: Exactly, and that thing of linking the inner world and the outer world. Yeah, so all of the above really speaks volumes. You see, Chiron actually cuts through Saturn’s orbit. Now I did make notes about this, as to when the last dates were. I think it was some point in 1992, Chiron went in through Saturn’s orbit at about 6° of Leo, and it was January 1999, it came back out through the portal of zero-and-some minutes of
47:00 Sagittarius, and it will come in and out through those two signs for quite a few passes still. CB: So it has a 50-year orbital cycle, right? MR: That’s right. It’s just over 50 years, but fairly even; sort of between 50 and 51-ish, but that’s pretty regular. Of course, because of the orbital eccentricity, you can’t divide up the Chiron cycle neatly like you can Saturn and say, well, roughly every seven to nine years, you get a big phone call from Saturn. You can’t do that with Chiron because the first square can occur any age from--I think it’s about five when I was researching this. You can get it as young as five-years-old, or you can get it in your
47:48 early 20s; it depends on which sign Chiron is in. CB: So because of its highly elliptical orbit, it’s more like an oval rather than a circle. And it moves through some signs of the zodiac very quickly, like Virgo and Libra in about two years; whereas, it moves through other signs, like Pisces and Aries, very slowly and takes eight years. MR: Correct. Absolutely right; and there you can see that Chiron actually moves through the orbit of Saturn physically. At the aphelion, in other words, it’s furthest distance from the Sun, it goes way up to Uranus, but doesn’t
48:33 actually cross it’s orbital path. It goes into what’s rather confusingly called ‘this fear’ of Uranus; it goes to the inside, but not actually right across the mean average orbital path. So there it’s really obvious because Saturn takes roughly 2-½ years to go through one sign and Uranus takes about 7 to 8 years. Likewise, when Chiron’s really near Saturn, or inside Saturn, it’ll go really quickly through its signs; and when it’s approaching the aphelion,
49:19 it’ll be long, like Uranus, 7 to 8 years. CB: Okay. Let’s see. So going back to the mythology, it seems like some of the main keywords that astrologers have developed, especially from the mythology, are ideas of Chiron being the Wounded Healer and that being a major recurring motif that astrologers use when they’re discussing Chiron. MR: Yeah. CB: And that’s partially due to the idea that he was somebody that was poisoned, but because he was partially immortal, he couldn’t die. MR: Correct. CB: He also had the skills to heal other people without being able to heal himself. MR: Correct. There’s another thing. In fact,
50:08 this was where I was going when I spoke about the fact that Chiron goes through the orbit of Saturn. To me, that particular astronomy also tells us something when we link it with our knowledge of astrology. So if we think of Saturn as established structures, obviously, that’s not a keyword description of Saturn, but the meaning of Saturn includes reference to established structures--history, tradition, the status quo, what we take for granted, also, our psychological patterning and defenses, whether they’re
50:54 known to us or unknown to us and so on. And so, when we’re in a process of change, it’s very painful for the ego. Even if it’s a change we’ve been working for or intending or working towards, it can still be very, very painful. When you take yourself to the edge of your structures, as you get to know about them, it can be exceptionally painful. There’s a way in which this endless looping around that Chiron does through the orbit of Saturn,
51:42 it makes me think of kneading bread or digging in the garden or something. Something has to be cultivated, and I think there is where the theme of the heart comes in. In many different traditions, it’s pointed out that the heart--be that the simple, feeling, human heart or the heart chakra with its internal energy connections--that is the place from which opposites can be reconciled, and a clear pair of opposites is Saturn and Uranus; so the status quo and that which turns the status quo upside-down, including internally.
52:28 So that can be a shock of any kind, including just the regular, ordinary shocks that we meet through our life, in the process of growing up and becoming socialized and all the rest of it. And so, Chiron goes looping through and connecting the visible and the invisible, in a process of spiritually maturing; so that may or may not have anything to do with being sick or ill or wounded, per say, but it might. There’s a correlate to that, which is that many people experience major, major awakenings as a direct result of illness and physical suffering and
53:19 wounds of various kinds; it’s incredibly common. I’m sure all of you listening will probably know at least one person, probably several, who’ve had those kinds of experiences. You really are taken right out of the familiar, visible, known world if you have an experience, a very severe pain. If you work with that in whatever way makes sense for you, it can really, really be your teacher; and that has been very much part of my life. I think that’s also one of the reasons I resonated immediately with Chiron.
54:14 This might sound like a strange thing to say, but I almost feel like the path of working with suffering--our own or others--it is a particular kind of spiritual path. There are lessons we get from our own illnesses and physical sufferings, as well as emotional sufferings, that we don’t get in any other way. CB: Right. Empathy is a really major component that sometimes comes from suffering. Though I’ve been thinking about lately, in reading one person’s biography, that his repeated instances of loss in his life had allowed him to cultivate a sense of empathy that
55:00 he might not have had otherwise. MR: Exactly right. And very often, in the case where Chiron in the horoscope can be seen to symbolize a really particular gift that somebody has, that’s usually a gift that has been bestowed on the back of a lot of suffering. You can’t manipulate that and say, “Oh, let me look at my chart and see what gift my Chiron placement is going to give me, so I can get to that as quick as possible.” CB: Right, like a short-cut or something. MR: Exactly right. Because it’s bestowed; you can’t fake that. CB: Okay. So there’s no cheat codes for Chiron.
55:52 MR: Right. CB: So let’s talk about an instance to give a concrete example. Obviously, that makes me think of your example, when you were 10, of having that injury and being in that cast. But then, as a result of that, going to the library and reading a lot and coming across an astrology book and having that initiation into astrology through that. There was a similar example, earlier this year, when the astrologer Rober Zoller passed away. I released an old interview that I did with him 10 years ago, and he similarly talked about being a very sickly child. And one of the only things that brought him pleasure that he could do was just read fairytales and things like that, and through that, he eventually got into astrology.
56:40 That seems to get to the core of part of what you're talking about, in terms of sometimes people having a pain or an experience of suffering, but something that allows them then to find something else that eventually they’re able to use to help other people in some way, or that becomes part of their personal journey. MR: Absolutely, yes. A variant on that theme is that where you find Chiron, it does sometimes indicate things that we do extremely well for others, but we can’t do for ourselves; that’s like Chiron not being able to heal his wound. And those things range from just amusing and bothersome to really, really big life patterns
57:36 that often do eventually come to a crisis, and the person who’s doing for others what they can’t do for themselves has to turn the ship around for their own survival sometimes. CB: Yeah, I’m thinking of a Chiron connected with relationships, with the 7th house, and maybe somebody that does marriage counseling for other people, but who, themselves, struggles with relationships for whatever reason or another. MR: Exactly. In fact, I can even think of a couple of examples of exactly that, and very poignantly, who got into the marriage guidance counseling work on the back of an extremely painful separation from her husband. And so, in a sense, she remains
58:31 subliminally brokenhearted and she has helped a lot of people; that seems to be what happens and how it works. And then a further level of awakening might well be, “Wow, what am I doing?” needing to redirect that energy to include oneself in the healing field; that's very common. In fact, often that happens around the Chiron return. CB: The process of using that to help other people, or the process of finally trying to turn that inside and trying to heal one’s own wounds? MR: It can be either. What I’ve noticed,
59:20 around the Chiron return, if people have a healing vocation of any kind, that’s a very common time for it to surface. Now it might sound kind of late in one’s life to be suddenly picking up a healing vocation; most people have known all along that they had that, but for one reason or another didn’t follow it. At the Chiron return, it’s like, “Okay, it’s now or never, and I’m going to do it.” The other variation is that people who have already been working in any of the fields of healing--I’m using that in a very broad, generic way--it’s not uncommon for them to get to the Chiron return and either give it up completely or retrain in a parallel, but similar field,
1:00:09 or take a slightly different road within what they’re doing, like maybe decide to write a book, or become a trainer, etc., and either way, doing a lot of reflecting on their work; it’s very, very common. And around the Chiron return, this I do want to mention. Of course, one can’t generalize about when women have their menopause, but I think it’s fair to say that, averagely, at least from the experience of people I’ve spoken with, it’s somewhere around 50 years. If it is,
1:00:58 this is a really useful piece of information. If the menopause coincides with the Chiron return, astrologically, what we can say is that around that time, every single Chiron aspect that is experienced from the Chiron return onwards is second time around; so it’s the Chiron return of every single aspect to every single thing on your chart, not only the 50-year-old thing. So what’s relevant about that is that there is this extraordinary process of recapitulation,
1:01:45 of recycling experience with Chiron. By the way, he’s not the only planet--he’s not a planet, but for brevity, I call him a planet. CB: Sure. MR: He’s not the only planet where you will find this. If you look deeply enough, you can find it with Saturn to some degree, but it’s very precise with Chiron; almost ridiculously so, sometimes. And in the first few years after the Chiron return, of course, what’s repeating is the period of the precognitive life. So after birth, and before we’ve learned to speak and walk, the memories from those times,
1:02:32 most people don’t remember much from that time at all because as we begin to speak and move, it changes the wiring of our brain to the cognitive stage. Those memories are often present or can be retrieved, if necessary, or occur in dreams, whatever. But the really, really early stuff, even including prenatal, it’s like the Chiron process opens the door on that, to the extent that it might be needed in one’s process--meaning, there might be patterning that originates back there that is still holding you back, or that you are still hurting from, or you don’t understand.
1:03:21 So the Chiron process, if you meet it in a very straight-up way, with healing practices, meditations, etc.--which gives you the chance to open your consciousness wide enough to really, really experience what’s there, even if you don’t understand it--it is amazing. It’s like the veil is pulled back and you get to see and feel and know absolutely what was going on. And by the way, this doesn’t stop. That will go on for the rest of your life. Any of you who are on a journey of awakening or healing, you will find that this Chiron process I’m talking about--it’s
1:04:12 a major accompaniment; it’s like having a friendly centaur coming along with us in our process. And the way that you work with your own process is pretty much guaranteed to change around the Chiron return because pre-Chiron return, most of us, all we want is, “Just fix it.” We want to fix it and be normal, or be whatever it is we think we should be, but just to fix it. For many people, it’s only once the Chiron return has happened that we really get to understand, “Wow, this whole journey is truly about accepting what is.” I know that sounds like a cliché, but think of the heart theme with Chiron.
1:04:59 Also, a little mythic detail. There was this bird called a griffin which used to peck out the liver of Prometheus everyday and then it would grow back again in the night. As if it wasn’t enough to be chained on this rock, he had this bird pecking his liver. After changing places, the griffin was shot through the heart and gotten rid of. Symbolically, that’s a nagging, self-critical voice that we have to work with in some way or another in our process.
1:05:46 It’s as if, around the Chiron return, the whole energy of all that starts to change, and it’s as if healing begins to occur on whatever level, including making contact with the right healer, the right of whatever persuasion. Meeting somebody who has a really important clue for you in the form of a book or a healing practice and so forth. And you can feel you’re on the stream of healing, and it’s a tremendous grace. It’s this shift from, “I just have to fix this,” to recognizing that, in fact, our life is a healing journey and becoming more and more
1:06:36 skilled and more and more gracious and empathic about how we meet that; that’s what brings also the gift of healing to other people. So that’s some of the ways I would understand this notion of the Wounded Healer. CB: That’s brilliant. And that makes sense because it’s only after that first 50 years that transiting Chiron has done a complete lap, all the way around your chart, and you’ve experienced all the possible aspects and permutations of Chiron’s aspects, both to its natal position, as well as to other planets in your chart; you can really look back and reflect on that full cycle and understand it. MR: Exactly. And I missed a link here, an important one. If we’ve developed the
1:07:28 capacity to roll with this sacred healing journey that we’re all on--because every single person, in some way or another, is going to suffer in their lives--it’s not just about fixing it; it’s about the compassion to let the energies roll in the way that they need to, if that makes sense. Now I’ve noticed that around menopause, women who do have that kind of a practice--they’ve cultivated that or are starting to--seem to have less symptoms of terrible premenstrual tension or mood swings or night sweats or anything of these things.
1:08:18 And it seems as if people who are really frightened of their own process or haven’t yet had the good fortune to make the right connections to support them in that risk somatizing some of the very powerful, physical experiences that will come through to a woman at menopause. If we take the year of the Chiron return as a kind of a birth, a rebirth, then we can take the year before that kicks in exact as the recap of the prenatal time, and there can be some extremely strange physical sensations that come forth when that’s
1:09:04 recapitulating. In traditional healing systems, they have huge wisdom about the prenatal life and its significance. In Western medicine, they do have some of that, but approach it in a very different way; basically seeming to always be looking for what’s wrong, not perhaps understanding the spiritual significance of what’s going on. The process of being beset with symptoms can be hugely alleviated for many women if they are
1:09:55 ready to undertake this kind of a healing journey. Obviously, some people do really have symptoms that really need attending to, so I’m not recommending that you just ignore them. But I know from working with clients that there’s something about connecting in with one’s own cosmic rhythms that it does the body good as well; we forget that sometimes. CB: Right. Yeah, it’s hard sometimes when there’s illnesses that can be psychosomatic in origin, but then other times there’s physical illnesses and ailments that people have that are independent of that, to some extent.
1:10:42 MR: Yeah. CB: So I want to back up. One of the things you really focus on in your book and spend a lot of time talking about is just the notion that the house position of Chiron as potentially being an area of life that is initially blocked, wounded, or not functioning in top capacity, to some extent, and being, maybe, ground zero or the starting point for understanding the transiting Chiron cycle and its aspects, especially back to itself. MR: Yeah. CB: So we talked about and we gave an example of Chiron in the 7th house and wounding surrounding relationships. But could we talk about some other house placements of Chiron and how that might manifest in an initial instance of wounding, just to give some examples?
1:11:33 MR: Yes. The other thing I’d want to add to that is the house position of the ruling planet of Chiron’s sign--that really speaks volumes. If you understand a bit or have got a felt connection with Chiron in terms of some of the themes that it embodies and portrays, with a very little bit of other astrological knowledge--house sign, aspects, dispositor or ruler, that kind of thing--with just
1:12:18 that, you’ve got enough information to begin to help you to see because the manifestations of Chiron can vary a lot. Very interesting. Sometimes it’s as if they’re not visible to the person. They could have studied Chiron, read all the books, have classes, and they don’t get it; they’re not seeing it. That’s part of a kind of defense because it’s quite likely that there is perhaps an area of pain that’s being covered over there. It doesn’t have to be a specific,
1:13:13 actual wound--like in my case, a broken bone--or a trauma of abuse of various kinds and so forth, but it can be where there is this kind of existential pain. Fundamentally, spiritually, I feel that’s where the deepest sense of disconnection from the Great Source will actually register. Now that can show itself through all kinds of other things, all kinds of other quirks, but at its base, it’s our felt alienation from our spiritual source and that’s where the healing
1:13:58 comes from. So there’s not one way of doing that, or even one right way, but it’s where the thing that we struggle with, we gradually peel back the layers and peel back the layers and then realize, “Wow, this is what’s underneath this,” and there we have something to work with. This is an example from my own life. So I have Chiron in Sagittarius--I think I mentioned it--and my Jupiter is very closely-conjunct my IC--which, by the way, I call the “I Don’t See,”
1:14:48 because that’s often how it is; it’s lying hidden--and it was a very specific, whole trail in my life, for me. As I mentioned, I was born in Rhodesia, which became Zimbabwe. On one level, witnessing that change from Rhodesia to Zimbabwe, it was like an experience of rebirth. There was a newborn country and everything, everything had changed, and it was as if decades, centuries of history had just been washed away. Absolutely, ecstatically wonderful. Had so many interesting experiences. Learned so much, etc.
1:15:40 Now when things started to go wrong in Zimbabwe, I can’t begin to tell you what I went through. It was like I had no sense of distance from this. I was profoundly identified to the ruler of Chiron on the 4th house--the home, the country, the family and all that. And I cried endlessly; I did rituals, I did all kinds of things. And then, it was at one UAC, I had a conversation with the wonderful astrologer Branka Stamenovic. You know her?
1:16:27 CB: Mm-hmm. MR: And she said to me--I can’t do the accent, so you’ll have to imagine it. She said, “One thing you and I share, it’s homeland pain. People who haven’t lost their homeland--as she had--they can’t understand what this is. You understand it, and I understand it. It’s called ‘homeland pain’.” I never forgot that. And it’s as if once I identified that, there was a long, long period of needing to work inwardly to reclaim the energy of necessity that had been invested in that.
1:17:21 And so, I tend to get a lot of clients who have homeland pain, or who have worked with very painful issues to do with either they are mixed-race or there’s an issue about racial origins and how they feel about that and so forth--very, very 4th house, all of it. So that’s the ruler of Chiron in the 4th. CB: Yeah, even though I don’t work a lot with asteroids, it’s not that I don’t believe in them because I have Chiron conjunct the IC. And while it’s not the only thing in my chart that would indicate this--and you can see it
1:18:06 traditionally or classically as well--but having Chiron conjunct the IC, losing my father at the age five to cancer--and that being an early experience of loss of a parent as being an early Chiron type experience of wounding or what have you--I could identify with that. I mean, there’s other placements--like having the Sun conjunct Saturn or other things like that that are also relevant--but it’s interesting how the asteroids can layer on additional nuances of interpretation on top of things. MR: Yeah, additional detail. What I’ve also found about Chiron, in fact, any of the centaurs, they’re like portals to the underworld, the realm of death. So at one or other points in our lives, all of us
1:19:00 become aware of death and physical mortality. And with Chiron there in the 4th, I would imagine that very young experience of loss just may have opened the doors to that, whether or not the rest of your family spoke about it in those terms. CB: Right, so those are really concrete examples--in your case, your place of origin and living situation and homeland, and also, ideas of ancestry and things like that that are 4th house topics, or for me, concrete things like parents. If we were talking about other houses, the 1st house seems a little obvious, that it could be more bodily issues or struggling with
1:19:52 health or illness issues perhaps. MR: Indeed. With Chiron in the 1st house, the person is often engaging with their own sense of woundedness, whether it’s obvious or not. I mean, some people even might have a physical deformity that they might successfully hide but which limits life and things like that; it’s often very specific there. And then if it’s Chiron in the 7th house, that can be a theme where the person is always looking after other people. They might have even made a profession out of it; if not, it’s something to be curious about. There’s a kind of triad around Chiron’s energy
1:20:49 in terms of how it might express--there’s the healer and there’s the one who is afflicted, and then there’s also the one who does the afflicting. I forget the name of the guy who did this--this is back from the 1970s--“Remember, victim and persecutor and healer.” Do you remember that? Or was it healer, victim, and persecutor? Anyway, it’s now called the something-or-other triangle; you do see that around Chiron. I was horrified when I was researching in a bit more detached way--not just with my own
1:21:35 process and my clients and so forth. I was pretty shocked to find a number of famous serial killers who all had extremely strong Chirons, but they did it by doing the wounding. It was really then that I began to understand how in the main, people who wound do so on the back of their wounding. So when there’s pain there that just isn’t processed, there’s a kind of knee-jerk reaction to put it out there to make somebody feel how you feel; and that can all be totally unconscious.
1:22:21 The most dangerous thing about unprocessed suffering is it will go and do it to somebody else if the pressure ratchets up. And of course, that’s what history’s made of. Wars come and people are pumped up as heroes. They’re paid by people who just want to take over from a motivation of greed and money and exploitation and territory and all that kind of thing, or internecine struggles of one kind or another. It’s a whole kind of bloodletting thing which brings the opportunity for people to just act out the unresolved pain that they feel inside
1:23:07 themselves by inflicting it on somebody else. CB: That’s a really interesting point. So it means in terms of Chironic wounding, not everybody’s going to grow up and take that wound and then become a shaman and start helping other people. Some people are just going to become the one who does that to other people, in a negative sense. I looked up the triangle, and it looks like it’s called the Karpman Trauma Triangle. The three pieces are the victim, the rescuer, or the persecutor. MR: Yes, that’s exactly it. CB: Okay. MR: Yeah, so there’s a similar one with Chiron. And so, from one point of view,
1:23:53 even if it were possible to switch off the world and all its wars and everything going on, it would probably take hundreds of years to process all of the suffering that’s already been generated. In that sense, finding the way to process one’s own suffering, and perhaps, even a bit wider than that--meaning to take on even more than just your own little share
1:24:40 through prayer, through ritual, through whatever means make sense--it makes a difference to the whole field in which we live. That’s not just a belief. I’ve seen that kind of stuff in action; I’m sure a lot of your listeners have. The kind of thing that we could call the Chironic Mysteries are really all to do with the experience of pain and suffering and the healing thereof, in such a way that there’s an opening of consciousness. It’s not just about fixing a broken arm, if that makes sense to you. CB: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense.
1:25:28 The last thing we haven’t talked about, that is a little bit more mysterious, for me, would be the 10th house in terms of what would the wound potentially be with somebody with Chiron conjunct the Midheaven or in the 10th house. MR: It could be a chronic sense of not feeling recognized. Often with our sufferings, things are not as they seem. We think that we’re hurting because of x, y and z, and then the more we inquire and work with it, “Oh, no, it’s not that. It’s something else.” And so, needing the approval of the world, that’s a potential 10th house theme, in one way or another. When Chiron is up there,
1:26:17 many different expressions can happen, but there can be an incredible feeling of pain if one doesn’t feel recognized enough. There’s a twist on that one too. It can sometimes be that the person can’t handle recognition and being applauded and celebrated and so forth. They may be coming from such a lack of that that it threatens to overturn all the known and familiar structures, and so, they freeze or turn their back on it because so much pain comes up; that’s a really interesting one. And then, of course, Chiron in the 10th, usually professionally-involved in the field of healing in some way. I remember a lovely
1:27:07 example of this; this was a woman who actually ran the admin desk in a hospital. I was very curious about the Chiron, and eventually, it came up about what she was doing and so forth. In the conversation, it came out that she had wanted to be a doctor, but she didn’t really have the intellect to get through the exams, and then she wanted to be a nurse, as a kind
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