Chiron in the Natal Chart: Your Chiron “Wound” Isn’t A You Problem
Pierre Mignard, Portrait of a lady in allegorical guise, holding a dish of pearls (detail)
Oysters, clams and mussels make pearls as a natural response to discomfort. When an irritant of some kind has gotten inside their shell, they secrete materials that eventually form a pearl. “All the animal is doing is putting a rind around an intruder, like a grain of sand or parasite.” Most of today’s pearls are farmed — we intentionally put something inside of a mollusk’s shell to trick it into making pearls.
Chiron is like that too: something gets under our skin, and we don’t really know what it IS, but we know that we feel horribly wrong. There is an intense discomfort wherever Chiron is in the chart, and something truly is very wrong there, but it’s never really been you. It’s always been an outside irritant, usually a world that does not embrace difference and diversity. Most of what makes Chiron hurt is our inability to conform.
But that “irritant” inspires us to create something very special and very beautiful to share with others.
Chiron in astrology
Chiron, “the Wounded Healer,” is a planetoid that represents the eternal feeling that there’s something fundamentally wrong with you when in actuality the problem is that the world fails to embrace different needs and ways of doing things. Chiron in astrology represents a pain that we each carry, but is it really ours to carry? Is there really something fundamentally “wrong” with each one of us or with our need and abilities? Or is it that the world fails to embrace our differences or recognize them as gifts?
Chiron is not only a sensitive, painful point in our charts. Chiron also represents deep wisdom that we have to share with the world. This is the wisdom that comes from study as well as experience, and from knowing pain and having the heart to share the antidote with other sufferers. It is the friction of the sand that creates the pearl.
In astrology, Chiron’s sign and house indicate where and how we tend to struggle and from which we derive a decent amount of discomfort, but it’s also where we’re almost ahead of our time. It’s like we each know a special truth about the sign and house that Chiron is in our birth chart and over time we develop an appreciation for the secret, special pearl that we create through our discomfort, distress, and difference.
Doukas Ioannis, Chiron and Achilles, 1873
Chiron’s mythology
Chiron was a centaur who was abandoned by his mother for being different.
Chiron’s mother, a nymph, had coupled with Cronus while Cronus had taken the form of a horse. Upon birthing him, his mother was repulsed by Chiron’s half-horse body and left him. Chiron was found by Apollo, who raised him and taught him a number of skills. Later in life, Chiron became renowned for his own teaching and healing abilities; while centaurs are typically violent and lustful, Chiron was cultured, peaceful, and, well, sane.
Heracles, one of Chiron’s students, opened a bottle of wine while visiting another centaur, Pholus. Smelling the wine, a slew of centaurs went mad for the scent of the wine, and Chiron was caught in this frenzy. To keep the centaurs back, Heracles fired poison arrows, and one accidentally hit Chiron in the leg.
Despite his deep knowledge of healing, Chiron was unable to heal his wound. As a child of Cronus, Chiron was immortal, and despite his immense pain he could not die. He eventually made a deal with Zeus to exchange his immortality to be exchanged for Prometheus’ freedom, as Prometheus had been punished for stealing fire from the gods and giving it to humans.