Chiron: a minor Saturn

An astrology teacher once described Chiron as a minor Saturn. Chiron is Saturn’s son, after all. The centaur child of rape, Chiron’s mum couldn’t stand the look of him. Saturn’s son, he was drawn to teaching, medicine, community service and a life of cultivation, making him a pariah among the more archetypally libertine, appetite-driven centaurs. The child of a God, Chiron endured deadly agony but could not die from being accidentally struck by an arrow laced with poison that had no antidote. Only through trading his immortality in exchange for Prometheus’s release, did Chiron find liberation from his suffering. 

“Wounded healer” is the phrase most popularly associated with Chiron. It is convenient to associate Chiron with the wound (in the tenth house, the wound lies in career progression and professional ambition; in the seventh, long-term one-on-one connections). The wound is what makes us wise, in a way that it’s easier to support others through struggles we know intimately than to help ourselves. 

I’m much more interested in Chiron as a survival strategy, as a methodology of self-remaking from the raw material of circumstances beyond one’s choices. The story of Chiron’s journey is the story of sexual assault’s pernicious afterlife. Of choosing service over a life of indulgence. Of war’s impact on non-fighters (Chiron was a doctor) and of political imprisonment (as in Prometheus’s case). Of being a god’s illegitimate child and what it means for a bastard to find a place in polite society. 

Chiron has just entered Taurus and is here until early 2034. Ruled by Venus, this Chiron transit questions your understanding of beauty, nature, luxury, consumption, aesthetics, stability, sensuality, security. Chiron in Taurus invites our curiosity about survival needs, scarcity and satisfaction. If Taurus is your second house, this Chiron transit is about possessions and personal resourcing. If Taurus is your eleventh house, this transit is about the scenes you’re in, your networks and communities, the weak links through which you build your public life. 

If you were born between 1976 to early 1984, this is the season of your Chiron return (which usually marks when people enter their fifties). Unlike other outer planet returns, many people do live to see their Chiron returns. If this is you, how can you reflect on your inner growth journey with compassion? Are you happy about the person that you are, spiritually speaking? What compromises did you have to make to survive capitalism? How have you had to cope with heteronormativity and shame? How can you look out into the rest of your life in a way that’s more intentional, more aligned with how you wish to blossom? Are the people currently in your life the people who affirm your highest self? 

If you have Taurus Sun, Moon or Rising, or a fixed-sign Rising, this transit might be felt as an invitation to face your ideas about pleasure, culture and what it means to exist as a body on a planet like this. How many of these are ideas you’ve embraced with purpose, and how many of these are overcompensations, or ideas you adopted because they were the default, though not the soul’s desire? 

Book a birth chart reading with a queer astrologer in Melbourne, Australia.

Gift an astrology voucher to a loved one.

 Share this post with your trusted group chat. 

Cover photo by Matt Jones via the Unsplash Licence