The library · The other points and bodies

Chiron

Chiron (2060 Chiron) anywhere in a chart, read in the modern Western manner

What the tradition reads

Chiron is among the newest bodies in Western practice, and its reading is modern throughout: the object was found on 1 November 1977, so no classical or nineteenth century authority treats it, and everything astrologers say of it has been assembled since. Cafe Astrology, run by the astrologer Annie, gives the common modern formula in one phrase, the wounded healer, and holds that Chiron in a natal chart marks the deepest wound together with the effort to heal it. The same page reads sign and house as showing the wound and the manner of its expression, aspects as showing the other figures in the story, and transits to natal Chiron as timing that work; it places issues of low self worth and felt inadequacy first, and potent healing power, knowledge and wisdom afterwards, so that good counsel is given to others more readily than taken. Zane Stein, who began studying Chiron within weeks of its discovery, keeps a different set of keys: healing and wholemaking, quest, guide, key, doorway, and maverick, a word he defines by the orbit itself, which runs between Saturn and Uranus, meaning one who neither wears the herd's brand nor carries the banner of protest against it.

The story

Charles Kowal found Chiron on 1 November 1977, on plates taken at Palomar Observatory on 18 October, and it was logged first as 1977 UB. It lay near aphelion when found and was then the most distant known minor planet; the press went as far as calling it a tenth planet. It was later recovered on images reaching back to 1895, which fixed the orbit: eccentric, with perihelion just inside the orbit of Saturn and aphelion just outside the perihelion of Uranus, one circuit in 50.71 years. Nothing else was then known in such an orbit, so a new class was made for it, and when other bodies turned up there in the early 1990s the class was named the centaurs. In February 1988, twelve astronomical units from the Sun, Chiron brightened by seventy five percent; a coma was observed in April 1989 and a tail in 1993, so it now carries the comet designation 95P/Chiron beside its minor planet number. The Minor Planet Center published the naming citation on 1 April 1978. Astrologers did not wait for any of it. Stein records beginning his study weeks after the discovery and working through 1978 with the astrologer Al H. Morrison on a chart for the discovery moment; Morrison is also credited with devising the key shaped symbol astrologers use.

Written from

Corpus key point:Chiron.