The library · The other points and bodies

Chiron in the eleventh house

Chiron (2060 Chiron) in the eleventh house, read in the modern Western manner

What the tradition reads

Chiron in the eleventh house is a modern reading, the body having been discovered in 1977 and read by house only since; the delineation here is Cafe Astrology's, written by the astrologer Annie. Alan Leo, in a textbook first published in 1903, gives the eleventh house friends, acquaintances, hopes, wishes and aspirations, the friends and acquaintances that arise out of unions, and calls it, taken by itself and free from affliction, a benefic house whose natural tendency runs towards good fortune and prosperity. Cafe Astrology reads Chiron there as a sensitivity to one's social connections and to one's place in a group which it declines to call a limitation, holding instead that the experience builds empathy and yields an unusually valuable view. It reads belief in people and in the power of a group, a steadfast humanitarian who champions individuality and is good at encouraging others to keep their own step, alongside frequent self consciousness among friends or in company, as though belonging had not been established. The page reads the wisdom of the placement as lodged in that same sensitivity, warns against overcompensating into what it calls a bottomless well, and reads friendships as eclectic and unconventional by preference. Easing off the search for where one belongs, rather than completing it, is the release it offers. A second set of delineations on the same page reads early rejection by peers for being different.

The story

The body itself had to wait for company. When Kowal found it in 1977 nothing else was known in such an orbit, so a category was invented to hold one object, and it stayed a category of one for more than a decade. Zane Stein's account names the arrivals in order as they were found and named: Pholus first, then Nessus, Hylonome, Asbolus, Chariklo, Pelion, Okyrhoe, Cyllarus, Elatus, Echeclus, Bienor, Thereus, Amycus and Crantor, with others still unnamed. Only once Chiron had these companions, in the early 1990s, was the class given its name, the centaurs, so the group came after the member rather than the other way round. Wikipedia describes the class as bodies orbiting between the asteroid belt and the Kuiper belt, in orbits that are not stable and are reshaped over millions of years by the giant planets. Alan Leo classes the eleventh house succedent, among those he says carry matters of feeling and emotion not yet ripe for physical expression but maturing for future development, and notes that it often holds strong planets in the horoscopes of those whose business is with the many rather than the few.

Written from

Corpus key point:Chiron:house:11.