The library · The other points and bodies

Chiron in the fifth house

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

What the tradition reads

The reading of Chiron in the fifth house belongs to modern practice, the body having been found in 1977; it is given here from Cafe Astrology, written by the astrologer Annie. Alan Leo, in a textbook first published in 1903, gives the fifth house offspring and generative powers, the sensations and pleasurable emotions that arise from the senses, and worldly enterprise and energy, and heads his chapter on it children, enterprise, speculations, gains and love affairs. Cafe Astrology reads Chiron there as championing at the core what it cannot easily practise: being unique, celebrating one's individuality, taking pride in oneself, relishing life. Past experience is read as having cast a shadow over all four, so that guilt attends acknowledging an achievement or showing something made, with self consciousness about seeming to brag, and sometimes guilt at enjoying idleness or childish things, together with a felt inadequacy on the creative side that the mind does not endorse. The page reads the philosophy of dancing as though nobody were watching as held wholeheartedly and performed awkwardly, and names these the wounds worth confronting. It also reads romantic and platonic relationships as part of the healing path, an influential teacher and motivator, skill at waking others to their creative power or true nature, and an attraction to people who are a little different or at some disadvantage. A second set on the same page reads a childhood made too serious too early, and creativity unrecognised by its owner.

The story

The fifth house is the house of children, and the centaur is remembered chiefly for other people's. Wikipedia's account has Apollo bring his son Aristaeus to Mount Pelion to be reared by him; has Apollo save Asclepius from his mother's funeral pyre and bring him to Chiron, who reared him and taught him healing; has Peleus deliver Achilles, whom the centaur fed on the innards of lions and boars and the marrow of bears, and whom he named; and counts Actaeon, Jason and Medus among the pupils as well. Chiron's own three daughters and one son appear in the same account, one daughter prophesying Asclepius's fate and being turned into a mare for it. Wikipedia calls the wall painting from the basilica at Herculaneum, where he teaches Achilles the lyre, one of the most common Roman depictions of him, and the same lesson is the subject of paintings it reproduces from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Alan Leo classes the fifth house succedent, among those he says carry matters of feeling and emotion not yet ripe for physical expression but maturing for future development, and reads it as a material representation of the eleventh house's hopes and wishes.

Written from

• Cafe Astrology, Chiron in the Houses of the Natal Chart
• Alan Leo, How to Judge a Nativity (first edition 1903), Chapter I, The Twelve Houses of the Horoscope, pp. 7 to 9, and Chapter XII, The Fifth House, Children, Enterprise, Speculations, Gains, Love Affairs
• Wikipedia, Chiron

Corpus key point:Chiron:house:5.