The library · The other points and bodies

Chiron in the ninth house

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

What the tradition reads

Chiron in the ninth house is a modern reading, the body having been found in 1977, and it is taken here from Cafe Astrology, written by the astrologer Annie. Alan Leo, in a textbook first published in 1903, gives the ninth house the higher mentality and the scientific, philosophic and religious tendencies, and with them long journeys, dreams and what he calls the image making power; he heads his chapter on it philosophy and travel. Cafe Astrology reads Chiron there as a powerful desire for meaning and for belief in something larger than the self, with the work of learning to trust one's own vision of the world named as the central task. It reads a championing of free thinkers, real talent for helping others find their own truths and gain their own experience, and considerable potential as a teacher or writer. Against that it reads a private sense of being unfulfilled on the same levels, original ideas about meaning held with insecurity and a feeling of disconnection from them, and a reluctance to throw oneself into the experiences one recommends. The page allows that education or the expression of views may have been limited early, naming religious or cultural restriction as one possibility. A second set of delineations on the same page reads a crisis connected with spiritual teaching, and a good teacher once extreme positions are moderated.

The story

The house of the journey and of the teacher fits the centaur's occupation exactly. Wikipedia names Chiron a great healer, an astrologer and a respected oracle, first among centaurs and highly revered as teacher and tutor, taught prophecy by Apollo along with medicine and music, and lists among his pupils the culture heroes who went on to found arts and to travel: Asclepius, Aristaeus, Actaeon, Achilles, Jason and Medus. Jason's voyage and Achilles's war both began in the schoolroom on Mount Pelion. The body carrying the name travels a long way itself, crossing between the orbits of Saturn and Uranus once every 50.71 years, and its own discovery was a matter of distance: it was found near aphelion in 1977 and was then the most distant known minor planet. Alan Leo classes the ninth house cadent, among the houses he says show matters latent in the mind and not yet ready for final expression in the physical world, sets it against the third as the subjective and abstract mind against the concrete brain mind, and gives it rapid transit, sea voyages and foreign travel where the third has only the short journey.

Written from

Corpus key point:Chiron:house:9.