Almagest

The library · The other points and bodies

Chiron in the seventh house

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

What the tradition reads

Chiron in the seventh house is a recent 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 seventh house unions, marriage and partnerships, and with them individual character and humane tendencies, names enemies among its matters, and calls marriage its chief influence and the house itself the complement of the first. Cafe Astrology reads Chiron there as championing at the core the belief in seeing all sides of a story and meeting people halfway, with wisdom about relationships that makes an exceptional counsellor, and then reads the practice falling short of the belief, with more given than received even where equality is held to sincerely. One to one relationships are read as the place where the transformation and the important lessons happen, and interpersonal conflict as a source of anxiety, guilt or crisis. The page reads an attraction to, and a tendency to attract, partners whom others might consider unusual or in need of repair, healing themes dominating the closest bonds, and a caution about serving repeatedly as a stepping stone for others who learn and move on. A second set of delineations on the same page reads early experience of rejection in the matter, perhaps from parents who separated or kept their distance.

The story

The wound in the myth was dealt during a visit, which is to say among the affairs the seventh house holds, partnership and enmity together. Wikipedia's account, following a scholium on Theocritus, places it at the cave of Pholus on Mount Pelion during Heracles's fourth labour: the guest asked for wine, the host produced a vessel held in trust, its vapour drew the wild centaurs, they attacked with stones and fir trees, and Heracles answered with arrows poisoned by the blood of the Hydra. Chiron, neither combatant nor host, took one in the thigh. Pholus, examining an arrow afterwards and wondering how so small a thing could do so much, dropped it on his own hoof and died at once. The same account gives the centaur a marriage: he lived on Pelion with the nymph Chariclo, who bore him three daughters and a son. Alan Leo puts the cusp of the seventh house at the west point, the descendant, and classes it among the angles, which he says show all things that must be expressed outwardly; he reads it as the unifying of all that stands separated or isolated in the ascendant.

Written from

Corpus key point:Chiron:house:7.