The library · The other points and bodies

Chiron in the sixth house

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

What the tradition reads

Chiron in the sixth house is read only in modern astrology, the body having been discovered in 1977; the delineation here is Cafe Astrology's, written by the astrologer Annie. Alan Leo, in a textbook first published in 1903, gives the sixth house service and the attachments arising from the expression of the tenth, and with them servants, helpers and those of inferior rank, work and employment, the condition of the physical body, and sickness, which he ties to worry and anxiety. Cafe Astrology reads Chiron there as real talent for helping others order their ordinary lives, gather information and find better ways of going about the day, set against a persistent sense of being behind, disorganised and overwhelmed in one's own, since the same attention is not turned inward. It reads methods at work that conform to nobody's tradition and are valued for it, and reads unequal working relationships, the kinds where one party instructs or employs the other, as complicated here and also as where the growth happens. The page names intense insecurity about being disorganised or not sufficiently together and says the expectations behind it are too high, which is the point of the reading rather than an aside. Nothing in this entry is a claim about anybody's body or any course of treatment: what the older authority assigns this house is work, service and sickness, and what is being read here is self expectation and the guilt attached to it.

The story

The centaur was a practitioner of remedies, which is why modern astrology keeps him near this house. Wikipedia's account has Apollo teach him medicine and herbs along with music, archery and prophecy, credits him with the discovery of botany and pharmacy, the science of herbs and medicine, and calls him a great healer and respected oracle whose pupil Asclepius became the god of doctors. Its irony is placed at the end: in Ovid's Fasti the wounded centaur reaches for herbs to treat his own foot and they do not work, and the master of the healing arts cannot heal himself. Alan Leo classes the sixth house cadent, among the houses he says show matters latent in the mind and not yet ready for final expression in the physical world, connects it with the mid-heaven and the second, and calls it unimportant where no planet occupies it and no sign on its cusp points that way. His textbook first appeared in 1903, which is to say the houses were parcelled out long before the bodies now placed in them were all known.

Written from

Corpus key point:Chiron:house:6.