The library · The other points and bodies

Chiron in the third house

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

What the tradition reads

The reading of Chiron in the third house is modern throughout, the body having been discovered 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 third house relatives and kindred, travelling, and the intellect derived from education and study, with the minor impressions made upon the physical brain; he heads his chapter on it brethren and relatives, short journeys, the mind. Cafe Astrology reads Chiron there as a long piece of work on wounds tied to early experience of communicating, learning and connecting, and reads the resulting style of expression, of learning, and even of getting about as unmistakably particular to its owner. Belief in the power of the mind and of conversation is read as unwavering, while the practice is read as uneven: speech that comes out as too much or too little, oscillating between the two, guilt attached to both, and a standing question about whether the account given represented its speaker accurately. The same page reads unconventional methods adopted in the pursuit of knowledge, sensitivity turning into skill, and real ability in helping others communicate and learn. A second set of delineations on the same page, from the site's Character Profile report, reads early criticism from family, perhaps unintended, about the manner of self expression, and counsels admitting mistakes rather than excusing them.

The story

The centaur's education was verbal and musical before it was anything else. Wikipedia's account has the abandoned child taken up by Apollo, who taught him medicine, herbs, music, the lyre, archery, hunting and prophecy, and has Artemis train him in archery and hunting, with his kindness and intelligence credited to them both; it glosses his Greek name, Kheiron, as hand. What he received he handed on, to Asclepius, Aristaeus, Actaeon, Achilles, Jason and Medus, and the same article names Dolops and Aphrus as his possible brothers, which gives the house of brothers something to work with. The house of siblings suits a figure defined by those he taught rather than by what he ruled. Alan Leo classes the third cadent, among the houses he says show matters latent in the mind and not yet ready for final expression in the physical world, and he explains its short journeys by its tie to the concrete or brain mind, which cannot travel far from the objects it is fastened to. He sets it against the ninth as the smaller and slower mind against the wider, and gives it education and studies of the minor and more conventional order.

Written from

Corpus key point:Chiron:house:3.