CHIRON: THE ANGUISHED PHILOSOPHER

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CHIRON: THE ANGUISHED PHILOSOPHER

Chiron has become known, since his discovery in 1977, as the Wounded Healer. He is known as a healer because mythologically he was a great healer, and because of the revival of the healing arts at the time of his discovery in the heavens. And 'wounded' because he received an agonising, incurable wound from a poisoned arrow.

He was in fact a polymath, known for his wisdom. He educated a number of the Greek heroes. At the time of his discovery in 1977, the religions of the East were becoming popular in the West, and the age of the gurus such as Osho - Neptune in Sagittarius - was soon to be upon us. This trend was arguably more significant: it was the wider context in which the return of the healing arts occurred. Philosophy in its ancient usage means love of wisdom, which is also the true meaning of religion. Hence my primary designation of Chiron as a philosopher.

And anguished rather than wounded? The term 'wounded', in our modern context, is psychological. It speaks of the therapy room and the attempts to alleviate human suffering through correcting what went wrong in childhood. Chiron thus becomes the archetype of the wound and its healing in that context. Point one: in the myth he was a physical healer rather than a soul healer (though that distinction wouldn't have been so black and white in those times). Point 2: his wound was incurable and therefore not psychological. Chiron is released from his suffering through handing back his immortality in exchange for the release of Prometheus from his sufferings. He dies, but is placed among the stars by Zeus, who takes pity on him, as the constellation Centaurus. He thus acquires another type of immortality.

And this leads to the main point of this re-interpretation of Chiron: his suffering is healed on an existential level, through his surrender of the physical body, not through an examination of his childhood. His suffering is therefore that which is inherent in the human condition, and requires moral effort, rather than an assignation of an external cause, to resolve. This is why I call him anguished rather than wounded. Morality, action in alignment with that which we know in ourselves to be honest and right, is very unfashionable these days, but it is the deepest and most powerful transformer.

Chiron was in crisis. This is where suffering may lead, and is often indicated by major outer planet transits. But Chiron had superpowers, as shown in his education of the Greek heroes. This gave him the ability bear his suffering, agonising as it was. And eventually, tiring of life in this way, to surrender his immortality, while taking pity on Prometheus. So Chiron describes the existential crises we may find ourselves in, and shows us to be capable of more than we thought, that we can bear the suffering and find a resolution on a new level: by reframing the suffering in the context of the inherent limitations of the human ego, what the Buddha called dukkha.

So what does all this mean in practice? I will attempt to show this through a consideration of Chiron through the signs of the zodiac, and one at least of the moral/existential challenges they each present. The signs show the different ways in which as humans we delude ourselves about the nature of reality, the bolt-holes we create, and the crises, if we are lucky, that they lead to. Chiron is the often acute and prolonged pain involved in such crises, the anguish, which becomes the motivation for a reframing of our values - for a surrender of the comfort zone which up until now had seemed to serve us, in order to live from a wider consciousness, sub specie aeternitas.

ARIES

Personal ambition. You may have battled your way through to a place in the world, and it has turned to ashes. You wonder what it was all for. It is your own self that you need to fight: aligning yourself at all times with the highest values, with the sacred.

TAURUS

Desire. Humans build a false emotional security through ownership and status. But you still feel hungry, unsatisfied. Maybe you have lost the things or people that gave you that sense of security and satiety. Only a hunger for the eternal can truly fulfill you.

GEMINI

Intellectual pride. People can spend their whole lives proving how smart they are. The culture gives high value to being clever. But you cannot run from your misery and inadequacies in this way forever. There are things that matter more than having a high IQ. Perhaps a longing for deeper meaning is awakening, for a different kind of truth.

CANCER

Tribalism. Home and family, with its requirements for conformity, its expectations as to who you should be, no longer comforts and nourishes you. Rather, you feel suffocated. You need to dare to enter a wider world, to remember that all of life is your family.

LEO

Self-absorption. You are in love with your own brilliance, and so are other people. But life has betrayed you: you are ageing, and no longer the centre of attention. You need to find and cultivate the divine source within, that is unique to you, instead of taking it for granted.

VIRGO

Judgement. Stop condemning others in order to feel better about yourself. Realise that deep down you are pure and always have been. And stop hiding behind your gift of service, and let shine the nature goddess that lies in your soul.

LIBRA

Projection. You know who you are through your relationships. But you idealise the other, and that never works for long. Amidst the carnage of your relationships, you need to find the inner man or woman that you have been seeking without. Then you will at last find your soul.

SCORPIO

Power. You want to feel powerful, and you do that by controlling others. If you are lucky, you will end up isolated and bitter. The power to live and renew flows through you, and in your crisis it is to those depths that you must now turn.

SAGITTARIUS

The guru. You have plenty to teach, and it tells you who you are. But does it come from you, or from what has been passed on? You need to dare to step outside the safety of tradition and speak directly from what you know for yourself, from experience.

CAPRICORN

Status. You are good at what you do, but you have come to rely overmuch on recognition from others. It makes you proud and touchy. Maybe your work has gone out of fashion. You need to know your value for yourself. Who do you answer to, the crowd, or God, however you conceive that?

AQUARIUS

Hubris. You value the distinctively human attribute of reason and originality. But you think it puts you above the animal. Nature will come back and bite you, make you ill in some way. Your soul-sickness can only be healed by learning to listen to and valuing the animal.

PISCES

Passivity. It is your gift to sense the wider pattern of existence, and the helping forces out there. But you rely overmuch on that and have not developed sufficient will or responsibility of your own. You can spiral into hopelessness and addiction. You know what it is you have to do in this life, and the decision is yours to make. Incarnate, and experience the joy of bringing spirit into matter.

 

 

THE UK FINANCIAL CRISIS

On 29th September 1976, the Chancellor Dennis Healey went to the IMF for a loan. Exactly 50 years later, on 29th Sept, Andy Burnham will be giving his 1st speech to the Labour Party conference as PM. The Chancellor now is also called Healey, and the country is fast heading into the same kind of fiscal crisis, due to the same Labour inability to cut spending. In 1976, the UK was in the early stages of Pluto hard-aspecting its Sun, Moon, Node and Angles, and it led to the Thatcher revolution. Now we are in the early stages of Neptune, the other big transformer, doing the same. The Reform revolution is a plausible outcome. Chiron is also where it was in 1976, at the cusp of the UK 8th, on the brink of taking us through a necessary but painful purge. In other news, the Bayeaux tapestry, depicting a successful invasion of the UK by boats from France, recently went on display in London. At the same time, protests on our coasts began against the modern invasion by boats from France. Appropriate for Neptune (sea) in Aries (invasion.) 

 

 

MANIFESTO FOR A POST-CHRISTIAN CULTURE

My recent book Chaos Shamanism was written as a manifesto for a post-Christian culture. Chaos is the potentially fecund spiritual melting pot we now find ourselves in, as well as being the mysterious origin of the universe in ancient Greek Myth. And Shamanism is the universal spirituality of early peoples the world over, founded in the simple experience of belonging to the natural world. The big religions that took over as we became 'civilised' have validity and even greatness at times, but they still represent a narrowing of that early experience, as they became distanced from nature and reduced themselves to just one story. In a way, Chaos Shamanism is for the few, for it is founded on a direct relationship with the natural world, of trusting one's own guidance, and most are not ready for that: that is why we have priesthoods, which are often a necessary step along the way. Whatever forms Chaos Shamanism takes, the collapse of Christianity presents a great opportunity to return to the spirituality that came naturally to early peoples, for which reason I have faith that it is the right way. 

 

It is more powerful because it is more open to how things really are, beyond any holy books or figures. That openness leaves room for lots of stories, sometimes contradictory ones, and it can incorporate the mythologies of the big religions too. Chaos Shamanism is a high voltage energy of the spirit, winging its way down from ancient times. It can bring a return of a shared experience of the sacred - the lack of which is slowly destroying our civilisation - but with less susceptibility to dogma and fundamentalism. Read my book, savour it, and join the spirit adventure of our age.And get a free astrology reading if you buy it and leave a rating on amazon!