Chiron
August 26, 2005 (with chart)
http://cainer.com/ericfrancis/aug26.html
Dear Eric,
I love how much you do with Chiron, which is at the root of
my question here. Chiron's a pretty big deal in my chart. Chiron in Aries and
my 1st house is opposite Venus in Libra and my 7th. Venus is flanked by Pluto
and Uranus, and I'm also a Libra with an Aquarius Moon and rising, trine my
late Libra Sun.
So, here's someone for whom relationships are incredibly
important, but most interpreters of Chiron have me scared witless about my
potential, for one -- as if Chiron were cursing my romantic happiness. To be
sure, in my life, forging solid love connections with men has been damned hard
for someone who otherwise has much to offer, and I have actually felt pretty
cursed. So part of my struggle has been not to give in to this victimy
thinking. (I also have
You tend to have a really positive and helpful spin on tough
aspects, and how to engage with them in a purposeful way. I wonder if there's
anything you could say about Chiron's role in relationships, and also the
potential for healing those Chiron wounds. Are they "unhealable" as
other Chiron thinkers have tended to portray them? With therapy and realism
understood as part of the equation, can one prevail?
-- Alexandra
Dear Alexandra,
To answer your question in one word, in my vision of life
and of astrology -- YES. One can prevail over the things that hold us back, and
heal the things that hurt us in the past, or that hurt us today. There would be
little point in living, otherwise. There would be even less point in attempting
healing, awareness or growth.
I am aware that many, if not most, astrology books,
particularly the 'serious' and psychological ones, can present a somber view of
life, and often of what happens under the influences of astrology. And though
astrology books can present information and examples, they cannot sit with us
in the process and help us work through what we need to work through in order
to grow. They cannot actually respond to our feelings and our needs. And most
important, they cannot cover all possibilities. And they don't include our
chart.
Astrology itself also has its limits. Most of the purveyors
of any system like to present it as the last authority, or at least need to
make a convincing case that it has a lot of authority. Astrology is useful --
to a point, and some of that depends on how you use it. And I think it's a
great idea to stay conscious of the limits, and work with them. Within a
healing setting, I prefer to think of astrology as a diagnostic tool rather
than the final word. From Greek, the word "diagnosis" means "a
discerning, distinguishing." Breaking that down a bit, "Dia"
means "apart," and "gignoskein" means "to learn."
Diagnosis is what we learn, see and discern when we take things apart.
Astrology helps us look into the psyche, as well as the
childhood setting, the family line and the parents, and also helps us see what
happens over the course of time. All of these things are very helpful in the
healing process. But to use a chart without the person connected with it having
a voice in the process is a little like having a movie on a DVD but no player.
What happens in life is more important than the chart or what it says; the life
itself is often more revealing of the chart than the chart is of life; and in
my view, astrology must always focus on people, their feelings and experiences,
and not their technical details.
No matter how good an astrology book may be, it cannot do
this. And no matter how accurate or insightful an astrologer may be, I feel
strongly that there needs to be a source and method of healing that goes beyond
astrology itself. We could put forth some theories of healing wherein astrology
itself works as a kind of tonic, guidance, support, or awareness-raising
agency; there are some ways in which it seems to work well -- such as when a
natal chart interpretation confirms your life ambitions, or even when a daily
horoscope column speaks to you.
It is also possible for an astrologer to study a position or
aspect sufficiently and in enough people to present a plausible theory about it
in a book or article. And it may be a very good theory and help some readers.
Finally, we can use astrology as a means of ascertaining or assigning the
meaning of events. This involves taking the bold leap to the idea that the events
have meaning; but of course they do. That meaning, or possibilities for
meaning, can be helpful. It is very often helpful to see life in terms of what
it may be teaching us and why, and to see the underlying messages of events --
and then actually learn something from them! But we are still pretty much in
the symbolic realm here. As the Course in Miracles says so beautifully,
"Symbols stand for something else, and the symbols of love are meaningless
if love is everything."
If you study astrology, please tape this to your computer:
What appears in the chart represents events, people, circumstances, situations,
feelings, ideas you have about yourself and the world, and so on -- but you and
what you actually feel and experience are the reality. How you correspond to
these symbols, and how they develop over time (that is, when transits happen),
is what I feel needs to come out of astrological work. Then, through this
process, the experience of the chart can gradually be understood in the
present, and an astrologer can help the person whose chart it is make the
decisions they face today.
Since we are using symbols, and since we don't quite get
that love is everything, we need to find out what they stand for. We need to
peel back the onion in terms of personal experience and interpretation of life.
This should take some time, say, at least a couple of sessions, and in the
space remaining, I will give a few basic examples of where we might go with
this from a real dialog with Alexandra -- a totally new approach for this
column.
When an astrologer is presented with a client and a chart, I
suggest that the first thing that happens is a process of getting acquainted;
that is, the use of the chart to see what's happening, and what has happened,
with the client, and enlisting the person to help clear up what's stated in the
chart. I recognize that there are some astrologers who can, or feel they can,
psychoanalyze the client entirely based on the chart; and even if they can do
so, I am not sure of the use of that. In any event, it would be a speculative
interpretation, no matter how accurate the interpretation worked out to be.
This is no small matter for astrology, but it's so large
that it rarely comes up. This approach to astrology is my response to the
"fate versus free will" discussion that has plagued our work. Is the
chart "deterministic" or does it point us to choices? Are we free, or
little cosmic puppets? Well, it depends on how you deal with the situation. If
astrology is going to be about free will, we're going to get there by free
will.
So, Alexandra, as you know, I wrote to you with some
queries. First, here is your chart:
When I saw this chart, the first thing I felt needed
attention was the Moon. I say that because: the Moon is rising, in the first
house -- so it's prominent and influential, if not immensely dominant; it is in
the last degree, which is an indicator of something -- of what, I don't know;
and it's square
The idea of this process is to get a better idea of what's
going on beneath the surface. Clients come in saying one thing, and often
something else is afoot.
So, I asked: please tell me a little about your mom in three
paragraphs. Here is the first paragraph, verbatim:
"wow, umm... ok, she was the middle class, middle child
of three, and her older sister and younger brother were problem children but
she wasn't (I mirror this exactly). her one "demand" on her folks was
that she got polio as a baby. never suffered any physical damage except it
weakened her back a lot, which has plagued her ever since. my grandpa was gruff
and authoritarian but loved my mom dearly. my grandma, one of the sweetest
women to walk the earth, was also a bit of a martyr and though my mom turned
out to be a self-sufficient working single mom of three--totally self-made,
self-educated, really refined--she took on some of those martyr qualities in
dealing with her own health."
[We also find out in the rest of the post that mom raised
the kids herself while running a business and getting back surgeries, and that
dad abandoned her several times.]
To be useful as an astrologer, it helps a lot to really
listen. Out of that paragraph, here is what I noticed, one particular sentence:
"[she] never suffered any physical damage except it
weakened her back a lot, which has plagued her ever since."
This felt like a giveaway; something became transparent to
me.
I quoted the sentence and sent it back, and asked her if she
noticed anything interesting about it. Alexandra responded:
"At the risk of being impossibly concrete, compared to
so many of those polio kids that were paralyzed, she got off easy and she
always said as much. her childhood was healthy after that, too. but her back
started to get really bad after we were babies -- hoisting us out of strollers
was probably what did it. she had two back surgeries when I was about 8 and 10,
and I and one of her good friends became her primary caregivers during that
time. when we were kids and desperately wanted mom to arbitrate our endless
fights, migraine headaches would prevent her from showing up.
"Yes, I have some issues with my mom over her
health."
My reply:
Thanks for responding. You said, "Yes, I have some
issues with my mom over her health." I believe you! -- and that was not
quite what I was onto! Here's what I was onto, and I get that she did not really
get whacked full on by the polio. Here's what you said, and I think it reflects
something important, look at your sentence structure carefully, I think you
said it quite precisely:
"[She] never suffered any physical damage except it
weakened her back a lot, which has plagued her ever since."
Nothing really, except it weakened her back, a lot?
In essence, the statement is either contradictory, or an
appearance on one level or the reality on another level, or at best, a kind of
minimization. I think it reflects more about her than about you -- about the
perception you were taught to have of her, something like that.
I think [with that statement] you may have the codes on that
late degree Moon rising, square
Is it, or is it not? Is it strong, or is it weak? What is
it? What edge is that Moon hanging out on, and how does it have so much
influence over you? What about your mom don't you know yet?
Also -- back surgery is excruciating, dangerous and it
doesn't always work so well. That is a lot for a kid to deal with. I am sure
that at 8 years old, you felt pretty grown up, because you had to -- but you
were little.
----
Also, I would add now there is the implication that
Alexandra is blaming herself, or was blamed, for her mother's back surgeries.
She said, "hoisting us out of strollers was probably what did it. she had
two back surgeries when I was about 8 and 10..." This is the kind of
belief, if unquestioned, that can be very debilitating to an adult.
Now, I'd like to drop in a little aside here. Alexandra
wrote asking about Chiron and her relationships. I wrote back and asked about
her Moon, in the form of her mom. I did not know what I was going to hear, but
I had a hunch it would be applicable. Relationships with parents have a lot to
do with relationships we have as an adult, and they are also quite influential
in setting up what we believe about life. This is not a discussion about the
past. It's a discussion about what we may believe right now.
For one important thing, relationships with parents can and
often do set the limits of our bliss. They can set the limits on what we feel
we deserve. They impart all kinds of ideas we may have no clue exist, until
some process opens up the subject and we start to listen to ourselves.
Alexandra replied:
"When I look at her life from my adult perspective, I
don't know how she managed. She kept a one-woman business running in the middle
of those two surgeries! I know now, after one month of grieving over my dad's
death (and many, many more to go) how much people need to shove big, scary,
life-changing stuff to the background so they can show up for work every day when
they are their own boss. Even though my mom would bitch about her back (and her
migraines) to us all the time when we were kids, and we'd roll our eyes as kids
always do, I can only imagine how much MORE pain and fear and worry and stress
she must have faced when she realized she'd have to have surgery. So even
though I experienced her health as a very central thing as a kid, she must have
tried to downplay it to herself lest she go fetal from fear.
"Not sure what you mean when you say 'the codes' but me
and my mom are like a never ending story. A therapist friend once told me, as I
was describing my relationship with my mom, that it was crazy-making because I
was running on two separate realities: on the surface, mom was dedicated, and
put us at the center of her life. But we had to walk a very fine line not to be
in her shithouse. I knew how to walk that line and got a lot of surface
approval, but felt a TON of internalized disapproval, because it was really
negative conditioning ("don't do this or mom will..."). I got good
grades in school and was self-sufficient as a kid (read constantly, didn't
cause too much trouble) but as I became a teenager, attempts to express myself
as I pleased did not go over so well. Imagine how little miss iconoclast Aquarius
rising punk rock high schooler managed being raised Mormon! I actually left
home for two months at age 15 due to a major dust-up with mom and refused to
come back unless she'd let me stay home from church. She agreed, but watched me
like a hawk til I went to college. We have since made peace -- I was always the
family-appointed Sane Child-peacemaker -- and I owe her so much of my success
now as a grown up writer chick in the big city. But it was a struggle,
man."
My reply: "You owe her what?"
Alexandra replies:
"Haha! I was just rereading my reply and thought you
might jump on that. Her example was a lot of it: she started what has turned
out to be an oddly-recession-proof business out of good taste and thin air, and
she showed me how to do that every day (she worked out of home so we witnessed
her whole career as kids, and I used to come with her on appointments after school).
She wears her expertise comfortably -- which was a good example to me, who
makes a living by expressing expertise in a breezy enough manner to be palatable
to magazine readers. She paid for my private high school education and college
when she could not afford it. She really raised all of us to feed our brains. She's
compassionate, articulate, has a ton of backbone (ha! irony!), integrity, etc.
And was always very vocal about the importance of those things -- they became
core values for me too. So in a lot of ways, she laid the groundwork for me to
do what I do now by her example and just by being a hardworking mom. That said,
when I first told her I wanted to be a writer, she said, "are you sure? That's
a really hard career path." Oh well. I showed her.
"Also, I'm feeling extra indebted to both my parents
after my dad's death, and one of my reactions to it is, appreciate mom as much
as you can while she's still alive to hear it."
Okay: appreciate, say thank you, give her a big hug, go
forth and be happy, right? In my view, we don't owe our parents our success, or
our lives. We're not their property, or their vassals, or their surrogates, nor
is our destiny their business. They hopefully do their best as parents, and get
out of the way -- or we learn to get out of their way and move on, as you seem
to have done. But that Aquarius Moon rising is a kind of a warning that unless
you take over the process of running your own life every day, mom's presence
will loom large all the time.
Rather than our owing our parents anything, I would propose
that our parents have a responsibility to help us deal with the unprocessed
material that they passed onto us; with their burdens that they passed onto us;
and with their false beliefs that they passed along. They are the ones, if
anything, who owe us OUR lives. And they need to pay up and be on their way.
Few parents do; few cop to the damage they do; instead, many try to keep
control, and engage their kids in neurotic relationships where nobody gets to
be an adult; it's always parent-kid stuff, and we see this played out in the
world all the time.
The dynamics of control are particularly insidious between
mothers as regards their daughters. Many never give up their grip, and many
never stop living vicariously through their daughters. Men at least are
rewarded for a measure of independence, professional, financial, sexual or
otherwise.
I had one last query for Alexandra. I saw that she had a
stellium of planets across Libra, and I know that Chiron came through there in
1994. So I asked her to tell me a bit about 1994-1995, because I felt a turning
point. She said:
"In 93, I decided pretty suddenly that being the
assistant to a bigwig
"In some respects, 94 was the real beginning of my
life."
----
So, what do we learn from this whole process?
Hmm, first, there's a heck of a lot behind a chart -- a
whole life! And the life is a lot more interesting than a jpg. And a heck of a
lot in that Aquarius Moon rising, square
Then, looking at a Chiron moment, in the form of 1994, we
saw a turning point, where she found her way and heard a calling, or took
control of her destiny. Read that paragraph carefully, the one beginning,
"in 93," and you will see a prime example of how Chiron can get life
going. It is truly the "inconvenient benefic," as Al H. Morrison said
it so well, way back at the beginning.
Last, we discovered the idea that Alexandra feels she owes
her mother something. I am not suggesting that she be ungrateful, but rather, I
am suggesting that there is no debt. I am not being a philosopher here, but
rather proposing a hacksaw where I see a chain. The sense of owing mother something
can easily translate into "owing everyone everything" -- and one is
probably not going to have happy relationships in that case. Relationships are
an exchange -- and it can take a long time to learn how to live in that
exchange.
We have not looked at Alexandra's natal Chiron, but it sure
is interesting: in Aries (a big subject by itself, if we want to get into
theory -- the ultimate astrological identity crisis, which can be exceedingly
productive), exactly opposite Venus and Uranus in Libra; and here is what I
think is super interesting: it's square Juno and Pallas in Capricorn; there is
something about marriage here, which is another way of saying something about
the need to be free. It is a square, after all; it's not just going to sit
around smoking expensive cigars. It's gonna stir stuff up.
Because so many marital relationships involve everything but
freedom, and because nearly all romantic relationships are based on the
marriage model, it can be rather difficult having relationships once you've
figured out you really need to be free. And that Aquarius Moon needs nothing if
it doesn't need to be free. But then what? That is a big question, and I'm
going to let it hang like that Moon on the horizon.
One last point. How much do you see in the water signs in
this chart? Even adding five extra heavy-duty planets -- Pholus, Nessus,
Asbolus, Hylonome, Quaoar and Psyche -- just two planets, angles or points in
her entire chart fall in a water sign -- Neptune, and the North Node.
Water is the nearly missing element. Because it involves
Water is also an essential element in relationships. It's
going to need to come from somewhere -- most likely a partner who is deeply
emotionally grounded and able to navigate in this element, which we all need to
do, no matter what our charts say.
Were this a live session, I would set the work down for a
week and come back to it a week later with Alexandra. At that point, I might
talk about her chart. Certainly, it would be an informed discussion -- that is,
informed BY HER. And all the little details would make a lot more sense in the
context of what we learned today.
Alexandra -- thanks for writing, and for letting us use your
chart and our email exchange. See you next week, or see you over at Planet
Waves.
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