This is the second entry of a two-part series. Here is the first. I’ve also posted an audio link below, sent in today by Melanie Reinhart, who helped with this article. It’s a song called From Soul to Soul, by a London gospel ensemble featuring Paul Carrack.
Today the Earth aligns with the Sun and Chiron to form a conjunction in Pisces. The conjunction is an extension of Tuesday’s New Moon, which was at the Neptune-Chiron midpoint. So today’s aspect is a kind of culmination. Whatever it represents has been brewing a while, and we will see different manifestations through the weekend and in truth for much longer.
In astrology, the Sun represents the adult ego. The ruling body of Leo and the one exalted in Aries, the Sun is the expressive principle — the big I Am. Egos come in all shapes and sizes. The adult ego is supposed to have a sense of both self and other; it wants a role in the world; it wants to shine out. It’s the basic statement of existence, but many more processes are operating that help that ego/I Am to mature — and those are usually represented by the outer planets (spending most of its orbit outside of Saturn’s orbit, Chiron has that property and in many ways exemplifies it).
As we mentioned yesterday, Sun-Chiron aspects can come with a struggle around maleness and around father. We live in a culture that doesn’t produce so many emotionally mature men. Whatever we can say about women, we might say that our culture specializes in the man-child — and the warrior.
We’re really great a creating warriors, who possess qualities which we then conflate with male maturity and extol as heroism. When you add Chiron to the Sun, by aspect or by transit, that hero can take a fall or be exposed as something less. Consider all the scandals involving corrupt cops and politicians previously venerated as heroes. For psychology heads, this is where the concept ‘shadow material’ comes into the picture, and the question of how we process it.
Taken another way, Sun-Chiron aspects can represent the very conditions that allow an immature man to grow into an expressive and responsible one. Often the way that happens is that a man gets hurt at some stage early in life, or experiences a sense of injury or of being outcast, and as a result of that injury or sense of injury goes through a healing process that allows him to gather power. What we think of as ego begins to express something deeper — that elusive quality we describe as soul, or in non-religious terms, you might say authentic personhood. Typically there is, however, little appreciation in our culture for the long process of initiation that it takes to get there.