Hi, my name is Chris Brennan and this is the Astrology podcast. Today I'm going to be talking with Melanie Reinhardt about the astrology of Chiron. So this is episode 271 and I'm recording it on Monday, September 14, 2020, starting at 11.04 a.m. in Denver, Colorado. Hi, Melanie, welcome to the episode or welcome to the show. Hi, Chris and thanks so much for inviting me to have a conversation with you.
Yeah, this is, I'm excited to do this episode. It's been one I've been needing to do for a long time and that a lot of listeners have asked me to do an episode on Chiron. I did an episode just sort of in general on the asteroids earlier this year, finally with Dmitra George, but I wanted to, we didn't really go. I saw that it was lovely. Yeah, I was glad to have that discussion, but one of the points that came up that was interesting that we noted is that she had focused more on series and best and Juno and didn't cover Chiron as much in her book, but yours was one of the first books that really set the stage.
Early in my studies and the early 2000s, there were like two major books on Chiron that were out there and yours was really one of the main ones and seems like it's been one of the most influential ones in establishing Chiron as something that a lot of modern astrologers use in practice. Really quickly, the title of your book is Chiron and the Healing Journey, which is published in 1989, right? Yes, and then there was a revision I did and my own imprint came out in 2010. Okay, yes. The first one was published by Penguin. Right, yeah, I was part of the Penguin Arcana series, which was like a really amazing series at the time.
Oh, that was, oh, it was really wonderful. Really wonderful. Like Jeffrey Cornelius is the moment of astrology in your book and like a few other really major books at the time. Yes. All right, let's go ahead. The series editor was Howard Susportus. Oh, wow. Okay. And then later, I think by the time of the second edition of your book, it was Aaron Sullivan. Correct. Okay. Yes, after how it died, she, was she'd been working with him on it, but she took over that and fought very hard to keep the thing going, but Penguin basically abandoned it.
Okay. I was wondering what happened. Which was a pity because actually when the series began, they had a marvelous overall editor called Robin Waterfield. He was a classic scholar. Yeah. And very much astrology friendly. He was a really notable classic scholar. Oh, absolutely. Yes. And a really nice bloke and very astrology friendly. And he went on to greater things and basically left a big vacuum in the overall editorship. And apart from his shepherding of it, really Penguin wasn't really equipped with the subject material, you know?
Sure. And then they just kind of abandoned it and just didn't reprint stuff. And bit by bit, the whole series went out of print. It was very sad that. Yeah. Well, this was back when major publishers like Penguin were still doing astrology books, which it seems like many have moved away from. Correct. Howard Susportus, the gods of change, was one of the books in that series, which is also an amazing book. That's right. But let's talk about your work. So first, I wanted to introduce you to my audience and talk a little bit about your background and some of the things that you've done just to give some context for your work.
So in your bio on your website, it says that you've been practicing astrology since about 1975. Yeah. Well, that was when I did my first piece of paid for work. I'd been reading charts already for a few years before that. Okay. So that was the first time you did a paid consultation. I was asked people like, what do you consider like the moment that you started being a practicing astrologer? And for you, it's the first time somebody paid you for a consultation?
I would know because I was already reading lots of charts actually before that for a few years. And I took that equally seriously, you know? Right. Certainly the first paid for consultation that felt like some little watershed also very significant was that was the very month that I actually met Dean Rudyard. Wow. So I was living in the States at that time in Massachusetts and he did a weekend workshop in the astrology center, I believe it was called in New York City. I traveled down to New York for this and had a weekend in heaven meeting Dean Rudyard and so on. He was quite wonderful.
And it was really down to him. He was the one who really gave me the shove to encourage me to start charging and to start thinking of myself as a professional, which I wasn't really before. I was taking it seriously, but that was very special. Was Rudyard one of your primary influences early on as a astrology? Absolutely. Yes. Astrology had come into my life when I was 10 years old and a very kind of, well, interesting circumstances in the light of what I focused on later. In that I fell and broke my arm rather badly up near the shoulder and I had a lot of time. off school because I had to be in this huge plaster cast. So moving on to difficult and getting around and all that. But the local library was at the end of our street. So instead of going to school, I would kind of waddle down the road. This big, big plaster cast thing and spend my day in the library.
Now this was back in Radeegia as it was, Zimbabwe as it's become and it was and is basically an agrarian economy. And so there was one shelf about yay wide. I could do not call philosophy psychology in religion. That was it. This was the national library of Radeegia. However, even a small bookshelf like that, if you really read this stuff and really think about it, you can get like years of inquiry and thinking and wondering and being philosophically stimulated. And there was one little book on astrology. I wish I remembered the title in the author, but I don't. And my memory of that is so vivid. I remember because I had my arm in this big cast out here. Because I propped the book on the cast and I was reading it like this and I absolutely knew that there was way more to astrology than was in this little book.
So I was left feeling really frustrated. Was the only one on astrology. And I just absolutely knew that there was so much more to it. And in that moment, the passion to find out and to learn more was ignited. So in the lacking classes or books because it was wartime and sanctions and all that, I simply memorized all the sunsines and then I would ask every single person I met, always ask them their birthday. And I would think and write notes and see how it checked out with this little book and Ponder and Wanda and so forth. And I did that for years and years. Just sort of thinking about it, mulling it over. I remember also my father showing me some of the constellations at night, vivid memories of that against a beautiful black African sky.
How did your family, you were born in Zimbabwe and you spent the first part of your life there? How did that come about? Yes. So my father was born in South Africa. His father was from Yorkshire and my mother was born in Dublin and they actually met out in Zimbabwe. Okay. So did you find astrology definitely at the age of ten or was it around ten? Yeah. Okay. That's a beautiful story. So you started, that started your lifelong interest in it and then eventually you said you were in New York, by the time you met Rudyard and you were living in the US at what point did your studies really accelerate or was it already just full on from there?
They accelerated when I left school and went down to Cape Town to university. And compared to Zimbabwe Cape Town, there was this major metropolis. And it was possible to get astrology books and things like that. What was the time frame and what was the astrological community like there and South Africa at that point? I didn't connect with it at all. Which is really interesting because I have a dear astrological friend, Darbicostello and she actually arrived in Africa the year that I left. So we were like ships passing in the night and never met there but met back in London.
So that's the step there. A friend gave me a book by Dane Rudyard called The Pulse of Life. For my, I think it was my 20th or my 19th birthday and I just had this epiphany when I read it. What I had just like an absolute ecstasy of connecting with the way this man thought and recognizing myself in the astrology and it was like this was what I'd been looking for. I was so inspired and that connection was part of the reason why I left Africa. I didn't really know anything about the astrological community in England and how rich it was but I knew at least I'd be able to get more of a astrologer's books and so forth.
So I did leave and I lived for many years either living directly in or connected to a spiritual community in the Sufi tradition and when I arrived there to take up my residence it only turned out that the man, the teacher who was focalising this community he was only the publisher of Dane Rudyard's work. So there was like the complete first edition, hardback, original publications of Rudyard which took up you know a big amount of the community bookshelf and it was through him that I first met Rudyard and then the second time was when I went down to New York to the workshop. Yeah. And so that was that community, the Sufi community was in the UK. Yes. Okay. Got it. So then eventually you make that personal connection with Rudyard. He encourages you to dive into the practice of astrology which must have been really compelling at that point if he was like your main person. Oh yeah. It was like it was like God on high had given me this crucial bit of encouragement.
Sure. So let's see. So to circle around, actually I'm not sure if to jump for it. I mean eventually when we jump into our main topic which is Kairan was discovered on November 1st 1977 by an astronomer named Charles Cole. This began a period in like the late 70s and early 1980s when it seemed like astrologers started slowly getting interested in studying minor planetary bodies and asteroids like series and vest and Juno and then eventually some astrologers started studying Kairan. At what point did you get interested in it or start researching it? Immediately that I heard about its discovery because it was immediately named by the person who discovered it. Usually a whole big numbering and naming process can go on which can take years actually for a name to be confirmed and it has to be agreed by a committee which is the International Astronomical Union.
In the case, the astronomer who discovered Kairan knew some background mythology and he could see that there was a relationship between Saturn and Uranus and so in that sense that is part of the genealogy behind Kairan's legacy and so forth so he named it Kairan. And the name stuck so that it was named immediately sometimes it's only named a long time after and it was only six months before ephemeralesses came out. Oh wow okay that's quick so he named it very quick because it orbits between the orbits of Saturn and Uranus. Yes and the other thing was that in the first ephemeralesses I forget oh Tony Joseph was the name of a leave. They came out within six months and there was an excellent introductory essay just two or three pages and I was very excited because it was exactly along the same lines that I've already been thinking.
So I was interested immediately for entirely personal reasons because I knew the mythology of Kairan and the whole notion of the wounded healer was already meaningful in my life. Had you already studied mythology a lot extensively up to that point or was that a major piece of your- I wouldn't say extensively but I'd studied quite a lot in a way using the planets as my base and kind of digging around from that but I'm not like a proper student of mythology like some of our community are. Okay so let's see so Kairan was the first of a new class of bodies called centauros that are discovered which are bodies orbiting between the asteroid belt and the quiper belt which is really far out there.
No it's my understanding that well in the beginning when the when this group of quiper belt objects- or let me put that differently- objects that were said to have originated in the quiper belt- we're discovered and the whole group was called centauros. There was a flurry of attempts to define these little beasts and in the beginning it seemed quite straightforward to me and it was logical and made sense and it was kind of obvious. So in other words there were a few distinguishing characteristics of these objects. One was they all have very elliptical orbits. Two was that the orbits are very steeply inclined to the ecliptic. And three they all with one exception I mentioned maybe later they all cross over the orbit of at least one of the classical planets.
Okay. But the sort of centaur zone if you like is in between Jupiter and Pluto. So if they go in closer like into the asteroid belt they're not centaurs anymore. And if they go further out than Pluto they're not centaurs anymore so they're kind of in this zone which links the outer part of the visible planets to the invisible planets and to me that symbolism absolutely speaks volumes you know. Do you want me to say a bit more about that all? I'd want to get into that. I like that actually because that's one of your access points that's really interesting to me in your work for understanding Kairan is not just a mythology but also the astronomical properties. Astronomy it's so so eloquent I love it.
Yeah. Astronomy I mean. So let me throw out a few other preliminary things really quickly so Kairan has been variously classified as an asteroid a minor planet a dwarf planet or even a comet. Some astrologers quickly became interested in researching it. I tried to compile a quick biography or bibliography and you could let me know if this is correct or not but one of the earliest astrologers or one of the first that I've been told who started working with kiron there was an astrologer named zane stein. Correct. Then there was another book by Hermany Lentero. Oh yes now I did read that. Titled the continuing discovery of kiron that came out in 1984. Fantastic book yes. Okay if you like that and then Demetri's book asteroid goddesses came out in June of 1986. There was another book by Barbara Henklau that came out on kiron in 1987. Your book kiron and the healing journey was published first published in 1989. Yep.
好的,天文学方面的讨论。我想快速提到一些前期信息:凯龙(Chiron)曾经被归类为小行星、小天体、矮行星,甚至是彗星。一些占星学家很快对研究它产生了兴趣。我尝试整理了一份快速传记或书目,你可以告诉我这是否正确。据我所知,最早或最先开始研究凯龙的占星学家之一是名叫赞恩·斯坦(Zane Stein)的占星师。没错。然后,赫尔玛尼·伦特罗(Hermany Lentero)写了一本书《凯龙的持续发现》,于1984年出版。确实是一本很棒的书。接下来是德米特里的书,《小行星女神》,于1986年6月出版。巴巴拉·汉克劳(Barbara Hand Clow)也在1987年出版了一本关于凯龙的书。你的书,《凯龙与治疗之旅》,首次出版是在1989年。不错。
And then there were other subsequent books for example by Martha Lang Westcott that also dealt with both asteroids as well as hypothetical planets. Is there anybody else that I should mention? Two more Richard Nol or Nolly. And this is an early one. I think it was just called kiron. Okay. There was some some great insights in there. And then much more recently Adam Gainesburg. Kiron and the wisdom of a deep something about the wisdom of the heart. Beautiful book. Okay brilliant. So that and so get Adam. Adam's is really recent and Richard Nol is like way back one of the first people. Okay. Yeah. Adam's book is kiron the wisdom of a deeply open heart. That's it. September 2006. All right. So that's some of the early history and that all sorts of sort of places you in terms of when when your book came out and also showing that there was a lot of early interest.
然后还有其他后续的书籍,比如Martha Lang Westcott的作品,也探讨了小行星和假想行星。还有其他人需要提到吗?还有两位,Richard Nol或者Nolly。他的一本早期书籍,我想名字只是简单的《凯龙》。这本书中有一些很棒的见解。而最近一些的是Adam Gainesburg的作品。书名是《凯龙与深入内心的智慧》,非常美丽的书。很好。Adam的书很新,而Richard Nol则是很久以前的作者之一。对的,Adam的书名是《凯龙:深度开放心灵的智慧》。发表于2006年9月。这就是一些早期的历史,并且显示出在你的书出版时已经有很多早期的兴趣。
So your book was published I guess 12 years after kiron was first discovered. And so you'd been working with it for at least over a decade at that point. Yeah. Because I got into it immediately. And also in in my own chart. I've kiron in Sagittarius opposite my son in Gemini. And it kind of it's visually stands out in the chart. So I said occasionally thought well you know if this little unknown object is going to be relevant for me it should be fairly easy to see in terms of life events and trans and them. And then about six months later I realized oh my god by transit kiron was about to make conjunctions with every single one of my personal planets. So it was discovered in Taurus. Then I have a whole band of planets in Taurus and Gemini. And I thought oh look at that.
I then thought oh well I guess you know if there is something in this for me or others then my life should turn into a like a ring sites a ring site seat with a kiron show. Right. Because just years about about 10 years worth of conjunctions. Okay. My my god I had no idea what was coming down the tracks for me I tell you. And I really feel I learned everything that I learned about kiron from this in a journey. And then later from working with clients. And I feel that the journey I went on equipped me to do that work. There was an entire kind of cosmology. Which kind of rolled itself out as a result of my journey. And it it went into areas of of psychological work that were unheard of back then. And on now not exactly top of the pops but more and more people that understanding these themes and writing about them.
So amongst others those include transgenerational trauma and by the same token, transgenerational healing. And also healing the historical wounds that are embedded in that ancestry. Even including things that aren't direct personal wounds. But things like cultural injustices and so forth because obviously coming from Rhodesia. There was really a lot to process in terms of the colonial history that went on in Africa. My god you know just unbelievable. And that was not really considered back then even in the more enlightened versions of psychological treatments and all the rest of it. And so I wrote about all of that kind of stuff in my book.
And it's lovely now to see that lots and lots of people are doing all kinds of really amazing work in exactly those areas. But at the time I was very much on my own with that. Even though I was in a Jungin analysis, that framework at least in the practice of it. I didn't really feel met by it. In the way that I was experiencing this process. And it was like I mean I hesitate to use the word because I don't want to be claiming anything. But it felt like a kind of process of shamanic initiation which went on from 1983 until past 1989 and that period included the writing of the book. Which felt to me like a thread. Like an Ariadne thread type of thing. In terms of the personal transits that I was watching from Kiron onto my chart.
Now you might be able to talk yourself into lots of things interpretively in astrology but you cannot fake transits that absolutely demonstrate the symbolism and the process. And it was like a kind of a lifeline for me. So pretty soon I began to get clients where it was the same. They were like walking symbolic compendiums of the story of Kiron. And this actually pings me onto one of the questions that you wrote here. A listener question. Okay. Yes, the question is when do you feel you need to talk about Kiron? Right, that came from a listener. Yes, from Zamboni. Yeah, Zamboni, folks. Yeah, that there's a very particular answer to that. First of all, I don't feel I need to talk about I need to talk about Kiron. And I almost never try to interpret it. All I do is listen. And if what I'm hearing from my client who's speaking is basically telling me a story which is so obviously within the territory of Kiron.
And there I hesitated because I now very much think of all the centaurs as a group. And when I say all I should clarify, I don't use them all is more than I forgot the number. I think it's about around 400 centaurs now. There's only about 20 of them I think which have actually been named. And of those even fewer that have been researched. Me, I don't think of myself as a researcher. I can only work with something that absolutely speaks to me. And I can't make that happen. So once that energy connection and almost like a full body energy connection has occurred, then I do the so-called research. But all I'm doing is kind of containing or like if you're painting you might have a vision first and then you get out the paints and the oils and the brush.
So that's what I tried to do with words, tried to paint a picture of what I'd already experienced, not just me, but hundreds and hundreds of clients. It got so bizarre that I sometimes thought, my god, this really feels like these clients are coming to teach me about how Kiron works. Unbelievable. So part of your process though was an empirical process of like understanding what this new body meant partially through paying attention to it in your own chart. And also, exactly. Paying attention to it in the charts of clients. Indeed. So just to go back to Zamboni's question, I really don't feel like I need to talk about Kiron. But I guess maybe because I've worked so much with it, mostly I do end up talking about Kiron. And mostly that's because I can hear the story in what people are telling me.
And it's got down to one time a man walked in limping and he'd fallen off a horse and injured his leg. Kiron was injured in his leg and he was a centaur, so his horse half with the lower half. I mean, and of course he had a big Kiron transit. And I'm sitting there kind of almost speechless because I don't even know what to say. Sure. Well, let's go back to square one just and let's assume that anybody listening to this doesn't have any idea what Kiron means or anything about the mythology and let's introduce the starting point. So you started sitting empirically, but also there was a heavy use of mythology and a sort of presumption that it seems like many astrologers were making from the 1970s and 1980s forward that the name that was chosen for Kiron and the Greek myths associated with that actually had some sort of deeper symbolic significance that actually related to what it meant in astrology, right?
Yes, I think, yeah, I think that's true. I mean, is that true or I don't want to put a reach here. Well, I don't I don't know about the assumption. Well, I never really assume that it was just that everything seemed to everything seemed to fit, you know, and then I mean, do you think that the mythology of Kiron is relevant for its interpretation and meaning and astrology? Yes, I do. Okay. I do. And do you know when I was actually writing the book, I mean, collected up these massive boxes of notes and so forth, but I actually never even thought of writing a book. I was just working to try and understand it myself. It was Howard who made that suggestion, bless him. So he had Kiron in Scorpio on the mid-Heaven and he was the one who gave me the show, gave me the prompt, you know? Nice.
Yeah, very nice. Yeah, so what is the myth associated with Kiron or what parts of the myth are relevant for somebody that's new to understanding Kiron mythology? Yeah, I would say that there's a very important reflection for us astrologers of the meaning of Kiron if you just study the astronomy a little bit. It's very graphic and I love that. So to me, you know, if the name and the mythology and the astronomy check out with the astrology that you're actually seeing, well, you know, that's good enough for me. I know that that's why I said I'm not really a researcher. I just kind of put stuff together and, you know, initially that would be a resonance in my own process and I don't automatically assume it's going to be of interest to anybody else.
It's usually a really long time before I have researched it and then begin to share it and so forth because essentially the other centers that I work with, I don't work with all 400 or something. I only work with four, but each of them I learned about in the same way and ongoingly, you know? Right. So, I think I can let me answer your question more directly. So we see that Kiron and the Centaur's occupy the zone in the solar system that goes between Jupiter and Pluto. So that zone includes the outer edges of the easily visible planets and the ones that can't be seen with the naked eye but were discovered with maths and technology.
So it really is like two different worlds. They cross to and fro between these two worlds, the visible and the invisible. Now that absolutely speaks volumes because we all know what the visible world is, at least at the level of the senses and the notion of the invisible worlds, wow, that contains so much. It's our own internal experience. It's what's known as the unconscious in some systems of psychology. It's the spirit world. That's a more ancient and indigenous kind of a cosmology, but it's totally part of the human experience. It's just been pushed out and derided and oppressed for so long that people don't believe it, don't believe in it.
Regardless of the fact that many, many people do have experiences of the spirit world through their dreams, through reveries, through spirit visitations, etc. But they probably don't speak about it. Afraid that people think they're mad. Likewise, people can communicate with animals. This is a natural thing. Like any gift, it can be more developed in some people than others, but actually it's natural to be able to communicate with animals. And this is a very, very ancient thing, communicating with plants, same thing. There's a whole range of wonderful and flower healing, essences. There's almost, not all over the world, people are now they're reviving the way of using plants, essences, and the way it's done is through a communion.
Where it's like you know, you speak to the spirit of the plant or more accurately, they speak to you. Now you see it's that kind of consciousness that Kiron brings to us. Some people are very at home in that and others are frankly terrified and don't want to know. Fair enough. You know, so this notion of crossing the borders and connecting different dimensions of experience between the living and the dead, between the animals and the human, between the past and the future, whatever. And making that bridge, I mean in Barbara Han Klaus, lovely book, she calls Kiron the Rainbow Bridge. And I think partly it's this astronomical symbolism that evokes that so Kiron acting as a bridge and bridging two worlds or two seemingly unconnected areas.
And that partially is also reflected in the astronomy as you described it as well as in the mythology of Kiron being like half human and half animal. Exactly. In his image, in his very form, is exactly that dilemma. Okay. And what is the, for those that don't know why, what that means in terms of Kiron being half human and half animal, why is that or what is the myth associated with that? Well, in his, in the myth of his origins, Kiron's father was Kronus or Saturn. And his mother was a nymph called Filira. And at the time Kiron was conceived, both these, well Saturn was a God, a member of the Olympian gang. And Filira was a nymph. But like gods and demigods often can shape shift.
So both of them had shape shifted into being in their horse form. And that, they were like that when Kiron was conceived. So when Kiron was born to Filira, when he came out of the womb, as half horse, he was completely horrified. And prayed to the gods to be made into anything other than what she was, namely the mother of a monster, as she saw it. So Kiron was abandoned. And in the time honored manner of myth and legend was found by a shepherd and rescued from certain death and taken to the great God Apollo, who became his foster father. So he was mentored and fostered by Apollo himself, who taught him numerous skills. Like Apollo was also associated with healing. Very significantly, both he and his sister were said to both send and cure plagues.
And yeah, he was, Kiron. was taught all kinds of survival skills and in a sense. He had almost like one can imagine the kind of initiation rights, the appropriate for a young man, young hero, whatever. And there was an incident where some of the more unruly sentors, the ones that they don't have any Olympian ancestors, they're more like a seething uncontrollable mob that used to rampage through towns and take wine and steal it or take brides and steal them. They're an image of just a raw, unbridled, vital force. And so those are the sentors without any particular Olympian legacy for ancestry. And they often used to fight.
So in one of those fights, Kiron got wounded by an arrow from Hercules, who was often, there's a lot of freezers statues in the British Museum, some of them from the Parthenon depicting the battle between the Lappaths and the sentors. And Hercules was often involved in those battles. And it's like the kind of time-honoured battle between the so-called civilized and the so-called primitive. So so evocative because of course a lot of that. Description rests on projection. Anyway, Kiron was wounded in the leg, pens which version as to where, but it's either the thile, the knee, another centaur was wounded in the foot, but that's another story.
And because the wound was poisoned, he couldn't heal it. And as a demigod, he couldn't die. And so he lived and I think it's either a poladorus or hisiod, it gives the figure of 900 and something years that he lived in mortal agony, unable to heal his own wound, but becoming a great mentor and wise man and healer himself in the process. And then eventually, he changed places with Prometheus. Prometheus, you might know this story, he was chained on a rock because he had mocked Zeus, probably not a very good idea, but that's what he did. Sure. And it's a really interesting story, but too long I think to go into here.
Prometheus is mainly known as the fellow who stole the fire from the gods. And that's like a comic strip version of it. There's a whole background thing which is really thought-provoking, very interesting, and that part is in my book. But anyway, the notion of changing places with somebody that's like the phrase walking a mile in someone's moccasins, you know, so it's awakening of compassion when you can really, really do that. And so this was what freed both of them from their suffering and Kiron was able to die, meaning become immortalized in this context.
In the constellation of Centaurus or some say Sagittarius, there's some scholarly discussion about which of those two constellations best portrays the storylines. And it does seem that Centaurus looks more like the insignia or the story around Pholus. But what is very interesting is that the two centaurs, they're not that far away from each other. I mean in Skyterms, of course it's like miles, but if you look on a star map, the two centaurs actually look or point their arrows towards the scorpion.
And above the scorpion is the so-called 13th sign, you know, a fukus that cyclically kind of gets reported in the news and causes alarm and despondency because everybody thinks all there's already signs are wrong and everything. But anyway, it's a beautiful picture because both the centaurs and also a fukus are concerned with illness, sickness and healing as well. And you know, the scorpion is also associated with poison and also the power of transformation that partly through the Pluto connection.
Because when we look at Kiron and the centaurs, what we can see immediately is that Pluto and Kiron and the centaurs, to me, they belong in the same category because of the astronomy. So all of them, so before Kiron and the centaurs was discovered, Pluto was the only orbit crossing planet at such a high, such a steep angle to the ecliptic. And it was Dan Rudjar who waxed lyrical about that decades before Kiron was discovered. And he spoke about orbit crossing in a similar way that he spoke about comets, that it was like the intrusion of new energy into an old system or the bringing in of the light from out of the dark.
Also, the purification, he spoke about the sense of something coming in to the solar system, almost like an intervention and bringing new energy. new impulses of energy and so forth. Not Rudolf Steiner, very interesting on the subject of comets because he spoke about a process of astral purification whereby the comet, so what we see as the comet's tail getting brighter and brighter and brighter, he describes that as sort of astral debris being burned up and so like purifying the solar system as it goes, very interesting. So temporarily in 1970, 1989, 1987, 1988, or maybe a bit later, there was just a short period where Kiron got a comet classification because they thought they saw a tail that was brightening but it didn't really come to much.
Now, what's so interesting about Kiron, it keeps on being reclassified. I think it's now settled because he's now the chief, chief center of the center gang, you know, but before that, he has an asteroid number, a comet number and of course a minor planet appellation. Yeah, right. First name was a planetoid, planetoid, asteroid, comet, then minor planet and then the subcategory of center. Yes, I'm the point is he's kept all of those classifications. He hasn't gone, oh no, no, not that. You know, it's like it all fits, it all kind of works. So a beautiful image of a process of transformation of our own core identity really, that when we're changing from who we thought we were into who we are becoming, you know, we might move from planetoid to asteroid to comet, et cetera.
And it's not that any of those are wrong, wrong and should be there for thrown away. They're all fine. It's all part of the journey. And to me, that's a very powerful symbol. Yeah, it looks like on the Wikipedia entry, it still has the dual classification. It says, although it was initially called an asteroid and classified only as a minor planet with the designation 2060, Kiron, it was later found to exhibit behavior typical of a comet. Today, it is classified as both a minor planet and a comet and is accordingly also known by the commentary designation 95 p slash Kiron.
So it still has this like dual astronomical role, which is really interesting in terms of like and time back in with the mythology of being a half human and half animal. Exactly. And that thing of linking the inner world and the outer world. And yeah, so all of the above really speaks volumes. Also, how I think about the fact, you see, Kiron actually cuts through Saturn's orbit. And now I did make notes about this as to when the last dates were. I think it was with some point in 1992, Kiron went in through Saturn's orbit at about six degrees of Leo.
And on the on the it was January 1999, it came back out through the portal of zero and some minutes of Sagittarius. And it will come in and out through those two signs for quite a few passes still. So it has a 50 year orbital cycle, right? That's right. It's just in just over 50 years, but fairly even sort of between 50 and 51ish, but you know, pretty that's pretty regular. Whereas of course, because of the orbital eccentricity, you can't divide the Kiron cycle neatly like you can Saturn and say, oh, or roughly every seven to nine years, you know, you get a big big phone call from Saturn, you know, you can't do that with Kiron because the first quirk can occur any age from, I think it's about five when I was researching this and get it as young as five years old.
Or you can get it in your early 20s. So it depends on which sign Kiron is in. So it's because of its highly elliptical orbit, it's more like an oval rather than a circle. Exactly. And it moves through some signs of the zodiac very quickly, like Virgo and Libra, and about two years. Correct. Whereas it moves through other signs like Pisces and Areas very slowly and takes eight years. Correct. Absolutely right. And there you can see that because well, Kiron actually moves through the orbit of Saturn physically.
And then at the app Helion, in other words, its furthest distance from the Sun, it goes way up to Uranus, but doesn't actually cross its orbital path. It goes into what's called what's rather confusingly called the sphere of Uranus. It goes to the inside, but not actually right across the mean average orbital path. And so there it's, you know, it's kind of really obvious because Kiron takes, I mean Saturn takes roughly two and a half years to go through one sign. And Uranus takes about seven to eight years. Likewise when Kiron's really near Saturn or inside Saturn, it'll go really quickly through its signs.
And when it's approaching the app Helion, it'll be it'll be long, like Uranus seven to eight years, you see? Okay. So let's see. So going back to the mythology, it seems like two of the main some of the main key words that astrologers have developed, especially from mythology are ideas of Kiron being the wounded healer and that being like a major recurring motif that astrologers use when they're discussing Kiron. Yeah. And that's partially due to the idea that it was, he was somebody that was poisoned, but then because he was partially immortal, he couldn't die, but he also had the skills to heal other people without being able to heal himself. Correct.
Now there's another thing, which in fact, this was where I was going when I spoke about the fact that Kiron goes through the orbit of Saturn. To me, that particular astronomy also tells us something when we link it with our knowledge of astrology. So if we think of Saturn as established structures, I mean, obviously that's not a keyword description of Saturn, but the meaning of Saturn includes reference to the established structures, you know, history, tradition, the status quo, what we take for granted. Also our psychological patterning and defenses, whether they're known to us or unknown to us, and so on.
And so when we're in a process of change, it's very painful for the ego. Even if it's a change we've been working for or intending or working towards, it can still be very, very painful when you really take yourself to the edge of your structures. As you get to know about them, it can be exception painful. And so there's a way in which this endless looping around the Kiron does through the orbit of Saturn, through the orbit of Saturn, it makes me think of kind of needing bread or digging in the garden or something. Something has to be cultivated.
And I think there is where the theme of the heart comes in because, you know, in many different traditions, it's pointed out that the heart be that the simple feeling human heart or the heart chakra with its internal energy connections, that is the place from which opposites can be reconciled. And hey, a clear pair of opposites is Saturn and Uranus. So the status quo, and that which turns the status quo upside down, including internally. So that can be a shock of any kind, including just the regular ordinary shocks that we meet through our life in the process of growing up and becoming socialized and all the rest of it.
And so Kiron kind of goes looping through and connecting the visible and the invisible in a process of kind of spiritually maturing. So that may or may not have anything to do with being sick or ill or wounded per se, but it might do. There's a correlate to that which is that many people experience major, major awakenings as a direct result of illness and physical suffering and wounds of various kinds. It's incredibly common. I'm sure all of you listening, we probably know at least one person, probably several, who've had those kinds of experiences.
You really, you really are taken right out of the familiar, visible, known world. If you have an experience of very severe pain. And if you work with that in whatever way makes sense for you, it can really, really be like your teacher. And as that has been very much part of my life, I think that's also one of the, one of the reasons I resonated immediately with Kiron because this might sound a strange thing to say, but I almost feel like like the path of working with suffering, our own or others, it is a particular kind of spiritual path.
There are lessons we get from our own illnesses and physical sufferings as well as emotional sufferings that we don't get in any other way. Right. Empathy is a really major component that sometimes comes from suffering. They've been thinking about lately in reading one person's biography is that his repeated instances of loss in his life had allowed him to cultivate a sense of empathy that he might not have had otherwise. Exactly right. Exactly right.
And very often, you know, in the case where Kiron in the horoscope can be seen to symbolize a really particular gift that somebody has that's usually a gift that has been bestowed on the back of a lot of suffering. And you can't kind of manipulate that and say, oh, let me look at my chart and see, see what gift my Kiron placement is going to give me so I can get to that as quick as possible. Right. Like a shortcut or something. Exactly right. Because it's bestowed. You can't kind of fall. You can't fake that.
Okay. There's no cheat codes for Kiron. So what are the, so let's talk maybe about an instance to give a concrete example. I mean, I obviously that makes me think of your example when you're a ten of having that injury and being in that cast. But then as a result of that, you know, going to the library and reading a lot and coming across an astrology book and having that sort of initiation into astrology through that.
I did a, there's a similar example earlier this year when the astrologer Robert Zoller passed away. I released an old interview that I did with him ten years ago and he similarly talked about being a very sickly child. And one of the only things that brought him pleasure that he could do was just read fairy tales and things like that. And through that, he eventually got into astrology.
That seems like an interesting, that seems to get to the core of sort of part of what you're talking about in terms of sometimes people having a pain or an experience of suffering, but something that allows them then to find something else that then eventually they're able to use to help other people in some way or that becomes part of their personal journey. Absolutely.
Yes. And a variant on that theme is that where, where you find chiron, it does sometimes indicate things that we do extremely well for others, but we can't do for ourselves. That's like chiron not being able to heal his wound. And you know, those things range from just, from just amusing and bothersome to really, really big life patterns.
That often do eventually come to a crisis in the person who's doing for others what they can't do for themselves has to kind of turn the ship around for their own survival sometimes. Yeah. Like I'm thinking of, let's say like a chiron connected with relationships at the seventh house and maybe somebody that does marriage counseling for other people, but who themselves maybe struggles with relationships for a while or just reason or another?
Exactly. In fact, I can even think of a couple of examples of exactly that. And very poignantly, who got into that the marriage guidance counseling work on the back of an extremely painful separation from her husband. And so, in a sense, she remains subliminally brokenhearted and she is genuinely able, she has helped a lot of people.
And you know, that seems to be what happens and how it works. And then a further level of awakening might well be, it's like, wow, what am I doing? And needing to redirect that energy to include oneself in the kind of healing field. That's a very common. And in fact, often that happens around the chiron return, you know.
The process of using that to help other people or the process of finally trying to turn that inside and trying to heal one's own wounds. It can be either like what I've noticed around the chiron return. If people have a healing vocation of any kind, that's a very common time for it to surface.
Now, it might sound kind of late in one's life to be suddenly picking up a healing vocation, but most people have known all along that they had that, but for one reason or another didn't follow it. And at the chiron return, it's like, okay, now it's now or never, and I'm going to do it.
The other variation is that people who have already been working in any of the fields of healing. I'm using that in a very broad, generic way. It's not uncommon for them to get to the chiron return and either give it up completely or retrain in a parallel but similar field.
Or take a slightly different road within what they're doing, like maybe decide to write a book or become a trainer, etc. And either way, doing a lot of reflecting on their work and it's very, very common that, oh, and around the chiron return, this I do want to mention.
Of course, one can't generalize about when women have their menopause, but I think it's fair to say that averagely, at least from an experience of people I've spoken with, averagely, it's somewhere around 50 years. So if it is, this is a really useful piece of information because if the menopause coincides with the chiron return, astrologically what we can say is that around that time, because every single chiron aspect that is experienced from the chiron return onwards is second time round. So it's the chiron return of every single aspect to every single thing on your chart, not only the 50 year old thing.
So what's relevant about that is that there is this extraordinary process of recapitulation, of recycling, experience with chiron. By the way, he is not the only planet, he's not a planet, but for brevity, I call him a planet. He's not the only planet where you will find this if you look deeply enough, you can find it with Saturn to some degree, but it's very precise with chiron, almost ridiculously so sometimes, and in the first few years after the chiron return, of course, what's repeating is the period of the pre-cognitive life.
So after birth and before we've learned to speak and walk. So the memories from those times, most people don't remember much from that time at all, because it's literally like as we begin to speak and move, it changes the wiring of our brain to the cognitive stage, and those memories are often present or can be retrieved if necessary or occur in dreams, whatever. But the really, really early stuff, even including pre-natal, it's like the chiron process opens the door on that, to the extent that it might be needed in one's process, meaning there might be patterning that originates back there, that is still holding you back, or that you are still hurting from, or you don't understand.
So the chiron process, if you meet it in a very straight-up way, with healing practices, meditations, etc., which give you the chance to open your consciousness wide enough to really, really experience what's there, even if you don't understand it. It is amazing, because it's like the veil is pulled back and you get to see and feel and know absolutely what was going on. And by the way, this doesn't stop. That will go on for the rest of your life.
Any of you who are on a journey of awakening or healing, you will find that this chiron process I'm talking about is it's a major accompaniment. It's like having a friendly centaur coming along with us in our process, you know, and the way that you work with your own process, pretty much guaranteed to change around the chiron return, because pre-chiron return most of us, or we want just just fix it. We want to fix it and be normal, or be whatever it is, we think we should be, but just to fix it.
And for many people, it's only once the chiron return has happened, that we really get to understand, wow, this whole journey is truly about accepting what is. I know that sounds like a cliche, but think of the heart theme with chiron. Also a little mythic detail, there was this bird called a Griffin, which used to pick out the liver of Framithius every day, and then it would grow back again in the night.
And so there he was, as if it wasn't enough to be chained on this rock, he had this bird, pecking his liver. And after the changing places, the Griffin, his name of this bird, it was shot through the heart and gotten rid of. So that's even symbolically, it can be like that's a nagging self-critical voice that we have to work with in some way or another in our process. And it's as if, around the chiron return, the whole energy of all that starts to change.
And it's as if healing begins to occur on whatever level, that including making contact with the right, the right healer, the right of whatever persuasion, meeting somebody who has a really important clue for you in the form of a book or a healing practice and so forth. And you can feel you're on the stream of healing and it's a tremendous grace.
And I think it's, and you know, it's this shift from, I just have to fix this, to recognizing that in fact, our whole life is a healing journey and becoming more and more skilled and more and more gracious and empathic about how we meet that. That's what brings also the gift of healing to other people. So that's some of the ways I would understand this notion of the wounded healer.
That's brilliant and that makes sense just because it's only after that first 50 years that transiting chiron has done a complete lap all the way around your chart and you've experienced all the possible aspects and permutations of chiron's aspects both to its natal position as well as to other planets in your chart that you can really look back and reflect on that full cycle and understand it. Exactly. Exactly.
So, and I'm Mr. Linky an important one. If we develop the capacity to roll with this sacred healing journey that we're all on because every single person in some way or another is going. to suffer in their lives and it's not just about fixing it, it's about the compassion to let the energies roll in the way that they need to if that makes sense. Now, I've noticed that around the menopause, women who do have that kind of a practice, if cultivated that or are starting to do seem to have less symptoms of you know terrible pre-menstrual tension or mood swings or night sweats or any of these things and it seems as if people who are really frightened of their own process or haven't yet had the good fortune to make the right connections to support them in that risk, somatizing some of the very powerful physical experiences that will come through to a woman at menopause because if we take the year of the chiron return as a kind of a birth, a rebirth then we can take the year before that kicks in exact as the recap of the pre-natal time.
And there can be some extremely strange physical sensations that come forth when that's recapitulating and you know in traditional healing systems they have a huge wisdom about the pre-natal life and its significance and you know in Western medicine they do have some of that but approach it in a very different way, basically seeming to always be looking for what's wrong not perhaps understanding the spiritual significance of what's going on and the the process of being beset with symptoms can be hugely alleviated for many women if they are ready to undertake this kind of a healing journey and obviously some people do really have really symptoms that really need attending to so I'm not recommending that you just ignore them but I know from working with clients that there's something about connecting in with one's own cosmic rhythms that it does the body good as well we forget that maybe sometimes right yeah it's hard sometimes when certainly there's illnesses that can be psychosomatic and origin but then other times there's sometimes just physical illnesses and ailments that people have that are independent of that to some extent.
Yeah um so when I back up one of the things you really focus on in your book and spend a lot of time talking about is just a notion that the house position of kairan as potentially being an area of life that is initially blocked wounded or not functioning in let's say top capacity to some extent and that being maybe ground zero or like the starting point for understanding the transiting kairan cycle and its aspect especially back to itself is understanding so we talked about and we gave an example of like kairan in the seventh house and woundings surrounding relationships but could we talk about some other house placements for example of kairan and how that might manifest in an initial instance of wounding in some some way or just to give some examples yes.
Um the other thing I'd want to add to that is the the house position of the ruling planet of kairan's sign that really speaks volumes and you know it's as if if you understand a bit or have have got a felt connection with kairan in terms of some of the themes that it embodies and portrays with a very little bit of astrological of other astrological knowledge I mean house sign aspects dispositor or ruler that kind of thing with with just that you've got enough information to begin to help you to see because the the manifestations of how kairan shows can vary a lot and very interesting sometimes it's as if they're not visible to the to the person they can have studied kairan read all the books seven classes and they don't get it they're not seeing it and that's part of a kind of defense I think because it's quite likely that there is perhaps an area of pain that's been covered over there.
Um it doesn't have to be um a specific actual wound like you know in my case erbrocan bone or a trauma you know of abuse of various kinds and so forth but it can be where there is this kind of existential pain which fundamentally spiritually I feel is like that's where the deepest sense of disconnection from the great source will actually register now that can show itself through all kinds of other things all kinds of other quirks but at base it's our felt alienation from our spiritual source and that's where the healing comes from and so there's not one way of doing that or not even one right way but it's that you know we're the thing that we struggle with we gradually peel back the layers and peel back the layers and then realize wow you know this is what's underneath this and there we have something to work with like for example and oh this is an example from my own life.
So I have chiron insurgitarious I think I mentioned it and my Jupiter is very closely conjunct my I see which by the way I call the I don't see because that's often how it is it's lying hidden you know right and it was very specific whole trail in. my life for me so as I mentioned I was born in radija which became Zimbabwe on one level witnessing that change from radija to Zimbabwe it was like an experience of rebirth there was a newborn country and everything everything had changed and it was as if decades centuries of history had just been washed away absolutely ecstatically wonderful really had so many is so many interesting experiences learned so much etc etc now when things started to go wrong in Zimbabwe I can't begin to tell you what I went through it was like I had no sense of distance from this I was profoundly identified so that's ruler of chiron on the fourth house you know the home the country the family and all that and I cried endlessly I did rituals I did all kinds of things and then it was at one uek I had a conversation with the wonderful astrologer Brankas Mankavitsch you know her yeah and she said to me um she said one thing I can't do the accent you'll have to imagine it she said one thing you and I share it's homeland pain and she said people who haven't lost their homeland as she had said they can't understand what this is but she said you understand it and I understand it it's called homeland pain I never forgot that and it's as if once I identified that there was a long long period of needing to work inwardly to reclaim the energy of necessity that had been invested in that and and so I tend to get a lot of clients who have homeland pain or who have worked with very painful issues to do with either they are mixed race or there's an issue there about racial origins and how they feel about that and so forth to very very fourth house all of it so that's the ruler of kiron in the fourth yeah I have it's one of the things even though I don't work a lot with asteroids it's not that I don't believe in them because I have kiron conjunct the icy and while it's not the only thing in my chart that would indicate this and you can see it traditionally or classically as well but having kiron conjunct the icy losing my father at the age of five to cancer and that being like an early experience of just like let's say you know loss of a parent as being like an early kiron type experience of wounding or what have you I could identify with that.
I mean there's other placements like having the sun conjuncts Saturn or other things like that that are also relevant but it's interesting how the asteroids can layer on additional nuances of interpretation yeah additional detail what I've also found about kiron it's as if kiron and in fact any of the centaurs they like portals to the underworld the realm of death so at one or other point in our lives all of us become aware of death and physical mortality and with kiron there in the in the fourth I would imagine that it was that very young experience of loss just may have opened the doors to that whether or not the rest of your family spoke about it in those terms you know right yeah so that I mean those so those are really concrete examples of like in your case like your you know place of origin and and living situation in homeland and also ideas of ancestry and things like that is other fourth house topics or for me concrete things of like parents if we're talking about other houses the first house seems a little obvious that it could be a more bodily issues or struggling with health or illness issues perhaps indeed indeed it's often with kiron in the first house and that the person is often engaging with their own sense of woundedness whether it's obvious or not.
I mean some people even might have a physical deformity that they even might successfully hide but which limits their life and things like that is often very specific there and then if it's kiron in the seventh house that can be a theme where the person is always looking after other people there might have even made a profession out of it if not it's something to be curious about because there is you know the there's a kind of triad around kiron's energy in terms of how it might express there's the healer and there's the the one who is afflicted and then there's also the one who does the afflicting so like that I forget the name of the guy who did this this is back from the 1970s now remember victim and persecutor and healer you remember that wasn't he a victim and persecutor it was this it's now called the something rather triangle you do see that around kiron.
I was horrified to when I was you know researching in a bit more and in a bit more detached way not not just with my own process and my clients and so forth I was pretty shocked to find a number of famous serial killers who all had extremely strong kiron's but they did it by doing the wounding and it was really then that I really began to understand how in the main people who wound do so on the back of their own wounding so when there's pain there that just isn't processed there's a kind of knee jerk reaction to put it out there to make somebody feel how you feel okay so that can all be totally unconscious and that is the most dangerous thing about unprocessed suffering is it will go and do it to somebody else that's really interesting if the pressure ratchets up and of course that's what history is made of you know wars come and people are pumped up as heroes and they're paid by people who just you know want to take over from a motivation of greed greed and money and exploitation and you know territory and all that kind of thing or internecine struggles of one kind or another and that it's a whole kind of bloodletting thing which brings the opportunity for people to just act out the unresolved pain that they feel inside themselves by inflicting it on somebody else.
That's a really interesting point so it means in terms of chironic wounding not everybody's gonna like grow up and you know take that wound and then like become a shaman and start helping other people some people are just going to become the one who does that to other people in a negative sense I looked up the triangle and looks like it's called the Carpeman drama triangle and the three pieces are like the victim the rescuer or the persecutor yeah yeah that's yes that's exactly it okay yeah so there's a similar one with chiron and so you know from one point of view even if it was possible to luck switch switch off the world and all its wars and everything going on to just switch it off it would probably take hundreds of years to process all of the suffering that's already been generated and in that sense um finding the way to process one's own suffering and perhaps even a bit wider than that meaning to take on even more then just your own little share perhaps through through prayer through ritual through whatever means makes sense uh it makes a difference to the whole field in which we live um that's that's not just a belief I've seen that kind of stuff in action I'm sure a lot of a lot of you listening have you know and that's the kind of thing that we could call them the chironic mysteries are really all to do with the experience of pain and suffering and the healing thereof in such a way that there's an opening of consciousness it's it's not just about you know fixing a broken arm if that makes sense to you.
Yeah that makes a lot of sense um the last angle we haven't talked about that is a little bit more mysterious for me would be the 10th house in terms of what would the wound potentially be with some of the chiron conjunct the midheaven or in the 10th house yes okay it could be a chronic sense of not feeling recognized and you know often with our suffering things are not as they seem we think that we're hurting because of x y and z and then the more we inquire and work with it oh no it's not that it's something else and so needing the approval of the world is that's a 10th house theme potential 10th house theme in one way or another and when chiron is up there well many different expressions can happen but there can be an incredible feeling of pain if one doesn't feel recognized enough there's a twist on that one too it can sometimes be that the person can't handle recognition and being applauded and celebrated and so forth because that may be coming from such a lack of that that it threatens to overturn all the known and familiar structures and so they freeze or turn their back on it etc because so much pain comes up that's a really interesting one and then of course chiron in the 10th usually professionally involved in the field of healing in some way.
And I remember a lovely example of this this was a woman who actually ran the admin desk in a hospital and I you know I was very curious about the chiron and then you know eventually you came up about what she was doing in so forth and in the conversation it came out that she had wanted to be a doctor but she didn't really have the intellect to get through the exams and then she wanted to be a nurse as a kind of sick and best and then she became ill and didn't get through the physical exam to to enroll but she wanted to work somewhere in the field of healing and so she trained in management and all and did all this admin but I could feel this woman's vibe I could feel the healer in the room and I said I said to her well have you ever trained in any other kind of healing because I could feel it and she looked a bit kind of you know like the rabbit in the headlights I kind of caught her out.
of something so I didn't say anything more and then she said well you know I don't usually talk about this but I did train as a spiritual healer and I feel it's my job to look after all the people who do the frontline nursing and doctoring and you know surgeons and all the rest of it she said I just sit at my typewriter and I answer the phone and I do all these things but I'm actually giving them healing wow that was that was a very memorable one and then of course being the 10th house it can be where there's a healer who gets quite a bit of profile you know who either himself embodies the archetype of the wounded healer or who kind of takes on the establishment over some particular aspect of you know medical law or you know commercial exploitation of medical proficient all of these things by the way with all of the above.
when I did the revision of the chiroin book and we were talking a little about this before we who's on the recording all right I was curious what because the book's gone through it's up to its fourth edition and you've done substantial revision so I was curious what is new in the latest editions that you changed over the 20 years since you published it first yeah yeah yeah so first published in 1989 there were two editions when it was still with Penguin and there was just minor corrections and a new cover the text didn't change at all okay but the 2010 edition which I published myself at Starwalker Press I pretty much rewrote the book okay now the reason I felt it was necessary to do that was firstly um the first edition goes but it predates the discovery of the corper belt with all of this wonderful astronomy which just is poetry in the sky in terms of what chiroin and the centaur's mean I just thought I can't possibly you know bring out the same old text without including all this marvelous new astronomy so I just thought well I'll just put in a whole new section relating to that.
then I started just doing a kind of proofread thing because as you as I'm sure you know you can never prove read a book enough right doesn't matter how much you do you always find mistakes okay yeah so in section four which was called is called Spirit of the Age I realized two things one that just simply on a practical level a lot of the people who I wrote about had died or more development on their stories and so forth and I just thought that this needs to be updated you know it really does right but then the big thing and this was the actual motivation uh my hope vision feeling when I was writing it the first time that so now we're going back to the 1980s was given what chiroin represented in the field of healing and it like emerged now with with the name of the wounded healer being tagged onto a celestial body.
So I thought surely now this must represent the flowering that the rise and the flowering of so-called alternative medicine because it was really burgeoning during those times so many people being trained in so many interesting indigenous techniques whole schools of things like osteopathy um you know traditional Chinese medicine but just a whole range of wonderful different things to do with health so I thought you know this is where we're heading uh no that was totally wrong yeah what's happened is the big foot of commercialization big money big farmer big medicine all of that has just come down with a crash on top of it to the extent that there is exclusion to the level of persecution there are even known excellent wounded healer types who've been killed subtly you know they have and it's an absolute minefield with a lot of very very upsetting stuff going on as we speak.
Um you know the the royal homeopathic hospital right you know the uh whatever you think of them the royal family use homeopathy and that's probably the only reason it survived here Charles is like really into it oh totally totally um and the queen okay and they don't really say much about this because everybody tries to make out that it's all stupid and worthless and so forth but there was a fully a full homeopathic hospital in central London and it almost closed and it's now it's been reduced to a shadow of what it was there was a major cancer clinic using alternatives of various kinds had a fabulous reputation a lot of fabulous people work there a lot of healing going on and so forth and it was closed down right powers that be yeah.
There's definitely been a lot of pushback but even in defense of like 1980s era you like the there's been some forms of alternative medicine like um acupuncture for example that has become a bit more mainstream and more accepted in some even scientific scientific circles it seems like yeah it's true it's true um but there was a lot of very ugly stuff on the ground I mean I know a lot of people who work in those kind of fields that I've heard many many stories and even done some pretty evociferous campaigning myself and so forth but that's another story sure and I just kept having this sense that in the times that we were in this is 2010 it came out in 2010 so I was writing it during the so-called SARS epidemic that's a whole other thing but I just had this for almost like a phrase in my head and that phrase is somewhere in the book that to remain healthy in the times we are living in is an act of true revolution.
And I mean that because to stay healthy mostly you you really do have to change your mental your mental cosmology and structure of understanding um because so much of you know the common medicine that is uh that that we meet today it has either already sold out to commerce a long time ago um or it's on the way there and there's a lot of absolutely disgraceful things that have happened in the name of healing and medicine and so to to return to the true basis of health which has to have a spiritual connection you know um is part of what I would think of as a healing journey um and this is this is connected I think to the whole momentum of of Kiron that that that kind of started in the 1980s well it was discovered in 1977 and then worked worked on various people including me and now I think it's almost like the ultimatum is getting even more clear that it is an act of revolution to to to manage to or intend to stay healthy in these times especially now that we're in a pandemic right.
Well it'll be interesting in the next decade um it was discovered in 1977 so we're coming up pretty soon on on Kiron doing one full orbital cycle since it's discovery I know the Kiron return I I hope I'm still alive wow yeah it's just I really do it looks like it's uh so it was discovered at three degrees of Taurus and Kiron is currently at about seven degrees of aries so I think I was looking it was around like 2027 or something it'll get into early Taurus or so yes it's there there will actually be three direct hits of of the return okay don't I don't have the dates with me but it goes way into um 2008 as well into 2028 yeah okay here it is it looks like it's already into Taurus by 2026 and then oh oh yes but I'm just thinking of the exact exact you know right at 20 2027 and 28 got it okay so here's the first exact hit it looks like in June may or June 2027 give or take.
Yeah yeah yeah um yeah so that was actually one of the questions though and maybe that's relevant from a listener in terms of you know a lot of the books on Kiron came out within the first decade of the release and I know at least there were two questions that were similar like that and I was curious what your reflections are now oh yes later one of them was yes from a listener named Diana Shap who said Kiron is so new is it fair to say that we may not still we may not understand it how many years does it take to see correlations between planets and earthly events and another person Claire Moon some oil said you're all all really great questions they said um I don't think that one can arbitrarily designate how long it takes to understand something because I think it's a process and the more we stay with something both individually and of course collectively the deeper that knowledge goes do you feel like you've had any some evolution of your views of Kiron since you wrote wrote the book in 1989 or yeah if are there any specific things besides some of your frustrations with alternative medicine not going as mainstream specific technical interpretive things that you've developed more over the past eight years yes yes and the main thing is the importance of the ancestral realm and the way the the centaurs including Kiron kind of opened that up now that was mentioned in the in the first edition but it seemed like that was what was continually presenting with clients that I would see and of course in my own process and this really makes sense to me um partly based on well the small knowledge that I have at least of some of the African tribal cultures around where I come from.
So the ancestors are extremely important in that culture so an anthropologist might call them ancestor worshippers but that is so not what's going on what's going on there is that the ancestors are seen like a membrane that protects the living or a membrane in the spiritual world that protects the living from negative influences in the astral that's just my my way of describing it but they talk about you know the individual person needing safety and protection in the spiritual world in the same way as you have a physical house that protects you from the elements or from people who might come to want to rob you or whatever and ideally you know a family and the and the the neighborhood in the village they are part of that safety system and thus it is with the ancestors in the spiritual world so the ancestors occupy the same realm as the centaur because they're in between the visible and the invisible.
I've also had the great good fortune to be able to do quite a lot of ancestral work in one way or another and spoken to numerous people who likewise have done that and the way that they the way that the process is signified with such precision by the centaur is just totally incredible I mean really it really is you couldn't make it happen so part of your your process after publishing the book on kairan in 1989 was expanding it to focus on the other centaur's and what are the what are the other ones that you incorporate specifically right so I use three more in order of their discovery a folus and nexus and charichlose the wife of kairan very interesting I a few years ago I had occasion to do quite a lot of work on her because I kept getting people with a very prominent charichlose.
Now there are more centaurs and I don't it's as if the other ones don't really have a fully fleshed out characterology in the mythology or much of a storyline really there may be mainly associated with one anecdote perhaps connected with another centaur or a god or goddess or demigod or something but they don't feel like really rounded out characters to me maybe because they just haven't spoken to me but these four absurdity do and there's also the mythology especially with folus and nexus is really really rich a lot to go from and you know after by 1989 I mean I was centaur'd out I can tell you I I mean when I was actually writing to contract that I mean I'd spent almost a decade collecting material and a headline boxes of notes and stuff and so on this was before computers and when kairan was finally published I thought okay that's it you know enough centaurs enough of that etc etc and my centaur buddy Brian Clark from from Australia I was vividly remember he would send me these faxes from new scientist magazine or other things but it's like new centaurs being discovered oh no no I'm not gonna work with them enough already this was too much so I did live and you know I would write him back or fax him back and say thanks Brian that's great and I actually wasn't even looking at them as they were country by fax in those days I was like screw it screwing it up and putting it in the bin because I refuse I'm not doing this and I did that for a few years.
Then there was a string of synchronicities that I absolutely could not ignore and I basically said okay I agree I'll do some more work kind of thing it was like that you know it was extraordinary yeah so you felt like this was your work and you were called to do it at different points even sometimes despite your resistance yes exactly exactly and of course once I was into it it was just very joyful a lot of hard work but very joyful do you have any advice one of the things that's happening now is we're having the discovery of new really large minor planets in the outer right wing of the solar system and astrologers are starting to think about like how to incorporate those or how to study those like especially bodies like ares do you have any advice that you learn from being an early pioneer in studying kairan that if you could go back and do it all over again that you would have applied if you were trying to study some of these new newly discovered planetary bodies yes but at first I I would like to respond to that great question with a quote from Richard Tarnas now he doesn't remember saying this but I know that this what I'm going to say was captured on a recording and at the astrological association conference in Canterbury in 1994 was a panel discussion and somebody who was in fact a new astrology student asked in general to the to the panel precisely that question in the sense of well oh and this was long before the discovery of the centaurs and you know the TNOs and all that she was actually just refer I think she might have been referring to like the asteroids but just different techniques that you could apply to the horoscope like harmonics and midpoints and what about draconic astrology and all these things so her question was how do I know what to use.
And this is what Richard Tarnas said this is verbatim I never forgot it he said in astrology you can only work with what is burnished into your soul end of in other words like I was kind of saying earlier I'm not I'm not really a researcher hmm I don't really have a researcher's mind but I know how to keep going on a trail once I really feel called that's a different kind of experience than just being wildly curious or wanting to know about something it's like your entire energy body has involved your body your feelings your mind your imaginations boom now I only work with that otherwise I think I'd go mad you know I've probably got too much air in my horoscope to be a researcher because I would that would be crazy.
So the advice yes um I would say unless you've got a really good grounded kind of mind you know something really helpful like maybe a lot of Virgo or maybe a good Saturn Mercury aspect or a third house which has got some good good something earth planets in there and so forth take care that you don't scramble yourself with that and find maybe your own way to have that not happen because it'll spoil it for you.
So my way as I described is I I can only work with what I feel is burnished into my soul truly and that narrows the field rather well it also makes it a wonderfully surprising thing like when I began to work with Characloh it was quite a few years since I'd had any major cent or downloads but this happened out the blue in the middle of a session with a client so wow you know um so I would say you know if you've got the kind of mind that can stay grounded and stay organized open up a file with different sections well you'd probably today you'd probably do that in a computer but most of my chiro notes they were in an old fashioned ring binder file with divisions first our second house and so on and so forth and that was how the material grew.
I just endlessly indisely made notes and that really worked for me and I think in general that's quite a good approach is to be structured with it and also be clear about why you're doing that I know for me it was very clear that I because these were all happening in my life with my transits I absolutely felt I needed to understand this process a bit because it was actually happening to me or in my life now with with the extra plutonians and so you know the the the TNOs and the S D.O.s and all of these weird things some of which are wonderful marvelous.
I did go through a phase where I deliberately decided to try to learn about them and I made some headway and it was very interesting I even did a workshop together with Stephen Forest on this because he was doing the same thing that was huge fun was wonderful but you know after I done all that work it didn't really stick because they were not burnished into my soul fair enough so be systematic be organized and ask yourself why am I doing this because you know in in the wisdom tradition which is astrology I think it's really the same as as many of the other wisdom traditions there's a huge difference between knowledge and wisdom and so wisdom is really only given on a need to know business.
And so to ask yourself why you might be doing something in astrology it's always an interesting inquiry because there is a part of us that has to know things needs to know things wants to figure it all out and in part that's a great motivation to be learning astrology because actually the end the learning is absolutely endless but at the same time there can be a very unhelpful ego driven aspect of that which isn't like wrong but it's good to be aware of that so that it doesn't pull you all over.
So therefore take charge of that wish be structured pace it and and let the journey unfold as it will that's what I would say it's helpful yeah I think that's good um I was just in preparation for this episode one of the things that I was doing is just using solar fire and searching for like everybody in my files that has kairan conjunct the descendant within like a three degree orb or something like that what do you think is that too tight or what kind of orbs do you use for well that's another good question now um in a general way I would start uh with the same use the same orbs that you're comfortable with as you would use for Saturn.
Okay but now I'm I'm one of these people what depending on what I'm trying to do in a given astrology project um I do sometimes play fast and loose with the whole question of orbs because what makes more sense to me is to really listen to the person and you know when I say listen I don't only only mean the words that they're saying because some some plants hardly speak but you need to learn to listen to their energies to intuit to feel the reality of this person who's horoscope you're reading you see and um in that case they might be saying things that if your idea about the right orb is to narrow you're gonna miss it you're gonna miss the planetary magic that they're telling you about and I remember.
when I when that really came home to me when I um this is quite a while back now I had a client who I really really liked so much and she had been through hell and high water in her life with illness and the result for her was she was left very very sensitized which was sometimes difficult for her but mostly very um enriching and she came and started talking about what was happening in her Pluto transit and I remember sitting there and thinking wait a minute Pluto is applying by 12 degrees to this woman's son and she doesn't really understand anything about astrology so what's going on and I just you know dropped all that and just listened and what was absolutely clear was the woman was she was picking up the resonance already and it was 12 degrees applying which is really a lot you know so after that I became maybe a little less fixed in my mind and decided to just try to listen out to the words the vibes whatever the person would say and if they are speaking the astrological symbolism well then those planets are in orb so that's my basic policy.
I also understand Chris you would you would know about this I'm sure is it true that way way back in the day in some of the old traditions they would refer to planets being conjunct if they were in the same sign and house yeah if they were anywhere in the same sign they would consider them to be in a conjunction and interpret it that way and they would just treat it as becoming more intense the closer they'd get by degree right right yeah so that's so so yes that that's an example but that's a great question so I know we need to wrap up soon but I just wanted to mention there's a few other keywords that I don't know if we mentioned I just want to run them by you really quickly one of them was doing for others what we cannot do for ourselves yes also another theme of sacrifice and being separated from something that we feel we can't live without.
yeah and finally another area that you talk about in the book was a feeling of exile oh yes yes that's that's quite a big one because the centers in the mythology they never inhabited the cities they lived in the caves that surround the villages and the cities and so forth out in the wild and you know if you go now today I don't know about precisely today it's maybe 15 years since I was last there but if you go to Mount Pelion which is the archetypal mythological home of the centers but it is a real place and a real mountain if you go there every second cafe store little hotel anything they all have little boards with something to do with Ken Tavros that's the center and loads of people who want to take you to Kairon's cave hmm and then lots and lots and lots of kairons caves you see and everybody says no no this is a real one so that's very amazing but what I went off I went off the rails there were you a question whether those are other core themes that I'm think we talked we've touched upon them briefly but just ideas of sacrifice being separated from something that was the notion of the exile.
so the so the centors they lived outside the city but at least the main the main ones the ones that are named often had a shamanic kind of a role vis-a-vis the humans so they were the healers the diviners that kind of thing and they inhabited this in between realm again it's between the city and the country so they're not in the country and totally disconnected from anything to do with human society but they're certainly on city dwellers either you know right so they're because they're half animal they're sort of cast out of society of human society but still interact with it in different ways yes and of course have a very special relationship with the energies of nature and and the earth okay and then finally just that idea of being separated from something that we feel as if we can't live it out seems to be a major recurring theme that we touched upon a few times when we were going through some of the houses but that seems like a good underlying theme to keep in mind yes because because of the extraordinary connection between the centaurs and Pluto who is the Lord of the underworld and therefore presides over the experience of loss there's a very strong resonance with Kairan there.
I mean the astronomical similarities are incredible. so all the centaurs and Pluto as I think I mentioned but just to repeat they all have elliptical orbits that are steeply inclined to the ecliptic and they all cross over at least one of the orbits of the classical planets and so it's as if you know Pluto, the Lord of the underworld is also like the king of the cooper belt and the centaurs are like the agents or emissaries or even the escapees from the underworld and it's like they are like our guides in very underworld kind of experiences where there might be immense suffering because we're ill or bereaved or because of painful things happening to those we're really close to whatever it is.
And so it seems to me that the centaurs are our little guides in those underworldy regions because normally you know we just think of you know Pluto, Lord of the underworld you know dark black heavy contracted kind of stuff but in in pretty much all cultures who've got any connection still with the the energies of the earth the underworld is thought to be under the earth and it is both the realm of the dead but it's not like oh it's the realm of the dead that's it it's full of different zones like the Greek underworld has many many different zones in it you know tartarus and the lithian fields and the place called aornus and all different things happen in these zones it's not just one uniform horror you know and it is also very much the realm that opens up if we for example go into a Jungian analysis or work deeply with our dreams and so and it's as if these little critters represent this energy of being able to handle paradox being able to handle dilemma in order that something deeper than the duality can come through I think that's really what they're about.
okay brilliant are there any other final things we should mention about kairan before we wrap up that I completely spaced out or forgot to mention oh well there's a listener question here from from from kairan moon okay I think we the question is did do we mention that yeah I think we got that one it was just tied in with the idea of how long it's been around one of the other the two other ones we haven't touched on was die that was that was was with Diana right but the next question I don't think we did with the kairan moon so with with that review that I told you about did we talk about that what part oh right yeah that was a funny so one of your early reviews of the book when it for not long after it first came out was kind of funny correct yeah because there was I mean I'm sure even though in retrospect it seems like there was this wave of astrologers getting into the asteroids and writing books about them occasionally I'm sure you got pushback as well right or skepticism or you know I didn't really no not so much okay I really didn't and I don't really know why I think at least so this was pre-internet days it came out before the internet you know and there is really a truth there.
I mean as long as I've lived in England I there is an amazing astrological community here that pretty much covers all bases in terms of all different approaches psychological traditional academic horary I mean you name it it's all here and this is a very small island and it's as if because we we know the people there's an amazing amount of really positive exchange now don't get me wrong it's not without it's kind of tribal horrors there's no group that can get away from that but I guess overall because there's so many different approaches and so many different kind of astrologers all doing wonderful astrology things in a relatively small area I didn't really get any negative pushback okay which I have to say I was hugely grateful for it would have been horrible.
Sure what what was the book review that you did oh this review I love this so I it was a reviewer who said it said a lot of kind of somewhat grudging positive things about the book and then said something like well if you're somebody who believes that if a fully fleshed out you know description of this tyron is possible in such a short amount of time since it was discovered I mean well in maybe this book is for you i.e. it's not for me the reviewer and then the final sentence this is verbatim I never forgot it I dined out on this and I wanted it on my epitaph however if rine heart is massively disconnected from reality at least she has done it in style I roared I loved it.
I've been listening to this listen to this I wanted on my epitaph yeah that's very eloquent somewhat praise in terms of yeah as a as a review that's pretty good you should put that on one of the future editions of the book on the back cover I didn't even think of that might might might might be fun all right thank you I know we're I don't want to take up more of your time I know we could keep talking all day but it's been two hours really yeah I didn't even look at the clock I've really enjoyed having a conversation with you it's been great yeah me too thank you so much for doing this we were been in the process of setting this up for a few months now and I'm really glad that it finally came together.
I just want to give a shout out and a thanks to my partner Lisa Shime for her help researching this episode because she's a big fan of kairan and oh wonderful help to me big big thanks to Lisa yes definitely and what do you have coming up or do you have any classes or events or projects that you're working on right now for the future yes um um we can't after next there's a weekend conference hosted by the um the London School of Astrology and the Mayo School they're both here in England and there there are some it's an amazing lineup really and I'll be doing a kind of workshoppy thing so that that means a long session three hours with obviously with a gap.
And I'm also doing something for astrology university it's not it's not yet up and advertised yet but it'll be on the 19th of December in between a couple of things local where I'm hoping they're going to be live but actually I don't think they are going to be and I'm also I'm also considering starting a small group which would be like a weekly two two weekly monthly kind of thing I probably wouldn't do that until beginning of next year but if I do if if I do start that it would be on on the events page of my website or also I would I would mention it in my one of my occasional newsletters so that's that's for subscribers and I do have a there's a sign up thing on the homepage of my website if you if you want to get that get that news.
And your website is Melanie Reinhardt.com yeah that's it okay great um so people can find out information about those events they can send up your newsletter there and I'll put a link to that in the description either below this video on YouTube or on the description page on the astrologypodcast.com website that's great so my website really is like an unruly jungle in that sense a bit centoric sure I mean it really needs a good prune and a good redo which I will get to at some point but in other words there's a lot of digging that you can do.
There's a lot of content on it yeah it's been really helpful as I was getting ready for this episode so people should definitely check it out they should also get the fourth edition of your book which when was the latest edition put out was it 2010 or more recent than that it was it was 2010 okay and in fact if any of you listening are Dutch speakers now there is a new edition of the Dutch language translation in preparation as we speak and when I was working with the translator she picked up a few things mostly in section four which you know like I said because like the people had died or a situation had changed and so on and so forth.
And she said well do you want to kind of update this or write a little extra piece so I said yeah great you know so by the end of the year it will be that the Dutch language translation will be that'll be the most recent edition but at some point I guess I'll have to do another small revision of kiron but the 2010 one still stands you know okay great and yeah people can find that on your website they can find links to that on amazon there's like a Kindle version as well exactly and there is a page on my website where you can buy my titles if you want and they're all available on amazon and and also other various book retailers you know like gardeners and co-bohned or only things that are tried to make them as available as possible excellent um great well thank you so much for joining me today I really appreciate it well likewise it's been great I could talk for another few hours with you.
Yeah well maybe we'll have to do this again some time to talk about some of the other centaurs and some of your other work with us fine brilliant all right well thanks everybody for listening to this episode of the astrology podcast thanks to all the patrons and supporters and we'll see you again next time special thanks to the patrons who support the astrology podcast through our page on patreon.com in particular shout out to the patrons that are on our producers tier such as Christine stone Nate Kratik Marin Altman Thomas Miller Bear River Catherine Conroy Michelle Merrillot Kristi Mo and Sumo Copic find out more about how to become a patron at patreon.com slash astrology podcast.
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