Advent: Chiron in Pisces

Dear Friend and Reader:

Today is the day that Chiron enters Pisces, where it will stay until 2018-2019. This is Chiron at the slow end of its orbit, in outer-planet mode. It seems like only yesterday (in the mid-1990s) when Chiron was clipping through a sign in just 18 months. I am here with an extended special edition audio presentation about this transit. The recording is about 35 minutes, and describes the three basic levels of Chiron in Pisces: water itself, the emotional realm and the spiritual realm. I describe all three in the audio, and end with a bit of history about Chiron and Neptune in Aquarius.

Planet Waves
Basket star and anemones, Vancouver Island, BC. Photo by Bev Dulis waterworksdesign.net.

Chiron is one of those things in astrology that really does need an introduction. Though the discussion has gone on some places for more than 30 years, there are relatively few cohesive and balanced discussions of what this energy represents. Amanda Painter, one of the Planet Waves editors, researched my various articles about Chiron in Pisces and we’ve got her selections below. Each excerpt links to the article from which it originates.

First, I have an older piece on how Chiron may be applied in readings. It’s called When Astrology Listens. It describes a case-taking technique that enables the astrologer to deduce how Chiron is working in a person’s chart, without having to speculate. The technique is based on listening to what a client has to say about their experiences of Chiron transits. Chiron is an influence that grounds strongly in experience rather than in theory, so the client’s history can be quite meaningful and helpful to their own healing process and the astrologer’s role as facilitator.

In Small World Stories, the 2008 annual edition, we included a succinct introduction to Chiron. Described by someone named Al Morrison as ‘the inconvenient benefic’, “Chiron nearly always bestows a profound gift; it will save us over and over, waking us up just in the nick of time; but the events surrounding it almost always seem a bit shocking as they occur. Though over time, a degree of mastery of Chiron’s most fundamental energy may be attained: and that energy is awareness.” Further into the essay, I note why the events surrounding a Chiron transit can feel so jarring:

The influence of Chiron in Pisces on the natal charts of a whole generation of people born during the 1960s — as well as the cultural matrix of that whole period — gets a close look in an article from a decade ago, simply titled Chiron in Pisces:

Building on the theme of the 1960s as a defining era, Chiron in Pisces: The Missing Piece summarizes the relationship between two astrological phenomena which defined the Sixties and are again shaping our current 2012 era: the Uranus-Pluto cycle and Chiron in Pisces. It turns out that Chiron was a key piece to how the Sixties felt:

In that same article, I describe how this current rendition of Chiron in Pisces comes with its own version of a wake-up call:

Most recently, the subscriber issue How to Cross an Ocean; How to Light a Fire touched on today’s ingress into Pisces, which shifts the flavor of our cultural focus:

It may sound a bit overwhelming in a rather diffuse sort of way. But as mysterious as the themes of Pisces and Neptune may feel to some, Chiron does not leave us drifting out to sea, as I explain later in that article:

And as for calling attention to the water on the planet that Chiron in Pisces may represent, we saw a startling example in the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, which accompanied Chiron’s temporary ingress into Pisces last year. Pisces, Chiron and Whole-System Thinking gives a broad view of some of what Chiron is trying to show us:

Yours & truly,

Eric Francis

PS, Thank you to my Chiron teachers, who helped me figure out this little planet: Melanie Reinhart, Robert von Heeren, Zane Stein, Dale O’Brien, Barbara Hand Clow and many, many astrology clients who shared their biographies with me in the process of my working on their astrological charts.

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Eric Francis, the founder and editor of Planet Waves, is an astrologer and investigative journalist. He was working in his first job as a municipal newspaper reporter when he discovered that his editor also owned an astrology bookstore. This began a long relationship between astrology and journalism, which has taken Eric through the pages of many newspapers as a horoscope writer, including the Daily Mail and the Daily Mirror plus numerous other venues. Today, Eric covers global turning point events through the lens of astrology. He is a specialist in newly-discovered planets.

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