Chiron Return: Midlife Transits

The Chiron return happens between the age 49-50, the 7th cycle of 7 years. It typically takes 7 years from the Uranus Opposition to the Chiron return. This is a crucial marker in our developmental cycle and what happens between the Uranus opposition and the Chiron return will define our next 50 years (god willing we live that long).

Chiron orbits in the solar system between Saturn and Uranus, and acts as the bridge between the serious, restricting, personal energy symbolic of Saturn and the revolutionary, liberating, collective spirit symbolic of Uranus. It symbolizes the generational wound we inherit from our ancestors. In her groundbreaking book, Chiron and the Healing Journey, Melanie Reinhart describes the awareness of this wound as living in the realm of our typhonic consciousness, prevailing during the period from conception, through gestation and birth, until about age three. It is pre-cognitive and can usually only be accessed in times of illness or distress.  During the Midlife Transits, we are granted the opportunity to live out Chiron’s mythology, to  “break free from the original matrix”... assert our individuality through the “process of rupture and exile - an initiation.”

In an excerpt from her book, Chiron in Love, Liz Green describes the mythology as such: 

“Chiron is in the wrong place at the wrong time. He is caught between Herakles, the solar hero who personifies the strength of the human ego, and the wild, untamed Centaurs whom Chiron himself has left behind. While the battle rages, Chiron takes no part; he has sympathy for both. Perhaps because of this mediating role, which deprives him of his natural aggression, he is accidentally wounded by a poisoned arrow aimed at another Centaur, and the wound does not heal, no matter what healing methods he applies to it. 

This terrible story implies a state of unfairness in life which is hard for any individual, and perhaps even harder for the idealistic individual involved in studies such as astrology, to countenance. We want to believe that life is fair, and that goodness is rewarded and evil punished, at least in some other incarnation if not in this one. Here is a good creature who suffers through no fault of his own, a victim of the inevitable battle between evolution and inertia, consciousness and blind instinctuality. Chiron is an image of that in us which has been wounded unfairly by life, and by inescapable conditions which reflect failings and flaws in a collective psyche which is unfailingly clumsy in its efforts to progress.”

This description really cuts to the core of what my Chiron return journey has felt like this year, especially as it relates to our recent election. You see, I share a Chiron return with the United States. I was born during the United States’ 2nd Chiron return in 1975. Both of my parents were born in the deep south, and though I was not raised in that environment, it is still very much part of my family’s past. I was brought up in the charismatic evangelical movement and most of my immediate family is conservative. I was the only member of my family to move to NYC after college and my travel and exposure to different cultures and religions set me apart from the rest. I had a falling out with many of my family members during the Obama years because of our disagreements over gay marriage.

As our political leaders took advantage of these issues to wedge a further divide, I like many in our nation, unconsciously took the bait. It’s not that I believe we shouldn’t expose these issues in an attempt to resolve them, but using these issues to amplify and further feed into distorted ideologies keeps us all from moving forward. It harms us at a fundamental level. Most of our nation, like me, has fallen into this trap in one way or another. Now many are divided into these extreme ideologies simply to serve those who wish to be in power. I was devastated when Trump won in 2016 and remember calling my father to berate him. He himself had been seduced by the dramatic propaganda of Fox News. But when push came to shove, he understood that it was simply rich people fighting with each other and to not take it too seriously. This was a year before we would find out he was dying from stage 4 lung cancer. I will never forget the precious time we lost. Truth be told, he had very fixed and distorted ideas about women, but he never treated me personally the way he seemed to perceive women. I knew that his mind was simply playing out the conditioning of his time.

As I was given the opportunity to try to mend the fissures within my family after he died, my child suddenly experienced their own intense identity struggles which made these fissures impossible to mend. I was thrown into the damaging political divide once again, this time more personally. As I navigated these challenging times, I felt re-traumatized by yet another election where Trump became the winning model of our divided country once again. However, this time I could see much clearer. It felt similar to the mythology of Chiron as I now felt sympathy for those unconsciously feeding into these false narratives. It profits people to keep us divided, stoking our fears and anger. Like Prometheus, we are condemned to eternal torment, our liver growing back each night so that the political eagles can feast whenever there is a political fight. 

I am thankful for the awareness I’ve gained during these very tumultuous seven years. I feel like I’ve been reborn. My role has yet to be defined, but I am finding the path getting clearer with each step.