Return of the Planets Part IV - The Aspects of Chiron - Learning how to heal

Having addressed the Return of Saturn and the Opposition of Uranus in our previous posts here and here we ended up wondering "How about Chiron, though and how does his return participate to the crisis of the so called middle age?" *
( *photos in this post are native shootings by Vassilis Papadolias in the archaelogical site of Stonehenge England )
Before we enter presentation of the meaning of the return itself, let’s take a look at the aspects that he forms during the earlier years of man’s life, in greater detail.

The Aspects of Chiron – Learning how to heal

The aspects of Chiron do not happen to every person at the same age. As with Pluto, the orbit of Chiron is elliptical, so from generation to generation –in a shorter cycle than Pluto though – the time that Chiron stays in each sign, changes. While i.e. he stays in Aries around eight years, in Libra he stays a little bit less than two, which results in a situation, where one person born with Chiron in Aries experience his first Chiron square in his twenties, while another person with Chiron in Libra has already experienced its first square when he was six years old.

This difference in the aspects of Chiron is responsible – among other factors of course – for the difference that is observed between generations in the age of their maturity. At least this is what many astrologers claim, highlighting that this is responsible for the parents complaining that their children have spurted a lot while they at their age did not have similar experiences. It is also responsibe for the strange sympathy that develops between children and their grandparents as the maturity squares of Chiron’s happen to coincide when the in – between generation is omitted.

Chiron according to experiential astrologers acts in the best way when it forms sextile aspects with its natal position. During the first sextile of our life we might become interested in the supernatural or have our first unusual experiences. We may pose our first questions about what comes after life. We might read our first metaphysics book, to discover there is something called astrology or psychology or something else, which, if one occupies themselves with it he feels relief in his pain and can heal his wounds. We discover as teenagers (if that is the sextile’s time) in what we are good at, if we are good athletes or good artists. We find out which is our creative pastime, that through which we feel capable of expressing ourselves creatively and be of service to other people as well. The discovery of the road which leads us there happens momentarily, like a revelation, like an inspiration, like an enlightment, one which opens entire roads towards the future. In a few moments, the person knows the way he will proceed with his life for the next years.

During the first square of Chiron, on the contrary, people feel their first bad emotional experiences. The first clumsy relationships, the first break ups and wounds, the first work failures, a feeling of awkwardness towards the things that life demands of them and some fears regarding what will become of them. If again the square happens at a young age – especially if it happens before the first square of Saturn in the first seven and a half years, the unusual experiences cause a lot of fear to the child and it is important to have the proper help and support.

Οn a more external level the square of Chiron can make a person feel that he doesn’t relate to his environment. He may feel that he has no relation to this and want to be cut off. It is the age of teenage crises or the first youth when we want to avoid the pressure of the house where no one understands us and everyone hurts us.

If anyone wonders in his life which were the periods he was coming into conflict with his environment, that words like wounds were being exchanged, that mistakes and faults in the manifestation of love and emotions were constantly happening, most probably he will find himself in front of a Chiron Aspect period. Through our wounds we learn to understand the emotions of others, to put ourselves in their place and understand their behavior. It is something, though, we learn progressively and while we grow up and through many situations we would not want to often remember. The emotional maturity, the lack of emotional rush, the ability to be there for people who need us or help them stand on their feet are the abilities that experiential astrologers connect with the return of Chiron, that happens when we get to 50 years of age.

During that age we can finally say that we have experience. And what exactly is, in reality, that life experience, but the experience of the wounds that others or we caused to us, the experience from the mistakes and our haste, the experience from the time we awkwardly stood across a person or a situation that needed us but we could not help them. Chiron’s return closes a cycle of experience that allows to a person to be emotionally mature and know the way in which he will succeed in helping other people. The focus on "how" (how one will say a nice word, how he will make an observation, how one will communicate with others) is the lesson that is attributed to Chiron from the experiential astrologers and the lack of knowledge of this way is what Barbara Hand Clow calls Lack of Mastery.

The age of Chiron’s return is the age after which we finally acknowledge that people are experienced to teach, to guide, to train us and our children in the reality of life. It is the age that moms show their daughters how to bring up their children and the professional manages train their successors. It is the age of the major result with the less effort and the bigger caution, the age that one is supposed to have their bigger financial comfort than they will ever acquire in his life and wonders about his existential matters while programming how to train his successors. The age we are looking back and recognize our mistakes and think back on situations, which if we were young, we would definitely want to do another way.

Conclusion

The study of returns of the planets during human life hides lots of surprises of realization. The reflection on our personal experiences (through the prism of the things we are reading) when we are learning about  planetary aspects leads to personal revelations as well and is by itself a “chirotic” procedure. The experience of the astrological influences in our life, gives us a tool of understanding what is happening to us and what is required from us. It also helps us find a way out to situations in our lives, find our way and face every moment’s challenges. The return of Saturn, the opposition of Uranus and the return of Chiron helps us to realize the most critical points of our lives, helps us to set our targets, to mature as individuals, to healthy share our experience with the environment and to communicate knowledge and experience to the next generation, as is demanded by the tough reality of life. 

In other words these symbolic lessons help us to mature as people, to evolve spiritually and offer to our fellow men the result of our own experience. So, it is worth it to deepen our individual knowledge of those returns and examine what we can get from them and how we can use their teachings to face the challenges of life.

Return of the Planets Part III - Opposition of Uranus – Achieving emotional balance

In the years between thirty and fourty, man continues ahead on the trails of the process we saw in our previous post ( here ) , trying to set his goals and do something important with his life. Approaching the age of fourty, though, a different type of developments starts to happen within human psychology. Anxiety begins to  mount, the tension, unexpected events, factors that cannot be controlled, dependence from
people and things we cannot control (spouse, family, children, friends, co workers) put us, among other things, in front of a set of emotional challenges of how we can manage to hold the balance in our relationships. It is not an accident that between the age of thirty five and forty many marriages go through a crisis. Many parents are confronted with their children’s puberty but also accept the first calls for support by their parents. All these needs increase the emotional tension in the psychology of the adult, build up anxiety and lead to a feeling of having lost our life’s purpose.

This tension comes at its highest, according to most astrologers, at the age around forty two years, an age when the opposition of Uranus to its natal position takes place. This opposition has a purpose to teach us how to balance our emotions internally and how we can manage our relationships and our communication with other people well. Linking astrology with metaphysics, some astrologers place the crisis of Uranus actually in the astral plane while the crisis of Saturn in the physical plane.
Alongside the influence of Uranus, latest generations happen to experience around the same age, the square of Pluto to their natal position. An aspect which in older generations took place at a later age, in latest generations, because of the elliptical orbit of Pluto, happens during middle age. The square to the natal position works alongside the influence of Uranus but with different results. This aspect forces the person to subject to restrictions he hadn’t had in the past. It forces him to experience situations so limiting that in order to preserve his emotional balance, he is forced to leave behind him people and things that were very important in his life so far and move forward counting only on his personal will. In contradiction to the Uranus crisis which teaches us how to redirect the tension of the emotion, the crisis of Pluto teaches how to harden our heart to withstand the pressure. 

From a more evolutionary point of view, the aspect of Pluto makes us maybe less “humane” from what we consider politically correct and many astrologers say that the square of Pluto is an aspect used only by people who couldn't stand up to the task of responding to the challenges of Uranus. My personal opinion, however, is that Pluto and Uranus are similar in what metaphysics calls first and second aspect of divine being. So, there is the way of will and the way of love for anyone to survive in the astral world, to say it in metaphysical terms. Each and every one of us can choose his own way or be affected by both of them, without one being better or worse than the other.

In any case, the person who manages to overcome the opposition of Uranus has learnt to control the tension of life. He has learnt to channel his emotional anxiety, to relax and ground the “electric” - according to the metaphysics – energy of Uranus with “chirotic” actions as New Age astrologers call them or in other words with alternative practices  such as yoga, massage, spiritual hobbies, crafts, etc. The secret of this process is for someone to understand that they must operate as a conductor of emotional energy. Words, actions, emotions and spiritual energy must go right through us and leave and not stay inside us, accumulate and become anxiety, stress, complexes and a cardiac arrest. 

Learning how to act as “conductors” in our lives is the teaching of Uranus. To learn, that is, to let all the offences we experience every day to go right through us and leave (meant on an emotional level implying non identification) instead of keeping them inside, to recycle and strengthen them. And the grounding of these energies takes place according the so called experiential astrology by using alternative practices that allow relaxation, expression of emotions in a creative way, understanding of things that happen to us subconsciously and the silence of the mind.

How about Chiron, though and how does his return participate to the crisis of the so called middle age? Before we enter presentation of the meaning of the return itself, let’s take a look at the aspects that he forms during the earlier years of man’s life, in greater detail.

Return of the Planets - Part II - Saturn Return – The first turning point

The return of Saturn is the most common return and the one that has been examined the most from professional astrologers, researchers or content writers. This return corresponds, according to most of them, to the stage of life where we are thinking about what we have succeeded so far in life from a material aspect, how much social recognition have we gained, how successful have we been, whether we have managed to put our daily life into some kind of schedule and generally assessing our achievements. It is the age where we compare ourselves to other people and realize at which points we have fallen behind and at which one we are further in life. At the same time, though, it is also the stage we accept we are not as good as other people in certain things and it should not sadden us as much but on the contrary, it should make us examine those things we have achieved and count on those we can do well.

Saturn’s return is considered as the first crisis of redirection around middle age because having examined what one has achieved, it is possible to make important decisions in his life, decisions which may change the direction he has taken so far, completely. Someone might change profession, another one move to another house and another one might decide to get married and start a family. In any case with the help of this return, we ascertain our limits, determine how far we can go in this life and face the spiritual challenge of accepting that everything is finite.

If after Saturn Return, we have managed to realize the above, we enter a new phase in our life. In that stage, we are finally aware of our limitations, we are called to decide what to do with our time and the skills we have been given. What will be our basic goal? Our main purpose? The thing we would like to leave behind us. For the sake of this purpose we will start working, counting on the experience of the first return behind us and the self confidence gained by our first achievements.

If we have not managed to accept the fact that everything is finite, though, we start our life again from the beginning, searching for a job here and there, going from one place to the other and changing the people around us, without being able to commit to any relationship. The lesson of Saturn’s return, then, is also about being able to commit to someone. As our life is mortal and the resources and abilities we have are limited, the only way to achieve big things in our lives is to trust others. The  restrictions of Saturn makes us realize our limited abilities, but also show us why we need the others and teaches us, by lessons in practice, to open up towards them, to look for commitment, cooperation and common effort to achieve what we could never achieve on own own.

Besides, let’s not forget that Saturn was traditionally the ruler of Aquarius, so maybe the description above can also be concieved as a bridge of spiritual evolution from the sign of Capricorn to the sign of Aquarius.

Is that all that can be said about Returns of the Planets? Not really! There are at least two other major returns that need to be mentioned. To continue in this context see our next article about Opposition of Uranus here.

The returns of the planets and middle age crisis’ - Part I

The returns of the planets and middle age crisis’ - Part I

A special case of consulting guidance  that interests most astrologers is how the client can cope with the middle age period. Astrology, these past fifty years has significantly changed its image towards the average person and the first impression that it makes on public opinion is not exclusively as an art of forecasting anymore (an art more or less of clairvoyance based on “inherited” abilities) but also as a language of psychological quest and an art of self examination. 

Among other elements that this process has offered to those involved with this side of astrology, are the psychological interpretation of the natal chart, the interpretation of the signs’ and the planets’ symbols, as well as the realization that the effects of the planets are not simply events of natural significance but also psychological tendencies which exist within us and manifest as factors that try to push us to make specific decisions. 

Amid other phenomena studied by astrology the past years are the so called returns of the planets, namely the long lasting aspects formed by the outer planets during their transit to their natal positions in the personal horoscope. The most usual planetary return which is examined exhaustively is the return of Saturn which happens around the age of 29. Less importance has been given to the return of the nodes or the returns of the progressive moon, while limited are the references to the aspects of Uranus transits towards the natal chart. 

Α special importance has been given to the subject of planetary returns from a new generation of astrologers, who initiated during the 70’s and afterwards in America, a wave of thought directed to psychological healing, experiental  events and  a synthesis of astrology with alternative healing practises (crystals, herbs, astrodramatic healing, yoga, regressions). Among these astrologers names such as Jeff Green, Barbara Hand Clow and Martin Lass, are included.  

The purpose of this section is to give some thoughts to reflect on and suggest a possible relation between planetary returns and the development of  our own psychology. It will also describe the kind of challenges we are facing at every age, but mainly between the age of thirty and fifty years old, an age of turning points of our lives, evaluation of our past and drawing of a new course for the future. In this way, it will be revealed that through the crises of redirection we are able to gain a new level of self knowledge, which will allow us to evolve spiritually, to unite internally and become more useful to ourselves and the others.

To be continued...

Glyphs of the Planets and their meanings