Chiron Enters Taurus
After spending eight years in the sign Aries, on June 19 Chiron finally dipped its toes into Taurus – but it will only be there for about twelve weeks before returning to Aries on September 17. We’ll have to wait until mid-April 2027 before Chiron settles in for its seven year passage through the sign of the Bull. It first touches Gemini in July 2033, but soon returns to Taurus, and only arrives solidly in Gemini on May 5, 2034.
Chiron’s journeys through Aries and Taurus are long ones, especially when we remember that its total orbit only takes a little under fifty-one years. Divide that number by twelve, and you get an average duration of its passage though each sign of about four years. One key to understanding why it spends so much time in Aries and Taurus is to remember that this planetoid’s orbit is highly elliptical. Its motion is slowest when it’s in Aries. By the time it gets into Libra, it’s halfway around the zodiac. That puts it a lot closer to the Sun and the increased gravitational pull zooms it along a lot more quickly.
There’s a second complicating factor: compared to the “real” planets, Chiron’s mass is low and so it gets kicked around a lot by their gravity. That’s why when you Google “Chiron’s orbital period,” you don’t get the kind of precision we’re accustomed to seeing with, for example, Mars (686.98 earth days.) Some sources give Chiron an orbital period of 50.7 years, while others say 50.45 years. That’s because of gravitational interference, mostly by massive Jupiter and Saturn. Sometimes Chiron is closer to them and it’s pulled harder, other times it’s further away and they’re less of an influence, so it all becomes a tangle of ever-changing variables.
One practical takeaway is that while we take Chiron seriously, we should never confuse it with the major planets. Chiron would fit between New York and Boston or just about cover the Shanghai-Hangzhou metroplex in China. Even relatively tiny Pluto – the smallest of the real astrological planets – is about twelve times Chiron’s diameter.
So, cutting to the heart of the matter, what can we expect from Chiron’s passage through Taurus?
THE SIGN OF THE INNER ANIMAL
Let’s start by clearing up some fog. The Spanish custom of la corrida de toros – the bullfight – has given everyone a distorted sense of what bulls are actually like. As astrologers, it helps us to remember that a bull is a male cow. Like most cows, leave a bull alone and it’s basically a big peaceful vegetarian. And that imagery paints a far clearer picture of astrological Taurus than bloody images of matadors facing off with charging, presumably terrified, bulls fighting for their lives.
Because of all of that, when I am practicing astrology I try to leave imagery of bulls and cows mostly out of the picture, and instead think of Taurus simply as animal energy – the wisdom we see in cats, ravens, deer, dolphins, whatever. However we imagine it, this sign of the zodiac is deeply connected to our instincts – all of those “knowings” and reflexes that are hardwired into us by a million years of hominid evolution.
For modern digitally-addled humans, it’s easy to forget our own animal natures – that homo sapiens is a species of primate, for starters. Our closest cousins are the Great Apes, as a quick look at any zoo or high school class will soon reveal. The main reminder we have of that animal part of ourselves is these physical bodies we’re walking around in, which means that bodily awareness is one very basic dimension of Taurus. That tells us that a deepening collective attunement to the physical body will be part of our experience of Chiron’s passage through Taurus. As we will soon see, there are both pleasant and unpleasant elements to that observation.
Let’s start with a quick linguistic survey:
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Maybe something you hear “makes you feel a little queasy.”
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A frightened mother says, “When I heard Billy was going to be okay, I felt like I could finally breathe again.”
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Maybe you meet someone “and they just don’t smell right to you” – those are your words, but everyone knows that you’re not talking about an actual odor.
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“Logically I think I should do this, but my guts are telling me to do that.”
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Watching the news lately isn’t good for my blood pressure.
All of those body-centered metaphors come straight out of Taurean consciousness. Often they represent real wisdom. How often have you “ignored your guts” and lived to regret it? And yet modern society often seems hellbent on turning us away from our inner animal. Putting kids in classrooms for hours or adults in chairs in front of computer screens all day long – how does your “inner ape” feel about that confinement? Slathering us with deodorants, destroying twilight with electric glare, shooting us up with Botox and collagens, eliminating both shivering and sweat – there’s an ancient part of you that simply finds all of that highly confusing.
The antidote? Taurus energy! Maybe you just need a hug – and it would be difficult to come up with a better signature statement for Taurus than that one. To live without touch is very difficult, but it’s even more difficult to try to explain why that observation is as true as it is. Like most truly Taurean insights, we just know it more than we understand it intellectually. Once again, we’re talking about instincts.
To grasp what’s going on in the sky now, we need to add the specific nature of the Wounded Healer – Chiron – to the mixture. That term “Wounded Healer” is a powerful one, at least for illuminating Chiron’s higher dimensions. At its best, it reflects the way we can help others once we’ve figured out how to help ourselves. Heal yourself and you’ll have a map you can share with others in similar predicaments, in other words. Still, for our present purposes, it’s helpful to remember that with Chiron, everything starts with a wound – or more precisely, with an awareness of a wound. That thought brings us directly to the heart of the matter. In a nut shell, we’ve all been experiencing Chiron in Aries for the past eight years and we’ve got scars to prove it – or we might say. “A Wound” to prove it.
As with all the signs, Aries is complicated, so I don’t want to reduce it to cliches, nor do I want to look at it in an entirely negative way. But that negativity is where I plan to start. Each sign has a wounding dimension and Chiron tends to reveal it. With Chiron in Aries, that wound is rage, along with its most common offspring, violence. Those hard feelings have a cousin who almost always accompanies them: fear. That’s the poison that Chiron has been bringing to the surface since 2018.
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Distilling the toxins down to their essence, with Chiron’s “diagnostic stethoscope” attuned to Aries energy, for the past eight years the message we have all been hearing is I want to kill something. That, or something wants to kill me.
The question that I am about to ask might not apply to everyone, at least not equally, but if someone claimed that it had no relevance to them at all, I’d be quietly suspicious that they were either lying to me or to themselves.
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Since 2018, how much time have you spent feeling either angry or afraid? That’s the signature of Chiron in Aries. More precisely, how much more time have you spent feeling angry or afraid compared to other periods of your life?
Let’s not go all airy-fairy here and start in about how anger and fear are negative emotions – well, at least not yet. We’ll get there.
Personally I’m angry about murdered children in Gaza, Israel, and Ukraine. I’m angry about Rene Goode and Alex Pretti. I’m angry about those 165 kids who were killed by a cruise missile in Iran at the outset of this pointless war. I’m angry about those poor girls whose lives were destroyed or diminished on Epstein Island – and I’m furious at a government that wants to protect the devils who perpetrated those crimes. I’m angry about what has happened to my country.
Here’s a big one to add to the list: Covid happened with Chiron in Aries – is anyone still angry or scared about that whole drama? Take your pick: what about those damned vaxxers or those damned antivaxxers? Even now, six years later, I still get nasty messages from people who disagreed with me about all of that. Why can’t they let it go? What morbid attachment to anger prevents them from realizing that reasonable people may differ when faced with complex questions?
Meanwhile, I am afraid we’re destroying the earth, all the while being led to hell in a handbasket by insane, violent, egomaniacal leaders who aren’t fit to tie the shoes of the defenceless souls they are murdering.
I’d be ashamed of myself if those evils didn’t bother me. But they sure have produced a lot of stomach acid in me. They’ve not been good for my blood pressure or my sleep. The core Chironic point is that these are not just philosophical or moral observations. These are results that I have experienced in my body.
You too, right? I know I am not alone in these feelings. Right on schedule, Chiron’s passage through Aries has brought the physical wounds of rage and fear to the collective surface. I’m not discounting the psychological and spiritual wounds either, but because we’re talking about Chiron in Taurus, I want to underscore the bodily side of everything. That’s a big part of what Taurus is about.
CHIRONIC SYMPTOMS
Half a century ago, Paul Simon used music to ask us all a simple question: “How long you think you can run that body down?” Welcome to the theme song for Chiron in Taurus. Your physical self has an important message for you: during Chiron’s passage through Aries, however righteous your anger might have been or however justified and real your fears might have been, they came with a biological price tag. You’ve been beaten up for a long time now, living on a diet of adrenalin. What’s starting to change is that you’re noticing its effects.
There’s some obvious good news implicit in that uncomfortable observation: no problem in the history of the world has ever been solved until it was recognized. Awareness is always the beginning of any healing process. We will get to that liberating perspective soon, but first let’s not ignore the rattlesnake in the living room:
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Between now and 2034, I suspect we will see an increase in the rate at which stress-related disorders are experienced and diagnosed. They are the inevitable result of eight years of chronic tension.
Will such disorders actually increase or are we simply looking at increased awareness of them? I suspect it’s a mixture of the two. Just to keep us grounded in our bodies, here’s a minor illustration of the principle I’m talking about: at this very moment, I am sitting at my desk, writing. I’m so intensely focussed on finding words to express all of this that I don’t notice how stiff my muscles feel as a result of remaining in one position for too long – until I do. Then, in response to the discomfort, I get up and stretch and it feels so good.
The stakes are far higher, but in parallel fashion, the pain of Chiron in Aries has been growing in us all day by day since 2018. We’ve just been too busy being angry or scared to notice it. Strong emotions such as those can eclipse pain, at least for a while. With Chiron in Taurus, everyone’s attention moves naturally toward doing a better job of monitoring the state of their physical bodies. The body’s message is clear: “Hey, thanks for finally noticing me – better late than never.”
Like everyone else, when I become aware of how cramped my body feels from sitting for too long, I feel motivated to get up and stretch. Naturally I want to change the condition that has been causing my unease. In the light of that simple, obvious thought, I think we can spotlight a question that is just beginning to crystallize in the collective awareness of humanity:
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Individually and as a community, aren’t we all tired of being angry and scared all the time? Hasn’t that stress crossed the line into some kind of danger zone?
The answer is fairly self-evident and its implications are potentially encouraging. Will Chiron in Taurus awaken many of us to the reality that we don’t need to feel this way? One core insight into Taurus is about the wisdom of simplicity – eat when you’re hungry, sleep when you’re tired, and get up and move if you feel stiff.
And stop fighting when you’re sick and tired of it.
Back in 1943, the late great Dane Rudhyar published a book called The Pulse of Life. In it, he postulated the idea that each sign is a reaction against the excesses or dangers of the previous one. The principle is elegant in its Taurean simplicity: Libran grace cures picky Virgoan criticism, while Scorpionic honesty cures the excesses of Libran “niceness” – and so on around the eternal circle.
Aries is ruled by Mars while Taurus is ruled by Venus. What is the cure for war? The answer is of course peace. Chiron’s entry into Taurus is signaling that humanity is increasingly desperate for some of that serenity, not so much because we love peace, but rather because we’re just tired of hurting. Maybe we are about to feel hurt enough in our bodies to give the endless wars a break. Maybe it’s time for us to realize that there are some things not worth fighting about. Maybe it’s time for us to remember to take a breath and let it out. Maybe Chiron will remind us that we are all “naked apes” beneath our clothes – and beneath our party affiliations. Maybe we’ll sense that it’s time to prioritize mental and spiritual health over winning every battle.
Does Chiron entering Taurus signal an age of peace, love, and understanding? The dawning of some fabled new age? I doubt it. I don’t want to become that hyperbolic. But there’s one astrological insight upon which you can count absolutely: it most certainly signals the end of the age of Chiron in Aries.
Can I get an amen?
Photo Credit: Aleksandr Ledogorov on Unsplash