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hermeticimp · 12 days

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Many are the faces of the Hellenic God Dionysus, but the duality of his nature is sometimes connected with two specific plants associated to the god. Dionysus relates to many plants such as Fig, Oak, Pine, Vine and Ivy, these two are specifically connected with two opposite faces of the god.

Grapevine starts its annual growth cycle in spring with bud break. During spring and summer, the plant grows and after flowering the vine sets the fruits that are usually harvested in early autumn. Following the first frost the leaves begin to fall as the vine starts to enter its winter dormancy period. The following spring, the cycle begins again. Following the same annual cycle Dionysus is seen as a god that is reborn every spring, bringing during the hot season prosperity and abundance before disappearing in winter. Grapevine grows thanks to the hot weather and humidity and so it represents the warm fertilizing humidity power of the god. Grape is used to create wine which is the drink sacred to Dionysus because of its ability to release mental faculties.

Ivy on the other hand, blossoms in the autumn when the vines are harvested and bears fruit in the spring. As an evergreen plant, ivy needs cold weather and humidity to grow and flower. Ivy vines crawl as snakes and in the myth, ivy appeared soon after the birth of Dionysus to shelter the child from the flames that burned the mother's body. To its freshness was attributed the virtue of dispelling the ardor of wine, so Dionysus was believed to have commanded his worshippers to crown themselves with it. Ivy, in contrast to the vine that bore fruit bearing vitality and exaltation, produced a poison that sterilized and had medicinal virtues that were refreshingly depurative and narcotic. The plant is also connected with thunder and lightning and was believed to have the power to protect from lightning and cure sore throat and cough.

Thus these two plants sacred to Dionysus are contrasted with each other in an eloquent contrast: the vine, drunk with light, is a child of heat and returns the rays of the sun by warming, with its libation, bodies and souls, while the ivy shows itself to be cold in nature; indeed the sterility and uselessness of its first sprouts recall night and death.

Their affinity is rooted in the very essence of the dual-figured god, whose nature is expressed from the earth by means of them: light and darkness, warmth and coldness, intoxication of life and breath of death that withers everything; the multiplicity of the Dionysian aspects struggling with each other and yet conjoined with each other is manifested here in vegetal form, stands in struggle with itself and prodigiously transitions from one form into the other.

Dionysus rules over all moist and hot creatures whose symbol would also be wine, as a hot and moist substance. In wine, heat is made ardor drink of fire that overwhelms everything, that ignites the soul and the body. But the moist heat is contrasted with the moist cold that as a Dionysian element, is manifested in ivy, a plant that greens even in winter when the Dionysian festivals take place.

#dionysus

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hermeticimp · 12 days

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the string

something happens when you join any artform where you connect to the past in invisible string . there is a tradition behind you and the second you pick up that pen or paintbrush or guitar you are connected to the thread and THAT alone is enough. every other success is a bonus

sometimes that thread is late nights on a tour bus cross country. sometimes it is a sold old galley opening. sometimes it is a book deal. but they are just the ones that get the most attention they are far from the most important

that thread also connects to the first garage band practice, to buying a paint set on a whim, to the novel in your head that refuses to trot out. these moments connect you to your heroes and your villains. to the way of legends.

and these quiet moments are SO IMPORTANT. never believe the bumps in the road have severed your tether. buckaroo that IS THE TETHER. you are part of a beautiful tradition and that alone bends timelines. congrats bud. its great to be here with you along the string

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hermeticimp · 12 days

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🌾 You are allowed to unlearn parts of you that do not align with who you are now 🌾

💌 You are allowed to re-evaluate your beliefs

🍃 You are allowed to change your mind

🦋 You are allowed to redefine your identity

☀️ You are allowed to let go of behaviors and habits that hinder your growth

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hermeticimp · 12 days

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Not every post about witchcraft needs to be tailored to the comfort of beginners.

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hermeticimp · 12 days

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It should 100% be illegal for companies to make you give them your payment information when you sign up for a free trial version of their product. It is not necessary and there is no good fucking reason for them to do it. It’s blatantly just so they can steal forgetful customers’ money.

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hermeticimp · 12 days

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Rabbits Rabbits Rabbits

Reblog this on the first of the month for good luck all month long!

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hermeticimp · 28 days

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young artist posting your work online, heed my warning. im holding your face so gently in my hands, you have to stop caring about numbers right now and start caring about making the weirdest and most self-indulgent art you possibly can

#reminder #things to remember #art #dionysus #hedonism #create what you want #buck propriety #offerings

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hermeticimp · 28 days

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hermeticimp · 1 month

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hermeticimp · 1 month

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you will live and you will say the wrong things and make mistakes and people will love you anyways.

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hermeticimp · 3 months

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Astrology as Brain Candy

One of the wonderful things about being a fiction writer is that you don’t have to worry about being right. Telling lies is the name of the game, so you have a license to follow interesting people down the most bizarre rabbit holes imaginable. All that matters is that their mistakes are interesting enough to weave a story around.

I came to astrology as an adult with little exposure to the discipline beyond newspaper horoscopes. There were whispers in my high school science classes about astrology. I knew that some famous astronomers in the past were also astrologers–Kepler, Regiomontanus, Tycho Brahe–but my teachers were baffled by their interest, and they taught me to raise an eyebrow, as well. At best, I was led to believe that their interest in astrology was an eccentric affectation. At worst, there were whispers about madness and genius, the inseparable twins.

When I was in my late-20s, I became fascinated by astronomy’s embarrassing estranged twin. Clutching my license to follow absurd ideas to their illogical conclusions, I threw myself down the astrological rabbit hole in search of a story.

I had always been told that astrology was fundamentally based on fantasy. Night sky as Rorschach test: Humanity looked at the stars and told stories about the shapes we found there. This story is true, but it isn’t the whole story. Encoded in the strange occult symbols are philosophical arguments dating back to the Presocratic Greeks. What is the fundamental nature of reality? How does existence come into being? What was the primordial substance air, fire, or water? In what positions were the planets at the first moment of creation? What is the nature of the lifecycle? Is it possible for matter to die?

Astrology doesn’t provide answers to those questions. It inhabits the questions themselves. In astrology, the universe is a clock. Viewed outside of time, the hands point to every possible number. The only answer to, “What time is it?” is, “Yes. As the planets cycle through the zodiac, they adopt different sides of every argument. Observe through enough cycles, and you’ll see what reality is like when each of the possible answers to these questions is true. Meet enough people, and you will meet each of these answers embodied as a living soul.

A chart is not a single answer but many. Every chart is a map of the universe in dialogue with itself. Within the thought-experiment of the chart, the answers talk with each other, argue with each other. The sun thinks the fundamental nature of reality is fire. The moon thinks it’s water. Together, they make steam, and from the steam, Neptune is born.

Taken all at once, the system of astrology is tremendously complicated, but it is the complexity of fractals, an endlessly complicated system built on simple rules. Just like complicated molecules can be broken down into simple elements, a chart can be broken down into planets, signs, houses, and the relationships between them. Signs can be broken down into elements, modes, polarities, and the relationships between them. Polarity is binary. Ones and zeroes.

There are people who could happily spend eternity contemplating elegant abstraction. You may be one of them. I’m not a mathematician, scientist, or technical person. I am a poet. When I explore the abstract complexity of astrology’s roots, I’m a diver, wearing specialized equipment, living on bottled air. I dive for the same reason pearl divers dive. I am looking for treasure in the depths. Imagery and metaphor.

Astrology is the difference engine of poetry: Like an organ grinder monkey, you can make music by turning a crank.

An example: Astrology says that Scorpio is the sign of “fixed water.” What, exactly, does that mean?

Fixity is one of the three modalities. Modalities map the lifecycle. Fixed signs are right in the middle between cardinal and mutable. They live like Vitruvian Man, arms stretched equally on both sides between infancy and old age.

Water is an element we are intimately familiar with. We need water, or else we’re dead. It nourishes us and cleanses us. It is the source and substance of life. Your brain is 95% water.

What does it mean to bring these two simple ideas together? In nature, what does fixed water look like?

When I was a young astrologer, I thought the answer to this answer was easy: ice. “Ice” came to me easily because it is unmoving and represents the stubborn unmovingness of middle age. (My sun sign Taurus embodies this quality most of all the fixed signs, so it’s not difficult to see why I chose this quality to emphasize.) Ice can be powerful. I was born on glacier-scoured land. The gently rolling hills are the bones of mountains that were once taller than the Himalayas. The ruins of a mountain range conquered by ice, the land of New England is a testament to just how powerful ice can be. Ice becomes powerful with time and movement, but these qualities are not essential (or even common) to its nature. With encouragement and pressure, ice can do extraordinary things. Without it, ice doesn’t do much at all.

The closer I’ve gotten to the midpoint of middle age myself, the more I’ve come to realize (or hope or wish) there is more to middle age than stubbornness. Middle age should be at the top of a big bell curve between beginning and ending. Under ideal circumstances, life at middle age reigns at the height of its power. It knows who it is, what it is capable of, what its domain is. It knows its limits, as well, and, within those limits, it doesn’t hesitate to act.

In nature, rivers embody fixed water most clearly. Rivers have the powerful earth-carving power of glaciers, but they are water at its most alive, most itself. Water that is unmoving–either because it is frozen or because it is stuck and has nowhere to go–is dead water. Middle age can be like a barren icefield or a swamp, but that is what happens when middle age has gone wrong. A living death at middle age isn’t the way things should be.

Springs, rivers, and oceans are living waters. This is the water of astrology, beginning, living, and returning to the source.

I speak with the confidence of a middle aged astrologer, but the answer to the question, “What is fixed water?” is far from settled. Like rivers, symbols are living, moving things. Attempting to settle a final answer on them is as foolish as building a city on a flood plain. Even within a single person, the answers change. Ten years ago, I ran the question of Scorpio through my natal chart and churned out ice. Today, I returned to the same place and found a river.

I would never claim to have a mind like Kepler’s, but it is no longer a mystery to me why geniuses of his calibur have been fascinated by astrology. It isn’t the answers that astrology can potentially give about the future that makes it so fascinating, it’s the questions it raises, the potential foci for rumination.

Like a child peering into a kaleidoscope, the mind is transfixed, staring into the starry heavens, enchanted.

#astrology #refs

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hermeticimp · 3 months

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You Also Are Psyche: Beauty and the Shadow Self

I was a teenager the first time crop tops and low-rise baggy jeans were cool. In my eyes, everyone in my school was a clone of Brittney Spears, and I felt like a hideous beast. Because I couldn’t go around with a bag over my head, I did my best to hide behind books.

One of those books was Till We Have Faces by CS Lewis. It is a retelling of the myth of Cupid and Psyche from the perspective of Psyche’s sister Orual. Orual was angry and bitter, and she was actually allowed to wear a veil to hide her face. Best of all, since she was a queen, there was no one to tell her not to write an entire book about it.

Till We Have Faces was the perfect medicine for that time in my life. I drank up Orual’s bitterness like illicit beer. I reveled in her self-righteous anger.

Her life was unfair. And she was allowed to file a complaint with the gods!

As she prepared to present her argument, I cackled with glee, convinced that the gods would see the rightness of her cause and… I wasn’t sure what I wanted them to do, exactly. Just the possibility that Orual might be right was enough.

Spoiler alert.

Orual doesn’t get what she wants, exactly, but she does get what she needs. After she is allowed to repeat her rant at the gods over and over again, she realizes that “the complaint was the answer.” She is not actually the righteous victim. The story (and her involvement in it) was more complicated, and she was (unknowingly) complicit in her sister’s suffering. Then she is taken to receive judgement from Eros. Reunited with Psyche, they look into a reflecting pool together, and she sees identical reflections.

“You also are Psyche,” the god says, and that is his judgement.

Orual receives, not mercy exactly, but a lesson in the interconnectedness of all things. She learns that gods and people “flow in and out of each other,” and, so, justice cannot assign blame to a single individual. The ugly sister and Psyche and Venus are one, and their beauty and ugliness and suffering are experienced by each other in the same way a body feels the pain of its hand or foot.

Psyche as the Shadow

As an adult, I have come to realize that Lewis’s version of Cupid and Psyche is about the paradoxical nature of the shadow. When we say “shadow,” we usually mean something ugly or wicked, but the shadow is anything about ourselves we can’t accept.

The difficulty I had with fashion as a teenager was just an outward manifestation of my inward struggle to see myself in my entirety. For whatever reason, it was (and continues to be) easier for me to admit my faults than participate in beauty. Attempts to put my “best foot forward” and present myself “in the best light” feel disingenuous. Like Orual, I am happy to show off my intelligence, but wearing makeup and fancy clothes and sitting in front of a camera feels fundamentally wrong.

It can be more difficult to accept the beautiful in us as it is to accept the ugly, and I get a lot of support from the spiritual community for my position on beauty. In a landscape rendered flawless by filters and Photoshopping and AI, refusing to participate in the beauty game seems humble and honest, but my motivations are anything but honest.

“If I can’t play the game well,” I say to myself, “I’m not going to play at all.”

For me, hiding from the camera is a subtle way of engaging in spiritual bypassing and, in the process, supporting the position that “only the beautiful deserves to show up” that I claim to stand against.

The Astrology of Psyche (Or, You Are Psyche, Too)

“You also are Psyche” is true in a mythical sense, but it is also true in a more literal sense. There is an asteroid named Psyche, which means the Goddess of the Beauty of the Soul appears somewhere in everyone’s chart.

In my chart, Psyche appears in my 10th house, close to my Midheaven, which means that my relationship with the myth of Psyche is an aspect of my soul that is a highly visible part of my personality–visible even to people who don’t know me personally. Psyche is close to my Mercury, giving me a “way with words” and making it easy for me to own the mercurial side of my nature, but Psyche is “close but not close enough” to my sun and Venus making it difficult for me to identify (sun) with Psyche and see her beauty (Venus) in myself.

Being able to see the astrology of a favorite story playing out in my life has helped me to begin the life-long journey of hiking to Psyche’s reflecting pool and seeing her face in mine, and I would like to help you, too.

If you’d like to learn more about asteroid Psyche in your chart, check out my workshop on Cupid and Psyche, or let’s chat over tea!

#astrology #asteroids #refs

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hermeticimp · 9 months

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Full Moon in Pisces (8.30.23) - Savior Complex

So, the Full Moon is in Pisces right now and my favorite artist's birthday was yesterday, so I'm dealing with a lot of feelings. I was encouraged to share them by @adapembroke and we've been trying to get me to post more, so here's hoping this is the full start of that. I won't get into my adoration for Michael here. That is something I will do in future posts because I have plenty I plan to write on him. This is about the raw emotions and realization that hit me in the last 24 hours. Just know that love goes deep and is unshakeable. Continues under the cut

I have feelings - especially since Michael's birthday was literally yesterday and he has a Pisces Rising (like me) conjunct his Pisces Moon. I spent Monday and Tuesday listening to him - the first day my brother was cooking for school, so we spent the day downstairs listening to his albums and going back and forth on what we appreciated about them. I find his album Dangerous from '92 is a surprise favorite since it's very 90s but even 30 years later still speaks on things we deal with now.

Then yesterday, I watched one of his live tour performances. I was having fun for awhile, but then it hit me just how much I miss and love him and why I fear shining too much as a sensitive person - because I watched one of my idols be destroyed by the world he was in. A person I share all my critical angles with, a person who also has Leo and Virgo placements and a Libra NN, his being conjunct my natal Chiron. He was a star who loved and shared his heart and he was crucified for what he said. That terrifies me. Michael's music was one of a handful of artists' that got me through the hardest times and his death was a changing point in my life. I love him much more than I would ever want to admit - even to myself, which makes that fear all the more real. I don't want to go out like he did. I don't wanna be destroyed for daring to be a voice against the crowd. It feels like all kinds of past life wounds and fears have been dredged up with this moon transiting my 12th and 1st houses.

So that was a lot. I've been really reflective. At the same time as this fear, I found a podcast last night about learning to embrace your voice and I've spent part of today reading the book "My Friend Fear". I even managed writing the characters I've been meaning to write for months this past week. So I don't want to let fear stop me, regardless of how valid. I just need to figure out balancing my fear and my need to use my voice. I think Michael being so relevant right now is meant to help with that.

Another theme that's been prevalent in the last few weeks, but feels pretty poignant on top of what I said is the concept of being someone's "savior". That theme has come up a lot. There's even a song ("Savior") by someone I look up to - Kendrick Lamar - where he talked about how he couldn't be anyone's savior even though people wanted him to be. On another song on the same album ("Mirror"), he apologizes for choosing to save himself and his family and not being that savior - which irked me when it came out (last year) because I never felt he needed to be sorry for that. You can't save everyone. You shouldn't be sorry for choosing yourself, especially when you've already given so much.

And yet, that's what Pisces does. It gives and gives and gives until it has nothing for itself. And it fails to have compassion for itself. It's inconjunct Leo, who healthily does take care of itself. They both have to learn the balance between healthily self-focus and giving compassionately and genuinely. And I've been struggling with that. Michael struggled with it and in the end, the Pisces shadow is how he left the world. I don't want that. If these Leo transits have taught me anything, it's that I don't want that. Sure, being vulnerable is scary, but I've spent my whole life being self-sacrificial and not valuing myself. It didn't get me anywhere good - not in the long-term. So why not embrace myself and who I really am? Why not embrace self-compassion and love while still giving people room to be themselves? I won't allow myself to stay transfixed by my pain. I will continue to dive deep and transmute it into light while exploring my depths and the depths of the world around me - to go underneath the underneath.

I will be me, even in this world that says that's wrong. I don't have a choice. Even if that means confronting what scares me most. I have to live for me.

I'm not anyone's savior but my own. You can't be anyone's savior but your own. The best you can do is lead by example - to be an inspiration, a Muse - the last of which is hilariously on the nose for me since I played a Greek mythology video game called Stray Gods: A Roleplaying Musical this past week where you play as a Muse who helps solve people's issues by getting them to sing what's in their heart. She can't force them to lie or go against their true nature, but she can elicit and inspire them to express themselves truthfully (to an extent). Even funnier is that the character's name - Grace - is one of the meanings for my nickname irl - Anna.

Michael's asteroid - like Hermes - lies in my 11H in Cap. He's an inspiration, a guiding light, a Muse… but he isn't my savior. He shouldn't have been anyone's but his own. And I won't try to be anyone else's either. Not if I want to make it out of this life the way I want to. I can't fall into the Neptunian illusion or Jupiterian delusion of grandeur. I have a voice and I will share it. If people resonate, they do and that's great. If they don't, that's fine too. It's not my job to save everyone - only to be share what I feel needs to be said and expressed for us to start healing as a whole. To share what I need to to express myself and be of service by doing so. I don't want to lose my faith and magic in this world, my sense of wonder. Michael is one of those that reminds me of that - for good and bad. I will honor myself first and foremost. I won't drown in this ocean inside me.

#astrology #ada's school of narrative astrology #narrative astrology #pisces #michael jackson #full moon in pisces #my writing

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hermeticimp · 9 months

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since the old version of this post was flagged for 'adult content'...

reblog this post if your account is a trans safe space or owned by a trans person!

along with that, reblog if your account is a non-binary spectrum safe space or owned by someone on the enby spectrum!

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hermeticimp · 10 months

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Rethinking Chiron

I have many reasons to be thankful for Chiron. That may seem like an odd thing to say about the Wounded Healer. Most astrologers would say having Chiron in the 11th house like I do means that some of my greatest wounds will come from rejection by my communities. And there’s nothing I can do about it. Chiron wounds can’t be healed, they say. The best I can hope for is using my experience with the wound to heal others with the same wound.

When I learned this, I got angry. I knew there was something to this Chiron business, but I believe in hope. I was convinced that my community was out there somewhere. I just hadn’t found my people yet. I didn’t care how many astrologers I respected subscribed to that story of Chiron. I refused to believe that my Chiron wound couldn’t be healed. If I couldn’t find a community to accept me, I was going to make one. I was going to build the most welcoming community I’d ever seen.

Before I knew what Chiron was, I had already started doing the work. After college, I spent a year in a community organizing internship. I was supposed to be learning how to rally a community around social justice work. What I actually learned was how to create communities where people aren’t just lonely followers and observers. They are included and actively involved members of the community because they are seen and appreciated for their unique skills and interests.

Using what I learned from that internship, I used Discord to create the community that would eventually become the Narrative Astrology Lab. I wasn’t thinking of it as a place where people with rejection wounds like mine could find a place they belong for the first time. Yet, over and over I’ve heard newbies say, “I’ve never been one of the cool kids before!”

Recently, one of the members of the lab asked me about my experience with Chiron. Mars had just finished spending months activating their natal Chiron in Gemini. I have Mars conjunct Chiron in Gemini in my natal chart, and they wondered if the transit had taught me anything about that Mars-Chiron combination.

I hadn’t realized it until that moment, but that transit completely revolutionized my view of Chiron. I no longer see Chiron as the Wounded Healer. The wound is only a small part of the Chiron story. Meditating on the rest of his story has made my view of Chiron so much richer… and brought massive healing, as well.

The wound of Chiron is a narrative problem.

I have only been physically dragged into a church once in my life. I was in high school, and my youth group was planning a retreat. It was the last night to sign up, and I wasn’t on the list. I had no interest in going. As we waited for our parents to pick us up in the church parking lot, a group of the younger kids begged me to sign up, and I refused. When it became clear that I wasn’t going to budge, the group picked me up like the world’s smallest traveling mosh pit and carried me into church.

My memory of this event is vivid. When I close my eyes, I can still see the white doors of the church getting closer as I yelled, begging to be put down. I didn’t want to spend days cramped in tight quarters with a bunch of other church kids. I wanted to be left alone.

I don’t have an especially vivid memory. It’s rare for me to be able to recall images from the past clearly. It’s even rarer for me to be able to recall a random memory like refusing to sign up for a church trip. I have learned that when my unconscious keeps a random memory cryogenically frozen for decades, the memory isn’t actually random. These oddly vivid memories are artifacts of a personal narrative I’m carrying that is disconnected from reality and ready to retire.

The story I told about that day at church was that it was one of many examples of times when I’ve been rejected by a community I care about. Looking at it now, it’s strikingly obvious that I wasn’t being rejected. They really wanted me to join them!

How could I make such an obvious mistake? Because of my personal narrative.

I’ve always been a weird kid. Wonky knees kept me from running around on the playground. I wasn’t able to participate in gym class. I had to sit on the bleachers and watch. The other kids noticed and acted like my disability was a communicable disease, either teasing me or avoiding me. By the time I was in high school, I identified as an outcast. I told myself that I was looking for my people as hard as I could, but deep down I believed I was–and always would be–rejected by every community I cared about.

The story of being dragged into church should have contradicted this narrative. If I’d been able to look at it critically, it would have, but the conscious mind filters our perceptions of reality to suit our unconscious narratives. The narrative of rejection clouded my judgment, making it impossible for me to see the truth.

All was not lost, though. Like a grain of sand in the shell of an oyster, the memory of being dragged into church irritated me until the day I was ready to recognize it as a pearl.

Chiron’s house is the place where we are adopted by the gods.

A few months ago, I was captivated by an element of the story of Chiron no one talks about. The story begins with Chiron being rejected by his human mother who is horrified to have given birth to a centaur. This is the part we focus on, the pain and horror of childhood rejection. But it’s not the end of the story. Chiron is adopted by Artemis and Apollo.

Today, we know that psychological wounding we get in childhood sticks with us for the rest of our lives, but in the myth, we don’t see him pining for his biological parents. We can chalk that up to ancient ignorance of child psychology, but doing so diminishes the love of adopted families. Being adopted by the gods seems to suit Chiron just fine. He grows up to be a well-respected doctor and mentor of heroes.

What if Chiron’s place in our charts doesn’t just point to a rejection wound? I wondered. What if it also points to a place where we have been adopted by the gods?

I thought back to the times when I have felt most alienated. I realized that those were the times when I spent the most time at the library. Books were my mentors and closest friends, but I wasn’t completely lacking human support. I had teachers who recognized my bookishness and encouraged me to see my love of reading and writing as a way to connect with others.

Who’s to say those teachers weren’t messengers of Hermes?

Planets conjunct Chiron aren’t easy to accept.

If my story was a simple fairy tale, I would say that this realization about Chiron allowed me to see that I had been accepted by every community I had ever belonged to, that my perceived rejection was just an illusion. And then I lived happily ever after.

The truth is more complicated.

On the day I was dragged into church, I had set a boundary with my community. I didn’t want to go to the retreat. I told them I had no intention of going. They physically crossed my boundary and attempted to get me to go anyway.

I wasn’t rejected, but my boundaries were. My community wanted me… but without my Mars.

When I look back at the times I’ve felt alienated in communities, my Mars has been there like a berserker looming over my shoulder. I am not an aggressive person. When threatened, my first instinct is to fawn, not attack. Yet, I’ve always felt like people can sense my Mars like the smell of something feral.

“I feel like I was raised by wolves and am still learning to be civilized, don’t you?” one of my professors once asked me.

When I was a teenager, I was a punk on the outside. It was my way of exercising self-defense. Like a hedgehog, I wore spikes on my skin. Kicking a hedgehog is its own punishment. I hoped that my spikiness would send the same message. Then I went to college with the plan to disappear in the crowded anonymity of Boston. I shed my punk aesthetic for a peacoat and a knitted slouch hat. I wore them like an invisibility cloak. If I had the language of astrology then, I would have thought: There is no reason for my Mars to be here. Maybe now it will shrivel up and fall off.

I suspect Chiron feels similarly about his horsey backside. In myth, Chiron is the token centaur in a community that sees centaurs as brutish barbarians. He achieves an honored place in his community by playing by the rules, continually demonstrating that he is “different than all those other animals.” He is the civilized centaur, so educated and refined he is trusted with the mentoring of heroes. In the process, he rejects the animal part of his nature that is rejected by his community.

Embracing Chiron is necessary healing.

In one of the versions of the myth of Chiron, he does an odd thing. When he is wounded and discovers it is a wound he can’t heal, he takes the place of Prometheus, the rebel being punished for stealing fire from the gods. Seeing Chiron taking punishment he doesn’t deserve, Zeus frees him and puts him in the starry sky.

In other versions of his story, Chiron isn’t wounded at all. He is rounded up with all the other centaurs and killed in a centaur genocide. His willingness to conform doesn’t save him. Neither does his supposed immortality. When his community decides it is no longer willing to tolerate centaurs, no one cares that he’s the civilized one. He is killed, anyway.

I like to think that these two versions of the myth represent different paths he could have taken. Different paths we all could take when presented with the option to wound ourselves in the quest to fit in. And the consequences of betraying an aspect of our nature.

It is only when Chiron is willing to identify with the rebel Prometheus, and embrace the rejected parts of himself, that he is able to take his place among the stars.

The alternative isn’t silent misery. It’s the death of his soul.

#chiron #ada's school of narrative astrology #narrative astrologer #astrology #refs

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