Friday, April 16, 2010

Chiron in Pisces: Integration and Integrity



© 2010 by Joyce Mason

Healing is bringing mercy and awareness
into that which we have held
in judgment and fear.
 ~Stephen Levine

In its 50-year orbit, Chiron changes signs from Aquarius to Pisces on April 20, 2010 where it will remain, except for a temporary retrograde back to Aquarius, until February 18, 2019. What news can we expect in Chiron’s realm of wounding, healing and wholeness?

First, let’s pause for perspective. Because of Chiron’s extremely elliptical orbit, it takes roughly 30 years to pass from Aquarius through Taurus. By comparison, it takes a mere eight years to transit from Leo through Scorpio. [1] Imagining this division in a “natural” chart with 0 Aries Rising, the Chiron signs have very uneven slices of the zodiac pie. [2] Some look like a dieter’s sliver—others, a birthday-sized indulgence. Pisces gets a healthy hunk of pie at nearly nine years in the sign, one of the longer visits by Chiron. Soon you’ll see why this is probably a good omen.

The last time Chiron was in Pisces was from late March 1960 through January 1969. [3] This is the cycle many of us reading these words were alive to remember. We’ll consult history for some hints about what to expect in the current cycle. [4] For people with Chiron in Pisces, it’s “your time.” You'll experience a major life transit, your Chiron Return, during the next nine years. Now to introduce you!

If You Have Chiron in Pisces

Chiron in Pisces has absorbed the full evolution of the Chiron signs. Your wound is a loss of individuality or your unique Self. Yet Chiron asks us to become all that we are, not just for ourselves, but to contribute our unique gift to help others.

Your link to Chiron is your compassionate kindness, but you retain the shadow of the wild centaurs. You want ecstatic unity, but unfortunately, you can be sucked into undertow of Neptune’s murky waters. Neptune, Pisces’ ruler, also can lure you into substances and addictions that go with his realm: alcohol, drugs, sex, and a desire to avoid life’s harsher realities. Your wound may come from an overly spiritual upbringing where you had ecstatic, mystical experiences that were a bit advanced for your tender years and neurological system. Wounds could be caused by parents, siblings, or other family members with bad boundaries—invading your personal space (privacy) or your physical space (incest).

When Chiron is in Pisces, expect the issue of setting healthy boundaries to be up big time. My Boundaries 101 post was also excerpted on Donna Cunningham’s Sky Writer,where tips from the trenches and depth insights on the subject are still being shared. Visit these posts, especially the comments, for more on this issue. Look for a Boundaries 102 follow-up post in the near future.


Boundary issues light up the part of the Chiron myth where the wild centaurs think anything and everybody is theirs for the taking—and somehow, you have been taken. In my article, High Signs 3: Living on the Upside of the Zodiac, I talk about the sign of Pisces’ need for devotion and a willingness to come back from the ecstatic state to bring the Oneness experienced down to earth for others to share. When you are willing to be that “rainbow bridge,” you have mastered the Fish swimming in opposite directions. You see yourself coming and going!

To bring heaven to earth in this ecstatic way, Chiron in Pisces make great musicians, “speaking” the universal language that unites the world. You can be a dancer whose movements teach others the path to ecstasy, a gifted psychic, or a poet. If it involves bringing that sense of bliss to earth, it’s for you. Spiritual leadership, artistic talent, facility with dreams and other tools of psychological exploration are other possible vocations. Chiron in Pisces knows the heaven side of bringing heaven to earth. You know your gifts are solid when you begin, figuratively, to buy round-trip tickets from earth to sky and back.


History Lessons

I reviewed the headlines for the last Chiron in Pisces cycle, year by year, and the themes were stunning. They include racial integration in society and music—suddenly, white people singing and listening to traditionally black music—and the integration of other polarities, such as male/female in the feminist movement. Racial integration and feminism both came of age during the ‘60s. Here’s a Chiron in Pisces giggle: Beach and surf music also dominated, a tribute to the Fish water sign! Another amusing, Chironic if not Piscean symbol: The Ford Mustang was the most popular car of the era, merging a driver’s wits and “top half” with a horse-named vehicle underneath. The Mustang allowed people in the ‘60s to become a sort of modern centaur, half-human and half-mechanical horse. Since mustangs are wild horses, even the wild centaurs of Chiron’s mythology are represented in the era’s favorite choice of wheels. I consider the American love of Mustangs to be a precursor of the centaur planet’s discovery in the next decade.

Because of Chiron’s connection to health, healing—and the fact that surgeon was one of his many talents, I wanted to know what happened in the area of health and medicine. Health care was the fastest growing industry and became more business-like as it grew. [5] By 1969, the average net profit of a medical practitioner was $32,000 or four times the net income of the average worker.
One of the most revolutionary changes under Chiron in Pisces was the initiation of the Medicare and Medicaid programs under President Lyndon B. Johnson. These programs routinely extended good medical care to the poor and elderly for the first time in history—certainly in keeping with the compassionate side of Pisces and Chiron as healer. On the downside, Medicare ended up costing far more than even the most conservative planners ever imagined, a price that’s still climbing—and we’re still wondering how we’ll keep paying as baby boomers come of retirement age, flooding the system with new recipients.

To hit just a few more highlights in Chiron’s realm of health and healing:

• Implantation surgery was revolutionized with the first human liver and lung transplants in 1963. The first heart transplant followed in 1964, using a chimpanzee heart while awaiting a more suitable donor. While these early patients did not fare well, their surgeries were the beginning of the commonplace organ transplants of today. (I can’t imagine anything more Piscean than organ donation, to merge a part of one’s self into another literally. The recipient also becomes a Chironic, composite being.)


• In 1964, the Surgeon General first warned the public of the dangers of smoking.


• Women were afforded unprecedented reproductive and sexual choices as the pill and IUD became readily available.


• As more drugs became widely available to combat a variety of diseases, rigorous FDA testing began to prove some of those drugs to be unsafe, such as thalidomide, a morning sickness medication that caused widespread birth defects. (Chiron was the original mythical being born with a birth defect as a horse/man.)

The biggest, Chironic headline of all in the health care field? In the 1960s, interest in alternative forms of health care strengthened, and it has continued ever since. [6] (Mythical Chiron was a surgeon who used herbs and other natural methods, the original practitioner of complementary medicine.)

Last time Chiron was in Pisces, compassion and the good of all were reflected in providing major medical services to the elderly and the monitoring health care impacts on the public.

Black and White, Male and Female

In Wholeness and the Inner Marriage, I discuss the concept that astrological Chiron is about the psychological integration of all polarities within us. Racial injustice is still a painful reality to many Afro-Americans, but the dichotomy of black versus white touches everyone at an archetypal level. Racial integration is the outer expression of the inner integration we need to make with our own shadows and the things inside us that seem to be at odds with one another. These are the opposing parts of us that seem, at first, too different for us to come to terms with them. The feminist revolution pits male and female in the same way, and we all have the recessive opposite gender inside us, the anima or animus, begging to be blended into a balanced wholeness.

The cultural shifts that occurred during Chiron in Pisces in the 1960s punctuate the role of Pisces as the consummate sign in the cycle of twelve, the place where it all comes together. Chiron in Pisces is the part of the cycle where we see our oneness with the Other—both inner (our disparate parts of Self) and outer (people different from us).

According to the opening quote by Stephen Levine, that which is unhealed is held in judgment and fear. Nothing could be truer historically about white society’s attitude toward blacks or other people of color; and men’s fear about women claiming their own power. Even the animus (recessive male) in some women cringed at the Women’s Movement. I remember a street-smart mom of a friend who was a feminist before there was a word for it. She was a single mother who made her way in a man’s world. She thought “women’s lib” was “for the birds.” Go figure. Still, we are fortunate to see how far we have come while not denying the distance we have yet to go: an Afro-American President (with a prominent Chiron who is actually half-black and half-white), three women Secretaries of State (including one black woman) and most recently our first Oscar-winning woman producer. The sign of Pisces rules film, so I couldn’t exclude this category, especially given how much film influences our culture.

Barack Obama, with his prominent Chiron in Pisces in the 1st House, will experience his Chiron Return in 2011-2012 with exact hits on May 21, June 25, and February 26. I suspect we’ll learn much about the archetype of Chiron and Chiron in Pisces as the “leader of the free world” experiences this major midlife transit in plain public view. I’ll be watching those turning-point dates for both personal and political changes experienced by “President Chiron.”

What’s the Outlook? Chiron in Pisces, 2010-19

From my typing fingers to God’s ear: I hope we see more integration—racial, political, sociological, and cultural—and individual. Most of all, I hope we see the rebirth of integrity as a paramount virtue. The words integration and integrity are interrelated.

When we are fully integrated—when we’ve come to terms with the different parts of Self and no longer judge or fear them—we are a person of integrity. We act from this whole self. What we believe and do is one in the same.

The United States of America has not been “in integrity” regarding race relations, women, gays, financial and medical equality—just to name a few realms of society that have major gaps between what we say we stand for and what we do. Reflecting on our Constitution and the ideals of “all men are created equal” and the so-called guarantee of “the pursuit of happiness,” I have sometimes wondered what country the Founding Fathers were talking about.

Even at those times I have been most depressed about how far we have to go, I am still encouraged by our progress toward racial and gender integration made since the pivotal decade of the 1960s. The USA is hardly the only wounded society on the face of the earth when it comes to these things; yet, we have more resources and know-how than most to do something about them.

A concept that’s truly “Chiron in Pisces” is the fact that the whole is equal to the sum of its parts. We are each other. That cosmic soup where Chiron in Pisces is so comfortable is the answer to the dilemma. Some say the synergy created among people is greater than the sum of its parts. Heal one and you heal the whole—and then some. If it spills across the globe, what a legacy.

Mend your own hurts, find your own missing parts, and your special gifts only you can give—your vocation. The resultant “you in integrity” is the beginning of a society that’s the same. I call it a divine domino effect.

Be the best, most unified you. You’ll know just what to do to make a difference over this decade while Chiron in Pisces sensitizes us, once more, to the issues of integration, integrity—and our obligation to love and care for one another.

obligation

c.1300, from O.Fr. obligation (1235), from L. obligationem (nom. obligatio) "an engaging or pledging."

Let it be our pledge to engage.

~~~

Photo Credit: INTEGRATION PUZZLE © Violad Dreamstime.com

Related Recommended Posts:  Chiron in Pisces - Water Over Rocks by Mandi Lockley and Chiron in Pisces by Tony Vowles. Note my comment about Chiron in Pisces and poetry.

Notes:

[1] Barbara Hand Clow, Chiron: Rainbow Bridge Between the Inner and Outer Planets, p. 79.

[2] Ibid., p. 80, Figure 1. An illustration of Chiron’s Orbital Times in the Signs.

[3] There was a retrograde back to Aquarius from April through mid-October 1968.

[4] For the sake of writing a blog-sized article rather than a tome, I limited my review to the last Chiron in Pisces cycle. Another reason: The ‘60s have more cultural relevance to us today than the 1910 – 1919 or even earlier transits of Chiron in Pisces.

[5] The 1960’s: Medicine and Health Overview

[6] What Is Complementary and Alternative Medicine?


Don’t forget the gift with purchase of Chiron and Wholeness: A Primer through April 30!

22 comments:

Susannah said...

Wonderful Joyce, I really enjoyed this article and it is really timely for me as my Chiron is at 0 degrees Pisces.

"When we are fully integrated—when we’ve come to terms with the different parts of Self and no longer judge or fear them—we are a person of integrity. We act from this whole self. What we believe and do is one in the same."

Yes, Yes, Yes ! :-)

Thanks Joyce.

Joyce Mason said...

Bless you, Susannah. With your Chiron at the sensitive ingress point, the fact that you resonate to the article tells me I hit the mark. Thank you--and Happy Chiron Return!

Anonymous said...

Thanks Joyce. Really informative and encouraging. I've got Jup/Chiron conjunct in Pisces (3d house/7-8 degrees) so have something to look forward to!Just have to sort out this t-square thing going on! In my country we are slowly getting to terms with the fact that diversity is positive, but there's still a long way to go, I'm afraid.

Joyce Mason said...

Hello, Anonymous--

Glad you found both info and encouragement in this post! The Cardinal T-Square is challenging many of us. (I speak from personal experience!)

Countries like people have their own pace of evolution. I hope I live to see the day when diversity is celebrated the world over!

Anne Whitaker said...

Hi Joyce

this is such a deep and insightful article - and its appearance is certainly timeous for me as I have been working (struggling!) towards some more progress on 'the stormy journey of the soul'in the week that Chiron shifts into Pisces. I shall send the link to my brother who has Chiron conj Jupiter in the first decanate of Pisces.

Thank you

Anne

Joyce Mason said...

Anne, thank you so much for your kind comment. I am feeling the shift of Chiron into Pisces in a big way. More on that in future articles ... and I hope all of us enjoy enhanced personal integration through many Piscean tools: music, art, poetry, dance, and so on.

Ellen Longo said...

Fascinating historical research, Joyce. Thanks so much.

Bella Voce said...

Thanks Joyce - Great Article. I have Chiron in Pisces at 6degrees in the 8th house conjunct the south node. Still trying to understand what it all means. Several things you said rang very true. Thanks for posting it. Kathryn

Joyce Mason said...

Kathryn, I'm glad the article spoke to you! That's a fascinating Chiron configuration. I'd imagine you are very gifted with intuition. Consider my Chiron and Wholeness: A Primer book for more insights. Since I specialize in Chiron, you might want to consider a personal consultation sometime before your Chiron Return, which will occur around March 2012. Many blessings and thanks for the positive feedback!

Anonymous said...

Hi-

Great article! Love, love, love this:

"Divine domino effect!!!"

p.s. This question is from REALLY out of left field, but since you're into dreams.....
...since we all dream of flying as though we're swimming, could it be a possible human ability??????

THANKS!

Joyce Mason said...

Dear Anon--

So glad you like "divine domino effect". I coined that expression many years ago when I realized a domino effect could also be positive. (We tend to hear it used only in the negative.)

Yogis have been purported to fly in states of meditation. I don't doubt it's a possible human ability; however, it can also mean you are having out of body experiences in your dream state. Based on personal experience, I recommend paying strong attention to what you learn while flying in your dreams. You may be receiving a potent message. When it happened to me, it was what I call a report card dream. I was being told I was on the right path and getting an A!

Anonymous said...

After looking up a lot of web articles on Chiron in Pisces, I only found that you, Bob Marx, and the author of Always Astrology make sense to me. Thank you so much for clarity in your writing!

Maybe I had difficulty in gleaning information from nearly all the other articles because I was dealing with Pisces world. :P

The passage in which you wrote about being wounded through boundary, privacy and individuation issues is personally relevant to me. I'm still learning, healing, and growing! :)


(Saturn in Aries and the 12th House; Pisces in Chiron and the 11th House; North Node Taurus)

Joyce Mason said...

Dear Anonymous,

Thank you so much for taking time to comment on how this article spoke to you. Often writing is an isolated task. You send out a lot of ideas and wonder if they get through. The great thing about blogging is the easy feedback!

Take care, and you might want to read my article on Boundaries 101, if you haven't already. Just pop the title into the Search This Blog box.

~Joyce

Joyce Mason said...

Dear Anonymous,

Thank you so much for taking time to comment on how this article spoke to you. Often writing is an isolated task. You send out a lot of ideas and wonder if they get through. The great thing about blogging is the easy feedback!

Take care, and you might want to read my article on Boundaries 101, if you haven't already. Just pop the title into the Search This Blog box.

~Joyce

The Medium said...

Joyce, I just discovered your blog and enjoyed reading your Chiron in Pisces piece. I too have been heavily into astrology for years, but also developed my medium ability to exceptionally clear level. You may enjoy the messages I wrote from Thomas Jefferson, Ronald Reagan and Steve Jobs. They are posted here on my blog under Salvatore. You can also find me on Facebook @ Salvatore Candeloro. Best to you and thanks for your sharing.

Joyce Mason said...

Thanks, Salvatore. I look forward to exploring you site!

Kat Daffodil said...

Joyce,
Once again your prose is just beautiful. I have Chiron in Pisces at 6 degrees conjunct my south node and opposite my Pluto in Virgo. Chiron is in the 8th house. Needed to see this article today. Interesting to me that the next three intense energy days correspond with a Jewish Holiday - a pretty important one (I am protestant by upbringing). I am just going with all of it and trusting God/Goddess in the process. Winds of change have me by the throat (Layoff and job change looming) - but trying to remember soul purpose. The whole idea of "Integrity, Integration" has been on my mind this summer - and to see it here in this beautiful article was simply lovely. You did read for me once about a year ago - and probably it is time for me to plan another one soon.

Love your website - please keep up the great work. All the best - Kat

Joyce Mason said...

Kat, thanks for your supportive words. I'm so glad this article speaks to you. I was raised Catholic in a Jewish neighborhood and have had the honor of having many Jewish friends and being part of many of the rituals and rewards of this spiritual path, It's one I love with all my heart and respect deeply. You're right--very ironic that #2 of 7 exact conjunctions of Uranus-Pluto arrives just after Rosh Hashanah begins. It's the first of the High Holy Days and considered the Jewish New Year. How's that for integration?

By the way, Happy Chiron Return! I hope it's a healing time that brings much ultimate fulfillment.

Every blessing!

PS - Knowing these articles help others is what keeps me keeping on!

Joyce Mason said...

Kat, thanks for your supportive words. I'm so glad this article speaks to you. I was raised Catholic in a Jewish neighborhood and have had the honor of having many Jewish friends and being part of many of the rituals and rewards of this spiritual path, It's one I love with all my heart and respect deeply. You're right--very ironic that #2 of 7 exact conjunctions of Uranus-Pluto arrives just after Rosh Hashanah begins. It's the first of the High Holy Days and considered the Jewish New Year. How's that for integration?

By the way, Happy Chiron Return! I hope it's a healing time that brings much ultimate fulfillment.

Every blessing!

PS - Knowing these articles help others is what keeps me keeping on!

Anonymous said...

What a wonderful article about Chiron. To be honest I didn't pay much attention to this comet or asteroid until it traveled into Pisces. I was born in 1964 when Chiron was at 18 degrees Pisces opposite Pluto, Trining Neptune as far as generational markers. The Pluto aspect is wide.

Unknown said...

This is fantastic. Journalism and astrology in perfect union. Love this.

Joyce Mason said...

Dear Unknown,

What a fantastic compliment, more meaningful than you'll ever know. I started out in college wanting to be a journalist, but as I became more self-aware, I didn't think I had a "pushy" enough personality to effectively insert myself in press conferences and other places that require a strong Mars. (Mine's in Cancer.) I was co-feature editor of my award-winning high school newspaper and won a Most Promising Student in Journalism award in my senior year.

As I matured further, I realized that there are many forms of journalism. By the time I was a certain age, I know I'd have been quite capable of managing the profession. Even blogging gives me a taste of it at times, as you noted and I hardly ever have consciously realized. Thanks for the reminder! I absolutely loved the show The Newsroom because it's my road not taken.

You made my day!