The discovery of Chiron in 1977 sparked a revolution in astrology, and few have delved into its mysteries as deeply as Zane Stein.
In an exclusive interview with MysticMag, Stein shares his journey of studying Chiron—from his initial fascination with its discovery to his evolving understanding of its significance.
He discusses how Chiron embodies the archetype of the “wounded healer” and guides individuals toward wholeness. Join us as we explore Stein’s insights into this enigmatic celestial body and its transformative role in astrology.
What initially drew you to study Chiron, and how has your understanding of its astrological significance evolved over time?
In November 1977, I came home from work, and the first thing my wife said to me was, “I heard on the news that they discovered the tenth planet.” I was excited and asked her for more info, but that was all she had heard. So I went to the library and looked through recent issues of a major newspaper (The New York Times), and sure enough, there was a large article with the heading, “Tenth Planet Discovered.” I was excited, and as I read through the article, two names were mentioned. Charles Kowal, the astronomer who discovered this new body, and Dr. Brian Marsden, head of the Minor Planet Center that coordinates planetary sightings. I went home and wrote letters to each of them (by mail, as this was pre-internet).
I was thrilled to get a reply several days later. Charles Kowal was kind enough to tell me the circumstances of how he found the planet and the approximate time of his discovery. Dr. Marsden sent me a ‘search ephemeris’, that is, a set of positions for the body for the few weeks around the discovery date.
I did not know what to do with these positions as they were in Right Ascension and Declination, so I contacted Al H. Morrison, a New York astrologer who knew just about every astrologer, asking if he knew someone who could convert the positions to zodiacal. He enlisted the aid of a colleague who had a TRS-80 home computer, and she sent Al back the positions that he sent to me. The three of us were excited when we started putting the new body as a transit in charts as it seemed to be significant, so we formed a committee to start studying it.
Shortly after that, two things occurred.
Dr. Marsden sent me a longer ephemeris based on several additional sitings on past photo plates, so we now were able to study the position for ten years. And Kowal named his body Chiron.
We called our group The Chiron Committee, and Al started sending a printed copy of the ten-year ephemeris for free to anyone who ordered anything from him by mail (such as his Void of Course Ephemeris.)
We got amazing feedback from recipients, which led me to form The Association for Studying Chiron, inviting people to join for a small fee, and I published a newsletter called The Key based on my findings, Al’s, and those submitted by members.
By that point, Chiron was my main focus astrologically and was stirring interest in getting astrologers to look at it. (It was still pre-internet, so this was, of course, by mail.) It was one such email exchange that led to Neil Michelson including Chiron in his published ephemerides, which were probably the most widely sold paperback ephemerides in the world.
How has my understanding of its significance evolved? That is a question that would take hours to answer. Which is why, in 2022, I published “Chiron, Healer and Wholemaker”, which is basically everything I’ve learned about Chiron since my first book, Essence and Application, a View From Chiron, was published in 1985. Let’s just say that when I first started working with it, I saw it primarily as emphasising the wounded healer mythos and as a teacher and door opener, with a possible co-rulership over Libra. Over the years I’ve grown to see that it rules no sign, but does rule a process that begins at Virgo, goes through Libra and Scorpio, and culminates in Sagittarius; that the wounded healer, teacher and door opener concepts are still true but Chiron is much much more than that, and oversees the process of becoming whole (or as Carl Jung called it, Individuation), it shows the wounds we have received through no fault of our own and yet feel on some level we received them because of a fault in our natures, and it shows where we each have a personal imperative to solve some deep issues that are very important to us.
Can you explain the concept of Chiron as the “wounded healer” and its implications in an individual’s natal chart?
In Greek mythology, the centaur Chiron was a “Wounded Healer” after being poisoned with an incurable wound by one of the arrows of Hercules, which had been treated by poison from the Hydra. Chiron was immortal, so it would not kill him, but the poison was not curable, so he was destined to be in main the rest of his earthly existence.
In the last century, psychologist Carl Jung created the term wounded healer. He saw that an analyst is compelled to treat patients because the analyst himself was wounded, and that only a doctor who had experienced a wounding himself would be able to help a patient understand and begin to heal from his own wound. For Jung, “a good half of every treatment that probes at all deeply consists in the doctor’s examining himself… it is his own hurt that gives a measure of his power to heal. This, and nothing else, is the meaning of the Greek myth of the wounded physician.”
The main path to begin healing from the pain of one’s wounds is to understand what happened. In mythology, Chiron was rejected at birth by his mother, who called him a monster and said she never wanted to see him again. He found a cave to hide in and would have lived there forever if not for the kindness of Apollo (the Sun god) and Diana (the Moon goddess), who came and coaxed him out of the cave and raised him as their foster child. You could say this was bringing to light (sunlight, moonlight) his darkest issues (in the cave). Apollo taught him everything he knew about healing, Diana everything about the fores,t including about herbs, and Chiron soon excelled at healing, surpassing his teachers. While he carried the deep, deep wound of his mother’s rejection, he was determined to heal others and teach them how to overcome their wounds; this was all the more poignant when he was wounded by the arrow, which was his second wound. The rejection by his mother was the first one.
All humans are wounded, some much more than others. And….like a tree that was struck by lightning, killing off the top branches, but which continued to grow, albeit in not quite the same manner as it would have had it not been struck, so people develop differently then they would have had they not been wounded, and who they become as adults is shaped by what happened, and how they reacted to it. And just like the tree cannot undo the lightning strike, people cannot remove or undo the cause of the wound, so they will always be shaped by that wound. But Chiron shows how to heal from the pain of the wound and how to become more whole, showing where the focus needs to be to work towards becoming whole.
How did the predictions about Chiron’s discovery come about, and what impact did its actual discovery in 1977 have on the field of astrology?
There were several astrologers who predicted a body like Chiron. I will quote from my website:
- Maurice Wemyss wrote a series of books from 1920 to 1940, his “Wheel of Life” series. One of the most intriguing things was his prediction of a body that would be discovered in the nature of Chiron, which would have an affinity for Sagittarius and a period of 45 years. Maurice was amazingly close with his prediction. Even the orbit is not far off, considering Chiron’s orbit shifts over thousands of years between about 46-51 years (although currently, it is closer to 50). Maurice was wrong about one thing: his prediction about where this new body would be found was wrong.
- In 1936, Dane Rudhyar published what has become an astrological classic, “The Astrology of Personality.” He talks about a series of links, or ‘moons’, in the solar system. The first, of course, is our Moon, linking Venus with Mars. The second, he said, may be the asteroid belt, linking the inner solar system with Jupiter. The third ‘moon’ is the inner solar system with Saturn and what is beyond Saturn. He has the outer reaches of this body going out almost to Uranus.
- In the Spring of 1961, Charles A. Jayne wrote an article for In Search magazine on hypothetical planets. For one of these bodies, he gave a period of 50 years, plus or minus 2 years. He said it would have an orbit so elliptical that it would actually swing inside the orbit of Saturn when closest to the Sun (Perihelion). He predicted that the new body would be found near its own South Node and with the Moon’s North Node in Scorpio. He named the body Charon and came up with a symbol for it, which I have placed at the top of this page.
Well, his prediction was right in every respect except two. First, the Moon’s North Node was not in Scorpio. (It had been in Scorpio up until December 1976, so Charles was only off one sign.) Second, the body was named Chiron. HOWEVER, within months of Chiron’s discovery, a moon was discovered around Pluto, which was named Charon. So perhaps Charles tuned in to both Chiron and Charon in his prediction. (The symbol, I understand, was designed thinking of Charon’s ferryboat across the river Styx.)
- Al H. Morrison published an astrology magazine in the 1970s called CAO TIMES. On the cover of the issue published August 29, 1977, Al chose to put a drawing that shows a huge body being lifted up above New York City by a construction vehicle. The caption: “Pedestrians watch as crane lifts another planet over NYC.” This was published only around two months before Chiron was discovered.
What impact did its discovery have on astrology? I would say there were many levels. Here are a few:
- Because Chiron was discovered between Saturn and Uranus (actually crossing Saturn’s orbit briefly), it acted like a link or bridge between two planets that seemed like they had absolutely nothing in common. Around the same time as Chiron was found, rings were found around Uranus, showing it did indeed have something in common with Saturn. I feel that because of Chiron, people began to look at the planets Saturn and Uranus, and their relationship, in a new light, which made their co-rulership over Aquarius make much more sense.
- Chiron opened the door for astrologers to take a second look at areas they thought they knew well (since it was found between Saturn and Uranus, an area we thought we knew everything about).
- Chiron paved the way, I believe, for the entrance of computers into astrology. A few months after Chiron was discovered, Michael Erlewine founded Matrix Software, the first company to offer a computer program that would calculate charts, and two years later, he published a book with all the algorithms and data required for owners of microcomputers to make their own complete astrological programs.
- It also opened up astrologers to the idea that there was much more out there than we had ever dreamt possible. It prepared us for other discoveries, like other Centaurs and bodies out past Pluto, making us willing to look at them with open minds when they would occur.
Could you discuss the significance of Chiron’s unique orbit between Saturn and Uranus and how this positioning , influences its astrological interpretation?
Chiron has what’s known as an elliptical orbit. Imagine stretching a rubber band between one finger on one hand and two fingers spread apart on the other hand to visualize the orbit. This means that its distance from the Sun varies drastically depending upon where in its orbit it occurs. Chiron spends most of its orbit between Saturn and Uranus, almost touching Uranus’ orbit when furthest from the Sun, and actually crosses the orbit of Saturn at the other extreme. So when it is furthest from the Sun, it can take over 8 years to go through the sign of Aries, while when closest to the Sun, it moves more quickly than Saturn and breezes through Libra in 1-1/2 years. We could write several pages about the meanings of this orbit. But I’ll just talk about one.
Astrologers are used to predictability when it comes to planets making aspects by transit to their natal position, and we especially rely on Saturn to show predictable cycles. Saturn squares Saturn age age 7, opposes at 14, squars again at 21, and returns at 28-29. Tell me your age, and I can tell you where you are in your Saturn cycle and a little bit about what you are going through without ever knowing what sign Saturn is in or even looking at your birth chart. A Saturn square Saturn has a core meaning applicable to everyone at that age.
Because of Chiron’s orbit, it is an entirely different field of experience. Depending on Chiron’s birth sign, someone with Chiron in Virgo can experience the first transit of Chiron squaring the natal positon around age 5-1/2, while someone with Chiron in Pisces won’t see that first square until they are about 23-1/2 years old. Try as you’d like, you would be hard-pressed to find anything that a 5 1/2 year old was going through that could relate to something someone in their twenties would be experiencing. But the first square does have an impact on everyone, just manifesting differently depending on their age. At the first square, there is an aspect of the wounding that occurs that causes one to break away from a part of themselves or disassociate from a particular area of experience, and they go off in a different direction, leaving some area or part of themselves behind. Only later, as they work on becoming whole, do they rediscover this part of themselves and learn they need to bring it back into their life in order to achieve that goal of wholeness.
What are some common themes or patterns you’ve observed in individuals experiencing their Chiron return around the age of 50?
For some, it is very subtle; for others, it is extremely memorable. As you approach the return, it is like, in some ways, you step outside of chronological time and see your past, present, and future all at once. You become aware of what you have learned during the first 50 or so years of your life and are able to share your learned wisdom with others. For many, it is a time when they see the multitude of possible directions they could go and get to choose which one to follow.
How do you see the role of Chiron evolving in modern astrology, especially with the ongoing discoveries of other centaur objects?
More astrologers start taking Chiron seriously and begin to integrate it with another body, Chariklo. Chariklo was Chiron’s wife in mythology, and the body of Chariklo is actually slightly larger than Chiron and also resides between Saturn and Uranus. I see working with the two bodies as a great help in the healing process, as Chiron shows the wound, and Chariklo helps create a safe place one can go to heal.
Find out more at: https://www.zanestein.com/Chiron_a.htm
