Chiron and the Advent of the Centaurs

I have always held a fascination for the power and mythology associated with the different planets in the heavens. Surely one of the most mysterious and profound of these myths is the figure of Chiron, also known as the ‘wounded healer’. From my studies of the Human Design System I have seen how potent an archetype Chiron is when viewed in a Life Cycle birth chart. The mainstream astrology community have also adopted Chiron as an extremely potent herald of the many changes and shifts that are currently taking place across our planet. Since the planetoid Chiron (sometimes also spelled Kiron) takes 51 years to complete its orbit around the sun, its return in our natal chart is a very powerful time indeed, opening up a culmination of transformations that can release our highest potential into the world.

The discovery of Chiron in 1977 appears in many ways to have opened a portal to a new future. Since the discovery, a whole host of other extra-terrestrial objects and asteroids have also appeared and been named. It seems that a whole stream of mythology was unlocked with the rebirth of this Chiron archetype. If you take a trawl through the internet, you will find whole tribes of people discussing these new myths and their implications and ramifications. Having said that, I would like to contemplate the Chiron archetype in the light of my upcoming course ‘55’ – the Coming of the White Goddess’, which is based upon my writings on the 55th Gift in my ongoing book The 64 Gifts.

Mythologically, Chiron was one of the Centaurs, a breed of creatures with the body of a horse and the torso of a man. Chiron himself is the best known of the centaurs, which are often represented as a wild and savage bunch of untamed beings. We will return to the figure of Chiron himself in due course. The centaurs themselves are an enigmatic group, which I think deserve further attention. The fact that the figure of man has been blended with the figure of a horse is extremely intriguing to me because the horse is one of mankind’s most ancient symbols of the Goddess or Divine feminine. In England alone over 24 huge chalk white horses have been found cut into the hillsides, and some of these have been dated to prehistoric times. It seems that various horse cults existed around the world, all connected with fertility and with the worship of the Feminine archetypes.

Wherever one finds a cult connected to a white figure, one also usually finds another cult, or the same cult connected to its black counterpart. There has been a great deal of exposure in recent years concerning the cult of the black Madonna, and the huge popularity of the Da Vinci Code also testifies to a powerful stream of energy emerging from these white and black archetypes in connection with the Goddess. The classic depiction of the centaurs as a wild, lustful bunch of beasts directs us to the darker face of the feminine archetype, where the sexual power of the horse is seen through the eyes of fear, and usually male, patriarchal fear. This dark face of the feminine is caught in so many wonderful mythic figures – Lillith, Kali, Hecate, Innana…Each of these archetypes invite us to embrace our earthy, animal nature before we can really touch our higher divine nature. This is where the centaurs come in, because they represent the perfect synthesis of man and beast. As an archetype, the centaur is really due for an overhaul in understanding and deserves our full respect. If we fear that part of our nature that we seem unable to control, then we can never be whole. The only way to heaven is down, through the underworld that terrifies us. This is the whole ethos on which my approach is built and upon which my spectrum of consciousness is founded. It finds its first practical outlet through the Venus Sequence – a system which allows one to work deeply with these two archetypes - the dark feminine face of the 64 Shadow states and the white feminine face of the 64 Gifts and beyond them, the 64 Siddhis, the manifestations of enlightenment itself.