Yael Dragwyla First North American rights

email: polaris93@aol.com 13,700 words

NEW MAGICKS FOR A NEW AGE

Volume II: The Magickal Sky
Book 2: The Planets

Part 14: Time’s Orphans – Asteroids, Comets, and Other Solar Bohemians

Chapter 14.2: Chiron and the Other “Minor” Planets

§ 1: Prologue: Worlds Enough, and Time

§§ 1: General Discussion

Chiron, discovered in 1977, at about 10:00 a.m. Pacific Standard Time on November 1, by Charles
T. Kowal of the Hale Observatories at Pasadena, California, is usually considered to be the first “minor”
Planet, or Planetoid, discovered in our Solar System. Large for an Asteroid, small for a Planet, its orbit
not expectable according to Bode’s Law, at the time of its discovery, it fit into no convenient
astronomical category. When at aphelion of its 50-year orbit, just inside Uranus’s orbit, it has no
observable atmosphere, but when at perihelion, well inside the orbit of Saturn, it has a very noticeable,
albeit quite thin one; for this reason, some astronomers want to re-classify it as a comet, a very unusual
one, with an orbit well inside the Solar System, unlike most comets, which spend most of their lives in
the frigid outposts of the Solar System, far beyond Pluto, in the ™ort Cloud of comets that forms the
outer bounds of Sol’s domain.
It may not be the first such body known to us. More and more astronomers think that Pluto and His
Moon, Charon, are bodies much like Chiron, with a similar origin, born in a cometary “cauldron” not far
beyond Neptune’s orbit. Repeatedly tugged and hauled by the gravitational force of both Uranus and
Neptune, several of these bodies, it is now thought, including Pluto, Charon, Chiron, and certain Moons
of Uranus and Neptune, were finally perturbed completely out of their original orbits and and tugged
inward toward Sol, taking up various orbits about Him depending upon their original positions in the
Solar family. This may have been true of countless such small, trans-Neptunian bodies that existed on
the Solar System’s fringes not long after the formation of the Planets, but disastrous collisions with bandit
bodies plunging through the Solar System from elsewhere, or even with Uranus and Neptune, cleaned
most of them out, and only these few remain today. 1
The discovery of these unusual children of Sol may provide new keys to the understanding of the
functions of Da’ath and the Tunnels of Set on the Tree of Life. Astrologically, they shed new light on
heretofore puzzling aspects of astrology, providing an understanding of certain functions of the psyche
and spirit and their expressions in the lives of individuals as well as the Collective Unconscious not
previously available to us in the West. They also open up ways for the West to integrate into itself
powerful, extremely valuable cultural resources from nativist cultures, such as shamanism and its cultural
correlates, the erstwhile lack of which in the West have created or egregiously exacerbated extreme,
long-standing sociopsychological and collective behavioral pathologies which we in the West cannot put
up with much longer and still survive. Our Planetary survival may, in the long run, depend upon the
psychospiritual treasures made available to us by recent astronomical discoveries such as these.
[Will add additional material on the Kuyper Belt objects and the Kuyper Belt population as a whole,
trans-Neptunian planetoids discovered in the 1990s and later, Pluto in relation to Kuyper Belt objects,
etc.]
 Endnotes
1
See “News Notes” in Sky and Telescope, Vol. 85, No. 1 (January 1993), p. 15, concerning the
discovery of minor planet 1992 AD, January 9, 1992, subsequently named “Pholus,” after a king of the
Centaurs. This body has an orbital period of 93 years, and may have a surface composed of organic
compounds.
See also “Comets at the Solar System’s Edge” by Paul R. Weissman in that same issue, pp. 26-29.
concerning possible confirmation of the Kuyper belt, a hypothetical disk of comets left over from the
formation of the Solar System.
 § 2: Chiron and the Shaman’s Journey

§§ 1: General Discussion

Astronomy of Chiron
 §§ 2.1: A Psychospiritual Perspective

Notes

Chiron’s Wound: anything which seriously injures our bond with the whole living world, and
especially with our local ecological, genetic, and affine communities. By healing that bond, usually
through a paradigm shift (see also New Magicks for a New Age, Volume 3, Book 6, Part 10 for more on
which), we heal such “incurable” eco-spiritual wounds within ourselves.. This is what is meant in the
story-cycle of Chiron by the fact that Chiron’s Wound was healed by his death: he was thus returned to
Mother Earth and made one with her. This can also be done in life, however, that is, without actually
killing the wounded one. The essential wound is, after all, in the spirit; the body needn’t be destroyed to
heal it, except perhaps in cultures so cut off from their spiritual roots and their bond with the living world
that only death can tear down the wall between their spirits and that of Mother Earth, as was true to a
great extent in Classical Greece.
For urban humanity, the Kuyper comet Chiron represents above all the domestication of human
beings either by human society, individual human overlords, or sentient slaver viruses (“thrints” – for
more on which, see below), their presumed ownership and treatment of us, and related issues. In non-
urbanized, “feral” humanity, Chiron indicates simply the ability to turn adversity to good account (“2 =
0”).
Chiron’s orbit lies between those of Saturn and Uranus, and His nature partakes to some extent of the
natures of both these Planets. But Chiron is also a Centaur, half-man (Aquarius/Uranus), half-horse
(Pisces/Neptune), and He thus also includes something of Neptune in his makeup. In addition, the story
of Chiron has to do with his search for healing, his death as the end to his agony, his resurrection as a
Constellation afterward, a Plutonian motif of death, re-birth, transcendence, and transmutation. Thus
Chiron represents all the Outer Planets, including Saturn, and could be considered a bridge between
Saturn and the Planets beyond Him, or a sort of key to the latter as aspects of Saturn.
 Introduction

In cultures in which people live a comfortable enough existence most of the time, such that they are
reproducing well above replacement, with the result that conditions tend to become crowded or even
overcrowded, life can become quite cheap, and their society becomes an extremely competitive one.
Life in such a society is comfortable – for those who can afford it, who can keep themselves and their
comforts safe from the predations of others.
Such cultures often foster the attitude that “I have a right to hurt others in some way, if I can just find
that way. I am allowed by the universe to hurt others, but there are rules as to how one goes about this,
so I have to discover what the rules are – and then, as long as I obey the rules, I am free to take pleasure
in and profit from the pain and damage to others.” On the other hand, societies in relatively
underpopulated regions don’t generally put a premium on the pain, suffering, and destruction of others as
a condition of achieving one’s own goals in the face of relentless competition and population pressure
from others, or even develop such a notion in the first place. Hence the difference between shamanic
cultures vs. those which, such as ours, at least officially do not value shamans or the conditions that lead
to the development of shamanism in a person.
The traits which are valued and cherished in shamanic cultures as at least potentially productive of
shamanism are frequently viewed as debilities, heresies, madness, or other excuses to persecute and
mistreat those who exhibit them in cultures like ours. In the natal horoscope, the placement of the
planetoid Chiron, Whose orbit ranges from just inside Uranus’s to not far beyond Saturn’s, indicates
where such traits are likely to develop in the native and his or her life, and how evident they are likely to
be. In shamanic cultures, this is a primary indicator of how likely a person is to become a shaman, of
what type; in cultures such as ours, it indicates how likely a person is to be wrongfully hurt in some way
by others and by life in general.
Members of non-shamanic cultures sense in those around them the areas of those others’ lives and
being where Chiron operates, and interpret that as license of some kind to attack people in those areas of
their lives. This cultural trait guarantees the practice of law as a battle between antagonists rather than as
a matter of equity, promotes child-abuse and woman-abuse on a wide scale and as a general condition of
life, and makes people regard others in general as little more than either obstacles to be got around (or
simply gotten rid of, by whatever means is necessary) or as means to some end not their own. Harm done
to others in such cultures is often rationalized as the result of those others’ “karma,” a particularly nasty
manifestation of the “blame the victim” syndrome. Since Chiron indicates “woundedness” in one’s life
and being, and since such “woundedness” can be exploited as an Achilles’ heel by competitors,
astrologically this planetoid thus tends to indicate unjustified assaults and other crimes upon the native
by members of non-shamanic cultures.

§§ 2.1.1: General Discussion

In the West, generally Planets and Lights have been perceived as either harbingers or actual causes
of things, whether worldly events, the courses of lives, or the traits of mind and body of individuals.
There is not necessarily in error, but it is not the only useful way to look at the functions of the various
astrological phenomena, whether Lights, Planets, Signs, Stars, or any other. Another way to view them is
as resources by which the events precipitated by transits and progressions can be turned to good account.

For example, Saturn rules difficulties, obstacles, pain – in general, all things dark and dreadful; but
Saturn also rules the wisdom that comes with age – and by means of which one can overcome many of
these evils, and learn how to live with the rest. Mars rules anger, war, rage, fire, fever – but also the
military, paramilitary, engineering, and surgical skills necessary for dealing successfully with the real-
world manifestations of such things. It might be helpful to remember this when dealing with Chiron,
called “the wounded healer” because in charts in which he is strongly placed, he generally indicates
wounds, in body, mind, and/ or spirit, that can give chronic trouble – but as a result of which the native
can also become a healer of conditions similar or related to his or her own. He was named after the
legendary Centaur, the foster-son of Apollo and Pallas Athena who became the teacher of Hercules and
other heroes as well as a healer of great skill. Eventually he sustained a wound from a poisoned arrow;
the poison on the arrow created an unhealable wound, putting him in incurable agony. The bastard son of
Philyra, a daughter of the God Oceanos, and Kronos, the father of Zeus, he was immortal, and therefore
could not die without divine intervention. He begged therefore begged Zeus, king of the Gods, for death,
as the only possible relief from his endless pain; Zeus finally granted him his prayer, allowing him to
change places in Tartaros with the Titan Prometheus, who had been chained there, a vulture feeding on
his eternally renewed and healed liver every day, as a punishment for defying Zeus’s edicts. Prometheus
died and was returned to Mother Earth, and thus his agony ended. Afterward, Zeus placed him in the
heavens as the Constellation Centaurus, restoring him to the company of the Immortals.
This myth seems to indicate that Chiron signifies the presence of unhealable wounds and intractable
pain. But another way of looking at the function of this strange, small Planet is to see him as the source
of things necessary to deal with and alleviate otherwise incurable, indefatigable problems and conditions,
as well. Thus in the natal chart, if he is strongly placed, he generally signifies a strong tendency to
become chronically damaged in ways signified by the nature of his placement; but he also,
simultaneously, shows how that damage can be healed, and how, as a result, one can learn to heal others
with the same kind of damage to their persons and lives.
In fact, in both the wounds he gives and the resources he provides for their healing, he functions very
much like the cultural niche generally called shamanism. In her tour de force on the astrology and
psychodynamics of Chiron, Chiron and the Healing Journey: An Astrological and Psychological
Perspective,1 Melanie Reinhart discusses the initiatory journey of the potential shaman, which begins
with an injury or an illness, either of mind or body. In cultures which have a niche for the shaman, the
resultant pathology, which can take years to resolve itself, is considered to be the sign that a God or spirit
is trying to possess the person. If he or she can successfully come to terms with or conquer that being,
wrest back control of his or her life from it and then learn to command the powers associated with it, he
or she then becomes a shaman, a person of power, knowledge, and wisdom, all of which come directly
from the process that began as a pathology, as the God’s or spirit’s attempt to take control of his or her
body, mind, spirit, and life for its own use, and became a tremendous source of benefits via the alchemy
of shamanic initiation.^1a In charts in which he is strongly placed, Chiron indicates exactly this sort of
potential for the native – but because our Western culture has for so long rejected nativist wisdom and the
shamanic process, regarding the first as atavistic superstition and the second solely as pathological in
nature, the Westerner who, having been thrown into the midst of just such an initiatory experience, has
made the most of it, converting his or her wounds and their source into treasures of wisdom, power, well-
being, and wealth (of one kind or another), is relatively rare.
Now, with the discovery of the “minor” Planet Chiron, for the first time Westerners have a way to
make the potential for the shamanic initiatory process a conscious one, to know it consciously for what it
is, not just a pathology, and therefore to be able to make the most of it, in a way not heretofore possible
for most Westerners. The Planet Chiron does not so much indicate woundedness and its cause as he does
the way to heal wounds that might come about, as described by his placement in the chart.
It has been written: “We are all born broken; we live by mending; God is the glue.” This is a good
description of Chiron’s rulership. In Qaballistic theory, we are all born “below the Abyss,” fallen
creatures that lack the preternatural gifts of the young Adam and Eve before they were cast out of Eden.
We spend lifetimes re-crossing the Abyss, recovering those gifts of body, mind, soul and spirit that in the
beginning made Adam and Eve little less than Gods themselves; thus we slowly become mended. And,
ultimately, we can only do this by learning to love – to love every aspect of Creation, to partake in every
kind of love, from Eros to Agape; for God is That in which we participate when we love, and act out of
love. Love is the glue that ultimately binds all of creation together, and knits up the seamless web of life
– erotic love, love of parents for children and vice-versa, love of friends, love of community, love of
humanity, love of all life, love of our Planet, disinterested love, perfected love, divine love. Thus God is
the glue by which we become mended from our initial “brokenness.”
One symbol that may be appropriate for Chiron is that of the Bridge. If God or the Gods are the glue
that mends us, Chiron may be thought of as the Glue-pot, for he functions as the bridge across the Abyss
from Chesed (Jupiter, the upper bounds of our “brokenness,” life after the Fall) through Da’ath (Saturn,
the Fall itself) to Binah (Uranus, the lower bounds of Paradise, the “unbroken state,” lived in the
untrammeled bliss of God’s love and Presence). 2 He serves as a bridge in other ways, as well. Socially,
culturally, and historically, he is a bridge between oligarchical, monarchical or otherwise non-egalitarian,
patriarchal, corporate society/civilization of the Old World, ruled by Saturn, and nativist, egalitarian,
matrifocal societies of the New World, Polynesia, Melanesia, and so on, ruled by Uranus.
Furthermore, Chiron is the bridge between humanity, ruled by Uranus and Aquarius, and Earth, ruled
by Saturn and Capricorn; between what we are as a separate species, and what we are as part of Gaia,
our living Earth. He thus also represents our pets, work-animals, laboratory animals, and livestock who,
divorced as they are from their wild origins, must live forever in the shadow of “super-parents” or
predators from whom there is no hope of escape save death – that is, us, whom they can never hope to
emulate, and of whom they can never be peers.
 Chiron signifies our potential for woundedness, and the quarter from which our wounds may come.
But while he is the Wounder, he is also the means whereby that which wounds us, as well as the wounds
it gives, can be transmuted, via Magick or other spiritual and/or physical alchemy, into positive assets, by
which healing is brought about. He thus signifies the process by which the Shaman comes into existence,
heretofore in the West only rarely recognized as such (rather than, say, crushed, persecuted, or obliterated
in the name of everything from religious devotion to mental hygiene).
Through the potential for Shamanic initiation which he gives us, Chiron hints at something even
more profound: the alchemy of biological process which, though it should be considered to be normal
and desirable by us, has been obscured, by accident or design, from the Western collective consciousness.
Chiron – the potential shaman – is wounded, i.e., undergoes the initial trauma which initiates the shaman
transformation; to be relieved of the pain of his otherwise unhealable wound, he dies – goes into the
initiatory trance or seizure, into the Underworld of the Collective Unconscious, where he learns the
secrets of creation, of human nature, of his own nature; he is reborn as the Unicorn – the healer, back
from the Little Death of Shamanic Initiation, spiritually immortal regardless of physical frailty, his tribe’s
guide, teacher, redeemer, and physician. Now let us look at the life-cycle of certain insects such as the
lepidoptera, the butterflies and moths: The juvenile form, the caterpillar, crawls everywhere in his world,
feeding on all he can find of his proper food, just as the potential shaman, as a child, goes everywhere in
his world, learning all he can about it, his psyche and spirit feeding on all experience available to him.
Then one day in Autumn, the caterpillar suddenly stops his peripatetic feeding, settling down in one
place, where he begins to spin about himself a soft, protective envelope, a cocoon; analogously, the
potential shaman, sustaining the initial trauma that sets off the process of true Shamanic initiation, leaves
off normal childhood pursuits, turns inward, weaves Magickal strangeness in the form of neurosis or even
psychosis about himself, finally goes into the Underworld, in trance, to begin the Shamanic journey that
will finally transform him into an adult shaman. If the caterpillar successfully survives the Winter in his
warm cocoon, he emerges in the Spring as the imago of his species, in its sexually mature phase, in
which he becomes immortal in the most literal way, by passing on his genes; and the Shamanic initiate
that survives the initiatory journey becomes a psychospiritual imago of his species, entering the
spiritually mature phase of his life, in which he can create his own true spiritual immortality. Thus the
answer to the seeming hopelessness of Chiron’s predicament, his unhealable agony, is the parable of the
caterpillar, the cocoon, and the butterfly: the caterpillar “dies” – spins a cocoon and pupates therein – to
be “resurrected” from its cocoon/ grave as a butterfly, the imago or reproductive life-stage of its species.
Likewise, Chiron dies in order to end his agony; goes to the Underworld; then is reborn as the Unicorn,
the archetype of justice and healing. Those with Chiron prominent in their natal charts, by becoming
healers and proponents of justice, thereby transmute their endless chronic agony into the immortal,
healing, redeeming fire of the Unicorn, the symbol of the Christ, the Solar Logos. The archetype of this
process for us in the West is, of course, Jesus the Christ. Chiron has often been compared to Jesus of
Nazareth in terms of his Jungian archetype, and certainly Jesus, in his life and work, is very similar to
Chiron in many ways: For 30 years, he wanders the world, learning all he can; then, for 3 short years, he
becomes a teacher; then he is betrayed, crucified, descends into Hell; then he is resurrected, immortal.
Insofar as this is a parable of the possibilities inherent in Jeder, Everyman, then it is closely analogous to
the myth of Chiron.
Death is only the leading edge of the Chisel wielded by the Master Sculptor of Life and the Cosmos,
Natural Selection. What death removes from the universe is returned, transmuted into beauty and glory,
by life and its future evolution. This is Chiron’s secret: that only through the doorway (Daleth, D,
Venus) of death (and the Little Death of Initiation as well as of orgasm and Kundalini Rising) can we
come into life’s greatest glories – Love, and our spiritual immortality, and the endless creativity that is
the heritage of all biological being.
Without death and entropy, there can be no love, and no creativity. Death makes possible the greater
immortality conferred by Eros, community, and procreation.
Ultimately, what we now know of Chiron’s functions can be summarized as follows:

Shit happens. When it does, Chiron signifies what form it is most likely to take, and what resources
one has to deal with it successfully, as shown by his placements in the particular horoscope in question.
Both the problems and the solutions defined by Chiron are not so much things as they are situations,
niches in time and space described by horoscopic graphs. Like electrons, the situations defined by
horoscopes are not so much objective phenomena as they are potentials, holes in space and time where
certain things are likely to happen. For example, Saturn’s placement in a chart tells us what resources we
have for dealing with any obstacles, hindrances, and evils that come up; Venus tells us what resources
we will have for dealing appropriately with sociobiological situations, including social events, sexual
attraction, and artistic productions.
Likewise, Chiron’s placements in individual charts tell us what resources are likely to be available to
us whenever we sustain or suffer from wounds for dealing appropriately with them – if we have the wit to
perceive those resources. In a sense, the horoscope indicates what the collective unconscious – of
humanity, of the whole living world – plans to do to the native. Chiron shows what the native can do
back to it – he is the repository of a sort of esoteric Bill of Rights, listing both the sort of assaults which
the world can commit upon the him or her, and the remedies which exist for these should they happen to
him or her. On a cosmic level, he embodies the principle of law which the Norse called wergild – the
payment, in goods or service, which the perpetrator of a crime was obligated to tender to the victims of
that crime. Thus if one suffers an evil for no good reason, buried somewhere in the effects of that evil
upon one’s person and life is a compensatory treasure of some kind, as it were, the forfeit the universe
has to make available in some way to the victim. Chiron is, in effect, a map showing the way to that
treasure.

[Use own chart as example; natal data March 20, 1945 @ 5:48 p.m. PDT, Huntington Hospital,
Pasadena, CA, USA] See Beatriz Steegh’s letter, Part 3]

Karma or no karma, there are countless cases in which the innocent suffer evil undeservedly. Chiron
and its placements show: (1) in a given society or situation, what sort of undeserved evils one would be
most likely to suffer, and when; and (2) what sort of cosmic wergild, as it were, one is entitled to as a
victim of undeserved evil.
As discussed above, most “primitive,” nativist cultures have clearly defined niches for what we
would call the shaman, who is either born with strange powers, by heredity or congenital accident, or
develops them as a result of illness, injury, or traumatizing experience, whether early or late in life. It is
never assumed in these societies that the person deserved whatever evil he or she suffered in the process
of becoming a shaman – if that had been the case, the compensating powers developed afterward would
have to have an infernal source, for they would be undeserved, unholy. Instead, they are a gift tendered
up by the injuring force in exchange for the injury itself. Of course, not all those who suffer evil become
shamans; many, in fact, do not survive those evils. But if we allow for reincarnation not as a moral
force, but rather as an inevitable process that happens as surely and inescapably as the rising of the Sun
each day – that the spirit cannot die and must therefore always have some vehicle for its manifestation –
then clearly those gifts can be accessed by the victims in incarnations to come.
Chiron thus serve as a sort of map to buried treasure: “Here there be Dragons.” Kill the dragon, find
the treasure – get underneath the agonizing memories of whatever caused the original damage, and you
will find enormous psychospiritual wealth, vast treasures that can include such things as
parapsychological talents, intellectual genius, prophetic and Magickal abilities, nonpareil artistic gifts, a
host of fantastic, miraculous, wondrous things. If one digs deeply enough, looks hard enough, is clever
enough to put all of it together, one should find not only enormous powers and gifts of this sort, but real
healing, an end to one’s agony. It is another of Sigmund Freud’s great sins that not only did he lie about
the real source of his patients’ agonies of soul and spirit, but he denied the very existence of the treasures
which those agonies could tender to his patients as wergild for what they’d been put through – and thus
damned his patients to unhealable horror.* Chiron should free us from that, if it does anything at all. It
should free the victims of child-abuse, of political torture and persecution, of such ghastliness as the
Holocaust, of “the guilt of the survivor,” that assumption by the victim of undeserved guilt for his or her
own sufferings. It should also free them from the trap of self-pity over their sufferings, as well, by giving
them the better alternative of compensation that makes up for the damage and restores them to real health
– something which, so far, the “culture of the whine” now so LOUDLY evident in this country ain’t
doing!

*Due in large part to the influence of Freud, psychotherapy eventually became a way of training the
patient back in upon him- or herself, turning him or her inward. When this is successful – thought it
is rarely completely so, thank God – the patient becomes a psychospiritually closed system, seeking
both the origins of damage to the psyche and Will (spirit) and ways of healing such damage only
within him- or herself rather than in his or her external environment, including the social
environment in which the sources of such damage in fact always have their origins. This is a deadly
trap. Living systems, including individual organisms, are not and never can be closed systems as
 long as they live – it is by dint of the fact that they are open systems that they can obtain and use the
energy necessary to facilitate the processes that keep them alive and healthy and rid themselves of
waste heat and solids which otherwise would build up in them to lethally toxic levels. The psyche
and the spirit are essentially biological in nature, so this is true of them, too. Therefore a
psychotherapeutic method which discourages the patient from turning to the external world to see
what part environmental factors have played in development of his or her psychopathology, and how
to deal with them to best effect, is as deadly to the psyche and spirit as suffocation is to the living
body.
_____________________________________________________________________________________

Another aspect of Chiron has to do with the nature of Western patriarchal culture and the wounds it
inflicts on men and women alike.
In Chapter 4 of Chiron and the Healing Journey, Melanie Reinhart discusses this issue in some
detail. As she points out, the Classical mythology of Chiron includes a number of important instances of
wounding or victimization of women, or of the Feminine within both men and women, especially in the
case of Chiron’s own daughter and granddaughter. And it is true that just as Chiron was rejected at birth
by his own mother, and never knew his real father, so in urban societies women – and the Anima, Carl
Jung’s term for the Yin or Female Principle within both men and women – are very often rejected, in part
or whole, from birth onward by one or both parents, siblings, other relatives, even society as a whole
simply because they are female human beings. Sons tend to be valued far above daughters; the generic
pronouns in many languages, including ours, are masculine in gender, not feminine or neuter; and like
children, slaves, and non-human animals, women very often are de facto, if not actually de jure, second-
class citizens in their societies – at best.
A very old saying refers to the vagina as “the wound that never heals.” In part, this reflects the
monthly menstrual bleeding undergone by all healthy, fertile women from puberty until menopause, part
of the cycle of human fertility, and absolutely necessary to it. It also, however, refers to the fact of the
legal, political, social, and economic wounding of women in patriarchal society, the endless double-binds
imposed upon so many women – and upon the Female in men – by society and the family, the cruelties,
injustices, and evils suffered by women the world over for no other reason than that they are women.
The vagina, endlessly vilified and anathematized in patriarchal society by men and women, Church and
State, powerful and powerless alike, is the ultimate gate of species immortality and of the genes of
individual human beings, and an archetype of creativity and fertility in all forms. Thus Chiron also
represents Woman, the wounding of her soul and political estate by society and the State, and the
creativity of the human spirit that is, in patriarchal society, made manifest only through the terrible
purchase-price of endless agony due to social reaction and injustice.
And herein, in the relationship between the woundedness of Chiron’s expression in the natal chart of
someone born and raised in Western culture and the general wounding of women and of Woman by
patriarchal culture, lies a clue to where the boundary-lines lie between Chiron’s universal biological
function and that function as it is modified in its expression by the particular culture into which one is
born. In patriarchal Western culture, women “properly” give birth in a hospital, lying flat on their backs
with their feet in stirrups. Even when they cannot get to a hospital to give birth, they try to find some
sort of bed to lie down in, even if it is only the back seat of a taxi; and in that bed, they give birth while
lying on their backs. They universally report that of all the pain they have ever experienced, that of
giving birth is the worst.
In “primitive,” nativist cultures, women almost invariably give birth in a squatting position – one
which thereby enables the woman to take advantage of the pull of the Earth’s gravity to help deliver the
child. In such cultures, women do not think of pregnancy, gestation or birth as an illness, to be suffered
and endured. Usually they experience childbirth as greatly effortful, but not as agony, and most women
in these cultures are quite able, after giving birth this way, whether at home, in the women’s birthing-
house, or in the fields, to get up and go about their business, carrying the child in a sling at their breasts
to free their hands for work.
What a difference from what women giving birth undergo in modern Western culture! Significantly,
such “primitive” cultures are generally matrifocal, rather than patriarchal, and in them women aren’t
psychically, psychologically, or even physically wounded and crippled as they are in Western culture
because of and in their womanhood.
Remember that Chiron was born a child of rape, rejected at birth by his mother because of the
violation of which he would otherwise have been a constant reminder to her. Perhaps the
“woundingness” of Chiron for those born into our culture is a result of the rejection, subjugation, and
terrorization of the feminine by patriarchal culture. In “primitive” cultures, the most powerful shamans
are often bisexual, combining the masculine and the feminine in one person – and they are cherished by
their people, not rejected by them as gay men and lesbians and bisexuals are in our society.
Perhaps the healing of Chiron’s wounds and woundingness can only come through psychospiritual
transformation, psychological and cultural changes of the kind it takes to recognize that the way in which
one views and deals with the most important aspects of life – birth, death, sex, gender, healing, being – is
not viable, and change it into one which is. Something as simple as recognizing that the supine birthing
position preferred by male obstetricians for their patients in our culture is neither natural nor healthy, and
replacing it with a more “primitive” but far healthier squatting position, may be all that is needed to
transform Chiron’s functioning in one’s natus and one’s life from a wounding one to a sociobiologically
and personally useful and benign one. In most cases, of course, Chiron’s placement in the chart has little
or nothing to do with giving birth; but the metaphor of labor in childbirth is an especially good one,
regardless of the exact areas of one’s life in which Chiron does manifest, because Chiron’s
“woundingness” seems to come from patriarchal denial of the Feminine in us all.
 §§ 2.1.2: Astromythology and Psychospiritual Aspects of Chiron

The astrology of Chiron isn’t merely an interesting new gloss on traditional esoteric science and its
applications. There is immediate need for it, to make sense of much of what has been happening in the
world since the first appearance in the human world of large quantities of radioactive material, beginning
early in this century, and the advent of the Atomic Age in 1945.
Statistically, the human body’s paradoxical reaction to repeated, cumulative, large doses of hot junk,
radioactive material and radiation in any form, from fallout to the initial electromagnetic pulse of a
nuclear device, which are admittedly extremely damaging to the body over the long haul, is an
extraordinary increase in performance-levels in both degree and kind. This is manifest in every aspect of
one’s life, from basic metabolic function to the sort of creative genius that characterizes a Mozart or a
Leonardo da Vinci. It also gives the recipient of such doses an extremely strong tendency to resist any
restrictions on his or her mind, soul, and spirit, to make any and all efforts necessary to overcome them.
The body’s biochemical reaction to chronic radiological insult disinhibits certain “silent genes,” part
of the enormous library of massively redundant genes in our genetic makeup which normally are never
evident in phenotypic function because they are kept “switched off” by various proteins manufactured by
other, regulatory genes. These “silent genes” were inherited by us from ancestors who acquired them via
retrovirus infection or through mutations of their parents’ germ-plasm, millions or even billions of years
ago. In most cases, they are never exposed to natural selection, since they are not allowed to participate
in the biochemistry of their owner, due to the inhibitory action of the regulator-genes. But once
“switched on” as a result of inhibition of certain regulator-genes as a direct or indirect result of
accumulated biological insult against the body of one kind or another, such as chronic exposure to
radiation or hot crud from fallout accumulated in the body over time, apparently they confer upon us
extraordinary powers of all kinds. They also create or exacerbate an already-extant tendency to
hypersensitivity to various stimuli, and hyperirritability as a result of exposure to those stimuli. In the
case of chronic exposure to radiation and radioactive material, this latter manifests as an egregiously
strong intolerance of any restrictions whatsoever on the freedom of psyche and spirit, resulting in an all-
out, usually unthinking struggle, with all one’s will behind it, to get free of any such restrictions that
might be placed on one.
Those of us who have been exposed to fallout, or who were children of survivors of the Bomb and/or
of other sources of massive, whole-body doses of radiation – the Hibakushi, “sufferers,” on the very cells
of whose bodies the worst of the sins of the Twentieth Century are writ large in a pen dipped in industrial
waste and radioactive sludge – have thereby been made the children of the whole world. Our spirits have
been nurtured not only on our individual mother cultures, but also those of all humanity, in all times and
places, from archeolithic protohumans dwelling on the beaches of the Indian sub-continent and the shores
of East Africa, to today’s astronauts and Kosmonauts. Even for those of us who have been born crippled
in body and mind, developmentally disabled by massive biological insult to our parents’ genes and to us
in our mother’s wombs, our culture and vision is necessarily universal. For just to keep our poor bodies
going, we need the knowledge and wisdom of all peoples that have ever been, from Stone-Age
shamanistic lore and herbal medicine to modern pharmacological and surgical expertise. And to nourish
our souls and spirits, we need the dreams and the visions of all of humanity, from the beginning down to
the last few years of the Twentieth Century, the world over – no one part of the world can suffice for us.
We need it all.
Thus we are driven to literally reach for the stars, out to interstellar, even intergalactic space.
Indeed, some of us even yearn to know what lies beyond the walls of our own universe, what the
multiverse at large is like. Nothing smaller, nothing less than the universe, or even the multiverse, will
content the raging hunger to accomplish, to achieve something truly universal in scope that fulminates
within us, a seething volcano of need to do. For only by such achievement have we any hope at all of
taming and harnessing the hellish pinpoint radioactive fires that burn within our very bones so
completely, so benignly, that all their fury goes to do life’s work, none of it to harm. Look into the
bedrooms we have had in our adolescence, even those among us who are mentally retarded or deranged
because of the effects upon us and/or our parents’ germ-plasm of the Bomb, and you will see those
yearnings displayed on walls, shelves, desk-tops, huge in aspiration, made manifest in paper, plastic,
wood, metal in a thousand thousand images and likenesses: posters of Anne Frank, Janis Joplin, Angela
Davis, Carl Jung, Susan B. Anthony, Malcolm X, the Emperor Joshua Norton, Albert Einstein, Bill
Gates, Martin Luther King, Stephen Hawking, Aleister Crowley, H. P. Lovecraft, Anton Szandor LaVey,
Kurt Gödel, Timothy Leary, Georg Cantor, our saints; Alfred E. Neuman, J. R. “Bob” Dobbs, the
Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers, the Three Stooges, Stan Laurel & Oliver Hardy, our Holy Fools; the
starship Enterprise, our cathedral; the famous “Yab-Yum” reproduction from the Kama Sutra, our Holy
Communion; enormously enlarged graphic reproductions of the Gigabyte Chip, our holy icon and
prayer-wheel; a book-shelf filled with our Holy Books, the works of Aleister Crowley, Stanley
Weinbaum, Adelle Davis, Fred Saberhagen, Stephen King, Robert Anton Wilson, Skipp and Spector, R.
R. McCammon, Robert A. Heinlein, J. R. R. Tolkien, Miriam Zimmer Bradley, The Boo-Hoo Bible,
James Glieck’s Chaos: Making a New Science, Principia Discordia. Thus we are relentlessly driven, by
the Fires of Forever burning deep within the bodies of every one of us, to literally reach for the very
Stars, or even universes beyond our own, harnessing the Dragon, setting to work at a task so great, so all-
consuming that it will have no time, no energy left to turn and rend us again from within or without. For,
given Life’s great business to fulfill, our deadly, deadly harrier, fallen so far from Grace, rises once more,
re-born, in the service of God and the Creation of God.
The Bomb almost killed us all. A thousand times, in a thousand ways, this century almost came to
an end, and the whole living world with it, in an all-consuming holocaust that would have left the Earth
no more than a silent, dead, burnt-out, radioactive slag-heap. The countless casualties of the Atomic
Age, from the walking wounded to the totally dysfunctional, are everywhere. Yet, because of the horrors
of atmospheric testing, leaking reactors, egregiously radioactive and chemically poisonous toxic wastes
contaminating every part of the globe, the testing of nuclear devices on civilians and military personnel
alike without benefit of informed consent, we are now at last in the process of throwing off the yoke of
psychospiritual and ecological oppression which has very nearly destroyed our living world and the spirit
of all its life, transcending the barriers that have kept Earth’s life imprisoned, enslaved, and the prey of
demonic spirit of the corporate state for so terribly long. We are now starting on the task of enabling
Gaia, Mother Earth, to fulfill Her drive to have a baby of Her own, a child for the Stars, carrying Her
genes and Her spirit onward to the Great Forever, reaching for tomorrow in spirit and body with all our
heart, mind, soul and strength, in the name and spirit of all Earth’s life. The demons within the human
soul and spirit for so long damned us all, drove us relentlessly to ravage Mother Earth, terrorize and
torture our neighbors and even our own children, treat the other living beings with whom we share the
Earth in unspeakably evil ways, even to gouge at and scarify our own souls with self-inflicted religious
and political terrors. Those demons are now learning to cower and draw back before the fires of
Armageddon now eternally burning in our very bones, the hot horror of Hiroshima, the great burning eye
of Nagasaki, the blazing talons of Chernobyl. Those three terrible, triumphant, fiery Archangels
vanquish the demons of restriction, cowardice, venality, erotophobia, and idolatry that have stowed away
in our very genes since, perhaps, the pre-Cambrian era of Earthly life, freeing us and, through us, Mother
Earth to begin to fulfill Her destiny as a living being.
The 1980s and 1990s have been replete with images of unicorns and dragons, done as posters, in
pewter and crystal and quartz and lead glass, sold in trendy New Age boutiques and occult head-shops
and through drop-ship catalogs and in your neighborhood supermarket, sometimes home-made by loving
hands, sometimes given as gifts to friends and loved ones, seen in countless homes as well as in
commercial and office buildings. Along with Chiron himself, these are superb archetypes of the
Twentieth Century in general and the Atomic Age in particular: Hiroshima is the Dragon; we, the
Hibakushi, the Wounded Ones, the Sufferers, the bridge of torn and cauterized and charred and smashed
and vaporized flesh between the Aeon of Osiris/Pisces and the Aeon of Horus/Aquarius, are Chiron; and
our indomitable need for liberty and the all-consuming craving for the Stars are aspects of the Unicorn,
the immortal Liberator, Healer, Redeemer.
The only way to overcome the terrible moral and ecological wrong of development, testing, and the
promiscuous, careless, murderous use of nuclear energy, whether in the form of the Bomb or in that of
deadly dangerous, ill-designed and badly maintained nuclear reactors, and to heal the hideous wounds
which these have made in us all, is to somehow harness their effects on us for our own good and that of
all life. And we seem to be doing just that, not only objectively, in terms of modern cybernetic,
materials, and other technology, but also within the Spirit. Chiron, dying, entombed in Mother Earth, has
risen, re-born, among us all, in a myriad glorious avatars, the apotheoses of James Michener’s Golden
Man. These are the true Universal Geniuses who, in growing numbers, are helping to transform our
world: Sir Stephen Hawking, perhaps the foremost physicist of our time, who has utterly changed our
understanding of the nature of physical reality as well as participated in a long, happy marriage, fathered
and raised two fine children, taught countless adoring university students, and given numerous lectures
on black-hole theory all over the world, all the while confined to a wheelchair because of genetically-
transmitted disease that supposedly should have killed him 25 years ago; Kitaro, the New Age Japanese
musician; Mikhail and Raisa Gorbachev, who sacrificed supreme political power over one of the largest
and most puissant empires in history in order to give their grandchildren – and the grandchildren of us all
– a chance at a living future; Admiral Hyman George Rickover, who dedicated his books to “all
America’s children,” whose Pearls of Great Price were liberty and the living world; Dr. Ivan Stang,
founder of “the world’s first industrial religion,” who said, “I want to do for mutants what Disney did for
kids,” and who has spent thankless years teaching that the greatest attribute of God is the ability to laugh
– especially at oneself; Dr. Masaaki Hatsumi, the current Grand Master of the Bujinkan school of
ninjutsu (ninja) combat arts and philosophy, who has proven, again and again, by his life and work, that
the spirit of the warrior and that of justice are truly universal, not confined to any time, place, culture, or
people, who has said of himself, when asked what he saw himself to be, “I am a UFO” – the ultimate
Erisian saint; the unparalleled cinematic genius, the Japanese film-maker Kurosawa, who, in his films,
shows the universality of the human spirit in its mortal predicaments by such creations as his Castle of
the Spider’s Web, the Japanese rendering of William Shakespeare’s MacBeth, and his Dreams, a uniquely
Japanese rendering of Dante’s Divine Comedy; Mickey Hart, of the rock-band The Grateful Dead, who
has spent much of his life and most of his fortune trying to educate the world to the need for radical
political, cultural, and economic change if we are not all to perish because of the results of environmental
pollution and destruction; the novelists Stephen King and R. R. McCammon, who are to America what,
respectively, Shakespeare and Dante were to their cultures; Nancy Collins, the brilliant American writer
and supposed erstwhile member of an underground all-woman garage band calling themselves The
Vaginal Blood Farts, whose horror fiction has the same universal vision and gripping power as the work
of Sophocles; musical giants such as the Beatles, Jim Hendrix, “Jellyroll” Morton, Elvis Costello, Janis
Joplin; world-renowned humorists, regardless of medium, cherished by fans in every possible part of the
world, such as cartoonist Gahan Wilson, publisher William Gaines, creator of MAD magazine, cartoonist
Gary Larson, comedian and political activist Dick Gregory, comedian Mort Sahl, comic artist and
publisher Don Martin, cartoonist R. Crumb, graphic artists Paul Mavrides, and the immortal Chas.
Addams; graphic artists including such titans as Frank Kelly Freas, Wallace Wood, Boris Vallejo, and
Frank Frazetta; New Wave cinematic geniuses such as Stephen Spielberg; Walt Disney, whose theme-
parks, films, and other productions have changed the entire world; and all the rest of the shining Host in
the Firmament of the modern Anima Mundi. The Dragon of nuclear energy has given birth to a world-
filling brood of Unicorns by the transforming Alchemy of Chiron. The discovery of Chiron, the Planet,
in 1977 was an extremely timely one; for we desperately need an understanding of the nature of his
shamanic Magick in order to heal ourselves and our world, and create a new and better tomorrow for us
all.
Ultimately, Chiron represents the innocent damned – those who, through no fault of their own, not as
the workings of Karma or Divine Retribution or any other just, right, good, moral process or Being, have
suffered unspeakable agonies, and taken upon themselves the guilt for it, where in fact they are not guilty
at all of anything that would have justified what they have been through. The survivors of Auschwitz and
Belsen, of the Soviet Gulags, of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, of terrorist raids by the Ku Klux Klan, of the
BATF-initiated holocaust in Waco, Texas in March 1993, of gross, chronic, aggravated child-abuse or
wife-beating or any other form of evil are all Chiron’s children, suffering Chiron’s incurable wound of
undeserved guilt and terror. Only the Shaman’s Journey through the Wasteland of the Spirit, the
Underworld of the Heart can free them from their agonies of soul and spirit, the crippling of their wills
and lives by a burden that never should have been given to them. By studying the effects of Chiron’s
passages, as it aspects our natal charts and falls in the those for the major milestones of our lives, perhaps
we can learn how to strike from our souls the chains that have been wrapped so heavily, cruelly around
them by a culture so many of whose major institutions and agencies endure only by continued
terrorization of the innocent and helpless. This is the gift that Chiron offers us: the possibility of
liberation through coming to face and understand the sociocultural and historical processes that have
shaped our lives in despair and horror, where we should have been living in spiritual freedom all along.

§§ 2.1.3: Chiron’s Meaning Today

Though I have been discussing high-tech urban cultures in modern developed countries today as if
they were entirely non-shamanic in nature, this is not really true. Ultimately, As Franz Boaz and the
other great anthropologists have said again and again, humanity is of one nature, and at bottom there is
no human culture, no society that is totally different from all others, or which even possesses some
outstanding trait that is shared with no others on Earth. At most, any given human culture may possess
traits that are extreme distortions or perversions or mutations of those possessed by others, as the Ik and
their extremely sociopathological culture – the ultimate sociological nightmare and anthropological
cautionary tale – take certain of the nastier aspects of Homo sapiens to their logical conclusions, and
thereby create for themselves a culture that seems totally, horrifyingly alien to the rest of us. Yet the Ik
are just people who have fallen into a hideous sociocultural trap built out of the same elements that social
institutions in other, healthier cultures are built, put together in unusual and pathological ways.
As it says in Ecclesiastes, “There is nothing new under the sun.” European-derived Western cultures
have not fit the currently conventional idea of the shamanic society since the time of the Old Roman
Empire. This model entails a Neolithic culture, or at least one that does not have a high-energy
technology, living by hunting and gathering rather than agriculture and animal husbandry, living in a
region only sparsely populated by human beings, having a religion of nature spirits whose will is
interpreted for the people of a village or small town by a few elders, male and/or female in that town
itself, rather than a highly formalized religion of worship of powerful Gods and Goddesses living apart
from the people and the land, mediated by priests and priestesses. Such cultures were already on their
way out in Europe by the time of the Caesars the the Roman conquest of much of Europe. And yet
examples of shamanic journeys and of shamans abound in European and European-derived cultures.
European literature and tradition is replete with them. We don’t normally think of these as truly
shamanic journeys, and yet a little thought will show that that is exactly what they are. They’re easy
enough to spot . All of them begin with somebody falling down a hole. They all end with some sort of
resolution and healing. And in between, all of them describe epic journeys through the Underworld and
all its perils – and treasures.
The first examples we have of the shaman’s journey among relatively modern cultures most ready to
hand are the Eleusinian Mysteries, built on the story of Persephone’s descent into the underworld and Her
marriage to Hades, the story of Orpheus and Eurydice, and the story of Chiron Himself.
Later come stories of dragon-slayers: A terrible dragon lays waste to the countryside. A Hero comes
and enters the dragon’s lair, determined to slay the dragon and free the people from its tyrannous
oppression. The Hero does indeed kill the dragon, and lo and behold! the dragon was guarding a
fabulous treasure, which now becomes the Hero’s. The Hero, taking the treasure with him, leaves the
dragon’s lair and returns to the world of light and air, one now filled with rejoicing over the death of the
dragon, and celebration of the Hero’s triumph. A good example of such a tale is that of Perseus and
Andromeda. Some of the exploits of Hercules are in essence identical to this type of story. And
Medieval European folk-tales are often concerned with such stories.
The first of the great modern European shamans, however, is Dante Alighieri, author of The Divine
Comedy. His Comedia is the record of a true Shamanic Journey.* In addition, it is a superbly detailed
map of the Collective Unconscious made by a scrupulously honest spiritual adventurer and explorer of
the world of the spirit. As a true explorer, historian, and scientific researcher of the Inner Planes, Dante
was as meticulous, faithful, and elegant in his recording of his observations of the Underworld as
Audobon and Aggasiz were of their subject. His observations are some of the best we have of the Inner
Worlds and the Collective Unconscious, dealing with things of universal spiritual interest and
importance. Sigmund Freud, who mined the psychospiritual vaults of ancient Greek culture for treasures
such as the tragedies of Sophocles and Euripedes to try to make sense of the workings and
malfunctioning of the human psyche, missed a fine bet in Dante. Dante, like the Greek tragedians, deals
with the universal, the things that compel our attention with such power precisely because they touch on
ultimate concerns. But Dante went beyond many of the Greek tragedies in his Comedia; for where the
latter deal with sin, failure, illness, and other sorrows of existence, unlike Dante’s Comedia, they do not
also treat of redemption, success, healing, and resolution. And The Divine Comedy is not merely a
cautionary tale for medieval Christianity! By translating the parochial European Christian symbolism of
the Comedia as Dante wrote it via Qaballistic correspondences into other cultural frameworks of
reference, it can be seen at once that The Divine Comedy describes universal aspects of human existence.
Dante’s Underworld is identical to that of every age and culture, save for the symbolic labels he puts on
the things he observed in it.

*That the Comedia is the record of a true Shamanic Journey, and that Dante was a true shaman as a result
of having made such a journey, is something which urban sophisticates and “New Age” thinkers will
debate. But though the Comedia came to be via the process of literary creation, rather than as a
result of falling prey to some dire evil, then recovering through a mystic trance, the “typical” route to
shamanhood, clearly the journey it presents is the Quest the Shaman must complete to gain his
powers, and Dante a real shaman. That this is so is shown by the following:
(a) This epic poem is unparalleled in Western literature, at least as much for its perfect poetic
form and the infra-structure of the world it presents to us as for the magnificent scope of its
canvas and the fascinating journey through that world it records. It thus satisfies the tests of
achievement for classification as a true shamanic record – in order to recover from his or her
wounding and gain the powers that come with that recovery, the shaman must accomplish
things that are not within the scope of powers of ordinary men and women.

(b) The sheer impact of the Divine Comedy upon the world has likewise been unique in both its
power and its nature. As Archibald T. MacAllister says in the historical introduction to
John Ciardi’s 1954 verse translation of The Inferno, published by New American Library:

The Divine Comedy is one of the few literary works which have
enjoyed a fame that was both immediate and enduring. Fame might
indeed be said not to have awaited its completion, shortly before the
author’s death in 1321, for the first two parts, including the Inferno
here presented, had already in a very few years achieved a reputation
tinged with supernatural awe. Within two decades a half-dozen
commentaries had been written, and fifty years later it was accorded
the honor of public readings and exposition – an almost unheard-of
tribute to a work written in the humble vernacular.
The six centuries through which the poem has come to us have
not lessened its appeal nor obscured its fame. . . . [T]he Divine
Comedy has demanded critical consideration of each successive age
and every great writer; and the nature of their reaction could well
serve as a barometer of taste and a measure of their greatness.

– Ibid, p. xiii

No other literary work of the Western world has enjoyed this sort of enduring fame or has
been so beloved, or so influenced world culture the way this one has, except the various
Western translations of the Bible. It is a basic principle of Magick and of shamanism that
for human beings, the Word, the Logos, is one of the most basic of true Magickal Powers.
Clearly this consummate manifestations of the Word in written form has had an incalculably
powerful and profound effect on the consciousness not only of Western humanity, but
indeed the whole world, and therefore, through the minds and souls of those it has so
affected, and the behavior consequently inspired by those minds and souls, on all of human
history since his time, to a greater and greater degree as the years have passed and the
awareness of this work has spread farther and farther out from its origins. This is perfect
description of the action of a true shaman’s Weapon on his or her world, of its enormous,
primordial power in all the worlds, whether the mundane one or those of the spirit.

(c) Finally, as a particular instance of the effect of the Comedia on history and the world’s
cultures, it was written, as MacAllister, above, puts it, in the “humble vernacular,” the
language of the common people of Italy of Dante’s day, the Tuscan dialect of Italian.
Within a few decades of Dante’s death, so widespread had the world’s acquaintance with
the poem become, and so positive was its reception by those who read it or heard it read
aloud by others, that the formerly despised vulgar (i.e., of the common people) dialect of
Tuscany, Dante’s mother tongue, became the formal, official language of Italy. This
demonstrates fairly conclusively that Dante was the true archetype of the urban, literate,
Western shaman, who gains his shamanic powers through mastery of the Word, especially
the written word, and who thereafter brings about changes in conformity with his Will by
means of the Word, as Dante did, and that his tutelary spirit was the Psychopompos, the
Logos, Thrice-Great Hermes-Djehuti, Who is the God of the Scribe, the Writer, and of
everything having to do with the Word, including its written versions.
 Dante is truly a shaman for the ages, including modern high-tech, urbanized humanity. Via his
journey he shows, as any true shaman knows, that in the heart of the poison is its antidote – that the way
to Heaven lies right down through the center of Inferno and out the other side, indeed, via a climb down
the very flanks of the Devil himself. Following Dante on his epic journey, first with Virgil, then with
Beatrice as avatars of the Psychopompos, we are shown in the most graphic way possible that only when
you figure out the purpose of that sudden descent into Hell and journey through it, which is to serve Life
and the Spirit of Life by finding the source of Life’s great Wound and healing it, do you have a chance to
reach the end of the journey through Hell and come out the other side, on the way to salvation.
A wide variety of examples of the true Shaman’s Journey that can serve as guides for us through the
Dark Night of the Soul are in existence everywhere throughout the West. One whose origins in their
modern form are more or less contemporary with Dante is set of Major Arcana from the traditional Tarot
pack. For example, Trump 0, The Fool, represents the sudden, unforeseen, precipitous descent of the
subject into the Underworld; Trump I, The Magus, represents the Psychopompos Who acts as his guide;
Trump II, The High Priestess, is a female version of the Psychopompos, such as Beatrice in relation to
Virgil in The Divine Comedy; Trump XV, The Devil, represents Guess Who? down there in the very
center of the Underworld; Trump XX, The Last Judgment, represents the exit from the Underworld and
return to Life; Trump XXI, The World, represents the world of Life itself to which the fully initiated
Shaman has returned after his or her journey through the Underworld.
Modern literature provides many excellent portrayals of the Shaman’s Journey. One of the greatest
examples of these, a work that is to modern American culture what Dante’s Comedia has been for the
Christian Europe of his time and since, is R. R. McCammon’s 1987 breakthrough novel Swan Song, in
which Hell is represented by America after all-out thermonuclear war, and there are three Dantes,
Virgils, and Beatrices. Another is Edward Stephens’ 1962 novel Blow Negative, in which the
Underworld in question is Ta’aroa’s or Poseidon’s rather than Saturn’s, and the destination of the journey
is to learn to live in and with it in harmony, rather than flee it. Thomas Keneally’s Schindler’s List
(1982), a novelized version of the life and achievements of Oskar Schindler, a real man who really did all
the things ascribed to him in both the novel and Stephen Spielberg’s 1994 movie based on it, presents a
Shaman’s Journey through a real-life Inferno, Nazi Germany, by an urban sophisticate who, along the
way, became transformed into a saint. Herman Melville’s Moby Dick (1851) is a sterling example of a
story of The Journey which, like Blow Negative, takes place in a Hell ruled by Poseidon rather than by
Hades or Satan.
The literature of modern science-fiction is a treasure-house of stories of Shamanic Journeys; often,
the Underworld is that of Hades or Pluto, interstellar space, the return from it homecoming to Earth.
Cordwainer Smith’s short story “A Planet Named Shayol” (Galaxy Publishing, 1961) combines the
framework of science-fiction with the gorgeously numinous aura of traditional types of story, reaching
back not only to Dante, but even before him, to Virgil and Ovid, for his Underworld and Shamanic
motifs.* Another example is Alfred Bester’s glorious 1954 potboiler, The Stars My Destination.
From the Golden Age of Science Fiction, in which fantasy and science-fiction were often strangely
commingled, and the difference between “hard” s-f and “soft” fantasy was sometimes hard to make out,
come the incomparable stories of C. L. Moore of Jirel of Joiry and Northwest Smith. Her “Black Thirst”
(1934), “Black God’s Kiss” (1934), “Black God’s Shadow” (1934), and “Jirel Meets Magic” (1935) are
all superlative examples of literary presentations of the Shaman’s Journey. In particular, “Black God’s
Kiss” and “Black God’s Shadow” together make up a complete story of descent into the Underworld on a
holy quest, the successful fulfillment of that quest, and return to the Upper World with its fruits.
The literature of modern horror fiction provides numerous examples of The Journey. From the pen
of Howard Phillips Lovecraft, the “Father of Modern Horror Fiction,” who is himself one of this
century’s outstanding Chironic personalities, come the following examples, among others: “The Shadow
Over Innsmouth,” “The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath,” At the Mountains of Madness. From the
unbelievably prolific Stephen King come works such as It (Viking, 1986) and Misery (Viking, 1987).
Michael Shea’s wonderful 1982 Nifft the Lean, as an example of horror in literature of the fantastic, on
the one hand, and the gorgeous series of short-story collections and novels created by Janet Morris
beginning with the kickoff Heroes in Hell (1986), as an example of horror in modern hard-core quasi-
science fiction literature, on the other, show what can and has been done with The Journey in very recent
times. The ultimate example of the latter, of course, is Larry Niven’s and Jerry Pournelle’s Inferno
(1976); this may be the purest modern version of Inferno in particular and stories of The Journey in
general that has ever been produced.
Even pornography has contributed to the literature of The Journey. One example is Pauline Réage’s
1970 novel, Story of O. This work is doubly fascinating because, among other things, it may (or may not,
we are left hanging – or perhaps “hung” might be a better term?) constitute the story of a failed Shamanic
Journey.

*Collected in The Rediscovery of Man: The Complete Short Science Fiction of Cordwainer Smith (James
A. Mann, editor. Framingham, MA: NESFA Press, 1993). See ibid., pp. 419-450.

There are examples of The Journey available from other media, as well. Notable examples include,
e.g., much or most of the work of the painter Salvador Dali; and George Romero’s magnificently gut-
churning cinematic trilogy, Night of the Living Dead (1962), Dawn of the Dead (1979), and Day of the
Dead (1980). At any rate, there is no dearth of representations of the Shamanic Journey in our culture,
and it is obvious that though we are not a “shamanic culture” per se, there have always been shamans
among us, our connections with the world of the Spirit, with the Gods and the Underworld, who have
come into their powers in the same way that shamans in “primitive cultures” do: first, you fall down a
hole . . .
From Dante himself through St. Francis of Assisi, St. Teresa of Avila, and William Shakespeare, to
Carl Jung, Aleister Crowley, Anton Szandor LaVey, and the “fictional” Alfred E. Neuman, America’s
very own home-grown Psychopompos, shamanic guides and teachers to mediate between us and the
Spirit World and help future potential shamans successfully complete their own initiatory Shamanic
Journeys have been with us since the Middle Ages and before. Those who prate of “technoshamanism,”
and talk of the need for “technological interpreters for the people,” have forgotten that the real challenge
to the Shaman is the Wound of the Heart, that technology is only a side-issue, that the things that are of
greatest importance to us – life, death, hope, despair, sorrow, joy, damnation, redemption, hate, love –
are the same as for those of people in former ages and other cultures. Like all other aspects of the living
universe, the Underworld – also known as Hell, the Inferno, and the Collective Unconscious – evolves.
So from time to time, in the wonderful phrase of Kingsley Amis, there must be made new maps of Hell,
and each generation and each culture must produce its own Dantes, to serve as shamanic guides through
the Underworld, both for individuals in that generation or culture, and for those generations, those
cultures, as collective entities. But regardless of the cause of the Wounding, the Wound itself, which is a
hole in the heart, is always the same – The Shaman’s Journey is timeless, for it deals with the things
that are universal and eternal, the Heart of Life, its Wounding, and its Healing.
 §§ 2.1.4: Nota bene: Notes Concerning Delineations of Chiron

§§ 2.1.4.1: On the General Functions of Chiron

Judging both from my own personal experience and the testimony of experts on the subject such as
Melanie Reinhart (e.g., in her Chiron and the Healing Journey [Penguin Arkana Books, 1986]), I would
bet money – a lot of money – right now that ultimately one of the things it will turn out that Chiron rules
is the sort of chronic, “cool” viral infection* that is virtually impossible to diagnose through primary
symptoms, but which nevertheless causes repeated trouble. The sort of trouble it gives can take forms
that are physical, mental, spiritual, or some combination of these, especially as a result of chronic allergy
conditions caused by the build-up in the tissues of the body of proteins shed over the years by the virus.
Chiron especially should rule such “cool,” chronic viral infections of the central nervous system which
irritate or stimulate the latter in ways producing behavior, feelings, and so on whose root causes seem to
be psychological but are instead the result of a physical agent, the virus. These symptomatic expressions
of the infection may or may not give problems. In the case of well-behaved, epidemiologically
intelligent viruses, it almost never will, because it is in the virus’s best interest to have healthy, happy
hosts; but otherwise, in the case of ecologically stupid, sociopathic viruses, there could be problems,
since the virus wouldn’t care what it did to its host as long as it got its goodies in the process.

*For an excellent colloquial discussion concerning “hot” vs. “cool” viruses and other epidemiological
matters, see passim William H. McNeill, Plagues and Peoples(New York: The History Book Club,
1993); Laurie Garrett, The Coming Plague: Newly Emerging Diseases in a World Out of Balance
(New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1994); Richard Preston, The Hot Zone (New York: Random
House, 1994).

Astrologically speaking, the important thing is that if Chiron does turn out to be the primary ruler of
such low-grace, chronic physical, epidemiological sources of toxicity, then transits to Chiron in the natal
chart, like transits by Chiron to anything in the natal chart, will trigger varying degrees and forms of
symptomatic expression of viral infection in the native, should he or she in fact be infected with a
“Chironic,” “cool” virus. That is, what Chiron would indicate in the natus is that part of the body most
potentially vulnerable to infection by such viruses, should they be presented to the native and should his
or her immune system not be up to the task of fending off those viruses (by “immune system” is also
meant that whole associated aggregate of benign, commensal viruses and other microbes normal to that
person, whose presence gives him or her benefit through its potential ability to out-compete or out-
combat wannabe microbial invaders, among other things). Thus Chiron in the natus would also indicate
primary “target” areas for viruses in the native’s general environment, which at least chemically could
signal, accidentally or otherwise, to those viruses, “Here’s dinner – come and get it!” (This might
explain why Chiron is so often prominent in the synastry between the charts of people who were
molested or raped as children and those of their assailants. Sexual transmission is one of the oldest and
most successful means by which viruses get from Host A to Host B. If the assailants were in some part
influenced by “cool” viruses whose preferred route for vectoring themselves was sexual, and if those
viruses could somehow sense that the child was vulnerable to infection via sexual means, it would do
anything it could to push its host into a sexual assault of some kind on that child, in order to continue its
own existence. Charts of both victims and perpetrators of such crimes should be examined to see what
support, if any, can be found in them for this idea.)
If this is truly the case, then Chiron here shares one of the major functions of Neptune and Pisces,
namely lordship over part or all the microbial kingdom and its functions, and one would then expect it to
be strong in many of Neptune’s Signs, showing its primary characteristics more strongly in those Signs
than in others, beginning with Pisces.

§§ 2.1.4.2: First-House Chiron With Neptune

A conjunction of Chiron and Neptune in the First House, or also conjoining the Ascendant from the
Twelfth House, or forming a stellium with the ruler of the Ascendant, can signify mysterious physical
illness of physical (i.e., non-psychosomatic and non-psychogenic) origin ultimately due to chronic
microbial (either bacterial, viral, or both) infection. The infection itself may or may not be the direct
source of any problems caused by it; one possible manifestation of such a condition may be an auto-
immune or allergy reaction to the cumulative build-up in the tissues of the body of proteins shed by viral
agents of such infections. In some cases of very low-grade chronic viral infections, in fact, the only
readily apparent symptom of the infection may be just such an allergy reaction; if, in addition, the
infection in such a case is in some part or parts of the central nervous system, it may manifest only in the
form of various odd “psychological” symptoms which are actually “somatopsychically” caused by the
presence in the brain and/or spine of an infectious agent of some kind, in the same way that third-stage
syphilis paresis – tertiary syphilitic infection of the central nervous system engenders behavioral,
emotional, and other bizarre symptoms once thought to be due to entirely psychological causes but which
are now known to be characteristic of the terminal stages of that disease.
Neptune in the First House or conjunct the Ascendant from the Twelfth or conjunct the ruler of the
Ascendant is also frequently associated with strong psychic sensitivity and abilities. Among other things,
Neptune also rules microbial infections of all kinds, issues related to public health and therefore
epidemiological phenomena such as epidemics of microbial infections, and so on. It may be that such
infections facilitate or help facilitate psychic phenomena of all kinds, especially broad-band psychic and
telepathic reception and transmission, which could be mediated, at least in part, as a result of infection by
a virus or viruses shared with at great many people or even all humanity or all Earthly life (Neptune in
Aquarius) (see Volume 3, Part 6, Chapter 10 of this work for more information concerning viral
infections and esoteric phenomena of all kinds).

§§ 2.1.4.3: Chiron returns

The 50th anniversary of any historically important event is always important to us – for example, in
the Old Testament, in Judea every 50th year in succession was a “jubilee year,” when all debts were
forgiven, all servants set free, and so on. This may be because it is also the Chiron return of the event,
the time when the giant planetary comet Chiron returns to the same celestial longitude at which He stood
when the original event occurred, of which this is the 50th anniversary. This year, 1995, is the 50th
anniversary of the end of World War II and its aftermath – of the liberation of Germany’s death-camps
and the Japanese concentration camps by victorious Allied military forces, of the dropping of the Bomb
upon Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and so forth. While there have been many memorials of these events, in a
great variety of forms from literature and cinema to memorial statuary, paintings, and journalistic
photographic portfolios, it would be expected that anything that comes out as Chiron returns to His place
in the sky where He stood during those horrifying times 50 years ago will have far greater
psychospiritual, legal, social, and other human impact than any that went before it.
Between 1984 and the present, with Pluto’s ingress into Scorpio and Neptune’s into Capricorn,
rapidly followed in 1988 by Saturn’s and Uranus into Capricorn as well (Saturn thereafter entering first
Aquarius, then Pisces, remaining in mutual reception with first Uranus, then Neptune, while the latter two
conjoined in Capricorn in 1993-1994), the mood of the whole world has been tumbling down into
despair. Chiron’s perihelion passage in the last couple of years and, possibly, the splendid but unnerving
impact of the fragments of Comet Shoemaker-Levy onto Jupiter during July 16-21 in 1994, last year, may
well have added to that mood. Everything bad that could possibly happen, did; then it got stuck that
way; then it rotted – such has been the effect of Pluto in Scorpio sextile Neptune in Capricorn. Uranus
in Capricorn is like a maniac in a straight-jacket, while Saturn in Pisces (1993-1996) is Arsenic and Old
Lace. With this background, what revelations are likely to come forth as Pluto goes direct on the 8th of
this month (August 1995) and enters Sagittarius (November 10, 1995), followed by Uranus’s ingress into
Aquarius in January of next year? Pluto in Sagittarius is the funeral pyre on which all the rot of Pluto in
Scorpio is burned away; Uranus in Aquarius is the Eagle in Flight. The former brings jihads, the latter
brings freedom – what revolutions will come forth now, as well? What new information will be made
public about the A-bombing of Hiroshima (a uranium-core version of the Bomb) and Nagasaki (a
plutonium-core Bomb), Hitler’s death-camps (Pluto/Neptune/Uranus/Saturn all associated with it), the
establishment at the end of WW 2 of clandestine arms of the US government such as the National
Security Council that were accountable to no one, not even Congress (Neptune, Pluto, possibly Uranus),
and all the rest of the world-shattering, culture-blasting end and aftermath of World War II?
 §§ 2.1.5: Correspondences

Gods:

Egyptian: Osiris
Greek: Chiron; Pallas Athena
Sumerian:
Babylonian:
Roman:
Hindu:
Szekeli (Romany Gypsy):
Chinese:
Japanese:
Judaism:
Christianity:
Islam:
Scandinavian:
Russian:
Hungarian:
Polynesian:
Africa:
Southeast Asia:
Celtic:
Native Australian:
Central American:
Eskimo:
American Indian:
American folklore:
Science-fiction:
Voudon:
SubGenius:
Discordianism:
H. P. Lovecraft:
Stephen King:
LaVeyan Satanism:

God-Name in Hebrew:

World Religions:

Archangel:

Angelic Choir:

Angel:

Angels given by Barrett, et al.:

Olympic Planetary Spirit:

Intelligence:

Spirit:

Spirits given by Bardon, Barrett, et al..:

Name of Planet in Hebrew:

Commandment from Exodus:

Ten Plagues of Egypt:

Verses from Creation Story in Genesis:

Cantos from the Inferno of Dante Alighieri :

Cantos from the Purgatorio of Dante Alighieri :

Cantos from the Paradiso of Dante Alighieri :

Orders of Qlippoth:

Qlipphotic Spirit (from Kenneth Grant):

Article of Bill of Rights:

General astrological classification:

General Qaballistic classification:

The general attributions of the Tarot:

Titles of Tarot Trump:

Correct Design of Tarot Trump:

Titles and Attributes of Court Cards:

Titles and Attributes of Numbered Cards:

Alchemical and Pythagorean Associations:

Attributions from the I Ching and Taoist Cosmology:

Attributions from Ninpo (Way of the Ninja, Way of Wisdom) and Shinto (Way of the Kami or Gods):

Other Magickal Correspondences, according to Barrett, et al.:

Day of the Week ruled by Chiron:

Geocentric:

Saturday; Wednesday night

Heliocentric:

Hours of the Day ruled by Chiron:

Geocentric:

Sunset Saturday, Sunset Wednesday

Heliocentric:

Grade of the Temple:

Colors:

Patterns:

Forms, shapes, lineal figures, geomantic figures, figures related to pure number, and numerological
associations:

Magick Square:

The Mystic Rose of 22 Petals (Regardie)

The Mystic Rose of 116 Petals (extension of the Mystic Rose of 22 Petals)
The Magick Square of Chiron

Stones, gems, and metals:

Herbs and Trees:

Animals and Other Organisms:

Ecological domain or process:

Legendary orders of being:

Foods, drugs, and perfumes:

Clothing, Magickal Weapons, and other things, objects, and processes:

Anatomy and physiology:

Psychology:

Diseases:

Occupations and ecological niches:

Places, nations, and peoples:

Places: Hiroshima, Japan; Port Chicago, California; Nagasaki, Japan; the grounds and physical
plant of Dachau, Auschwitz, and other death-camps of Nazi Germany

Nations: the United States of America; Russia; Israel (modern and ancient); India

Peoples: the Jews; the Gypsies; the various American Indian peoples; most native peoples today;
the peoples of India

Planetary Age of Man:

Matters of the horoscope:

Music:

Poetry:

Books and other literary productions:

Visual arts:
Saints and exemplars:

American emblems, sigils, symbols, myths, folklore, and urban legend:

Section 14.2.2.1.6: Delineations of Chiron in the Signs and Houses and in Aspect
 Endnotes

1
New York: Penguin/Arkana Books, 1989.
1a
The classic Western work on shamanism, one of the very best in existence, is Mircea Eliade’s
Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy (Cambridge, MA: Princeton University Press/Bollingen
Foundation, 1964). It gives the background necessary for an in-depth understanding of Melanie
Reinhart’s treatment of the astrology and psychology of Chiron. 2 See Barbara Hand Clow, Chiron:
Rainbow Bridge Between the Inner and Outer Planets (St. Cloud, MN: Llewellyn, 1992). She is not,
frankly, real long on hard science, but her astrology is superb, and provides a good deal of support for the
thesis that Chiron serves as a bridge across the Abyss.
2
See Reinhart, ibid., pp. 40-49.