Chiron in Pisces: Integration and Integrity

© 2010 by  guest blogger, Joyce Mason, All Rights Reserved

Donna says: Joyce our resident expert on Chiron, will be teaching a Chiron 101  E-Classfor 6 weeks by group e-mail, July 11-Aug. 19, 2011. Only time this year – $79. Details here: Chiron 101 E-Class.  Questions? Contact Joyce.  This is a sample of the material she’ll be covering–an excerpt from a much longer article. 

In its 50-year orbit, Chiron changed signs from Aquarius to Pisces on April 20, 2010 where it will remain, except for a temporary retrograde back to Aquarius, until February 18, 2019. What news can we expect in Chiron’s realm of wounding, healing and wholeness? Pisces gets a healthy hunk of pie at nearly nine years in the sign, one of the longer visits by Chiron. Soon you’ll see why this is probably a good omen. 

The last time Chiron was in Pisces was from late March 1960 through January 1969. This is the cycle many of us were alive to remember. For people with Chiron in Pisces, it’s “your time.” You’ll experience a major life transit, your Chiron Return, during the next nine years.

If You Have Chiron in Pisces

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

Your link to Chiron is your compassionate kindness, but you retain the shadow of the wild centaurs. You want ecstatic unity, but unfortunately, you can be sucked into undertow of Neptune’s murky waters. Neptune, Pisces’ ruler, also can lure you into substances and addictions that go with his realm: alcohol, drugs, sex, and a desire to avoid life’s harsher realities.

Your wound may come from an overly spiritual upbringing where you had ecstatic, mystical experiences that were a bit advanced for your tender years and neurological system. Wounds could be caused by parents, siblings, or other family members with bad boundaries—invading your personal space (privacy) or your physical space (incest).

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

To bring heaven to earth in this ecstatic way, Chiron in Pisces make great musicians, “speaking” the universal language that unites the world. You can be a dancer whose movements teach others the path to ecstasy, a gifted psychic, or a poet. 

If it involves bringing that sense of bliss to earth, it’s for you. Spiritual leadership, artistic talent, facility with dreams and other tools of psychological exploration are other possible vocations. Chiron in Pisces knows the heaven side of bringing heaven to earth. You know your gifts are solid when you begin, figuratively, to buy round-trip tickets from earth to sky and back

History Lessons

I reviewed the headlines for the last Chiron in Pisces cycle, year by year, and the themes were stunning. They include racial integration in society and music—suddenly, white people singing and listening to traditionally black music—and the integration of other polarities, such as male/female in the feminist movement. Racial integration and feminism both came of age during the ‘60s. 

Because of Chiron’s connection to health, healing—and the fact that surgeon was one of his many talents, I wanted to know what happened in the area of health and medicine. Health care was the fastest growing industry and became more business-like as it grew. By 1969, the average net profit of a medical practitioner was $32,000 or four times the net income of the average worker.
 One of the most revolutionary changes under Chiron in Pisces was the initiation of the Medicare and Medicaid programs under President Lyndon B. Johnson. These programs routinely extended good medical care to the poor and elderly for the first time in history—certainly in keeping with the compassionate side of Pisces and Chiron as healer.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Black and White, Male and Female

In Wholeness and the Inner Marriage, I discuss the concept that astrological Chiron is about the psychological integration of all polarities within us. Racial injustice is still a painful reality to many Afro-Americans, but the dichotomy of black versus white touches everyone at an archetypal level. 

Racial integration is the outer expression of the inner integration we need to make with our own shadows and the things inside us that seem to be at odds with one another. These are the opposing parts of us that seem, at first, too different for us to come to terms with them. The feminist revolution pits male and female in the same way, and we all have the recessive opposite gender inside us, the anima or animus, begging to be blended into a balanced wholeness.

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

Barack Obama, with his prominent Chiron in Pisces in the 1st House, will experience his Chiron Return in 2011-2012 with exact hits on May 21, June 25, and February 26. I suspect we’ll learn much about the archetype of Chiron and Chiron in Pisces as the “leader of the free world” experiences this major midlife transit in plain public view.

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

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

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

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

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

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

(Note: this is an excerpt from a much longer article.  See it and the footnotes to her sources here: The Radical Virgo: Chiron in Pisces: Integration and Integrity.)

Want to learn more about Chiron?  Joyce Mason  will be teaching a Chiron 101 E-Class for 6 weeks by group e-mail, July 11-Aug. 19, 2011. Only time this year – $79. Details here: Chiron 101 E-Class post. Questions? Contact Joyce. 

More of Joyce’s articles on Skywriter:

• Chiron Cycles and Life’s Purpose
• Chiron and Vocation: Do What You Love and Wholeness Will Follow
• Chiron Potpourri—a Q&A Session with Joyce Mason
•  Chiron Transits—a Q&A Session by Joyce Mason

About the Author: Joyce Mason has consulted, written, and spoken on astrology for three decades. Recently, she has published two e-books on Chiron that can be purchased in the sidebar of her blog, The Radical Virgo. She’s the President and CEO (Catalyst, Enthusiast, and Organizer) of Sacramento Area Astrologers, a newly forming chapter of the National Council on Geocosmic Research (NCGR). She’s seeking volunteers for her Chiron Research, part of a new book she’s writing.