7th House: Here our sense that our needs are rendered insignificant by our marriage or life-partner, or even a business partner come to the fore. We may also feel that we suffer inordinately at the hands of those with whom we are competing for position, or those with whom we are openly opposed in some way. The pain of Chiron then is configured into those very close relationships but here, our problem is not that we feel a need to give ourselves up, as with Pisces, it is almost the opposite, we feel as if we are already meaningless within the relationship and now our challenge is to find a means of creating some awareness of our significance. As ever with Chiron, there is some measure of bad childhood programming involved and we may have subsumed the lesson of an overly selfish parent with Chiron in Aries here. Winston Churchill had this placement and his mother was a renowned socialite and was estimated to have slept with considerably more than 1000 men in her life: it is therefore easy to see how Churchill may have learned that the male counterpart in a close relationship might be essentially valueless, there is no indication that his own marriage was particularly difficult however, although Churchill was known to spend many of his nights alone in the grip of his ‘black dog’, a depression with which he struggled for all of his adult life. Rock Hudson, by contrast, who shared this placement, was as an actor cast into archetypical romantic leading roles but speculation about his private life and sexual orientation led him to marry his agent’s secretary Phyllis Gates: the marriage lasted three years and it was only after her death that it was revealed by close friends that Phyllis was a lesbian who had only married Hudson for his money. While this is an extreme case, it encapsulates many of the themes of difficulty, pain and secret sensitivity associated with Chiron in Libra’s house.
8th House: Here is a difficult placement for Chiron with a double Martian influence (Aries on Scorpio) and it creates a real power-vacuum in the native; an inability to sexually transform may be evident, and impotence, frigidity, lack of meaning in intimate relationships are all possible as well. Alternately, sexual infidelity may be a theme in close relationships and this may itself create financial dependencies as a result through divorce settlements, alimony and attendant loss of homes and status. Consider the example of Hugh Hefner, founder and editor of Playboy magazine: (this from Wikipedia). “Before [Hefner’s and first wife Mildred Williams’] wedding, Mildred told Hefner that she had had an affair; he has called the admission “the most devastating moment of [his] life.” A 2006 profile of Hefner revealed she allowed him to have sex with other women, out of guilt for her infidelity and the hopes that it would preserve their failing marriage. Mildred and Hugh divorced after ten years of marriage in 1959. After his first marriage, Hefner’s self-promoted public persona became that of womaniser and party animal. He has said that during some years, he was “‘involved’ with maybe eleven out of twelve months worth of Playmates.” Hefner has had sustained relationships with Donna Michelle, Marilyn Cole, Lillian Muller, Patti McGuire, Shannon Tweed, and Brande Roderick, all of whom were chosen “Playmate of the Year.” Others include Barbi Benton, Karen Christy, ex-Sunday school teacher Sondra Theodore, and actress Carrie Leigh, who filed a $35 million alimony suit against him. Benton, who dated him for 8 years, remains a fixture in Hefner’s life and a regular visitor to the Playboy Mansion, which she found for him. In 1971, Hefner has acknowledged, he experimented in bisexuality.” The tragedy here is that Hefner lives in a way that many unevolved men would posit as the dream-life and yet the level of difficulty and pain surrounding sexual issues for Hefner are quite clearly overwhelming, provoked no-doubt by that initial admission of infidelity by his first wife and it was this factor which created his sense of sexual worthlessness which he has compulsively attempted to redress with a series of grotesque and emotionally empty liaisons ever since. The Scorpio influence of Chiron in the 8th may also manifest in alcohol or drug issues (Betty Ford). Many celibates and abstainers have this placement of Chiron.
9th House: Here the pain of low self-esteem can manifest through educational, philosophical, racial, religious and spiritual matters. The native with an inactivated Chiron in Aries here might always feel fundamentally under-qualified or inexperienced in some key element of vocational life, or they may struggle to develop a meaningful and supportive philosophy of life (in Jupiter’s house). They may struggle with matters of faith, and either feel that life is a dull, monotonous shuffle unto death, or alternately that they are unworthy of salvation. On the other hand, Chiron responds well to the expansive properties of the 9th, so the outlook is generally fortunate here and the possibility of self-improvement is never far from these people’s minds, and the Chiron half or full-return may spark a desire to go back into education or to rededicate the spiritual life in some way. For an excellent example of Chiron in Aries in the 9th we need look no further than Maria Montessori, the pioneering (Aries) educator (9th) who developed her original models of educational best-practise through her sympathy for mentally retarded children in the hospitals of Paris, who she felt had been abandoned and forgotten: Maria was a true disciple of Chiron and anyone with this particular placement could do no better than to read the thought-provoking biography of her incredible life and work.
10th House: Here the career or vocation comes to the fore, and climbing the corporate ladder to success might turn out to be a very slippery slope indeed for these individuals, and the sense of being ‘passed over’ for promotion might well have been invented for this exact placement. Status too may become a limiting factor, perhaps it manifests here as a sense that your status is unrecognised or marginalised in some way, or that your greatest achievements are ignored by others completely, especially those with whom you are configured in your vocation. A good example of this is Albert Adler, who was one of the principal founders of psychoanalysis along with Sigmund Freud, and among psychologists he is considered to be equally influential in the development of psychoanalysis as his better known counterpart and yet, while the world has heard of Freud, Adler’s name is not nearly so well known, this mostly on account of the fact that Freud decided Adler’s ideas were too threatening to his own efforts to tolerate coexistence and issued an ultimatum to all members of the psychoanalytic society (which he shepherded) to drop Adler or be expelled. Thus Freud became the shining star of psychoanalysis and Adler, though equally brilliant, became a footnote by comparison. Thus Chiron creates enormous difficulty in the area of vocational exposure and status. It is interesting to note though that Adler was primarily a medical doctor before he became a psychologist (a career (10th house) in healing (Chiron), and he was encouraged to become a doctor after suffering from rickets as a child: rickets is a softening of the bones, leading to deformity, Saturn rules the skeletal structure and the 10th house too.
11th House: Here Chiron in Aries creates the individual who is taken for granted within the social circle, organisation or collective; maybe the friend whose contribution and support is never acknowledged or who feels in some way less significant than their peers. Here is the child at school whose friendship does not seem to be particularly prized, the friend perhaps who is dropped just as soon as another more intriguing association is in the offing. Similarly, membership of non-vocational groups or societies may evince the same issues, after the church meeting, Chiron in Aries in the 11th gets to put the chairs away and sweep up and nobody ever says thank you. Fundamentally though, there is another level of Chiron in Aries here that explains its manifestation; it is technically correct to say that here Chiron creates a condition where one’s uniqueness is not recognised, in some sense as a friend you may be considered too conventional to make much of an impression and this is at the heart of the matter the reason why you will feel taken for granted. Consider David Beckham, the English midfield soccer player who, although he is possibly the most famous soccer player ever to have lived, is not considered to be particularly exciting or cultured as a player, indeed, he is no Pele or Maradonna, for all his wealth and fame. Solid, hard-working, accurate and dependable, but essentially, not very quirky or likely to exhibit flair or unpredictability; and this really describes the quality of Chiron in Aries in the 11th, our genius, brilliance, quirkiness or essential different-ness remains unnoticed.
12th House: Here is a very difficult placement of Chiron to describe because the pain of feeling irrelevant is suppressed, but there is too a genuine possibility that Chiron activated in Aries here will create the correct ambience for the tipping over into a truly spiritual or poetic life; for this reason I do not consider Chiron in the 12th to be necessarily bad, although, in Aries here it is certainly no asset to the materially minded or those who crave worldly success and power. Indeed, the desire for purely egoistic prominence (Aries) to stand-out or pioneer, will invariably be thwarted and may well lead to one’s own downfall, as was clearly the case for Robert Kennedy, whose demise (12th) came through a gunshot (Aries) wound (Chiron) as he aspired to the presidency. On the other hand, an ascetic, spiritual or poetic life is perfectly sympathetic to this placement, and when you consider that Robert Frost, Carlos Castaneda, Eva Peron, Marcel Proust and GK Chesterton all shared this placement it is easy to see the requirement to approach life in a manner more conducive to Neptunian experience.
