Chiron in Love

Liz Greene released a new book, Chiron in Love, last week. I get excited about a new, meaty astrology book to dive into.

There's this term in astrology literature that gets thrown around all the time: "cookbook." There's a large subset of readers who just want to know what a given planet does by sign and house and that's it. If you memorize the sign and memorize the house, you can then take that information and incorporate it into your readings. Or if you're doing a reading and you get stuck, you can turn to the page in your cookbook and find out what Venus does in the 9th house and Aries.

My favorite Liz Greene book is Saturn: A New Look at an Old Devil, which is probably the most cookbookiest of her books, but it's also a poetic look at the planet that everyone loves to hate. It's actually my favorite book to read at the beach, though lying on the beach is the antithesis of Saturn energy (that's how I live my life, I guess). If you read one Liz Greene book, read that one.

Many of Greene's books are transcripts from seminars, and the Chiron book is no different. It makes sense: if you're doing pioneering work and sharing with others in a public forum, why not take the seminar, where people can ask questions and make comments, and turn that into something that's accessible to more people? She's not alone in doing that: it's a phenomenon you see often. The discourse and input from the audience is usually useful, but occasionally there is a comment that is so stupid that I wonder why it didn't get edited out.

The Chiron book isn't really a cookbook. It's about Chiron in mythology, and she delves more deeply into the different faces and appearances of the gods and titans in various myths than any author out there (in all of her books), so if you want a solid mythological understanding, always read Liz Greene. She mostly manages to discuss Chiron through the signs, but due to the seminar format she was working in, some got discussed more than others. Not so much with Chiron through the houses. She focuses on synastry/interaspects between people's charts, and in doing so, makes comments on what Chiron-planet aspects are like in a natal chart. So if you're a beginner who yearns for complete understanding of a what Chiron *does* when it's in a chart, you're not going to walk away satisfied, but if you're someone who reads charts and is looking for validation and confirmation of some hypotheses you've made over the years (like me!), reading this is cathartic.

I think my favorite part of the book is when someone asks about the positive side of Chiron, because Chiron wounds are wounds that can never be healed, and Greene says "this IS the positive side" meaning, knowing and understanding one's wounds and having the chance to not inflict them on others is a positive manifestation of Chiron. Even if it sounds negative. Even if it IS negative. Chiron wounds are deep and feral, and we all have them. Chiron in its negative form is joining an angry mob and further victimizing other people through mob action or mob mentality.

If you're adept enough to read multiple charts and can understand how to do synastry, you might get a lot out of this book. If you would like to know quite a bit about the British royal family and their history with Chiron aspects (which is quite interesting, as well as visible), you will enjoy this book. Beginners will get pretty confused, so I wouldn't start with it if you're at entry level.

One thing beginners can fall prey to is not having enough experience reading charts and reading book after book, thinking "that sounds like me" and self-diagnosing with all kinds of issues. Often, in Liz Greene books, attendees start jumping to conclusions and Greene interrupts them, and she keeps these interruptions in the book, and I think for good reason. If you're a sensitive person who is interested in astrology, I think it's very common to self-diagnose. Refrain from doing that to yourself, and to people in your close vicinity. Instead, run your hypotheses by someone else, preferably someone more knowledgeable in astrology than you.

I think it's worth saying that Greene started using Chiron right away in astrology. It was discovered in 1977, and she took Chiron seriously and discussed its activity and aspects in earlier books, so this isn't the only place that she discusses Chiron, but obviously it is the most concentrated. This isn't globally true of all other astrologers. So Greene gets props for this.