Chiron/Sun, we find it easier to understand when Chiron hits any of the personal planets.  The personal planets have to do with our functioning, have to do with our effectiveness, and we understand when Chiron places a chink in our armour.  Chiron/Mercury, and our ability to move, articulate and/or take in ordinary information can be flawed (we learn later that we can move through the universe at will, and take in deeper meaning).  Chiron/Venus is often capable of universal compassion and has great gifts for self-expression, except for the gift of appreciating itself.  Chiron/Mars feels inadequate to act, until it learns to be a vessel for higher powers.  Chiron/Saturn often has a problem with mastering anything, becoming an authority, or just ‘growing up.’  It all makes sense, Chiron initially holds back what it touches.

All this becomes problematic when Chiron touches the Sun.  The Sun is a light, does not behave the way a planet does, and is in fact there to shed light on Chiron, no matter the aspect it takes. This is true of all Sun aspects– however, the Sun often uses an illusion that convinces us things are going the other way.  For example, if you have a Sun/Pluto contact, you think it’s Pluto doing a number on the Sun every time you have a transit or progression.  Nothing can be further from the truth.  It’s actually the Sun creating Plutonian experience so that you can use the Plutonian energies in a more enlightened way.  The Sun, at the center of each existence, creates and consolidates experience for us so that our consciousness evolves and we move from the past to the future.  But we’re deceived into thinking that Pluto is winning the war, attacking the Sun, attacking our power, attacking our individual light.  Pluto transits and progressions are associated with death, undeniably, especially when the Sun is involved.  Sun/Pluto feels like death.  But this is the Sun telling us we are at the end of this particular journey, and must be reborn.  The Sun is the conductor of the entire chart, even when it makes no aspects.  If it does make aspects, pay attention to them, they are more important than anything else in your chart.  They are about your personal growth, your individual light, your eternal being.

The Moon is also a light, and Moon/Chiron is powerful in its own way.  Moon/Chiron is about releasing the past, releasing security and belonging, and finding security/home in the higher worlds and higher powers.  We learn that we are greater than our mundane lives would have us believe.  But with Sun/Chiron, we often don’t know what is broken, what is being wounded.  All we know is that we aren’t what we could be, and yet we feel ourselves to be so much we might burst.

It is often said that Sun/Chiron carries a blow to the identity.  I’m not so sure about that.  How many of us really know, really feel, our Sun positions?  How many of us feel as if we are emanating creative power in accordance with the universe?  Where the Sun is, we begin the process of understanding in a raw, connected way.  We know, because our light is at the center of everything in the world and beyond.  When we fully grasp the Sun, we know that we are a creative force and a vessel for divine energy.  Usually, we find it difficult to tap into this energy before the age of 36, the age of spiritual maturity, and most of us can’t really access its power until we reach the Chiron return at 50.  Now, there is an interesting coincidence/synchronicity.  Fifty years before we can fully carry the Sun.  Why?

I’m not saying that we don’t have solar moments, times when the beneficence of the Sun is with us, the wind at our backs and in our sails.  We know those times, because life seems to skate along according to our will, whatever we have longed for manifests in our lives and time speeds at an incredible rate.  We feel at one with the universe.  That’s the power of the Sun at work.

But to use the Sun in a conscious way, to apply it to our will, is quite another thing.  Whenever Chiron is involved, and it doesn’t matter in what way, we are learning lessons about our own divinity, about what it means to be a vessel for divinity.  When Chiron and the Sun are involved, we may feel completely cut off from those solar blessings.  We not only feel deprived of the luck and the oneness with the universe that comes so easily to others, but we may feel abandoned by life itself.  Sun/Chiron says, “I may have to live my life and put one foot in front of the other, but my movement has no meaning.”  We may cry out from the hunger of the conscious will, but no one is listening.

This is abandonment of the deepest kind.  The Chiron/Sun child wonders why everyone else has a guardian angel, he never sees/feels his own.  In the cruelest circumstance, the Chiron/Sun child may have the gift of perceiving the divinity in others, a belonging he may never feel.  Chiron/Sun feels as though no one is supporting his wishes or desires.  There is no one looking over his shoulder, guiding his path.  It isn’t so much a lack of identity (unless there is heavy Pisces involved) as it is a feeling of exile from life itself.  On the contrary, as often happens to one who has no one else to rely on, the ego/identity can be strengthened, but it isn’t the healthy and flexible ego that negotiates the world in a creative way, it’s the rigid and defensive ego that constantly braces itself against the storm of life.  Life becomes a prison in which the candle slowly suffocates.

If abandonment and slow death is not an issue, a feeling of basic unacceptance is.  This isn’t the rejection/scapegoating of Moon/Chiron, who desperately wants to belong, but a continual feeling that ‘something is wrong with me.’  I’m not different or rejected, I’m inadequate.  Whatever I try to create, whatever I try to build, crumbles to the ground.  Often, Chiron/Sun experiences this continual destruction of what it has begun, until it gets in contact with the deepest, most broken levels of its being and exposes the human glory that is hiding beneath.  A friend of mine is an actor who is well known for playing the grotesque and the broken.  He is often asked how he is able to expose the deeper levels of his psyche.  His answer is, the deeper you go, the more grotesque and outrageous the things you expose, the bigger the parade that will form behind you. The more broken, the more universally human. At its best, Chiron/Sun can be the epitome of compassion, a compassion and forgiveness that borders on the divine.

On a superficial level, there may be a lack of identity with Chiron/Sun because of this inability to create.  If I can’t express myself, if I can’t create a comfortable identity for myself, then how do I know who I am?  Chiron/Sun can often create an identity out of self-defense that has nothing to do with the inner being. As a consequence, painful experiences throughout the life expose the falsity in excruciating ways.  There is often humiliation and shame involved, often exposing the lack of inner growth that occurs in these circumstances.

Ultimately, the purpose of Chiron/Sun is nothing less than the unveiling of inner divinity.  I am the god in me, just as I am the god that is in everything, and everything is in me.  I cannot be hurt, because I am living truth.   Chiron/Sun learns through hard experience that life is a celebration of the divine.  By the time the Chiron return comes around, Chiron/Sun has figured out the big questions:  what do I know that is worthy of passing on?  What is my legacy?  What is my personal wisdom and how do I use it to benefit others? The times when Chiron is square to itself, or opposing itself, may be particularly challenging for these individuals.  They usually experience an existential crisis that can make or break them.  Rather than living a hollow life or a life of defensiveness and falsity, Chiron/Sun lives every day engulfed in meaning, celebrating the beauty of life both within and beyond time.

Chiron/Sun is destined to learn how to live life as a vessel for divine expression.  Devotion comes easily, because every molecule of life is revered.  Chiron/Sun learns to be the healer, the teacher, the wise man or woman because it cannot do anything else.  It learns, as the poet Fredrich Holderlin knew, “Where there is darkness, the saving powers also rise.”  Above all, Chiron/Sun learns that the saving grace of the Sun is forever within.

Chiron/Sun in Synastry will be discussed in the upcoming ebook:  Beyond the Wound