What is a Chiron Return Astrologically?

A Chiron Return is that around the age of 50, or thereabouts (for some, it is 49; for others 51) marks a new paradigm, as Chiron returns to its natal position. This moment delineates the end of the heroic youth, as we enter the realm of "elder. At this moment in time the task was to care for what is meaningful to us, not what others judge as important, but which is intimately creative and restorative to the individual.

Here, we have the opportunity to go back to the source of our deepest, unresolved wounds; to heal them, so that we can live the remainder of our lives in keeping with our true soul purpose.



During this time, we may relinquish that which is inauthentic; we may re-order our priorities; or liberate the unlived passionate expression of our spirit, and become our true selves. Through this process we can contribute to the fundamental healing of family, our society, and our planet.



Chiron’s fate embraces both the pain of incarnation and the fires of spirit. In reality, the spirit is often chained up in the cellar, buried under ancestral rubble, until the wound of living has reached its density then spirit bursts through. At fifty death is no longer just a psychological process or metaphysical metaphor; it is a physical reality. The pain of living is peeking. While death may seem unreachable, on a faraway horizon, nonetheless, it is visible, more visible that ever before. Moving towards that inevitability seems to also hold the key to a renewed release of spirit. The authentic aspects of the self that are still buried may still be alive under the rubble. In writing on this period, Jung suggested that ‘too many aspects of life which should also have been experienced lie in the lumber-room among dusty memories; but sometimes, too, they are glowing coals under grey ashes.’

Fifty marks a new paradigm. And this new state has immense possibilities, but the map needed is different than the one used in the first half of life. Chiron returns in the period post mid-life. The mid-life map, with its potent astrological cycles, looked back; it took a psychodynamic approach to understanding the self. Childhood demons were exorcised, the inner child liberated, adolescence was revisited, and the road less travelled was explored. The decade of the fifties, however, looks forward into an uncertain yet brave New World. Spirit is unleashed as we turn towards the western horizon of our life. The quest for meaning has a different hue. And what was a priority in the morning of one’s life is not as important in the evening. Erica Jong expressed it this way: ‘All the things you suffer from when you’re younger become far less important at the age of fifty.’ Priorities are shifting, a redirection has been seeded.

Chiron was mentor to the solar heroes who came to his cave to be initiated in the mysteries of life. Chiron’s return marks the end of the hero’s worldly quests, the death of the embodied mentor and the entry into the elder phase of life. The Chiron return is followed by the second Saturn waning square at age 52, then the fourth Jupiter opposition at 53, when the process of reinvention is starting to take hold. While a lot of reshaping and reinventing is occurring between 50 and 55, the individual may feel they are in a liminal state, suspended. Yet an orientation to a new life is occurring.