Natal Wheel › Guides › Aspects › Neptune and Chiron
Neptune and Chiron · porousness and old grief
Neptune in aspect to Chiron
Neptune dissolves the boundary between self and everything else; Chiron ensures there is something raw on the other side of it. The combination is unusually receptive to atmosphere and to other people's pain, often without a clear sense of where that material is coming from. Artistic and spiritual capacity is genuine here, and so is the temptation to anaesthetise, since the input does not switch off by itself. Much of what such a person feels in a given day did not originate with them, and learning to tell the difference is the practical work of the placement.
What each body brings
| Neptune | longing, imagination, dissolution |
|---|---|
| Chiron | the wound that teaches |
The soft aspects (trine or sextile)
With a trine or a sextile the sensitivity is an instrument rather than a leak. Music, image, care work and contemplative practice all use it, and the person can usually tell their own feeling from the room's, which is the whole difficulty of this pairing solved. They tend to be the one who names what everybody was already feeling, and to do it without any sense of having performed a service.
The hard aspects (square or opposition)
Square or opposition, the boundary fails under pressure. Sacrifice is offered that nobody asked for, illness is vague and persistent, and escape routes become attractive. The repair is unromantic: sleep, structure, and someone who will say plainly what is actually happening. The person will usually resist all three on the grounds that the situation is more subtle than that, and the situation is generally not more subtle than that.
The conjunction
Conjunct, compassion and injury are indistinguishable. The person feels for others accurately and constantly, and is very poorly defended against it. Deliberate limits are not a betrayal of the gift; they are what lets it last. Without them the capacity burns out somewhere in the forties, usually presented as a crisis of faith or a collapse in health rather than as the accumulated cost it actually is.
Reading it in a chart
The orb settles how strongly this shows: a contact within a degree is a defining feature of a chart, one at the edge of the orb is a colouring. The signs the two planets occupy change the manner, the houses change the arena, and a third planet touching either of them can change the reading entirely.