{Originally posted on Hominy Creek Horoscopy’s blog 1/18/2018}

Over the last six years we have been blessed by Neptune’s presence in his strongest sign, Pisces. On the physical level this invites an increase in flood-like phenomena, while on the energetic level, in his own sign, Neptune opens the floodgates of grace for the spiritually sensitive. Chiron presently shares this watery space, but these two spiritual planets will not conjoin at any point of their Piscean sojourn between 2010-2018. They last met in late Aquarius back in 2010. Let’s give Chiron a retrospective before he moves into Aries this April.

Tracing their past activity together in Pisces can illuminate their present vibrations. In fact it’s quite rare for the two to make actual contact in Pisces. In the last five hundred years this has taken place only twice: in 1528, and 1862. Upon investigating, it turns out that both of these dates feature extraordinarily apt events of a Chironian-Neptunian nature.

In 1528, two key events are remembered in European history. England faced a summertime epidemic of “sweating sickness”: it can’t get much more blendy between these protagonists than a ‘wound’ of a ‘moist’ nature. The very Neptunian disease, causing fever, shivers, exhaustion and profuse sweating, reared its sickly head throughout the reign of Henry VIII but only reached epidemic heights when Chiron and Neptune conjoined that year in 1528.

Earlier that same year, Protestant martyr Balthasar Hubmaier was burned at the stake for the crime of espousing anabaptist heresies. What was his capital offense to Catholic doctrine? The belief that an adult should decide whether to be baptised (Neptune/Pisces) as a believer in order to proclaim his own Christian faith (Chiron/Pisces).

When the cycle came around again in the sign of the Fishes, record amounts of rainfall in Northern California swelled into the Great California Flood of early 1862, when water levels at one fork of the American River rose by 35 feet.

And as for this iteration of Neptune-Chiron in Pisces, well the waters sure are rising, and often tragically. Maybe we owe the fact that we haven’t all sunk this time around, to how these two watery planets have not actually crossed paths in the oceanic sign. Yet with the rising earthly tides, has come a definite Chironian urge to awakening, which has allowed quests to proceed into new depths of Piscean awareness all the while.

With Chiron crossing the Aries point in a few short months, we might see a galvanized spiritual leadership emerge. We might even become those leaders. We might have to!

Praise Kheiron Phillyrides,
Kentaur of Mount Pelion,
Son of Kronos, Son of Ouranos.
You bring the moment to its peak.
Holder of Harp and Herb, healer with sound and plant.
Mentor and sage, friend of humanity.
Your skilled hands guide us in ways of healing.