Chiron

Your sore spot, and what healing it can teach you. Astrologers look at the zodiac sign and house where ⚷ sits in a birth chart and read it as the area of life where you feel most hurt or inadequate. The hopeful half of the reading is that this same spot becomes your gift: having lived with the wound, you understand others who carry it and can help them.

Astrologers built this reading after 1977 from Greek myth. Chiron was the wise centaur (half human, half horse), gentle where his kin were wild, who taught heroes such as Achilles and the healer Asclepius. In the best-known version, a poisoned arrow of Heracles wounded him; being immortal, he could neither die nor cure himself, until he gave up his immortality. A healer who cannot heal himself sums up Chiron's astrological meaning in one picture.

Why does the symbol look like a key?

It is the letters O and K joined together. When Charles Kowal discovered the object in 1977, it was nicknamed “Object Kowal”, and astrologer Al H. Morrison built the glyph from those two initials: an oval O at the base, with a stem rising from it that carries the arms of a K. The result happens to look like an old key, and on its own it is easily taken for one. Unlike the symbols for the Sun or Saturn, it is a modern invention made for astrology; astronomers identify the object by its number instead.