CHIRON & ERIS: When the Wound Demands War, and War Demands Healing
A volatile series of Chiron–Eris conjunctions spans 2025–26, exposing deep collective wounds through wild, unruly confrontations and upheavals. How does it proffer change and alter courses?
• Woundful provocation • Aggravated injustice • Weaponising past trauma • Exposure of ancestral betrayals • Conflict that facilitates healing • Unprocessed grief erupts • Empathy meets rage • Social wounds rupture • Vindication through strife • Reclaiming agency through exploring pain •
Few pairings of mythic archetypes in modern astrology evoke such a raw and visceral clash as Chiron—the Wounded Healer, condemned to immortality with an incurable injury—and Eris—the goddess of strife who casts a golden apple into the feast, forcing long-standing resentments to flare into open conflict and protracted wars. Though each celestial figure is relatively new to mainstream astrological discourse (Chiron was discovered in 1977, Eris in 2004-5), they each carry a weighty presence that resonates strikingly with the enmity and internal struggles that have shaped humanity's consciousness in the late twentieth and twenty-first centuries. What emerges from their confluence is neither the serene notions of a “spiritual upgrade” nor a purely negative prediction of outright cataclysm; rather, it is a potent—often harrowing— blend of expression that binds empathy with disagreement, suffering with resistance, and the longing for redemption with the raw impetus to tear down illusions.
Such a complex synergy of archetypes cannot be captured by neat, New Age platitudes any more than King Lear’s tragedy can be reduced to a moral fable about filial duty or the Russian Revolution can be tidily classified as a step towards humanity’s “progress.” Indeed, if one seeks a literary analogue, we might imagine Iago from Shakespeare’s Othello (himself a cunning manipulator of hidden wounds and seething envy) crossing paths with Hamlet—that quintessential sufferer whose introspections border on the paralysing—producing a scenario where grief, bitterness, and unspoken grudges boil over. Hamlet, weighed down by existential dread and the unhealed trauma of his father’s murder, could be said to bear a Chirotic wound; Iago, with his relentless incitement to rivalrous animosity and destruction, channels the Erisian impulse to sow conflict precisely where illusions remain. One might argue that Hamlet never fully harnesses the combative impetus that might break him free from his psychic prison, just as Iago never grasps the fundamental empathy that could redeem him from cynical malice. But if we imagine these archetypal forces combined—fused into some tragic composite figure who both suffers deeply and cannot resist provoking others into open discord, then we are staring at the uneasy hybrid that Chiron/Eris form.
This duality emerges in historical moments when repressed pain, systemic injustice, or cultural infractions reach a point of combustion, often triggered by an individual or movement that refuses complicity in silent suffering. Consider the controversies surrounding Rosa Luxemburg and her condemnation of imperialism’s brutality at the end of World War I, or the way Frantz Fanon exposed the psychological wounds of colonial subjects forced to swallow unending humiliation. Each sought to articulate, with a certain ruthless clarity, how unhealed traumas (Chiron) demand to be confronted with fierce retribution (Eris) for genuine transformation to occur—quiet endurance alone, they argued, only prolongs or deepens collective agony. Indeed, in many real revolutions, the figure or faction that emerges to speak truth to power also unleashes bitter envy, fear, or hostility, because social fallacies—like the paternal myth of Tsarist benevolence or the supposedly honourable veneer of empire—have become existentially threatened.
"I bear the wounds of all the battles I avoided." ~ Fernando Pessoa
In the astrological community, Chiron initially gained traction as “the Wounded Healer,” often simplistically explained in tofu humanistic workshops that emphasised the path from personal pain toward a gentle, empathic wisdom. Yet if one examines the original myth seriously, Chiron’s plight is agonisingly bleak: an arrow steeped in Hydra’s venom lodged in his flesh, leaves him in excruciating pain he could never be rid of. His nobility, ironically, derived from his capacity to share in the vulnerabilities of mortals, despite his immortality, thereby teaching them how to transmute lesser sufferings into heroic quests. But there is no escaping the essential tragedy of Chiron’s predicament. For all his knowledge of the healing arts, he cannot absolve himself of his own unremitting agony. Like Raskolnikov in Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment, Chiron finds himself on an inexorable path forced by an internal crisis, one that compels him to confront the darkest corners of the psyche—though unlike Raskolnikov, whose path to redemption involves confession and a return to communal moral codes, Chiron doesn’t quite find neat closure or reintegration. Instead, his “redemption” ends in a curious bargain with Zeus, surrendering his immortality—an ultimate act of capitulation to cosmic forces rather than any triumphant moral victory.
Eris, conversely, broke onto the scene in 2005, dismantling the old paradigms of planetary nomenclature, at once dethroning Pluto from the pantheon of classical planets, and sowing chaos within the International Astronomical Union much in the way she sowed discord at the wedding of Peleus and Thetis. She is the archetypal voice that sneers at hypocritical harmony and performative niceties, the cry that demands we own up to our species-wide capacity for envy, rivalry, and destruction. Even in the literary sense, Eris finds her echoes: from the catastrophic envy of Salieri in Peter Shaffer’s Amadeus, who, faced with Mozart’s brilliance, grows consumed by bitterness to the point of sabotage, to the raw competitiveness of Heathcliff in Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, whose primal resentments tear the domestic sphere asunder. These characters embody the Erisian principle that repressed envy does not vanish; it metastasises into a vortex of revenge, compulsion, and scorched-earth confrontation, which, once unleashed, initiates horribly painful and irreversible leaps in our evolution.
But what happens when the inescapable sorrow and wounded empathy of Chiron locks arms with Eris’s unstoppable impetus for hellbent conflict? On an inner level, this manifests as a relentless impetus to unearth old hurts that we might otherwise try to keep buried. If Chiron alone sometimes leads to resigned acceptance of chronic pain—like the depressed figure content to remain perenially in therapy without ever truly disturbing their external reality—then Eris catalyses that stoic acceptance into unfiltered anger, forcing the individual to confront not only the emotional cost of the wound, but also any distortions or scapegoating that helped keep that wound from being expressed or explored. If you imagine a contemporary scenario, you might see someone who realises that years of microaggressions at the office or emotional neglect in childhood have built up a swirling resentment, a quiet “I’m fine” that, under Eris’s touch, explodes into: “I refuse to be complicit. I’ll bring down the entire system if that’s what it takes.” That impetus is not necessarily graceful or strategic—it can alienate colleagues, threaten existing alliances, and even produce further injuries—but it can also be the only way to shift from silent endurance to the possibility of redemption, albeit redemption wrought through confrontation.
Locally, in relationships and smaller communities, the synergy of Chiron/Eris appears as an uncorking of longstanding bitterness—a vetch of complex traumas that might have festered for decades. Think of Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, where Anna’s repressed despair inside a loveless marriage collides with a scandalous affair, exposing the hypocrisy of Russian aristocratic society. One could argue that she experiences a Chirotic wound—her emotional vacuum—yet Eris is there in her decision to defy the norms, creating havoc and scandal, revealing the fault lines in family structures. The ultimate tragedy is that the old illusions cannot hold, but the social order punishes her for her defiance. In this sense, the Chiron/Eris dynamic can be seen in personal betrayals, family feuds, or quiet vendettas that simmer until one day an offhand remark or confrontation sets events spiralling. Healing is possible, but only after the illusions are shattered, the repressed hostility is vented, and a raw confrontation with guilt, sorrow, or betrayal takes place, often not without loss. Observe the recent death of Virginia Giuffre, a tragic figure who, in her pursuit of exposing abusers within elite networks, became emblematic of how society often punishes those who reveal its most uncomfortable truths—emphasising the stark, Chiron/Eris reality that only after the myths are unravelled, and hostilities dragged into the open, can genuine transformation begin to occur, albeit at heartbreaking personal cost.
Globally, the cyclical recurrence of Chiron/Eris conjunctions speaks volumes about how societies handle structural wounds. Historically, the first major confluence of these energies in the twentieth century occurred around 1917–1918 in the late degrees of Pisces, overshadowing the final stages of World War I and spurring the Russian Revolution. At that point, one could see the entire continent of Europe in a Chirotic state of shell-shock: millions dead in the trenches, an entire generation haunted by post-traumatic stress. Who was to blame? Eris in late Pisces, moving toward Aries, instigated the collapse of preconceived notions about aristocratic prerogatives or the inherent “nobility” of war. The downfall of Tsarist power, the decline of the British ruling class, the unstoppable tide of Bolshevism, and the creation of entirely new political structures were savage echoes of Eris’s impetus: the illusions fueling war propaganda were simply no match for the raw wound inflicted on the masses. However, the “solution” was hardly peaceful or utopian—what followed was protracted civil conflict, famine, the eventual terror of Stalin’s regime. That, too, is instructive: the eruption of Eris seldom yields comfortable resolution; it can merely enforce a new shape of power, sometimes as oppressive as what came before, if the deeper misconceptions are never truly confronted. We can witness parallel illusions unraveling in Europe’s fracturing alliances, the United States’ deepening partisan divides, Russia’s revived imperial aspirations, China’s authoritarian consolidation, and the Middle East’s precarious realignments leading to genocide, yet again—all echoing the Chiron/Eris lesson that once-latent grievances, left unaddressed, will eventually explode into transformational upheavals, often installing new structures just as fraught as those they replace. The cycle is haunting.
When Chiron/Eris next aligned in 1971–1972, this time in Aries, the impetus shifted from the watery dissolution of Pisces illusions into the fiery directness of Aries. We observed massive social upheavals in the form of anti-war protests, second-wave feminism, civil rights expansions, and the persistent unravelling of colonial frameworks. Although neither Chiron nor Eris were discovered at the time, the phenomenon, though operating beneath conscious recognition, was equally pervasive and unleashed a “big stink” that severely undermined official narratives, forcing entire administrations to lose face. The bogus ideas of paternalistic governments insisting on a righteous mission in Vietnam were systematically dismantled by frontline journalists, whistleblowers, and activists who refused to remain complicit in the ongoing bloodshed. Though we might also note that even among these movements, fractures and rivalries emerged, just as Eris would predict. The birth of identity politics in the early 1970s, for instance, was not always a harmonious enterprise but a messy, necessary confrontation with the wounds inflicted by racism, sexism, and class structures. If Chiron presided over the collective realisation that “We have been deeply hurt by these systems,” Eris insisted that this realisation should be weaponised into a direct, potentially scorched-earth battle to overturn them.
Fast forward, then, to the emerging triple conjunction set to repeat over the next 12 months, and we anticipate a renewal of that same fiery dynamic. This time, however, the crisis revolves around the tightening grip of corporate oligarchs and billionaire rulers, whose unchecked power amplifies the stark gulf between the ultra-privileged and the working majority. We are witnessing new waves of activism around individual autonomy, mass immigration, rising unemployment, homelessness and wealth inequality, likely to reach a tipping point when Eris’s impetus for strife meets Chiron’s confrontation with unhealed wounds—both societal and ecological. In the same way that the artistic communities of Weimar Germany or the civil rights protests in 1970s America used adversity to spark revolutionary cultural expression, we might see the same impetus today: new forms of anti-war activism, unionisation efforts, or radical political movements that channel the pain of inequality into demands for abrupt change. Yet we must also acknowledge the risk that the Eris-driven rage, if not guided by a deeper Chirotic compassion, can morph into reactionary violence. One only needs to recall the fate of revolutions hijacked by terror to see how easily a wounded collective can become a merciless aggressor in its own right.
This underscores the essence of the third, hybrid dimension that arises from Chiron and Eris merging: a demand that personal and collective wounds be neither prettified nor left to stagnate under the pretenses of “evolutionary progress,” but engaged with in a manner that may be painfully direct and not necessarily guaranteed of a benign outcome. It is reminiscent of the tragic arc in Toni Morrison’s Beloved, where the trauma of slavery surfaces as a relentless haunting that cannot be smoothed over—only confronted, named, exorcised at tremendous cost. The psychological agony that the characters endure is fundamentally Chirotic, but the poltergeist-like fury that tears through their household is Erisian, forcing them all to face the monstrous truth of enslavement rather than keep up the façade of uneasy peace. In a far more personal manner, that dynamic recurs in everyday families where generational secrets—incest, abuse, betrayal—are forcibly revealed by one outraged individual, leading to explosive conflicts yet also the possibility, at last, of genuine accountability and perhaps a measure of release.
One might be tempted to say that Eris is simply “scornful’ and “destructive” while Chiron is “healing” and “constructive,” but their synergy herein defies such simplistic dualism. Eris will ironically generate more honesty about the wound’s origin, while Chiron can imbue that explosive revelation with a deeper sense of empathy, though whether that empathy can last amid the chaos is an open question. In the worst expressions, Chiron/Eris can degrade into genocidal vendettas or ideological wars that cloak themselves in righteous rhetoric, but never address the underlying pain in a truly integrative fashion. In the best of circumstances, however, we might see something akin to Martin Luther King Jr.’s radical empathy married to Malcolm X’s unwavering challenge to structural racism: a synergy that acknowledges both moral suasion and fierce confrontation as vital components of social healing. The corrupted narratives that protect oppressive systems can only be shattered by Eris’s brand of relentless friction, yet it is Chiron’s capacity for shared vulnerability that can keep the project from devolving into endless vengeance. We are all too familiar with wars that are unlikely to bring us any peace.
Ultimately, in an era when pop astrology so often hails new celestial discoveries as if they were beacons of mystical positivity, the Chiron/Eris combination offers a sobering reminder that some cosmic forces enter the collective psyche to dredge up resentments and re-aggravate old scars as much as to propose new solutions. The illusions that hush up these resentments, be they illusions of national righteousness, family unity, or personal superiority, face a brutal test whenever Eris is in the picture. And if Chiron is near, these conflicts inevitably strike at the heart of existential or ancestral wounds we thought we could outrun. There is a certain bleak, if clarifying, wisdom in that realisation: we must be prepared for the possibility that the cure might require a battlefield of sorts, that the healing could come only after skewed perceptions are laid bare, and that a measure of permanent sorrow might remain, even in the best outcome.
If all of this feels disconcerting or cynical, it might be instructive to recall that the greatest works of literature—whether Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex, Shakespeare’s King Lear, or Dostoyevsky’s Crime And Punishment—are rarely uplifting in a facile sense. They often track how our wildest delusions, once destroyed, leave a ghastly aftermath of despair and emptiness, yet also free the protagonists (and the audience) from the tyranny of falsehood. In the same manner, the synergy of Chiron/Eris can herald a painful, confrontational, but ultimately illuminating breakdown: dysfunctions that hamper personal growth or perpetuate oppressive social systems cannot survive the combined onslaught of the Wound that won’t heal and the Goddess who ensures we can no longer look away.
It is both a warning and a promise. As we now move closer toward the next major triple conjunction in the mid-2020s, global rifts over imperial culpability, economic inequality, and both national and personal identity politics may flare with unprecedented severity, while personal crises over self-worth, family ties, or psychological scars likewise intensify. The illusions that these crises expose—blithe corporate promises of “sustainability,” superficial public relations “healing,” or interpersonal relationships built on unspoken resentments—cannot stand unchallenged. With Pluto in Aquarius, and the transitions Neptune and Uranus into masculine signs, some misconceptions will be shattered in the manner of a series of fiery revolutions and catastrophic wars, others might be painstakingly unravelled in the process of profound new therapies or candid family confrontation. The reward, if we can call it that, resides in the possibility of forging something more honest and resilient, albeit still bearing the scars of the conflicts and heartbreak that precipitated it.
In the end, to approach the Chiron/Eris synergy with the caution it demands is to recognise that not all universal processes trend toward gentleness or easy harmony. As T.S. Eliot posited in “The Wasteland,” sometimes the soil of our civilisation is sown with corpses and myths, and we must face the macabre truth of it before any new growth can sprout. A seemingly unhinged Eris stabs at our pretences with savage clarity, while Chiron, seeking to make amends for past grievances, boldly compels us to integrate the wound into the core of our being, neither romanticising it nor denying its pain. This alchemical merging produces a third, higher force that, in linguistic terms, is still novel and scarcely understood. Yet in its most potent form, it can unearth hidden realities and set us on the brutal path of metamorphosis, though the road is strewn with the hollow shells of vague notions we thought essential to our emotional safety.
Thus, as we stand on the threshold of the next major wave of Chiron/Eris alignments, we might do well to remember the cautionary tales of centuries past: misconceptions and fallacies unchallenged tend to fester and turn septic and rancid, and wounds ignored can mutate into resentments too large to contain. Whether in our literature or real revolutions, the impetus to face our shared pain seldom arrives swathed in subtle cosmic blessings—more likely, it storms the feast, flinging the apple of discord into the midst of our most injurious pretensions and forcing us to react, often in the most deranged manner. In that moment, if we are to glean any genuine healing, we must do as Chiron would: endure the pain, name it openly, and—like Eris—have the audacity to destroy what no longer serves. The result may not make for a neat and tidy moral parable, but it may be the only path to carving out a future that stands, however precariously, upon unmitigated truth.
Dates:
What We Can Expect:
Disclosure of Hidden Wounds: Sudden exposures of systemic or personal pain, surfacing opportunities for ruthless honesty and possible resolution.
Catalytic Breakthroughs: A harsh but liberating confrontation with truths long ignored can trigger creative reorganisation in collective structures or personal lives.
Reformative Struggles: A surge of dynamic initiative to address inequality or long-standing, transgenerational unresolved grievances, often through decisive, confrontational means.
Challenges:
Escalation of Conflict: Unhealed envy or anger surfaces abruptly, igniting hostilities and intensifying social or interpersonal division.
Reactive Polarisation: Power struggles intensify. Suppressed rage explodes in destructive patterns, from sudden meltdowns in relationships to public scandals, from violent protests to protracted campaigns of persecution and genocide.
Excessive Vulnerability: Emotional crises or physical stress from unresolved trauma, leading to burnout, volatile behaviour and utter atrocity if not managed carefully.
How Will It Affect You?
These conjunctions activate significant inner planet activities, unleashing intense rivaly and competition, aggravating unprocessed sorrow in everyone’s chart, but the impact is strongest where Aries falls in your birth houses or aspects your personal planets. Old resentments may resurface, demanding you break toxic cycles or openly confront your deepest frustrations. If handled consciously, you can transmute personal pain into a force that dismantles self-defeating patterns—and spurs real progress. If resisted, expect power struggles, inner turmoil, or abrupt rifts pushing you to face what you’ve evaded.
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Great article Ang, I do so love your literary analogies. Thank goodness for Jupiters ingress into Cancer bringing his much needed blessings to the place of his exaltation. The great benefic should provide some wisdom, grace and resilience as he is squaring Eris/Chiron by whole sign making him a significant part of the story untill June 2026. He’s also in mutual reception to the moon in the ingress chart, which is trining Eris & Chiron by whole sign. I’m in the process of delineating the ingress so haven’t anything further to add at the moment and it’s way past my bedtime!
This is more than my words can say, I truly appreciate your insightful wisdom as well as guidance for all of us.