Just over a year after the discovery of Pluto, Charles Carter published a description of its basic astrological significance - to which there was little to alter in the light of subsequent experience.

How did he achieve this feat? He explained that his conclusions were 'mainly founded on careful observation of my own directions.' As for the mythological associations of the name Pluto, he said he had tried to banish any preconceptions that might have taken root in his mind as a result of the name bestowed on the newcomer.

The empirical nature of this procedure is a model for any kind of astrological investigation. Carter recognised that planets are generally given meaningful names, but rather than speculate on that basis he took the more laborious route.

It seems a pity that, in the case of Chiron, the latest addition to the planetary population, the jumping-off point has tended to be the mythological associations. So much so that if you mention Chiron in an astrological gathering, the first thought of practically everybody in the audience is 'Ah yes, the wounded healer.' The result is a very woolly perception of this fascinating influence, which has become a sort of wild card, able to mean almost anything you fancy.

Another factor in divining the meaning of this body (once called an asteroid, it is now considered to be a comet, but it will be with us for a few thousand years) has been its unwillingness to be fitted into any recognised category. So the word 'maverick' suggested itself. Maverick means (according to my dictionary) 'a person of independent or unorthodox views', which remains most typically true of Uranus, although self-reliance, and the power to see where others do not, is indeed part of the essence of Chiron.

As soon as the Chiron ephemeris was available, I followed Carter's method, calculating its directions, progressions and transits for my own life. Early in my astrological career - following Carter's advice to all astrologers - I started to keep a record of events as a way of testing new theories and observations. (I blushingly admit this now covers a span of over forty years.)

Before getting too far into this exercise it became clear what Chiron was doing, and I would like to characterise these conclusions.

From the significance of each planet, considered singly, a whole perspective of the human condition can be developed. We can argue that the dominant factor in life is our genetic makeup and our conditioning (Moon), or that it is our ability adapt and adjust to new conditions (Venus), or that it has all been a story of the triumph of reason (Mercury), or we can claim, with the Greek philosopher, that 'Strife is the parent of all things' (Mars). And so on.

The Chiron view of what life is all about seems to echo the theme of many folk tales, namely that it is a hazardous journey in which daunting tests have to be faced and passed to win the prize at the end.

This may sound solemn, but in fact as Chiron sets out on his adventures his cap is at a jaunty angle and he whistles a cheerful tune. There is a touch of swagger about him, which his trials and ordeals can only temporarily dent. He is the giant killer, the dragon slayer, refusing to be intimidated by difficulties and doubt.

I always see a mischievous twinkle in Chiron's eye. Left to himself, his style is roguish, provocative, teasing, impertinent, prodding, irreverent, sometimes outrageous.

From my autobiographical notes I detected this regrettable tendency in myself at times of high Chiron activity, to thumb the nose at authority, offer to fight the bigger boys, question what had never before been questioned, and generally to 'take the dare'. That was before I realised how neatly this confirmed one piece of Chiron mythology - but not in his role of a wounded healer.

As the wisest of the centaurs, Chiron ran a school for heroes where they had to pass tests which were not for the faint-hearted. The planetary agency that bears his name still seems to be urging humans to have the audacity, the nerve, the cool cheek, to attempt what might seem to be just beyond their scope.

Audacity can be an advantage in many activities and occupations, and I was not surprised to see it listed among the desirable qualities in a sober book on industrial management. As the poet Dryden put it: 'Bold knaves thrive without one grain of sense, But good men starve for want of impudence'.

I have seen cases where Neptune combined with Chiron has produced an audacity that owes much to sheer bluff!

The purpose of this planet seems to be to stretch us, and presumably thereby to tap the potentials we all have, unused. And there is nothing (either inwardly as qualities of mind and emotion, or outwardly in action) that cannot become the subject for 'training up' to a higher level of skill and mastery. The goal of creating the superhuman out of the averagely human appears to be Chiron's remit, but this is the same impulse that persuades the child it can stand, and walk, and run - do things that were once impossible.

As for more complex achievements like playing Mozart, handling a supersonic aircraft, climbing Everest, the child might well be discouraged at the outset by the realisation of what was going to be involved. But of course the secret lies in passing tests, one after the other, each slightly more challenging than the last. All that matters is that we dare to attempt! A matter of saying yes to life's invitations and worrying about it afterwards. Generally we do better than we ever dreamt we could.

Therefore Chiron does indeed have to do with education in the widest sense - the development of the whole person. It's more a training for life than narrow academic disciplines. Chiron's style is more that of the football coach than the maths professor.

Just as Pluto's discovery focused attention on depth psychology, Chiron is associated with what has been called height psychology, in which the emphasis is on peak performances and peak experiences. According to this perspective, the world is a school and life is a learning process, with no fixed ceiling to what might be attained. The idea that man is an unfinished being, an embryo, a transitional form on the way to becoming something else, is very close to Chiron's heart.

It is a bracing philosophy, to take everything life can throw at you as a means of 'training up'. The most popular institution in ancient Greece was the gymnasium. This was not merely a place for physical exercise, although it was that as well, but for exercising the mind through lectures and discussion. Even today in some European countries a 'gymnasium' is a school that prepares youngsters for university. What is not so well known is that for the Greeks the gymnasium was a symbol for life itself. Their gods ran the earth as a gymnasium for the improvement and development of human beings, and all experiences were to be welcomed as exercises whereby humans became spiritually stronger. Perhaps we are too concerned with winning or losing, and not sufficiently aware of what is being gained from the effort itself, regardless of its outcome. As Epictetus puts it:

There is only one thing for which God has sent me into the world and that is to perfect my own nature in every sort of strength, and there is nothing in all the world which I can not use for that purpose.

It has often been pointed out that we assume that spiritual development will happen without exercises or hard tests, whereas in the case of physical training it is accepted that exercises are valuable in themselves. Runners run to the point of exhaustion, weightlifters groan and strain in an effort to top their previous best - but where are the spiritual athletes?

Coincident with Chiron's discovery came many evidences of a new tendency to push humans towards the upper limit. The success of the three Superman films may have been because they expressed an idea whose hour had struck! Indeed, those involved in the making of these films seem to have been well aware of this dimension, and knew they were not merely providing entertainment. A number of self-improvement books came onto the market, with significant titles - Superman, Superwoman, Supermind, Superpsyche, Super/earning.

Chiron favours the philosophy that anybody can do anything. Or at least that everybody can do more than they think they can. A large area of the brain seems to be dormant, as if just waiting to be used. I knew one man, rich and powerful, who was born when Venus was in close association with Chiron. With those he liked - his children, friends and some employees - he delighted in throwing them some new challenge to see what they could make of it. He never played safe with his employees, but promoted them to the upper limits of their ability.

People in need of an injection of this philosophy are the chronically shy, timid and insecure. In his book The Shy Person's Guide to Life, Michael Bentine notes that according to an American psychologist named Dr Cheek - a marvellous name for an expert in shyness - interest in research into shyness has only been shown since about 1978. Chiron was discovered at the end of 1977.

Greater interest in the problems of the shy seems to be part of the new psychotherapy that has been developing to celebrate Chiron's arrival within human consciousness. It is only recently that mental health professionals have moved towards a more 'educational and skills' model of people's problems, and away from the old 'disease and treatment' model. The new approach says: 'This person is in a mess. Never mind how he got there, what can be done to get him out?' Or as the Buddha put it, somewhat earlier, the urgent task is to distinguish the fire, not inquire how it started. The idea that the task of therapy is to teach new skills means that there are very few of us who could fail to benefit from retraining of some sort, and so a distinctly Chironic climate is being created.

Chiron's glyph is a sort of key, and the key to this modern therapy reminds us very forcibly of the values of Sagittarius. (It would take a lot of persuasion to convince me that Chiron's zodiacal affinity lies elsewhere!) Sagittarius is about belief systems, our overview, the opinions we add to the facts. The new therapy aims to change beliefs that are leading to life distortions. Aaron Beck, an American psychiatrist who has worked with deeply depressed people, became convinced that behind most ineffective behaviour, including depression, lie a number of faulty or irrational thought processes. Perhaps the best-known pioneer of this ‘cognitive therapy' is Albert Ellis.

The jauntiness natural to Chiron comes out strongly in the new psychotherapy, because it has been found that well-adjusted people usually hold beliefs about themselves that are better than the reality! In depression we lose the ability to see ourselves through rose-tinted spectacles. Perhaps all the time we are either inwardly talking ourselves up, or talking ourselves down (Muhammad Ali - 'I'm the greatest!' - was born with Chiron closely opposing Mercury and the Moon).

It may be no more than coincidence that 1976 saw the publication of the biography of the designer and illustrator Edmund Dulac, who for many years was obsessed by the theme of the centaurs. (The germ of it may have been a male model he drew at art school, whose false leg ended not in the customary ferrule but in a hoof, producing a man-horse image.) His biographer Colin White, remarks: 'In Chiron Dulac found the symbol for his own personality.' The theme received its most public expression in a poem written by W.B. Yeats called 'On a Picture of a Black Centaur by Edmund Dulac.'

I mention Dulac because clearly his horoscope may help us to confirm that this latest addition to the astrologer's vocabulary has been correctly named. Dulac himself was interested in astrology, and the book contains his chart, drawn in his own hand, with an ascendant of Virgo 13⁰35. The data: 22 October 1882, 2.29 am, Toulouse. Chiron is exactly square the Moon, and in septile to his ruler Mercury. A designer of bookplates, as well as stamps and playing cards, Dulac adopted the centaur for at least three of them. In his chart Chiron is sandwiched between Saturn and Pluto in Taurus - the black centaur? His biographer says the image appealed to Dulac for its echoes of a lost Eden, and indeed Taurus does seem to retain this yearning for some paradise state, snatched from us by a Scorpionic Fall.

The centaurs were a boisterous and unruly lot, and instead of patient coaxing Chiron adopts the more robust method of pushing us in at the deep end. He wants us to reject the rules and limitations that so often intimidate us into accepting an interior version of ourself. And he rubs his hands in especially pleasurable anticipation whenever people say this or that thing just can't be done. He wants us to challenge life with a shout! This attitude has been called 'thinking like an immigrant'. When you are new on the scene, you are not so aware of what is supposed to be feasible and what is not, or what has been tried before and failed. In particular does this planet enjoy cutting through red tape and protocol. While some are producing reports and commissioning studies, and arguing for against your proposals, Chiron just says 'Let's do it!'

Of course, as with all planetary agencies (I have an aversion to downgrading them as 'energies'), the basic principle becomes diluted as it finds its way into the real world. Also, while Chiron can boast a high success rate ('Who dares, wins.') a worthy goal does not mean you will automatically avoid trouble. To which Chiron would probably grin and say 'So?' After all, not to have courage to attempt can itself be disastrous. And if battles with giants are not always won the first time, nor even the second, the struggle itself develops strength and nerve.

Politically Chiron is the friend of gadflies, of dissent and agitation - particularly if it is student led. At the important Capricorn ingresses for 1988, 1989, and 1990 we find a close opposition of this planet to Saturn in Capricorn, representing the old order. Unprecedented changes are taking place, but they have a different flavour from the revolutions and upheavals associated with other planets. Here is the sacrosanct old order, in the grip of geriatrics, and breezy Chiron comes along and blows a thunderous raspberry. This planet impudently questions everything, like the child who saw the emperor had no clothes. In fact in many ways it is precocious, and one drawback of Chiron's attentions is that developments may occur too soon, before the conditions are ripe enough to sustain them.

Chiron simply refuses to see that obstacles cannot be removed. The same month that Chiron's discovery was announced saw the astonishing initiative by President Sadat of Egypt to bring peace to the deadlocked strife in the Middle East. In fact when he departed for Israel, in his grey business suit and polka-dot tie, Chiron was in the midheaven. Sadat himself was born under Sun square Chiron. But audacity on the world stage has its drawbacks. We seem to have entered on an era when the problems will revolve not around the big power blocs but small nations tempted to mighty feats of dragon-slaying. The strong man who attempts the impossible will exercise a magic appeal. Chiron's refusal to be dismayed by formidable odds is all very well, but what about when unscrupulous politicians or generals suddenly realise that the highest pinnacles of power may be within their grasp!

Chiron has a valuable role to play in our inner theatre. He is the imp we all carry within us. However much we might try to stifle it, there is a little voice that mocks the pretensions and pomposity of our false self. The court jester of old - the wise fool, with his face-pulling and outrageous comments is a Chiron figure, and we each have our private internal jester. One cleric called him 'the angel of the ludicrous', who jokes us out of being the heavy-minded bores we have it in us to be. Thanks to him, we are saved from taking ourselves and our predicament too seriously. But it is from the imp that we ourselves draw our impudence, the ability - like the hero of the folk tales - to cut the inflated and intimidating down to size. So the imp can be useful if he jolts us into thinking the unthinkable, and doing the impossible. It would be nice if the word 'imp' came from the same root as impudent, impertinent, and imprudent - but alas!

There are thinkers who fulfil the role of the imp in our society. One such was the dramatist George Bernard Shaw, who when he appeared before a committee on stage censorship proudly proclaimed himself as an 'immoralist and heretic'. Shaw was born with Chiron in Aquarius, in opposition to a Sun-Venus conjunction. In Man and Superman he spotlights 'man's unceasing creative evolutionary urge for world-betterment as well as for his own self-improvement' (Chambers Biographical Dictionary). All through his career Shaw was shaking his fist at the oppressions of an unimaginative society, and urging a more creative approach based on heroic effort without thought of reward, and with the utmost integrity.

Although Chiron is the great tweaker of noses and twister of tails, provocation can be constructive. None has understood this better than Edward de Bono, who gave the term lateral thinking to the dictionaries, and who himself was born under a conjunction of the Sun and Chiron. Of one technique he writes:

The process is one of provocation. We put forward an idea as a provocation to get us out of a fixed set of ideas so that we can think of new ones ... We decide to look at something in a novel way in order to see where it gets us.

In several of his books de Bono uses a word he invented, 'po', derived from words like possible, hypothesis, suppose, poetry, and positive. It is intended to announce that in this statement we are just trying out an idea, flying a kite, floating a possibility nothing yet set in concrete, but something to play with. 'We need a language indicator,' he says, 'to show that we are behaving in this irresponsible manner.' He tells us that by sheer chance the syllable 'po' does have a symbol in Linear B, the ancient Minoan language. This symbol is related to the sound for horse, and is shaped like a horse's head! In time, he says, it might be introduced as a new punctuation mark at the beginning of a sentence to indicate that the sentence is meant to be provocative. How old Chiron would have applauded borrowing a bit of the centaur to stretch the mind in this way!

As was only to be expected, many familiar birth charts benefit from the insertion of Chiron. Adolf Hitler's chart has a Moon Jupiter conjunction in the third house, the signature of the mass rallies where his oratory worked up the crowds into a frenzy. Chiron is in close opposition to the conjunction. There certainly was an audacity in the posturings of this Chaplinesque figure, as well as in his assumption of power and territory. A new 'buzzword' was heard on every hand soon after Chiron's discovery - the Yiddish chutzpa. A fitting word to apply to the arch Jew-baiter!

Hitler had his own vision of superman, the Nordic master race. His implacable enemy, Winston Churchill, was born under a close opposition of Mars and Chiron Churchill's style ranged from the impish to studied provocation, as when he hurled insults at Hitler ('this bloodthirsty guttersnipe') across the Channel even while England was ill-equipped to defend herself. Incidentally, Churchill was one of the few politicians to support Edward VIII in his bid to marry Mrs Simpson, and wrote the King's abdication speech. Edward had Chiron in the seventh house (the unthinkable marriage!) squared by an inflated, getting-out-of-hand, conjunction of Jupiter and Neptune. Mrs Simpson, later Duchess of Windsor, had Chiron in Libra (analogous to the seventh house) exactly opposed by Mars.

We should not forget that the centaur shows the human growing out of the animal, and it is only humans who can draw the bow at a distant target. Animals are condemned to eternal recognition of the same, whereas humans can climb. In essence I would say that Chiron is concerned with raising humans to a new plateau of achievement or insight, through passing tests for which we need a certain audacious belief in ourselves and our as yet unfulfilled possibilities.

The word 'mettle' comes close to it. It means courage, spirit, but also the inherent character. To be put 'on one's mettle' is to be roused into producing one's best efforts.

In Chiron's school, ordinary men are turned into relative supermen. The superman ideal (I hope feminist readers will allow the terminological liberty and not insist that I substitute 'superperson') is a durable image. In his book A New Model of the Universe P D Ouspensky devoted a chapter to superman. He writes:

The idea of superman is as old as the world ... Sayings and legends of all ancient peoples are full of images of superman. Heroes of myths, Titans, demi-gods, Prometheus who brought fire from heaven; prophets, messiahs and saints of all religions; heroes of fairy tales and epic songs; knights who rescue captive princesses, awake sleeping beauties, vanquish dragons, and fight giants and ogres - all these are images of superman.

I must confess that my view of the astrological leans heavily towards occult or esoteric conceptions of the universe, in the sense that I believe that what appears to the senses is but a fragment of the totality, and that behind the scenes of life all sorts of unsuspected issues are in contention. Nor would I make the mistake of imagining that all this hidden activity reposes in any 'collective unconscious' of mankind - it is real and independent of us.

From this standpoint I can dimly see that through the agency of Chiron we humans may experience an overshadowing from some higher plane which beckons us upward. For Rudolf Steiner, the myths are a hazy recollection of an even earlier time when humans, in a dreamlike consciousness, were in direct touch with divine beings. In this connection Steiner spoke in one lecture about the reality of Heroes - superhuman beings who stand higher than man in evolution, and who have already developed what man in time is himself destined to develop. Steiner said:

The Hero cannot directly incarnate in a physical body under earthly conditions; but he can do so by going down into the physical body of a human being, and thus enabling himself to work as a man among men. In the initiates of earlier ages we have beings of this kind.

I am prepared to believe that in Chiron, and the forces this cosmic intention generates, we may be seeing the intersection of human activity with Hero activity.

Dennis Elwell is the author of Cosmic Loom.

[First published in ‘Pulsar: The Journal of the Scottish Astrological Association’ No 5. Summer 1990]