Facing Our Ancestral Shadow: Centaur Asteroid Nessus

I recently decided that the type of astrology I practice is “trauma-informed astrology.”

Trauma-informed refers to two integral pieces of my approach to astrology: centaur asteroids and the Compassionate Inquiry counseling approach created by Gabor Maté.

Though I may not always include centaur asteroids in a reading, I am alert to “centauric processes” and energy in a birth chart or a snapshot of astrological time.

Melanie Reinhart qualifies a “centauric process” in this way:

A Centauric process will engage both our creativity and also shed light on our pain, confusion, and inner poisons. Some of which will be personal, and to do with our own life and feelings, and some of which will be larger than our own life, possibly to do with ancestors or the collective. Centauric consciousness may be what helps us discern these boundaries and act accordingly…Their region [the Kuiper Belt] contains what is trying to die and what is trying to be reborn.

In this post, I’m tackling one of the most traumatic centaur asteroids, Nessus.

Nessus in Myth

Nessus is one of the centaurs from Mt. Pelion in Greece who was involved in the battle between the Lapiths and Centaurs, a major theme of Athenian art. (There’s a great short video about the depiction of this battle on the Parthenon that explains the myth and the rape of the Lapith women.)

After the battle, Nessus fled to the Evinos river in Western Greece and acted as a ferryman where he met Heracles (Hercules). Meeting Nessus is the beginning of the end for Heracles’ hero’s journey. (Heracles had a lot of “past karma” with the centaurs.)

Heracles needed Nessus to ferry his wife Deianeira across the river (Heracles was tough enough to ford the river on his own), but while Nessus was carrying her across the river, he tried to rape her. Heracles in turn shot an arrow that killed Nessus.

But here’s where the myth turns into a complicated tale of retributive betrayal and violence. Deianeira was pissed off at Heracles for having an affair with a younger woman (Iole). Nessus, while dying, gives some of his blood to Deianeira and tells her to use it as a love potion to stop Heracles’ philandering.

Deianeira puts the centaur blood on a garment and packs it with Heracles’ “suitcase” as he goes off to celebrate his heroic triumphs. While at some point after Heracles departs Deianeira realizes the centaur’s deception, that the “love potion” is actually poison, she cannot reach him to warn him.

Heracles dons the poisoned garment and then dies a long, tortured, rage-filled death. (Don’t worry, he gets taken in by the Olympian gods after death, so he’s fine.)

In the post-classical world, the “shirt of Nessus” has become a folklore motif and a literary symbol for being slowly wounded or poisoned by a hoped-for outcome or expectation, or being poisoned by something that is pre-existing or inevitable. (Fun “shirt of Nessus” fact I discovered: the key architect of the July 20 plot to assassinate Hitler described his fate as a “shirt of Nessus,” an inevitable outcome of trying to off Hitler from within ranks.)

Nessus in Astrology

Nessus is kind of a “strange bird” among the major centaur asteroids. (His name in ancient Greek means “baby bird.”) His orbit lasts 123 years or so, is highly elliptical, and though he orbits between Saturn and Pluto, he doesn’t really get close to them. In fact, astronomers have modeled that Nessus won’t get very close to any planet for 20,000 years!

Melanie Reinhart interprets Nessus’ orbital aloofness in these terms:

…the Nessus process is one that is perhaps not meant to be enacted or put into material form, but rather acts as a transformer or purifier, linking the energies of Saturn and Pluto.

Nessus Significations

Nessus represents the deepest shadow material that we inherit as a “pre-existing” condition of our human birth.

Nessus signifies both the personal experience of violent trauma— rape, abuse, suicide, violent acts, mass extermination— and the collective response to these traumas.

It is the process by which horrific traumas affect one person’s health, are passed down genetically through epigenetics, and then activated by our personal experiences. (For Dr. Gabor Maté’s view of the relationship between epigenetics, trauma, and health, see this opinion piece on his blog. )

Nessus also represents the way these traumas pass into our familial and collective unconscious, slowly poisoning our capability to become self-actualized and aware of our origins.

Nessus in a birth chart represents some of the toughest material to confront. It is everything that a family or cultural group doesn’t bring up in casual conversation. At some point growing up, you realize it’s there:

“Oh wait, my ancestors were slave owners/fleeing mass extermination/scarred by civil war?!”

“You mean my whole maternal lineage was changed when my great-Uncle became a suicide bomber/freedom fighter in Belarus? ” (My story.)

“My grandmother’s rape on the boat to America was hidden from us until her death. Uncle Jack actually had a different father.”

I love this Washington Post multi-media story about the slave trade and Black Americans discovering their origins. It references all of the themes I brought up above.

Deathbed revelations are definitely a Nessus theme.

Like Deianeira trying to coerce Heracles to become faithful, ancestral traumas demand absolute fealty and secrecy. Nessus represents the pain of remaining faithful, unaware, or quiet about ancestral wounds.

Nessus Discovery Chart

A brief word about the Nessus Discovery Chart, a method for creating a “birth chart” for the discovery of a planet or asteroid.

Nessus was discovered at Kitt Peak observatory in Arizona on April 26, 1993. On this day he was at 5 Scorpio, opposing the sun at 7 Taurus. (Of course Nessus was discovered in Scorpio.) Pluto in Scorpio was in a T-Square with Saturn in Aquarius and Chiron in Leo. The nodes were in Sagittarius and Gemini.

This configuration suggests that physical security and an ability to create goals for the future come to fruition when we are able to face our shadow and find the truth about our origins.

A Personal Encounter with Nessus

We are currently living through a year where Saturn, Pluto and Jupiter are meeting in a set of historic conjunctions. There are many resources you can find about the Saturn-Pluto and Pluto-Jupiter conjunctions of 2020.

One that directly relates to Saturn-Pluto is a lecture by astrologer Lynn Bell that I highly recommend, though it is very dark and hard to watch.

Bell talks about the Saturn-Pluto conjunction at 2 Cancer in 1914 that kicked off World War I. Watching this lecture, a lightbulb went off for me.

World War I is one of the largest wars in history, that was followed by genocides and a pandemic, engendering about 170 million deaths all told. I have spent my academic career working on the genocides that came out of World War I in Ottoman Turkey: the Pontic genocide, mass exterminations of Christian populations (Greeks Assyrians, Armenians), and the Exchange of Populations between Greece and Turkey regulated by the Lausanne Treaty.

In my birth chart, Nessus is at the same degree as the Saturn-Pluto conjunction that kicked off World War I. My work has been to give voice and visibility to the survivors of the genocides in Asia Minor, their poetry and music, and the ways that the culture of pre-Ottoman Turkey lives on generation through generation.

On the Dais with Nessus

After I completed my doctorate at the Université Libre de Bruxelles (ULB) in Belgium, one of my professors invited me to speak at a conference he was organizing in February 2014 at the Royal Belgian Academy. The subject was the Pontian genocide, an event that had taken place 100 years prior.

I was quite nervous about this talk, given that it was going to be a large audience of mostly French-speakers, on a topic that I hadn’t written about since 2003, and one that was very political. Protestors were lined up outside the academy and the atmosphere was tense and defensive.

I was filled with anxiety, insomnia, and barely slept the entire time I was there.

The day of my talk, the proceedings got moved from the auditorium to the Royal Belgian stables!

I was placed on a panel featuring scholars whose life’s work was to document the most traumatic, secret material: how the Ottomans carried out the genocide. The speaker before me ran through massacre after massacre with dry precision, showing slides of mass graves piled in caves and pits.

I watched the audience react to this horrific material moment-by-moment. I’ll never forget the image of my dear friend Irene, her face illuminated by the afternoon sunlight, with tears running down her cheeks.

Finally, it was my turn to speak. My topic was carrying on the legacy of the survivors, celebrating the genocide anniversary, and preserving cultural traditions. I tried to pour as much love and grounding energy into the space as I could muster.

But it wasn’t enough for the traumatized audience. When I finished, a second-generation Pontian-Belgian came to the microphone and berated me. “What good is memory and tradition when I lost my homeland?” he said. “Can you give me back my homeland?” he yelled over and over in French, until the moderator shouted back at him: “Who do you think this American woman is, Barack Obama?!”

The astrological transits for that day: Nessus at 29 Aquarius (the degree where Saturn was in his discovery chart), close to Mercury Retrograde in Aquarius with the Moon in Scorpio widely conjunct Saturn.

In Conclusion: The Buck Stops Here

Melanie Reinhart used the phrase “the buck stops here” for how we react to intergenerational traumas relating to Nessus themes. What she means by this is that we have to bring to our conscious awareness what has been hidden, toxic, and destructive in our ancestral lineages and then make a choice to confront them.

While Nessus work is nebulous, frustrating, and painful, it is truly the work of “being a better ancestor” and transmuting the pain that previous generations have left behind.

If you’re interested in Centaurs and working with them on your healing journey, I offer monthly programming through my Centaur Healing project.

References

Reinhart, Melanie. Saturn, Chiron, and the Centaurs: To the Edge and Beyond. 1996.