Mars Attacks

I'd woken late, a couple of minutes before 10am, and made my way to the kitchen carrying the bucket of accumulated dishes to wash from yesterday's meals. As I stepped to the kitchen sink, I stepped on the shard of a broken cup that I'd broken on the day before. I thought I'd picked up all the fragments but this one had escaped me. 

The shard sliced my right foot and I began bleeding immediately and profusely. I don't think I've ever lost so much blood. Eventually I stemmed the bleeding, applied a bandaid and all was well, although I think I was in mild shock. The time was a little after 10am and I've set the chart time to 10:10am which is pretty close to the time the accident occurred. The date is January 22nd 2023 and the location is Jakarta.

I suspected the involvement of Mars of course and I wasn't wrong. Figure 1 shows my natal chart with the transit superimposed on the outer ring.

Figure 1

As can be seen, Mars about midway through my second house in 8°39' of Gemini almost exactly opposite my natal Chiron in 8°57'R of Sagittarius. Mercury is in 8°57' of Capricorn and so is exactly semisextile natal Chiron and quincunx transiting Mars. Of course, my natal Mars-Venus conjunction, with midpoint in 9°14' of Aries is involved as well. 

The designation of Chiron as the wounded healer comes to mind. I was definitely wounded in the leg, like the centaur Chiron, and this quote from Wikipedia is relevant:

In Greek mythology, the centaur Chiron was a "Wounded Healer", after being poisoned with an incurable wound by one of Hercules's arrows. Jung mentioned the Chiron myth "wounding by one's own arrow means, first of all, the state of introversion".

For Jung, "a good half of every treatment that probes at all deeply consists in the doctor's examining himself... it is his own hurt that gives a measure of his power to heal. This, and nothing else, is the meaning of the Greek myth of the wounded physician."

Jung felt that depth psychology can be potentially dangerous, because the analyst is vulnerable to being infected by his analysand's wounds by having his own wounds reopened. To avoid this, the analyst must have an ongoing relationship with the unconscious, otherwise he or she could identify with the "healer archetype", and create an inflated ego.

Withdrawal of both projections may however ultimately activate the powers of the inner healer in the patients themselves.

Jung’s closest colleague, Marie Louise Von Franz, said “the wounded healer IS the archetype of the Self [our wholeness, the God within] and is at the bottom of all genuine healing procedures.”

Jungians warn of the dangers of inflation and splitting in the helping professions, involving projection of the 'wounded' pole of the archetype onto the patient alone, with the analyst safely separated off as 'healer'.

I don't want to make too much of such a transient event but it was impactful psychologically to see one's life blood spilling so profusely and dramatically on the white tiles underfoot. I was reminded that, given my disillusionment with the medical mafia, I need to be my own healer and treat my own wounds, both psychological and physical.