The effect of transverse gluons on the chiral symmetry patterns of excited mesons is studied in a Coulomb gauge QCD model. The linear rising static quark-antiquark potential and the transverse gluon propagator known from lattice studies are input into the model. The non-perturbative quark propagator, which enters the meson bound state equations, is derived from the Dyson--Schwinger equations and a complete set of mesons for general spin quantum number is presented. From analyzing the bound

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... equations for large spins it is demonstrated, that chiral and axial symmetry are restored. In this limit a complete degeneracy of all multiplets with given spin is observed. The effect of the transverse gluon interaction is shown to vanish rapidly as the spin quantum number is increased. For vanishing dynamical quark mass the expected meson degeneracies are recovered.