Taurus (April 19-May 20) — Calm, collected and attractive on the outside, raging like a tempest on the inside, Taurus is the blacksmith shop of the soul. If you’re a Taurus, you’ve incarnated at this time for the purpose of being shaped and tempered. Just be sure you go gently on yourself even during the tempering process. And remember that such deep working out should be harnessed in the form of creative energy as well as sensuality. You need both.
What I find interesting is how many Taurus people relate to this description with a little smile and a nod, and how it seems to fit them so well, once you look beneath the grooming and the impeccable personal presentation. You can sometimes see the little puffs of smoke coming out of their eyes and hear the hammer strike between the notes of the musical intonations of a Taurus voice.
You do have a gift for working and shaping things on the material plane. All art, no matter what medium, is all about shaping the physical plane. Your art needs to be pragmatic.
In fact, staying connected to your creative process will make change — the stereotypical bane of a Taurus’s existence — easier for you.
CHANGE AND VALUES
While you’re famous for your supposed stubbornness, few understand that you’re trying to work out your inner complexities and don’t want to make a move or a decision until you feel you’re all sorted out. Change is challenging for you. It’s easier if you think it’s your idea, so make sure you keep coming up with new possibilities to keep yourself on the move. There is always more to sort, but at a certain point you have to go with the experiment of living.
The nature of Taurus is to stick with things a long time, and to stick with places, to stay put in a lot of ways — not to embrace change readily. The cardinal signs are the ones that provide you with the drive and the impulse to move forward, the ones that provide you with the progress that you want to make and to take initiative. In your chart they are concealed, and it’s one of the reasons there is this kind of delay factor with Taurus where initiative is very challenging.
But I would propose to you that that may be a reaction formation; it may be a defense of some kind against the constant fluctuation that you feel and the answer would seem to be to hunker down into something. But if you give yourself more opportunity to fluctuate, more opportunity to experience the possibilities and you are open about that, and you let yourself do that in a way that is authentic, you may find that you do less clinging; you let go of yourself more easily, more lovingly.
If you want to study some of your values, and how you really want to express yourself in the world, look at your ninth house and for our purposes let that be Capricorn (using whole-sign houses). There’s an orientation on the past (and Taurus is famous for that) and there’s an orientation on structure — Taurus is pretty famous for that as well — and there is an orientation on the parents.
There are two places where this happens; it happens once because Capricorn is the sign very closely associated with parents and the 9th is the house of the hidden psychological legacy of our parents — particularly of our mother. The third house is the hidden psychological legacy of the father, and in your case that is likely to be Cancer.
In another sense, Gemini — your second house by whole signs — also represents what you value. And Gemini is ruled by Mercury, which retrogrades the most of any of the planets.
The challenge of having Mercury influence your house of values (Gemini) is that it may seem to constantly change — and therefore you have to become a master at pattern recognition; you have to look at what you’ve been doing all along, for example.
You have to look at what you keep coming back to. Look at what you tend to struggle with. Do a compare and contrast with what you say is important versus what you end up actually treating as important. This works in terms of how you treat people as well. How do you treat yourself versus how you treat others?
Since Mercury rules your second house, each time Mercury goes retrograde you may experience crisis of values related to the sign it is in at the time. This is challenging, but actually serves to keep you looking at your life with fresh eyes based in the present — rather than getting stuck looking through the lens of the past.
SEXUALITY/RELATIONSHIPS
Your sign is ruled by the planet Venus, the planet which represents you. It’s bright, beautiful and has an atmosphere of ammonia cooking at 900 degrees centigrade. It’s healthy to let some of that fire and passion out into the open.
Scorpio is your opposite sign — your 7th solar house that describes your partners and relationships. The traditional ruler of Scorpio is Mars. It is the thing you seek the most to relate to, being such a tactile person with such a spectrum of emotional desires and needs. Yet given the placement of Aries, also ruled by Mars, in your 12th house by whole signs, you may have a character trait of getting uneasy when people get to know you too well.
Taurus is a sign of the earth element, and is also a fixed sign, coming in the middle or peak of a season — which happens to be the season of Beltane, the pagan celebration of sex. Your erotic nature is more promiscuous than you may want to admit; however, you also have a strong drive to bond with others. You must find a balance between the two. To learn more about yourself, look up the sign of your Venus as well as your Moon, two elements in your chart closely associated with Taurus.
In many ways you have unusual freedom in your personal relationships. The thing they have in common is that to be healthy, they need to be oriented on new, open-minded concepts of commitment, and on recognizing the toxic role of guilt; and they need to be generous in allowing you space to be a different person every day. Note that this is not generally what our relationships are about. This may have particularly little to say about what your past relationships have been about.
Remember that confidence and digging in your heels are two entirely different things. You must handle your possessive nature carefully so as not to alienate others, and remember that as much as you might like to be ‘taken possession of’, this doesn’t really work for you. At a certain point you will need your independence.
In your chart, Virgo is associated with the 5th solar house (5th by whole signs for Taurus rising): pleasure, risk-taking, creativity and children. Virgo as the related energy field gives this house a serious cast for you; and you have a way of making into a mental or psychological issue what could be explored in direct, physical experience. You can get lost in the concept of relating, more easily than you enter the experience of the relationship. I realize that Taurus is one of the most physical signs, but in my experience, Taurus is also one of the signs most given to turning nearly anything into an abstraction.
There is a Mercury connection between the 2nd house (which is Gemini for you) and the 5th (Virgo). Both are ruled by Mercury, and together they ask: how may you be using your sexual desirability as a way into your self-worth? Having a positive image of your sexuality can be a core theme of how you feel about yourself, but it would be wise to have some boundaries so that you can, at least, know when you’re substituting one for the other.
You connect desire to emotional security; and being desired is connected to your feeling emotionally secure. More to the point, desire is how you know you’re alive.
This offers you a short-term solution to the question of both sexual need and personal confidence. There is a paradox involved, though, which is that the kinds of passions you enjoy the most are rarely the most stable or dependable. And there is the other part of your nature, which seeks stability and certainty; and that usually means making sure things are always a little more like yesterday than like tomorrow.
CAREER
Let’s talk about your professional life for a moment — which, by the way, was not designed as a substitute for anything in your life, but rather as one of the main events of your journey on Earth. You have Aquarius in the solar 10th house, your house of career and reputation. That alone, apart from any transits that may come through, is a placement that says you are here to make an ORIGINAL CONTRIBUTION.
As one so concerned with how you are perceived and whether you fit in, you would do well to study this house carefully: to understand all things Aquarian, such as the drive for conformity.
You may come up against the idea that in order to do something in the world, you must give up your precious individuality. The group nature of Aquarius intimidates you: the sense of others having control over you or your reputation. You don’t want others deciding anything for you. And as long as you keep telling yourself that, you will create a standoff.
This is what I will call defensive individualism. Being who you are is in truth not about defending yourself over what you might not be; it’s about a positive, direct expression of your existence.
The main issue is that you are pulled in two directions. First, you need a humanitarian career. Indeed, your solar chart says you absolutely must be involved with work that serves the collective good. One enormous issue that affects your mission is your quest to find your rightful place in the community: a fully constructive place for yourself in the family of mankind that reflects who you are, why you are here, and moreover, why we are all here.
Taking you in the opposite direction is the fact that you’re a Taurus. You like things that cost more than you can earn in most humanitarian careers. And much of what has distracted you from achievement is your constant calling inward; an elusive ‘search for yourself’ that seems to divide your inner world from your outer world.
Part of your career struggle is that you tend to make it abstract. You might think in long spans of time rather than in terms of what you want to do today or this year. You might not recognize that day-to-day building of creative momentum is always an experiment, and it continuously calls for moving from theory to practice; from the general to the specific.
Your astrology, utmost and topmost, is about discovering yourself and applying not competition between these two states but vision to your gradually focusing sense of presence in the world, which is close to your sense of mission.
You are unlikely to find that many people who get the concept of vision. This is your role, not theirs. In a sense, it is the answer to everything: for you. Try as you may (or may have) you cannot live by a template, a plan, or anyone’s notion of proper, and still be happy.
Yet all the opportunity in the world — and there is plenty in your world — is worthless if you don’t give yourself permission to say yes to yourself, and then to actually be who you are, without any notion of pretense. Give yourself permission to make decisions — and most of all permission to get it wrong.
MONEY
I remember when I was a younger astrology student reading and hearing about how good with money Taurus people are. Then for the next 15 years I studied Taureans, and I discovered that a lot of you have some significant discomfort with money; and often significant financial problems that you don’t really understand.
The thing is, you always do maintain a certain level of comfort and the appearance of affluence. You might have a dime in your pocket and minus $11 on your debit card; but you look good and your house is warm and you don’t miss a meal. Knowing this, I would propose that it’s safe for you to honor your higher goals, remembering that money itself is not one of them. Yes, you can seek cash and property; but only at the not-so-small expense of your soul.
Part of your situation involves having Gemini in the 2nd house of money and resources. The second house is about your values, and it is about wealth; it’s what you have and how you value what you have. You might have a lot and think it’s worthless and put yourself down for it. You might have a little and think it’s amazing and be able to make so much out of it. There are a lot of options here for what you have and how you value it. There is a constant ongoing dialogue and this is the main thing that you are deciding on — because of the presence of Gemini.
Because of this second-house influence, you feel two different ways about financial success. You have two belief systems that are trying to operate at the same time.
Forget this struggle. Do what you want and need to do, and you will thrive. I recognize that there are many Taureans with money issues, but any astrologer still in business will tell you that no Taurus needs to struggle financially, and this is from experience and not from books.
Taureans are rather fun to have sex with (Scorpios, don’t worry, you are too), and one rarely finds them wanting for much of anything material. They almost always have the most comfortable homes with a stash of imported chocolate in the pantry. But there’s a touch more going on; that is, brains. Few people notice because those born under Taurus tend to be somewhat reserved and refined.
SELF-CONCEPT/IDENTITY
Aries (wherever it may land in one’s chart) tells us something about our self-concept and sense of identity. You have Aries in the solar 12th house — the really mysterious house where everything has the approximate logic of a dream. Things don’t really exist in the 12th house; they waft in and out of reality. So for as solid and as tangible as you may aspire to be, there is often a missing element of self and this can drive you a little nuts. It’s often like your ‘self’ is hidden in another dimension.
Mars rules this house; and Mars has a second role, as the ruler of your opposite sign, Scorpio: it’s also your relationship planet. So the planet that represents your hidden or missing self is the same planet that represents your relationships. And when you put those two together, you get boundary issues. Is this other person you’re with really your secret self? Hmmm, sometimes it seems like they are. Your inner twin can seem to double as your outer twin or relationship partner. And then where do you fit in?
I suggest that you not think of this as being about personal relationships as much as a relationship to existence. Your relationship to existence is described by Scorpio as your opposite sign. Scorpio is sending you vibes that everything you do, such as breathing, taking a bath or moving house, requires you to change. You in turn react by trying to be as stable as you can, nearly all the time. Yet at the same time, you are enticed into a continuous relationship with surrender.
There is something about your struggle to feel secure in the world that involves the sense that some vital aspect of who you are is tucked away in another dimension. You keep trying to get into that dimension, or to act from there, and yet at times you wonder whether it really exists; whether you’re not chasing some dream of yourself.
You need to live in your truth, rather than living a plan or a concept. It can take a long time to make these distinctions.
You actually can lose your mind, of a variety, during an intense 12th house experience. There is really no such thing as the human ego in this house. Because yours is the only sign with Aries placed here in your solar chart, this suggests a kind of lost quality much of the time. It is difficult for you to initiate activity. The sign of SELF, vitally important in any chart, is your house of SELFLESS. If you ever wonder why it’s so much work for you to seize hold of your will and do something with it in a timely fashion, we really don’t need to look much further than this fact.
Aries is a challenging sign to have in the 12th house because it is the energy of self-presence, I am, ego-consciousness. To have the energy of self in this parallel universe kind of gives the feeling that you are in a different room all the time.
You have your identity, but deeper in there’s this other identity that you can’t normally get into. There’s not really a way into that that doesn’t involve some kind of access point to the 12th house. It can drive the classically Taurean impulse to fantasy, driving the inner world.
MENTAL OUTLOOK/RELIGIOUS BELIEFS
In understanding Taurus, we have the question of why people with a strong element of this sign tend to see the world in such abstract terms: that is, why you tend to get lost in your head. The missing-self idea explains this in part; but we can account for this in two other traits: idealism and perfectionism.
The perfectionism comes from having Virgo in your house of experiments and play. Virgo is cautious and experiments necessarily require a risk. There is a contradiction implied. You often respond by turning risk into a mental exercise. Your part needs to be translating them right back into direct, grounded experiences; and this is a zone of life where perfection is not a value.
Your chart suggests that you are strongly influenced by the religious beliefs of your parents, often in ways you cannot see. A religious belief doesn’t mean accepting that Jesus was born and laid in a manger on Dec. 25 of the year zero. Rather, it’s about an approach to life that includes a kind of orthodoxy that pervades your ideas: there is a way to do things right; you can find it in a book; every other way is suspect.
You may think this is your material, but it’s actually on loan from your ancestors. It’s not exactly obvious that the ideas about life that you carry, wherever they came from, have a way of dictating the world that you see.
There remains in astrology the question of how Taurus acquired its faith in orthodoxy, and what its effect is on your ability to have some freedom. I am less inclined to think it has something to do with Taurus per se as I am to think it has to do with the placement of Capricorn in your solar chart. Capricorn, the sign of organized beliefs and power structures (among other things), is placed in your 9th solar house. The 9th is one of the houses where we seek liberation.
Pluto in Capricorn (9th House)
Since 2008, Pluto in Capricorn has been helping you take apart what is not true and crave what is. Pluto plunging through Capricorn is the main influence driving this process of reassessing what you believe, or said another way, your persistent thoughts. This will be influencing your relationship to your religious notions, your childhood religious tradition, your current religious tradition (if you have one), what you think of as your more original spiritual ideas, your sense of right and wrong, and perhaps more than anything, your allegiance to what your family believes.
This transit is more challenging than you might think, as Pluto gradually dismantles all of the beliefs that you inherited from your parents, and in particular, from your mother and her side of the family. This is another way of saying that your personal religion is being dismantled and replaced by something more direct, visceral and at the same time intuitive.
Your inscrutability normally masks a much deeper cleverness, creativity and uncompromisingly opinionated way of viewing the world. If you are stubborn, it’s only because you know so much. Your intelligence is so powerful because it combines mental knowledge and body knowledge. Most ‘smart’ people are just that: witty and, sadly, cut off from their heart and guts. By whatever means this comes to pass, you are about to make contact with this resource: with your mental clarity, your ability to focus on a single idea, and most important, with the true value your wisdom deserves.
Pluto in the 9th (Capricorn) is putting a lot of pressure on you to re-think your concept of the past and to go deeply into the hidden psychological legacy of your mom (or whichever parent you think that is) and to liberate yourself from it and to evolve out of that.
Chiron in Pisces (11th House)
With Pisces in the house of hopes and dreams, that pretty much covers everything that’s pleasurable, creative or addictive. Chiron is going to help you apply your new understanding of who you are to the world around you, and figure out how to observe and recognize what you want based on who you are becoming inside. At first, you may notice that plenty gets filtered out, stuff that may have glittered in the past but which now seems irrelevant.
Pisces, the 11th house of Taurus, holds the key to much of what you want the most from life; it’s the house of your highest vision of your life. You will have two planets there for the long run, and those are helping you gather energy and focus your vision. This is best done in the truly egalitarian spirit of Pisces. But you will need to be realistic all the time, and use your discernment all the time. Neptune will feed your vision but it can also put you to sleep. Chiron will focus your vision and keep you awake.
Chiron is asking you to focus on a goal, and that goal needs to resonate with your deepest passion. It is not necessarily a professional goal; it is more likely to be a healing goal.
You now have a channel of some kind that you can develop and learn how to work with and use in a way that is both mature and is oriented on healing.
One interesting thing about these placements is that they are suggesting that friends become more than friends, friendship becomes more than friendship. This may have always been true for you. The presence of Pisces on the 11th house is suggesting that you have the capacity for a deeper intimacy with friends that is a little bit more like what most people might think of as lovers, even though there are some severe cultural mores against this.
Uranus in Aries (12th House)
You have Aries associated with this house (the 12th). That’s an interesting placement because Aries (wherever it may be) is so firmly about where we seek identity. And your tendency is to go looking in this totally intangible place. Taurus has a reputation for being stubborn, grounded, practical and materialistic. That’s a kind of reaction to a compelling drive to seek your sense of self where nothing is really solid.
Uranus plunging into your 12th house and Aries is like a sudden impulse to wake up, all at once. This is the electric fire of the psyche. When I talk about curiosity of self, and liberating yourself from useless concepts and ideas without having to analyze them first, this is what I’m describing.
Uranus has no connection to discipline, except for needing it desperately. I suggest you cultivate structure consciously, carefully and flexibly.
Remember that certainty is not going to help you now; the closest you want to come to that is fulfilling your basic responsibilities, and knowing when you want to move on. As original stuff comes out of you, look for places to invest it.
There is freedom of self in art, and that is precisely what Uranus in your 12th house is calling for. This freedom of self may be the most alien thing you’ve ever considered; that is a factor of a 12th house Aries placement. Remember that: Uranus not only seeks freedom, it will go to any lengths to get it, including the potential for chaos.
If you vent the energy and (better yet) harness it well, you will feel safer and more grounded, which brings me to one last thought about the 12th: anxiety. If you want to understand why someone is anxious, look at their 12th house. You have enough going on there to raise the energy on this emotion, which is like diluted fear. We live in an age of anxiety, so it’s easy enough to get caught up in it.
I suggest you be mindful that the presence of big planets in your 12th house could easily stir up anxiety attacks; they are a sign that the pressure has become too high in there, and that you will benefit from blowing off steam or engaging in creative activity.
You are being called by Uranus in Aries to be awake to your own existence: first, awake within the lucid dream of existence, then fully awake within existence itself. Aries is your 12th house, which is an odd placement because your whole function of I Am can, and often is, swimming in a kind of lucid dream. And Uranus is jolting you to consciousness in the midst of this dream — the message being that it’s time to face the day, no matter how strange or wonderful it may seem.