Eris in the 12th solar house. Spiral Door aspect, Quaoar and Ixion in the 8th solar house. Pluto working toward the 9th solar house. Saturn in the 4th solar house heading for the 5th. Chiron-Nessus conjunct in the 10th solar house. Mars retrograde in the 3rd solar house. Venus retrograde in the 4th and 5th solar houses.   Taurus is the relationship house for Scorpio, the career house for Leo, and the home and security house for Aquarius. This interpretation works for Taurus rising as well.

EXPLORING just what it is about Taurus, you know, just what that odd special something is, one is always taken deeper in, and not where one expects to go. The metaphor I like to give comes from the book Esoteric Astrology by Alice Bailey, who describes Taurus, on the inside, as the blacksmith shop of the soul: a smoky place with a hot fire and molten metal, and the god Vulcan down there hammering away at his anvil. Vulcan, in other words, not Venus, is the god associated with Taurus, at least as Bailey explains things. Vulcan is not actually a planet (some astrologers use a hypothetical planet known by that name), but the metaphor is meaningful.
 
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. The seemingly endless, intense tests and tribulations of recent years go along with this: your life has not resembled the familiar images of Aphrodite we see laying on her divan or being worshipped on a pedestal. They resemble something else. Indeed, at times you may feel as snubbed by her as Vulcan was in the myth.
   
Notably, Vulcan was the god rejected by Venus in favor of Mars, and therefore (looked at another way) represents something of the displaced or castaway aspect of the Taurus psyche; the part that exists beneath the level of appearances, perhaps forgotten, perhaps surfacing as shadow material, and perhaps as a quality of you deep beneath any appearances but urgently needing expression. We could ask which aspect of yourself you relate to when you relate to others; and which they perceive, regardless of which you choose to express.
 
If in the past decade you have learned how not to have every encounter with another person become a power struggle, you are doing great. Your life is almost always intense, and based on what I know about Pluto transits, if you haven't learned how to guide that obsessive, impassioned intensity by now, you're probably reading this horoscope from another dimension, with St. Peter looking over your shoulder. I am going to hazard an educated guess that you have lately decided that resistance is not always a virtue; I trust you've observed that change usually brings improvement to your life. But this has, as I am suggesting, been challenging.
 
Equally difficult has been having your idealism slowly stripped away, particularly about relationships, though it would be interesting to consider what has replaced it. Is it pragmatic values, or cynicism? Is it a sense of loss, or of opportunity? An appreciation of your own virtue, or the sense that nobody can really be trusted, once you get too close to them? Well, actually, that remains to be seen. Though Pluto has been creeping across the degrees of your 8th solar house -- the planet of transformation, making an eternally slow transit through the house of transformation -- the Spiral Door is in the process of opening to a new reality at the end of this stage of the journey. You will in this year find out what you have been striving, struggling and waiting for through the long years of Pluto in Sagittarius.
 
The peak of intensity involves a relatively recent discovery, one unknown to the Greeks and Babylonians from whom we inherit our astrology. In your solar chart (or the natal chart for those with Taurus rising), the 8th house -- the dark, mysterious zone of deep encounters that rewrite the lines of our souls, and which reveals our true feelings about sex and death -- concludes with the Galactic Core. Sagittarius comprises your 8th solar house; the Galactic Core is in the last degrees of Sagittarius, so planets transiting this house get there at the end of the transit. They must cross the core before they can get to the next house, the 9th, the house of spirituality, the higher self, and participation in the world.
 
A planet moving from one house to another, or one sign to another, is not like the speedometer needle going from 30 to 40. Rather, there is an initiation process involved; a cycle ends and a new one begins, and between them is a transitional phase that, because Pluto affects everyone, everyone is going through, and you are encountering in a particularly poignant way.
 
This is because the core is a point that we could call our cosmic origins, our deepest inner truth, and the invisible beacon that points us home, indeed, that pulls us toward home with its gravity, light and love. It is way off the wavelength of most of the world, though the longing for it is exploited by many, including politics and religion. Astrology is full of little metaphors that help explain the world, and this is a fine one.
 
The 8th house represents what you might call the most powerful tropisms operating in the psyche -- the things toward which we are irrevocably drawn, and cannot resist. The core of our galaxy is perhaps the most vivid image of God that exists in astronomy, and the one thing we all have in common; our common source; our shared reality. And toward this, you are pulled all the time. Pluto is now focusing your mind, your growth and your soul's passage precisely in the direction of home. It's as if you're being called to surrender to your cosmic origins, but with the knowledge that something about your worldly life will experience profound transformation as a result. In other words, you are not dying -- you are being born.
 
As the years have evolved, I would imagine you've considered many ways to name the experiences, which have come one after the next in an endless succession. With Sagittarius, we have something associated by most people with spirituality and the quest for truth, though in your 8th house, we have an environment of sex and surrender, of death, and the actual experience of recreating oneself into a new being. True, this is spiritual, but in ways that are not usually associated with yoga weekends or vegetarian cookouts. The idea that what people typically call sex can have any vague connection to what other people usually call spirituality is still something of a joke, and the results are not usually so funny: in particular, unhappiness and fragmentation; shallow encounters; treating sex like a commodity and religion like it's a product of something other than human experience and passion.
 
The pain and struggle that comes from this split is worth pausing over. Many people talk about the association of love and sex. Others talk about how God is love. How, then, does it become blasphemy to associate God with sex? We had better ask, because in worldly terms it is the essence of blasphemy -- and for honest seekers, one of the most meaningful dimensions where healing occurs, and where we begin to allow life force, blood and feelings to flow back into our psyches numbed out by isolation, war and violence.
 
In these years of your life, indeed, a significant portion of your life, Pluto has come along like a blowtorch and fused these two seeming opposites, eroticism and divinity, into one thing, an entirely new thing, a unique new element in your soul. New, except for one thing, and I have written this before.
 
Religion accuses mankind of usurping God's power. Religion has also turned sex, the experience which creates life, into a sin, and projected the power of creation onto a phantasm of God that it uses to terrify us. It is religion which has usurped the power and creativity of humanity -- and it is you who are involved in a profound process of getting it back.
 
The beauty of this is you know instinctually how good life can be when you live the whole natural truth of who you are: God, love, passion, sex, creation, service. The difficult thing is how often how few others can relate, and how many are satisfied by what amount to superficial exchanges and partial honesty, men and women alike. You have been through so much that superficiality at this point probably either makes you nauseous or works as a momentary relief from all the glum negativity we are getting bombarded with every day. Indeed, the fact that the media has become a death fest in a time when you are so sensitive must be weighing on you profoundly.
 
Yet you must stand up to the world. You know you must be strong in the face of it all. Eighth house Pluto is a story about learning to be the equal to others; generally, this means learning how to stand up for yourself and not get taken along the road of other people's power trips, and there are plenty. But I would propose a question here, which is that if you cannot share pleasure on equal terms with others, can you really be equal?
 
The image of the Spiral Door opening at the last edges of your 8th house is an image of taking what we might call your personal power and allowing that to go a step further, into a kind of cosmic union with yourself that opens up some significant opportunities to make the kind of contact that you have needed and wanted for a long time. It still may be that you are the one leading the way, and in such times you must do your best to be patient, but more than patient, trusting, aware and a bit clever about getting your needs met. If you can keep doing what you must do, seeking what you want and guiding yourself toward a more positive outlook, you will be met by authentic results -- even if you cannot say what they will be.
 
Now, in practical terms, what is this about? 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 this house, the 10th. That alone, apart from any transits that may come through, is a placement that says you are here to make an ORIGINAL CONTRIBUTION (this is the only time I am using "all caps" in the entire horoscope section -- 40,000 words, and just two of them are in all caps -- the words "original" and "contribution," and they are in direct reference to you and why you are on the planet).
 
For a long time, you had Neptune alone transiting this house, perhaps for seven years. Neptune was giving you a lot of ideas and ideals about what you might do and wanted to do and wished you could do. But mostly it was insubstantial; dreams and daydreams, but actually, a process was underway of the old patterns keeping a grip on your life slowly being dissolved. Then all of a sudden, two Centaur planets showed up; not one but two: Chiron and Nessus. This was in early 2005, about two years ago, and that year was the time when, seemingly very quickly, your mind started to focus; your mission started to become clear.
 
Notably, this probably showed up with a series of crises over your direction and potentially actual workplace crises. These were related to helping you make sure you are actually doing the right thing; helping you break out of those very firm fixed patterns and find your new path. Yes, it was annoying; just when you were getting used to living with 8th house Pluto seemingly forever, just when you had a grip on that, at long last, suddenly the whole issue of purposes started to vibrate through your life, not letting you give up the idea of what you really needed to be doing for a moment.
 
You are likely to have noticed two things: ideals need to be acted on, and it's not easy; and two, there is a dark side to what we are called upon to do, and that often involves acknowledging the world's pain. In other words, we would not need healing if not for sickness; we would not need teachers if not for ignorance; we would not need inventors except for need itself. And indeed, you are being called upon to be all of those things -- but with one focus; one mission. In reality, that is, in the physical world of people, organizations and society.
 
The issue with Centaur transits is that they can, at times, have this way of making you feel pretty unstable. Centaurs all have an edgy feeling, a little dangerous, verging on impossible; they push us to our limits and make us redefine the idea of a limit. Centaurs do extremely weird things with the whole notion of "possible," because the things that actually happen under Centaur transits are things we previously thought were impossible. Then one day they are necessary; and then the next day you're actually doing them.
 
We must add one last characteristic to these events, which can be easily deduced from all of the above: they involve gaining experience, and learning through experience. If you don't rise to the occasion, it's really easy to get shredded; if you pluck up some confidence, you can find yourself living on a whole new level, and working with talents you had only previously dreamed of.
 
Along this vein, Saturn transiting your 4th house has been pushing you to make some changes to what you consider your foundation. Nobody should stay in one place too long, as in one house or one community or one neighborhood; one of whatever you want, but change at the root level is essential to keep a human being healthy. The resounding message, indeed, the compulsion, of Saturn in Leo has been to clean your life from the roots; to repair your foundations. In order to do that, you've needed to assess where you are, and why you are there. There must, with Saturn in the 4th house, be a connection between location and purpose. The two can often exist independently, but not now, not for you. You draw too much strength from your home and your physical location to have that be out of whack or off kilter. So, without interpreting anything special here, I would just suggest you consider what messages you have been getting from the world and from your life, and take this opportunity to do something about them, if you feel that's the right thing to do.
 
Venus and Mars are both making retrogrades this year. Both are interesting and will be yet another stage of helping you reorient and rearrange your personal relationships; yes, yet again, in a new way. While these retrogrades happen later in the year, we can work with them now, and their effects are starting to manifest. I'll keep these discussions brief and to the point; they are simpler than the earlier subject of this essay.
 
For a long time, your relationships have had the feeling of power being brokered, distributed or somehow becoming an issue. Pluto in the 8th can be reduced down to a series of power equations, and while in some ways exciting, they are not exactly what you would call recreational. Venus retrograde is calling on you to get back to some of that fun aspect of relationships. True, you may have a huge case of post-traumatic-romantic-shock syndrome. You may be keenly aware that any situation can suddenly manifest more karma than you can haul in the Space Shuttle. You may be the type that adds up your dinner check on a solar powered calculator, and have (at times, hopefully other times) plotted and schemed your romances in this way. But how about, you know, some fun? How about picking people who are actually fun? I am aware you need smart people and smart fun; don't compromise. Dumb fun is stupid. Intelligent fun. Brainy fun. Whatever. Fun, your style.
 
As for Mars, this happens later in the year, but you can prepare now, and by prepare, I mean practice being clear. Clear, first, with yourself. You may have noticed once or twice here and there that you try to think with your emotions. This is a little like driving a Ferrari into a lake. Cars are fun and lakes are fun, but -- you need a boat for the lake and a car for the highway. When Mars enters Cancer on Sept. 29, if you find yourself feeling like you can't keep your focus, like you make no sense, or moreover if people are saying you're being aggressive, or reacting like you're being aggressive, remember: drive on the highway, and take your boat on the water. Feel with your emotions and think with your mind. People will like you more, you will like yourself more, and your days will go easier.
 
Indeed, if you think with your mind and feel with your feelings, there will be more to talk about, less to argue about, and all those cool things you like to think about, you'll be able to share with others. How is that for a plan? You can even start right now.


TAURUS
For more information about your relationships, please see Scorpio. This will give you an idea what is happening for those closest to you, and how they may experience you. For more information about your career, please see Aquarius. You can consider this an alternative take on your professional life, as it's an assessment of your 10th house. For more information about the home and security angle of your chart, please see Leo. This will give you greater detail on themes just covered in this horoscope that relate to home and security. For an explanation of the houses, please see this article.