Taurus

Fixed earth, ruled by Venus

Earth is the element of what can be touched and counted, and fixed earth is earth that stays put. The tradition reads Taurus as the most settled of the twelve: patient, sensual, attached to what it has built or bought or grown, and very hard to shift once its mind is made up. Virgo, the mutable earth sign, is read as sorting and improving, and Capricorn, the cardinal one, as organising towards a goal; Taurus holds on and enjoys. Its steadiness is read as its gift, and its stubbornness as the same quality on a bad day.

Venus rules Taurus, as it rules Libra, and in Taurus it is read on its earthy side: comfort, food, touch, music felt in the body, and money as security rather than show. The Moon is exalted here, traditionally at 3°, which the tradition reads as feeling at its calmest and best fed. Mars, the ruler of the opposite sign, is in detriment, and modern astrologers who give Scorpio to Pluto put Pluto in detriment here as well. No planet has its fall in Taurus in the traditional scheme. The decans belong to Mercury, the Moon and Saturn as faces, or to Venus, Mercury and Saturn when counted through the earth signs.

Taurus as Sun, Moon and rising sign

The Sun in Taurus

A Sun in Taurus is read as a self that grows by accumulating: skills practised until they are second nature, belongings and friendships kept for decades. The tradition describes a calm, unhurried person with a firm sense of what is theirs, a pleasure in good materials and plain comforts, and a loyalty that does not need announcing. The shadow in the same reading is inertia, and a habit of taking a change of plan as a personal injury.

The Moon in Taurus

The Moon is at its most comfortable in Taurus in the old scheme, and a Moon in Taurus is read as needing routine, physical ease and a home that stays where it is. Feelings are slow to rise and slow to leave; comfort comes through the senses, a meal or a familiar room, more than through talking it over. It is the Moon sign most often read as steady under pressure, and also as the one that keeps a grievance longest.

Taurus rising

Taurus rising is read as a composed, deliberate manner, a pleasant voice and a person who seems in no hurry at all, and it makes Venus the ruler of the chart. Taurus is the natural sign of the second house, the house of what a person owns and values, which is where much of its vocabulary comes from. At the latitude of London Taurus rises in a little over an hour, faster than most signs; at the latitude of Sydney or Buenos Aires it takes nearly two and a half.

Taurus holds the middle of spring in the north, when growth is at its greenest, and the middle of autumn in the south. Halfway through the sign, about 5 May, the Sun passes the old cross-quarter point between equinox and solstice, the season of May Day and Beltane. The Sun takes about thirty-one days to cross Taurus, longer than it spends in the winter signs, because the Earth slows in its orbit as it heads towards its farthest point from the Sun in July.

The bull

The best-known bull is Zeus in disguise, the white bull that carried Europa across the sea to Crete. The glyph is a circle with horns. The reading leans more on the animal than the tale: a strong, placid creature that will not be pushed, and is dangerous only when somebody finally tries.

Taurus and Scorpio across the wheel

Across the wheel is Scorpio, fixed like Taurus but water rather than earth. The two are read as the axis of what is mine and what is shared: Taurus keeps its own resources, Scorpio deals in what binds people together, debts, intimacy and inheritance among them. The second and eighth houses carry the same pairing. In a chart, weight on this axis is read as a question of holding on and letting go, and of the difference between security and control.

The sign and the constellation

The constellation Taurus is one of the easiest to find, with the red star Aldebaran as the bull’s eye, the V of the Hyades as its face and the Pleiades on its shoulder. The Sun stands in front of it from about 14 May to 19 June, which is mostly the sign Gemini; for most of the sign Taurus the Sun is actually in front of the constellation Aries. Indian astrology’s sidereal Taurus begins about 15 May. The drift behind all this is set out on the page about signs and constellations.

Common mix-ups

Aldebaran and the Pleiades lead people to picture Taurus in the spring sky, but in April and May those stars are lost in the Sun’s glare; Taurus the constellation belongs to winter evenings in the north. Births on 19 or 20 April and on 20 or 21 May fall at a change of sign, and the hour decides it, which a birth chart works out from the date, time and place. Being fixed does not mean the Sun lingers in Taurus: the word describes the settled middle of a season, not a speed.

What this page claims

This page sets out how Western astrology reads Taurus and where each part of that reading comes from. It describes a vocabulary rather than a person, and it predicts nothing about anybody born with the Sun, the Moon or the ascendant in Taurus.