Almagest

The library · The signs

Taurus

general summary for a strong Taurus placement

What the tradition reads

Taurus is the fixed sign of earth, the sign that follows Aries as the zodiac's first taste of stability after its first taste of motion. Its ruling planet is Venus, and where Aries claims urgency, the tradition reads Taurus as claiming endurance: patience, persistence, and an attachment to what already exists rather than a hunger to begin something new. Alan Leo's Astrology For All describes Taurus natives as slow, plodding, patient, enduring, and remarkably conservative, possessing immense physical and mental vitality that becomes, when turned toward pure self interest, an equally immense obstinacy; the sign's strongest wills, Leo writes, are born under Taurus, and its people rarely waste their forces the way the more scattering fire signs do. The tradition credits Taurus with steadiness, tenacity, and a love of comfort and the good things of life, alongside a slowness to anger that, once roused, becomes formidable. Taurus governs the second house in the natural wheel, the house of possessions and personal resources, and the sign is read accordingly as the zodiac's instinct for building and holding value, whether material, sensory or emotional. Its shadow is possessiveness and a stubbornness that refuses even useful change; its gift is a reliability that other signs, more restless, depend on without quite matching.

The story

Taurus's bull is older than any single myth attached to it: the Mesopotamians who first mapped this stretch of sky called it the Great Bull of Heaven, and the constellation is bound up with bull worship across several ancient cultures long before the Greeks gave it a story of their own. The Greek telling that has lasted longest concerns Zeus, who desired the Phoenician princess Europa and transformed himself into a tame white bull to approach her unnoticed among her father's herds. Drawn by the animal's gentleness, Europa climbed onto its back, at which point the bull walked into the sea and swam with her all the way to Crete; only there did Zeus reveal his true form, and Europa became the island's first queen. Zeus is said to have set the shape of the white bull among the stars afterward, in memory of the crossing. The myth gives the fixed earth sign a story about disguise and abduction rather than about patience, but the tradition reads the constellation's endurance in its own way: a bull that carried its burden the entire distance across open water without breaking stride, exactly the steadiness Taurus is asked to represent.

Written from

Corpus key sign:Taurus.