Aries-Taurus Threshold
A fire must be fed.
Fire is the stuff of stars, the lightest and quickest of the elements — and fire is so hungry. How do you sustain a bright belief, a burning devotion, a glimmering connection? How do you give it form? Taurus responds to the fire of Aries with the food of the earth.
It’s a long drop from Aries to Taurus. We fall from the heights of star-fire, down through air and water, down, down, down, to fertile earth. Feel that thud. Feel the land reach up and hold you. Reaching up to you with presence and seeming solidity, while actually teeming with movement too slow and small for you to sense. Taurus is a fixed sign. A holding sign. A forming sign. Taurus is how earth holds and gives shape to fire. It is spring.
This thud from fire to earth is the story of Taurus. Because Taurus is at once celestial fire and terrestrial soil, in more ways than I realized.
The Goddess
When I think of Taurus, I go straight for the earth. Cows and meadows. Muscle, big eyes, crescent horns, inertia, fecundity. Simple, enriching sensual pleasure. The chewing and chewing and chewing cows do. To soak, marinate, soften. The speed of Aries, that momentum required to burst through winter, comes to a gravitational slow-down, to a pleasure-heft in Taurus. To bask, relish, linger, luxuriate — these words of pleasure require a shift in speed, a shift in our experience of time itself.
In a culture intent on urgency, Taurean approaches are refreshing and nourishing. However, this depiction of slow and pleasant is far from complete. It’s important to remember Venus rules Taurus and she expresses a wide spectrum of power, rage, and care. Taurus is no less about power than Aries is. Taurus is about wealth and how we define it. Agricultural societies measured their wealth in cows. To have access to bulls and cows was to have milk, butter, ghee, and cheese. To have access to bulls and cows was a guarantee of earthly nourishment and prosperity.
In the ancient world, bulls were more than 6 feet tall and they were aggressive. Their scale, strength, and sexual vigor made them symbols of divinity, of the gods themselves (Rosenberg, 2012). In Mesopotamian cultures, artists added horns to the heads of gods, like halos, to distinguish the divine from other figures in their work (White, 2011). And the bull most associated with the Taurus constellation was the Bull of Heaven, an enormous, dangerous celestial creature unleashed by the goddess of love, fertility, and war.
The Bull of Heaven
The story of The Bull of Heaven comes from the Epic of Gilgamesh. In this tale, the goddess Ishtar says to the hero: “Come, Gilgamesh, be you my bridegroom! Grant me your fruits, O Grant me!” But he rejects her. She rages and brings the Bull of Heaven to destroy Gilgamesh’s home city, Urduk. The Bull had been living in the celestial realm and fed on the celestial grasses along the horizon. Ishtar knows that when the Bull of Heaven is brought down, where it cannot feed as it should, the Bull will wreak destruction upon the land. This is celestial fire coming to the earth. And it is so hungry. When Ishtar brings the Bull to Urduk, “in its insatiable hunger, [the Bull] devoured the pastures and palm groves, and drank the rivers dry” (White, 2011). The land was destroyed.
Stories like this — hero rejects a goddess's sexual advances, goddess flies into rage, and seems to have an outsized, violent reaction — are common in myths across the world. But these sexual rejections are not individual; they are ecological. This is a sacred rite rebuffed; balance collapsed. As I described in my Pisces to Aries Threshold post, Aries was associated with the sacred marriage rites between the king and Ishtar (who is the land, who is Inanna, who is Aphrodite, who is Venus). The ritual marriage would promote “the fertility and fecundity of all nature” (White, 2011). With Gilgamesh, we see that ritual is not held. And the goddess rages and the land is brought to ruin. All the fertility associated with Ishtar and bull is drained dry.
Aries initiates the vow. Taurus keeps it — or doesn’t. Goddess-as-land responds in kind.
The description of Uruk destroyed reminds me of an essay Robin Wall Kimmerer wrote about nature’s gift economy and generosity. Kimmerer writes: “When the gift is dishonored, the outcome is always material as well as spiritual. Disrespect the water and the springs dry up. Waste the corn and the garden grows barren” (2020). Taurus season seems like a good time to ask questions about reciprocity and exchange. In what ways might we be turning away the goddess (pleasure, love, the gifts of nature, the gift of being part of an ecosystem)?
I’ve been reading The Healing Power of Minerals, Special Nutrients and Trace Elements by Paul Bergner. In this book, Bergner describes how commercial farming has stripped the soil of nutrients by not leaving some plants behind to die and sink their minerals back into the earth, and by not allowing the earth to have fallow times. We must leave things behind so more will come. We must share if we expect to have more. We must share because it is true wealth. That is one way we sleep with the goddess.
In the end, Gilgamesh destroyed the Bull of Heaven. As a taunt, his beloved companion Enkidu threw a piece of the dismembered Bull at Ishtar. The goddess, in deep grief, “assembled the courtesans, prostitutes, and harlots / over the Bull of Heaven's haunch she began rites of mourning” (The Epic of Gilgamesh, 2003). This story will be echoed in the death of another monster-bull, the Minotaur, whose name was Asterion. Asterion means “starry” (and just so happens to be the fixed star conjunct my Ascendant degree). In the mysteries rites, the Minotaur was “a bull and star at the same time” (Kerényi, 1976). This story is echoed again in the rites of Dionysus, the god of life-itself, who is called “the cow’s son,” “worthy bull,” δικέρωτα "two-horned," ταυρωπόν “bull-faced.” Bull sacrifice featured prominently in Dionysus rituals and stood in for the god himself, the god who dies and lives and dies and lives.
With Venus, we mourn the Bull of Heaven. With Dionysus's maenads, we mourn the loss of the bull-faced one and rejoice in his return. These stories fold in on each other, double-backing, echoing, shedding skin and regenerating. The bull is a star. The bull is life itself. The bull is power and fertility. The bull is an oath made to the land and so each other. It echoes and echoes so that we hear it again.
If Taurus is about prosperity and pleasure shared, then it is also about a different kind of security we might find. Here is Kimmerer again: "Security is ensured by nurturing the bonds of reciprocity. You can store meat in your own pantry or in the belly of your brother. Both have the result of keeping hunger at bay but with very different consequences for the people and for the land which provided that sustenance."
I welcome the Sun’s entrance into Taurus. The fire of Aries must be fed. You too are starlit fire. Everything here is. The only way to be fed is to feed the earth too. To keep oaths to Venus. To revel in the land that feeds you. To leave some gifts behind, give some away, and feel the flow, ῥέω (rhea), between.
References
The Epic of Gilgamesh. (2003). Penguin Publishing Group: United Kingdom.
Bergner, P. (1997). The Healing Power of Minerals, Special Nutrients and Trace Elements. Prima Health: Rocklin, CA.
Kerényi, C. (1976). Dionysos: Archetypal Image of Indestructible Life. Princeton University Press: Princeton, NJ.
Kimmerer, R. (2020). “The Serviceberry: An Economy of Abundance.” Emergence Magazine. https://emergencemagazine.org/essay/the-serviceberry/
Rosenberg, D. (2012). Secrets of the Ancients Skies, Volume 1. Ancient Skies Press: New York, NY.
White, G. (2011). Babylonian Star-Lore: An Illustrated Guide to the Star-lore and Constellations of Ancient Babylonia. Solaria Publications: London.
