Taurus New Moon Meditation for 2004:

The Ethical Gifts of Taurus
By Jean Hinson Lall

Beginning with last month’s Aries New Moon, we are in a period where for the remainder of the year New Moons will fall in the late degrees of each zodiacal sign. This means that the Sun will have completed most of its journey through the sign before the Moon catches up with it. If we think of the New Moon as a time of beginnings, these late-degree New Moons may have an unusual degree of perspective and "maturity," like a couple marrying late in life. The Taurus Moon this week, for example, is conjoining a Sun that has already experienced a First Quarter, Full Moon and Last Quarter lunar phase since it entered Taurus. The Sun’s Taurean sojourn has in fact taken place under the aegis of the April 19 solar eclipse in the last degree of Aries and the May 4 lunar eclipse in Scorpio—signs ruled not by love-goddess Venus but by the gods of war and death, Mars and Pluto. Thus, although the New Moon is by nature forward-looking, and the Taurus New Moon usually peace- and pleasure-oriented, this one may be more retrospective and complicated, if not conflicted, in its mood. Reinforcing this tendency is the fact that Taurus’s ruler, Venus, has just turned retrograde late in Gemini.

Very prominent in the evening sky in recent weeks, Venus had been tracking closely with Mars, then slowing down and making an exact opposition to Pluto at the beginning of May, thus doubling the impact of the Aries and Scorpio eclipses. She will repeat the opposition to Pluto in early June and again in late July.

The image of two cobblers working at their bench points up the link between Venus, ruler of Taurus, and Pisces, which rules the feet. According to astrological tradition, Venus is exalted in Pisces, which means that her nature can be expressed most fully in the sign of sacrificial love and mystical union with the divine. The cobbler’s humble vocation is one I value more and more the older I get, for without well-designed footwear I tire quickly and am ineffective in pursuing my goals, however exalted they may be. In this Sabian symbol the image of the shoemaker is doubled, which fits in well with Venus’s present placement in Gemini, sign of the twins. The doubling of an image suggests a coming to greater awareness through thought, the work of Hermes/Mercury. Venus in Gemini, retrograde, now leads us to reflect and to discriminate regarding questions of love and truth, war and ethics.

Astrology textbooks often try to link knowledge, wisdom and ethics to particular signs, houses and planets, but in reality every one of these has its own wisdom and way of knowing, and each contributes to character, morality and ethics. Last month I mentioned the "shepherding instinct" that seems to arise naturally in Aries. Let’s consider Taurus now. If Venus, the planet of love, reaches her exaltation in Pisces, we must remember that she starts from Taurus, the fixed Earth sign. If she is self-sacrificing and mystical in Pisces, in Taurus she is grounded in worldly existence and bodily truth, the truth mediated by the physical senses and the sense of the beautiful.

Many are the strands in our cultural tradition which hold that truth is accessible only to one who turns away from the body, the world and the senses. Many religious and philosophical teachings exhort us to hate this life (for the sake of a higher life), to repudiate the body, and to mistrust the evidence of our senses. The laws of right conduct are alleged to come from a transcendent source outside and above ourselves rather than being in any way intrinsic to our nature, and morality is viewed as a struggle to overcome the body rather than its fulfillment. A deadly split is thus created between sacred truth and actual life in the world. The body and human attachments are placed under a curse.

Given the present state of the world, we may ask how well this approach to truth and ethics is really working for us. All around us we see horrific cruelty and destruction being visited upon human beings by other human beings, often on the explicit basis of religious principles and ethical ideals. We also see some individuals reacting from a primary level against the wrongs being committed. These are people grounded in the gifts of Taurus, the fundamental knowing of the embodied creature.

How do we know that it is wrong to torture, mutilate, rape or murder another, to destroy his livelihood and blow up his home? We know this not only because moral laws have been handed down to us or imposed by an outside authority, nor because we have logically worked out the necessity of behaving well toward others, but because we live in our own bodies and have their testimony as to what is beneficial and what is hurtful. If we are brought up to treasure our bodies, we realize that every living being is also to be treasured. If we are taught to trust the evidence of our senses, noticing when we are hungry, what tastes good or bitter, what gives us pleasure and comfort, and what is dangerous and damaging, we not only learn to take care of our own needs but to perceive the needs of fellow creatures. If, through pain and suffering, we realize the vulnerability of our own bodies, we are better equipped to respect the fragility of other life forms. If we love our own children, parents, spouses and friends, cherishing their mortal physicality, we are in a better position to grasp that people everywhere feel the same way. We don’t need to ask, "Do the Russians (or the Iraqis) love their children, too?"

People who give themselves joyously to the life of this world have a starting point for ethical thought and behavior. When they witness acts of blatant cruelty, they do not need to consult a rule book or legal statute to determine whether wrongs are being committed; they know by their own visceral reaction, a Venusian response to moral ugliness. Their feet immediately set out on a path of right action; their hands move to protect, to comfort, and to heal. Such a morality of the body does not make philosophical or theological ethics irrelevant, but undergirds it, preventing it from splitting off from the world and being used as a weapon of tyranny.