Bull from Heaven or Minotaur Below the Castle: Taurus Mythology for the Lunar Eclipse

Hey everyone, this is Adam Elenbaas from Nightlight Astrology, and today, we are back to take another look at this weekend's upcoming eclipse in the sign of Taurus. This is a lunar eclipse happening on October 28, 2023, and today we are going to look at a passage from Liz Greene's book The Astrology of Fate from a section called The Myths of the Zodiac in order to illuminate the mythology of the sign of Taurus. What are the archetypal dimensions of this sign that may be relevant to us as we go into an eclipse weekend with the moon, the lunar eclipse in the sign of Taurus. So that's our agenda for today. 

Before we get into it, don't forget to like and subscribe. I'd love to hear your thoughts and reflections as we're approaching this eclipse, especially reflections on what you've learned from the Taurus eclipses over the past year and a half. If you want, you can find a transcript of today's talk on the website nightlightastrology.com. 

When you are over there, do not forget that we are in promotional mode right now for my upcoming class, Ancient Astrology for the Modern Mystic. If you click on the Courses page and go to the first-year course, you can learn all about it. It starts on November 18. So it's coming up really soon. We still have spots available with the need-based tuition. I'll go over that in a minute. 

We are also having some alumni come on this week to talk about the program and, more in general, about astrological education and astrological learning and what makes ancient astrology a little different from other forms of astrology. Not better or worse. Just what makes it what's what's make it what why is this so unique? 

Ancient astrology really completely grabbed my heart, my mind, and my soul when I started studying it because of how deeply it gets into the question of why. Where did this come from? Why did it ever come to be a thing? What did ancient astrologers believe? Where does the idea of a sign, a house, the planets, aspects? Where does any of it come from? What's the underlying philosophy? 

If you understand the why, you have a powerful tool that can help you utilize all of the craft elements of astrology intuitively; personally, it comes from you. It doesn't come from memorizing techniques. 

In fact, there was an astrologer named Firmicus Maternus who was writing a letter to students of astrology, and in it, he said, If you have been transformed inside through your consciousness by the subject that will make you more successful than having memorized all the techniques in our textbook and that's really in my humble opinion, that's what makes this program so good is that we're trying over the years to make a program that is better and better and better. 

We've refined it and made it better every year, specifically at helping people have a transformational experience while studying and an experience of the why behind everything that gives you a personal sense of ownership and freedom when you're actually looking at charts and, to me, that's the most magical thing that ancient astrology has given me personally, and I know that you'll be excited when you study it and learn about it. 

Anyway, there are 30 classes on the year. We break out in between sessions, and you have optional tutoring groups you can attend with our staff. We have interactive group forum discussions led by staff; we have a bunch of guest teachers that come in outside of our major curriculum. There's a ton of bonus material, there's a workbook, there are optional quizzes, and there's an optional certification exam for people who are interested in trying to make this a professional practice. 

We have three years' worth of curriculum plus an extra year of horary curriculum. So there's a lot of material here that we have for people who want to go professional. The early bird payment saves you $500; there's a payment plan if you want and the need-based tuition. 

The need-based tuition is for people who want to study, they're like, I want to dive into this, but I have budget restrictions, and whatever the case is, we think that people who can afford it will look and say, I can afford that and people who say I want to do this, but I can't afford it for x y&z reasons will use the tuition assistance and we've trusted people to be discerning and not take advantage of that and we have had seen really good results over 13 years of doing this. 

So, if you are in need of a little bit of help to make it happen, use the tuition assistance, and we'd be glad to work with you and make sure that no one's priced out of studying a sacred subject. Okay, well, that is our promotion for today. 

So, let's go ahead and review what we're actually looking at before we talk about the eclipse. We have an eclipse coming up on October 28, that is, this Saturday, in the sign of Taurus. It's a lunar eclipse, and exalted lunar eclipse lunar eclipses are always full moons. And this one is moving into conjunction with Jupiter; Jupiter and Uranus are co-present. It's opposite Mercury and Mars in Scorpio. 

So, one last eclipse across the Taurus Scorpio axis, we talked about the history of these eclipses and yesterday's video; if you haven't watched that, I would recommend going back and starting there. 

Today, I want to talk about the tensions, the archetypal mythological tensions that are inherent in this sign, and there's not just one set of world myths that belong to this sign. This sign speaks to an archetypal dimension of life that people in all different mythological traditions all over the planet have talked about for 1000s of years. So these are just examples that come from the Greek tradition mostly. 

But at any rate, now settle in and grab some popcorn if you're if you're watching in the evening, I guess. I don't think popcorn is very good first thing in the morning. Although there is an argument to be made about stale popcorn leftover, like if you just leave a bowl of popcorn out overnight, it sounds gross, but I don't think there might be anything I love more than a bowl of, like, one-night left-out popcorn. That's weird. 

Anyway, so Taurus. This comes from Liz Greene's book The Astrology of Fate. Liz Greene is considered one of the modern masters of psychological astrology and studied with Carl Jung and James Hillman. She's just a profound writer and had 1000s and 1000s of clients as a psychological counseling astrologer, and is really famous for having a really deep and nuanced understanding of ancient mythology and its relation to the 12 signs and the planets and so forth. So here's what she has to say about Taurus from the section of her book in The Astrology of Fate called Myth and The Zodiac. That's about four pages long, so you're, you know, just sit back, enjoy, and then afterward, I'll give my own reflections as an honorary member of the Taurus rising club. 

Mother of God! no lady thou: Common woman of common earth! Mary Elizabeth Coleridge 

Three different mythic bulls claim the honor of being associated with Taurus. One is the white bull that carried Europa from her home in Tyre to Crete; this bull was Zeus himself, transformed into animal form for the usual purpose of abducting or seducing the woman of his choice. The second is a cow rather than a bull, the animal form of 10, another of Zeus' paramours, whom Hera in her jealousy turned into bovine shape. The third and most famous is the Cretan bull with which Pasiphae, the wife of King Minos of Crete, fell in love, and which fathered the monstrous Minotaur that the hero Theseus had to kill. We will consider the symbolism of the bull itself and of 'cow-eyed' Aphrodite-Venus the planetary ruler of Taurus, in due course, but first, let us begin with the story of the Cretan bull, which seems to have profound bearing on Taurus' fate. 

King Minos was the son of Europa and Zeus, himself the child of the god turned bull. He was King of Crete and wielded great power from his island seat over all the Greek islands and parts of the mainland. When young, he contended with his brothers Rhadamanthys and Sarpedon for the throne and asserted his claim by divine right. He prayed to the god Poseidon, lord of the sea and of earthquakes, to send a bull out of the sea as a sign, sealing this prayer with a vow to sacrifice the animal immediately 

as an offering and a symbol of service. Poseidon, who is also portrayed in bull shape, complied; the beast duly appeared, and Minos took the throne. But when he beheld the majesty of the beast, he thought what an advantage it would be to possess such a creature in his herd and risked a merchant's substitution, which he supposed the god would not notice or mind. Offering on Poseidon's altar the finest white bull that he owned, he added the sacred sea bull to his herd. 

Poseidon, however, was not amused at the substitution. He retaliated at the blasphemy by enlisting Aphrodite to inspire in Minos' wife Pasiphae an ungovernable passion for the bull. She prevailed upon Daedalus, the celebrated artist-craftsman, to make her a wooden cow in which she might receive the bull in sexual union. Daedalus performed the work, Pasiphae entered the cow, and the bull in turn entered Pasiphae. Of this union was born the Minotaur, a hideous monster with a human body and bull's head, which fed upon human flesh. Minos in his fear and shame hired Daedalus to construct a labyrinth in which the foul creature could be hidden, and into which groups of living youths and maidens were left for the Minotaur's meals. 

He had converted a public event to personal gain, whereas the whole sense of his investiture as king had been that he was no longer a mere private person. The return of the bull should have symbolised his absolutely selfless submission to the functions of his role. The retaining of it represented, on the other hand, an impulse to egocentric self-aggrandisement. And so the king 'by the grace of God' became the dangerous tyrant Holdfast - out for himself. Just as the traditional rites of passage used to teach the individual to die to the past and be reborn to the future, so the great ceremonials of investiture divested him of his private character and clothed him in the mantle of his vocation . . . By the sacrilege of the refusal of the rite, however, the individual cut himself as a unit off from the larger unit of the whole community, and so the One was broken into the many, and these then battled against each other - each out for himself - and could be governed only by force. 

Campbell goes on to describe this figure of the tyrant-monster who is so common in fairy tales (frequently a giant, like Fafner and Fasolt in Wagner's Ring); the hoarder of the general benefit, the monster avid for the greedy rights of 'my and mine'. It is interesting to note that Hitler was a Taurean, as were Lenin and Marx. 50 is Queen Elizabeth II, who seems to have understood to a remarkable degree the deeper meaning of her investiture as Queen, and remains a symbol of stability and moral firmness for the whole of the United Kingdom. But the tyrant-monster of which Campbell writes is the challenge of Taurus, its dark face which must at some point be met in life. The earthy power which allows the tyrant to accrue his wealth, as Minos gathered wealth and power over the seas, is the gift of Taurus; but the dilemma lies in his relationship with the god, and which god it is he serves, the deity or himself. The story of Minos ends in a stagnant situation, where a destruc- tive monster lies at the heart of the apparently abundant realm. This situation of stagnation leads inevitably to the coming of Theseus, the hero who must release the deadlock It is a characteristic irony of myth, which we have already met in Aries, that Theseus - who, like Minos, is a king and divinely fathered - is the child of the bull god Poseidon. The creature which he must confront at the heart of the labyrinth is the dark, bestial form of his own spiritual father, as well as the symbol of Minos' sin. Thus Minos, his Minotaur, and the hero Theseus are bound by the same symbol of the bull, for they are aspects of the same archetypal core. And Minos and Theseus are in a sense doubles of each other, for one commits the sin against the god, while the other must redeem it. 

But what is the bull, the symbol of power which must be dedicated to the god? We have seen, in the imagery of Aries, that the ram is connected with the hidden God, with phallic power and potency and the omnipotence of the Father. The bull is an altogether different animal. He is not fiery; he is earthy, and while he is connected with the fertility of the earth, this is not the same as the fertile creativity of heaven. In the Buddhist tale of the taming of the bull (which is sometimes portrayed as an ox), a man is shown in the various stages of development, where he must learn to tame the recalcitrant bull and where ultimately, man and bull vanish and are revealed as part of the same divine unity . The bull is not evil, but if it is allowed to run the man, then it may lead him to destruction, for he is at the mercy of his desires. But repression likewise is not an answer. Man and bull must perform a dance where each comes to respect the other. In these Eastern images the problem of the relation between the ego and the instincts is portrayed, and this problem lies at the centre of Taurus' pattern of development. 

Other mythic stories also portray the struggle with the bull. One of the most powerful is the Zoroastrian god-man Mithras, the Redeemer, who is always portrayed in his famous cap with his hands about the bull's throat. Herakles also must conquer a bull. These motifs of the conquering and sacrifice of the bull seem to deal with submission to a greater Self, and the realisation that the power of the bull is not 'mine' but must be directed towards a more transpersonal goal. Whether we consider bull or, as in the myth of 10, cow, we are faced with the same animal. The primary association with this creature is, not surprisingly, the goddess Aphrodite, who is called 'cow-eyed' and whose nature may tell us a good deal about the meaning of this beast which it is Taurus' fate to encounter and tame. 

Aphrodite-Venus has more 'personality' and clearer outlines than virtually any other Greek goddess. She is not just an abstract concept meant to personify some dimly sensed order in the cosmos. She is terribly alive, and this quality transmits itself from the sculptures of her which we have inherited, dating back before the Greek era to the great goddess Ishtar of the Middle East. She is gifted with generous and carnal affection and a complete lack of ambivalence about sex. Paul Friedrich, in his book On the Meaning of Aphrodite, calls this 'sunlit sexuality', in comparison with female deities such as Artemis and Athene for whom the sexual act is equated with pollution. Where the body is a pollution to most of the Olympians, it is sacred to Aphrodite. This is in part why she is usually portrayed nude, where the other goddesses are almost always covered up. She seems to embody naked, unashamed nature. She also acts as a mediator between the world of the immortals and the world of men, just as Zeus does, for she is happy to mate with mortals. Generally a mortal man who has sexual relations with a goddess is punished by death or castration or worse. We have met an example of this in Ixion, who was punished by being bound forever to a fiery wheel for his attempt to seduce the goddess Hera. But Aphrodite is a potential lover for any god or hero who catches her fancy. In this sense she is prepared to come into incarnation, to relate to the world of living men and earthly things. She can be looked upon in her nudity by mortals; therefore she is accessible to human experience, unlike gods such as Apollo and Artemis who remain elusive and punish those who peer too closely.

 

Aphrodite is an active female: She takes the active role in wooing 

and seduction, love and love-making. She is never raped or assaulted by a male; she is so powerful sexually that this would be impossible. In no way does she resemble the victim-like women whom Zeus and the other male gods pursue, abduct, rape and humiliate. Aphrodite is an image of relative sexual equality, a rare being for a time in history when the prevailing collective view leaned in the opposite direction. She is also the patroness of courtesans, although she presides equally enthusiastically over passionate sex within marriage. While Hera, queen of the gods, stands for the structures and moral codes which bind the institution of marriage within the collective, Aphrodite embodies its conjugal joy and fertility. Procreation, desire and satisfaction, adornment and culture, beauty and erotic arts: all these belong to her. Her love-making is a civilised art, in contrast to the physical violence and rapacity of Ares-Mars. Paul Friedrich writes: 

The drives of sexuality are natural; on the other hand, sophisticated love-making is highly cultural. Aphrodite mediates between the two, 'puts them together'. Or, better, she does not make them identical but interrelates them and makes them overlap to a high degree. To put it yet another way, we can agree that she is a 'goddess of rapture' but ought to recognise that this rapture harmoniously blends natural and cultural ingredients.

Aphrodite's gifts, however, have a double edge . The arts of love and the satisfaction of desire can unite man and woman in harmonious sexuality and a happy wedded life. But on the other hand they can generate rivalries, jealousies and passions that acutely threaten the relations between individuals, kinship groups and even nations. Thus Minos' passion for the sacred bull leads to his wife's overwhelming passion for the same bull, and the monster that results becomes the canker that rots the kingdom from within. Even the cow, which seems such a peaceable creature, can lead to chaos and destruction. In the early cosmogonies Aphrodite has no mother, but is born of the union between the sea and the severed genitals of Ouranos after he is castrated by his son Krenos. This suggests that whatever Aphrodite is, she is not maternal in the ordinary sense, although she is fertile. Perhaps it would be more appropriate to say that she is in no sense a wife, although she favours the physical joys of marriage. Friedrich suggests that she is the most 'solar' of the goddesses: 

Artemis and Hera are strongly lunar, the former typically moving in the moonlit midnight air, the latter often depicted with a lunar crescent. Their symbolism has rich antecedents in Old European civilisation, and there is of course the more general psychological association between the moon and menstruation, virginity, and the female principle in general . . . It is Aphrodite who more than any other goddess is unambiguously solar in many passages, and this solarity is naturally connected with her goldenness. Note that she seduces Anchises by daylight. There is a deep-lying opposition or contrast between her sunlit sexuality and Artemis' furtive and moonlit anxiety and hostility as regards carnal love. 

All this paints a vivid portrait of one aspect of our bull. One may well ask why Theseus, or Mithras, must then subdue it, for Aphrodite seems a benign goddess with qualities which our present culture badly needs. But it is due to her wiles that the Trojan War began, and the havoc she causes is always a threat to relationship, whether on an individual level or a collective one. She is a most ambiguous goddess. In Sparta, she was worshipped as a bloody battle goddess, and her Egyptian counterpart Hathor, the cow-headed goddess, likewise was said to thrive on blood and slaughter. Perhaps we need to look again at Hitler, who not only had the sun in Taurus but also Libra rising, and was therefore doubly ruled by Venus. The Buddhist formula seems to be a most appropriate one: Do not slay the bull, but learn to dance with it in a developing pattern of mutual respect, so that the bull becomes more human and the human more animal. 

I have met many Taureans who have attempted to cope with the potential problems of the bull, its powerful passions and its single-minded covetousness, by 'splitting', i.e. withdrawing into the intellect in order to avoid the threat of the overwhelming senses. This is of course no solution; it is what Minos did by stuffing the Minotaur into the labyrinth. The body then usually rebels against the tyranny of the mind. Likewise I have met Taureans who are imprisoned in their senses, where the bull or cow runs the man or woman; and this too satisfies neither bull nor human partner, for then we are back with King Minos who repudiates the Self and attempts to possess for his own gratification what is not his, with tragic results. 

We have so far dealt with the female aspects of the bull. But Aphrodite is part of a pair in myth, and although she is no wife in the conventional sense, nevertheless she is married: to the strange god Hephaistos, who is called Vulcan in Latin, and who was given to her as a husband by Zeus and Hera. Whenever gods are paired in this way in myth, I feel that something is implied about two halves of a single archetypal pattern. Although the marriage of Aphrodite and Hephaistos is an uncomfortable one, a marriage it is nonetheless; he is her 'right' spouse. We must therefore consider him, for he also can give us insights into the nature and fate of Taurus. 

Hephaistos is the divine smith, and he is mirrored by the smith gods of many cultures, for he is ugly and lame. He has much in common with the Teutonic dwarfs, for he is a creature of earth and his skill lies in his artistry and his physical power. According to the tale, he was so weak and sickly at birth that his disgusted mother Hera dropped him from the heights of Olympus to rid herself of the embarrassment of such a pitiful son . I have met this sad pattern in the early lives of many Taureans, whose families had hoped for something more flamboyant, more brilliant, and more effervescent than the slow and earthy creature which the Taurean child so often is. Hephaistos survived this misadventure because he fell into the sea, where the sea goddess Thetis took care of him and helped him to set up his first smithy. He rewarded her kindness with many beautiful and useful objects. Eventually Hera saw Thetis wearing a lovely brooch which Hephaistos had made, and upon finding out that it was her lost son who was the creator, summoned him back to Olympus where she offered him a finer smithy, married him to Aphrodite, and made a great fuss of him. Eventually they patched up their quarrel, and he even went so far as to reproach Zeus for his treatment of Hera when the king of the gods hung his wife by her wrists from Heaven because she had rebelled against him. Zeus in anger heaved him down from Olympus a second time, and he was a whole day falling. 

On striking the earth, he broke his broke both legs and became lame; afterward he could only walk with golden leg- supports. Graves says of him: 

Hephaistos is ugly and ill-tempered, but has great power in his arms and shoulders, and all his work is of matchless skill. He once made a set of golden mechanical women to help him in his smithy; they can even talk, and undertake the most difficult tasks he entrusts to them. And he owns a set of three-legged tables with golden wheels, ranged around his workshop, which can run by themselves to a meeting of the gods, and back again. 

This is a curious marriage, between the beautiful, indolent and mischievous Aphrodite and her ugly, ill-formed yet gifted spouse. She despises his ugliness and is forever unfaithful to him, yet she cannot be parted from him. I think that this pair of figures forms an uneasy core to the sign of Taurus, for there is that in the sign which possesses the marvellous skill, power and ingenuity of Hephaistos yet which is slow, clumsy and unglamorous, and there is also that which embodies beauty and which despises its own physical imperfection. Whether the Taurean acts this strange marriage out through an actual partner, or whether it forms an inner conflict between the idealism and the earthiness of the sign, nevertheless this marriage is a given, a kind of fate. The ego perhaps needs to come to terms with the bestial bull; but the bull itself is divided, between its coarseness and its grace, and all three comprise the daimon which infuses this deceptively simple sign. 

That's a beautiful reading. I so enjoy her ability to craft through myth and metaphor, all of these very interesting connections. There were some people, when I read the Liz Greene section on Libra, who seemed to think that I was presenting it as the gospel, and then they felt like they had to go and say that they didn't think that it was the gospel. 

Just so you know, you know, take it or leave it. She is one of you know, dozens and dozens of interesting astrologers that I have developed my own understanding and relationship to the archetype of Taurus over the years. So I don't present this like, here's the truth, and now just take it and go. No, but for your consideration, Liz Greene is right about that. 

So a couple of things as a Taurus rising the dance between bull and Minotaur The Taming of the ox or the bull in the Buddhist metaphor has been so apt for myself and for my wife, who's a double Taurus, and many people that I've seen over the years as a counseling astrologer who are working with a stellium in Taurus, Taurus Rising Sun or Moon in Taurus, etc. 

I think, for example, of my grandfather, my grandfather had Mars and Jupiter in Taurus, right on the midheaven, and he was he, he, you know, he had some stories to tell about his time in the military in the war and so that was like, you know, very Mars-Jupiter kind of thing. 

But also he was like, you know, really, really industrious. He built a lot of stuff. He kept bees, he had an apple orchard, and he had a Christmas tree farm. He managed to find and build artesian well ponds, find the artesian wells, and then dig them out and build artesian well ponds on his land. He built his own home; he built his own cabin. It was just such a Taurus in that respect; Mars Jupiter like they want to build, so he's very industrious. 

But he also struggled mightily with food, became overweight, developed what is it called adult-onset diabetes, the kind that can come because he wasn't eating very well, and later in life, he developed diabetes as really as sort of a result of that, and I don't know, maybe genetic stuff, too, but and then he struggled with alcohol, and with I don't know if my grandfather ever had an affair or not, I suspect he probably did. 

But at any rate, I watched him as a kid, always grappling between the Minotaur and the bull. On the one hand, his relationship with the land and nature really was inspiring to me as a kid. He had a very soft Venusian, I mean, keeping bees, an apple orchard, a Christmas tree farm, pumpkins, and he would harvest all of it and just donate it to his church or, you know, whatever. 

So people in the neighborhood would come over to get their Christmas trees from his Christmas tree farm, and he wouldn't charge anything, you know, or maybe just something very, like a donation type of thing. So I watched him just be such a builder of beautiful things, and he was always outside. He was always in nature. He taught me to fish. You know, obviously, before, when my dad was a kid, he taught my dad how to hunt. 

He was also driven by the Taurean. Like, like Venusian-like lust, and he was an alcoholic at one point, and then had to get sober, right, and he was always dealing with dietary stuff and on and on. I think he was as a kid before I knew anything about astrology. He was my first, like, bull slash Minotaur figure. 

So, I think of him a lot when I think about what Liz Greene was saying. But I think about myself, too. There's always been, like, the cycle, and you know, it's like really familiar to my wife and I because she's a double Taurus, too. We say when we've reached the place where we've turned into a Minotaur, we'll look at each other, and we'll both be like, yeah, it's time to get back on the train. The train where? To Healthytown, USA. 

It's like, just that tendency to go through patterns of product productivity and patterns of stagnation, patterns of indulgence, followed by patterns of moderation, you know, finding habits that work and keep peace and stability and ease and temperance and then losing those patterns and devolving and getting lost in the labyrinth where there's a hungry Minotaur chasing me. 

That's been my dance as a Taurus rising for sure. I don't know about you guys. I'd love to hear your stories, and then there's the other side, where you have this kind of like dichotomy between very sort of productive, industrious, but kind of like slow and stubborn and fixated on things and that kind of dichotomy between being good at stuff and productive, but like, not very attractive. That's a really interesting part as well. 

In fact, when I reflect when, I think about my own grandfather, he was like, he had like, some of the grossest, like personal hygiene, because he just like being outside all the time and he was always dirty, and he was, you know what I mean? Like it was always just caked in just dirt and work and he was, you know, very much like a bowl had been like rolling around in the mud, super productive, doing super beautiful, industrious things. He could build amazingly beautiful things he just never seemed to be as good at, like cleaning up. 

I don't mean that as an offensive thing; it's just like, that's also this weird thing with Taurus, where, like, and I can think about like that even in myself, like, I can be hugely productive. But something there'll be patches of time where, like, I'm super productive, but I like wearing my baseball cap rather than, like, just like taking care of my hair. That's embarrassing. 

The other thing that I would say about Taurus is that there's this duality between being possessed, being possessed by something, and sort of being self-possessed. Self-possessed, to me, would mean that you have a thoughtful conversation within yourself and your own choices and habits of behavior. Habits of indulgence, patterns of your appetites possessed, on the other hand, would mean that something has taken over you. 

Like, I'll give you an example, when I'm in the basement, doing stuff, she sits down there, near the there's like a sliding glass door, and she sits and watches squirrels. Like she is in heaven, just like staring at the squirrels, and also, like, I kind of feel bad for her, you know, like, we don't have a fence. So I can't just, like, let her out, you know. But if I'm like, if I'm sitting there, and I'm going to leave, so I want her to come with me, or I'm going to feed her, take her for a walk. So I need to get her attention, let's say, and I'm like Hilda, Hilda, you know, I'm not gonna say too long because I want to wake her up. But if I'm like, you know, and then fine, she'll just be like, so dialed into her instincts. Right, and it's, I think it would be called, like a prey drive or a prey instinct or something like that. 

She's hungry. You know, she's like, that is that is a squirrel. So I have to clap, do Hilda, and then she'll go, oh, there's a human. Oh, yeah. Oh, a walk. Okay, cool. Like, I'll do something else. That's it, and the way I see that is like, there's totally someone at home with this dog. You know what I mean? I think that's true for any animal, you get to know you're like, it's a person and by person. I mean, it's a soul. It's a being, and they they're, they're conscious like when she's like in instinctual mode. It's like she's possessed by something, and I have to like, boom, boom, come on, and then she'll stop looking at the squirrel and be like, oh, yeah, what are we doing? 

But that's in a sense, that's like what Taurus is dealing with all the time. There's always a glass window you're looking through at the squirrel where the instinctual body has just taken over. Maybe it's not a prey drive. It's more like a pleasure drive. You know, it's what do you want? What do you desire? What would taste good, or what would feel good? It's a little bit more Venusian. But it's hard to snap yourself out of that. So another duality is this duality between self-possession and being possessed by something instinctual, that you, it's really hard to snap out of it, like a program that's running, that's not easy to come out of. Right. 

So anyway, these are some of the dualities inherent in Taurus through the lens of Liz Greene; again, for your consideration, it's not the gospel or anything, and some of my own reflections, this is what we're working with, with the eclipse coming up this weekend. 

Some of us, what we're going to go through is going to be the culmination of things that we've been working on with respect to our bodies, our desires, and the need to have, you know, have we tame the eye have we danced with the bull? You know, are we having that dance with the bull rather than trying to submit it? 

Right, or rather than running the program, and we can't get away from the squirrel watching window. So I think that's the tension we're working within a specific area of our lives. This eclipse will also amplify some of those dualities and tensions, solidifying some of the insights and wisdom, the process of change and growth that we've gone through, and rewards for hard work because lunar eclipses bring things to fruition. It's like the fruits of the cycle are ready to appear. The fruits gonna appear on the tree. What have we grown? What are we going to taste, and what will we what desires may we need to let go of because they're taking over, they're causing stagnation or something like that. 

Okay, so reading hour today, I hope it was fun, and I hope you are having a good week; we will have more to come. We're going to look in particular at the signature of Mercury and Venus opposite Jupiter in this eclipse that's coming up later this week; alright, that's it for today. Take it easy, everyone bye.