Taurus 4°

(For last year’s meditation on the Sabian Symbol for this degree:  click here)

I have to start work on our Gemini themed show for this coming Sunday, which is actually a bit early—shows are typically the third Sunday of the month but as May started on a Sunday the third one is the fifteenth, when we are still in Taurus for another five or so days. That said, these shows really are hinged on the transition from one sign to another.

Aries was the premier masculine, objective, active sign, ruled by Mars, the planet named for the uber macho war god whose sigil, the spear and shield, also recalls the male genatalia, arrow emerging from circle. It’s motto is the self evident I am. Then we had Taurus, the premier feminine, subjective, passive sign ruled by Venus, the planet named for the uber femme goddess of love whose sigil, which can be red as a flower with petals or a hand mirror, also recalls the circular womb led to by a canal crossed with a hymen. The Taurus motto is the possessive “I have”. Aries, cardinal fire, is creation, the big bang the spark of life, Taurus is, fixed earth, the garden, Eden, which led to certain temptation.

Gemini, the third and a mutable sign, is a combination of these opposite signs that come before, the magical child, the literal offspring of male and female, the fertilized egg. Picking up from the Taurus flower, Gemini is the winged birds and bees, mutable air, buzzing about, picking up bits and pieces, cross-pollenating the planet with information. A combination of masculine and feminine forces, ruled by planet Mercury, named for the aptly winged god of communication, Greek Hermes from whom we derive the word Hermaphrodite, in that god’s coupling with the goddess of love. Mercury’s sigil, depicts winged capped head of Mercury on a cross, thoughts having wings, while it also recalls a an insect with antennaes attuned to both sending and receiving messages—active and passive; objective and subjective—at once. Gemini’s motto is I Think. Mercury is the mentally manipulative messenger god of communication and all such related words as community and committees, specifically the immediate sort. Immediacy being a commodity of both time and space—Mercury is, well, mercurial and can be nearly everywhere at once, in an instant—he is also the god of immediate surroundings, of brotherhoods, guilds, bands, the market place, the word merchant deriving from his name.

Robin Hood, named for a bird, flitting from tree to tree, and his merry men, is a legendary incarnation of Mercury; as is Robin Goodfellow, Shakespeare’s Puck, the messenger of King Oberon, as Mercury/Hermes is the messenger of Zeus/Jupiter. Peter Pan and his island of lost boys—boon companions. Jack Sparrow, Batman’s Robin, on and on we see this boyish character echoed through our consciousness.

In biblical terms, where as Aries is Genesis and Taurus is the garden of Eden, Gemini is the gift-curse of consciousness as resulted from biting into that forbidden fruit of the knowledge of good and evil—duality!—the twins of Gemini. Good bad, clothed naked, mortal immortal. In biting into that apple we at once were elevated to god consciousness and yet fell from grace being doomed to live a mortal existence. I say why put a tree of forbidden fruit in the first place unless you want we mere humans to trip, stumble and fall from this grace. I’m just saying. It’s like the most obvious foreshadowing.

The Gemini of which we speak of course are the classic Greek Twins Castor and Pollux, one mortal the other divine, of course, same themology as the Judeo-Christian story. And more bird imagery, flight being symbolic of the immortal aspect of our nature, our soul forever taking flight. For you see these so-called twins, who weren’t actually twins with each other at all, were born, hatched from two separate fertilized eggs their mother Leda laid, after she was laid by Zeus in the guise of a swan. They each had twin sisters that hatched along with them however, Clytemnestra and Helen, ultimately, of Troy fame.

Castor and Clytemnestra were mortal and Pollux and Helen were immortal, one egg being fertilized by Leda’s mortal husband, the other by divine Zeus. Okay pin in that.

Myth. Greek myth. Bible myth. It’s all allegory. It’s all archetype. The stories being told are being told right here within us. And the Zodiac brings those stories down to us. The Zodiac, with its myriad mythic associations per sign, point to realities that live within all of us.

It’s not foremost about what Sun sign you are—you’re a Pisces, I’m a Libra—that’s the nitty gritty that we can get into with you on a personal level, but first, there is something, more sweeping, but most essential, about which the Zodiac teaches us about everybody—the underlying truths of all human existence, collective and individual.

Aries and the first house teaches us all, and this is each of us speaking, that: I am a spiritual warrior (for what is up to you); Taurus teaches us that: I have a garden of delights—talents, abilities, innate qualities (which we all have to cultivate); and Gemini teaches us that: I think a full range of thoughts, from the divine to the earthly to, potentially, something lower still, and that my ability to think is my divine power and/or potentially my diabolical undoing. Mercury’s winged cap shows that my thoughts, as an expression of my soul, have wings; but that these can also be devilish horns that can lead to our downfall, if not our damnation.

Copyright 2016 Wheel Atelier Inc. All Rights Reserved.