Venus finished her jaunt through Gemini’s place of stimulating plurality, and entered Cancer on Monday night — where the Moon met the Star of Aphrodite at her own doorstep, setting together in silver slivers on the western firmament.  We are amidst a few days through which Luna lends presence to both Venus and Jupiter, the big planet some ways along in the sign of its exaltation.

The New Moon in Taurus came and went over the weekend as the fixed earth sign’s season sighs through, a layer of resolution to the natural polarity of the Taurus/Scorpio axis and its ouroboric loop.  What is bred in the bones comes out in the flesh, and where the Full Moon in Scorpio two weeks prior revealed yet again the hidden internality of our hadean concerns, these matters have been realized once more in the body of Taurus — center sign of Spring’s inhalation.

As consciousness descends through the head with Aries, so Taurus rules the throat and the first passage by which most nutrients must travel.  As the New Moon waxed through Gemini into the week’s beginning, Mercury departed Taurus to conjoin Uranus, still in the early degrees of its seven-year trek through Gemini and what will certainly bring electric upheaval.  The somatic nature of a rather easeful lunation was lit up with the spark of ingenuity, facility of word and hand lent by the mutable air sign and its ruler Mercury’s return to its yang home, that restless lungful at Spring’s end.

While the quicksilver planet exalts in Virgo, it does have a kind of impish, solar affinity in Gemini different from the earthy tempering of its exaltation.  Mercury’s entry to the sign of the Twins saw its mutual reception with Venus turn momentarily to co-presence, but the Fairer Benefic finished her passage through this shimmering place and entered the Moon’s home of Cancer in near the same breath as Luna.  Fittingly one might feel, my above flicks of them were taken on Monday night at Pittsburgh’s point of highest elevation above sea level.

The Sun’s passage through Taurus likes to pose questions in plain sight about what resonates most with the intelligence of the body, our felt sense of nurture, value, security, and successful ‘building toward’… Taurus sometimes asks that we strip away what complicates the divine birthright of harmonic and pleasurable living.  But so much does.  In a way, elemental Air follows Earth because language tends to come after the sensations from which we abstract it.  Just as Earth follows Fire, because what we reach out and touch grows from the light that smiles upon it.

The third face of Taurus, in which this recent new moon took place, deals with the sowing of seeds and the projection of what one’s harvest will be — a Saturn-ruled decan within Venus’ pastoral gaze, concerned with the relative successes and failures dealt by forces outside one’s control.  With most of the planetary activity at present found across the first four signs of the zodiac, and the weekend’s moon happening in the final days of Taurus season, much of our energy is oriented around new growth and nurturing its development.

Mercury in Gemini is well equipped to navigate the external map, its marks showing different bodies of water stirred by winds of fate and fortune.  Venus in Cancer seems a gentle repose, yet self-protecting.  Mars has left its yang home of Aries for debility in Taurus, though a decidedly pleasure-oriented one.  So many ingresses inside just a day or two, tempered by the lull of a void moon until she entered Cancer minutes after Venus.

Yet distractions are aplenty with these planets varyingly sextile or averse to each other, their rays in communication or lack of sight, and the lunar cycle builds to first quarter with the Moon in Virgo this weekend.  Still, Taurus implies its polarity as things stubbornly, even as no story spoken into suchness can ever truly pass out of being.  These gentle days of Venus and Jupiter in Cancer can help all the more in our receiving, tender memory and the emptying of that which holds it.


—A.B.