♉ Taurus

Taurus is the ground of the zodiac: steady, sensual and patient. It builds slowly, savours the physical world, and won't be rushed off what it values.

Taurus at a glance

• DatesApril 20 – May 20
• ElementEarth
• ModalityFixed
• Ruling planetVenus
• PolarityNegative
• ArchetypeThe Builder / The Gardener

Taurus dates, to the minute

The Sun is in Taurus from about 20 April to 20 May. The exact moment moves by up to a day from one year to the next, because a year is not a whole number of days. These are the moments the Sun crosses into Taurus and out again, computed by the same engine that casts every chart on this site.

Times are Universal Time (UTC). Your own clock can put the change on the day before or the day after. Born on one of these days? The Sun sign then depends on the minute, and a chart cast with your birth time settles it.

What Taurus is like

Taurus is the first sign that has to keep something. Aries starts; Taurus is what happens once the thing that got started needs feeding, tending and defending, which is slower work and much less applauded.

It thinks through the senses. A Taurus judgement about a person, a room or an idea usually arrives as a physical response before it arrives as an opinion, and it holds. This is the sign least likely to be talked out of anything, partly from stubbornness and mostly because the first impression was made somewhere words cannot reach.

The pace is deliberate, which is not the same as slow. Taurus will not move at a speed that would make it careless with something it values, and most of what looks like resistance is exactly that: a refusal to be hurried past the part that matters.

Fixed earth. It stays, and it makes things that stay.

In the body, Taurus is linked to the neck, throat and thyroid.

What it costs

What Taurus keeps, it keeps past the point of use. The grip that holds a friendship through a bad decade will hold a job, a habit or a room long after the pleasure has gone out of it, and the sign rarely notices the year that happened.

And comfort is a real appetite, not a small one. Taurus can build a life so pleasant that nothing in it ever has to change. That is not a failure of character; it is the appetite doing precisely what it is for.

The counterweight is already in the sign. Taurus knows the difference between what it values and what it merely owns, better than almost anyone. It just has to be asked.

Your Sun sign is one placement of ten

One planet in ten. If you have read this page as a description of yourself, you have read about a tenth of a chart.

The Moon is in a sign of its own, and Mercury, Venus and Mars are each in theirs. A Taurus Sun with an Aquarius Moon is restless underneath a steady surface and usually knows it. What a chart holds is the tension, never the resolution of it.

Born with the Sun in Taurus

Twelve of the most looked-up people among the famous charts on this site, each with the Sun in Taurus at any hour of their birthday:

Each one is a full chart, with the Moon and every planet, so you can see how differently the same Sun sign sits in twelve lives.

Where Taurus sits in your chart, whatever your sign

The twelve signs are all present in every chart, Taurus included, whether or not anything is standing in it.

Traditionally it is read as the ground you will not be hurried across. Find yours, and see whether the thing you are slowest about is also the thing you would defend first.

Taurus on the eastern horizon at the minute you were born makes a Taurus rising sign, a different placement from a Taurus Sun and one that needs your birth time: what a rising sign is.

Taurus season, in the sky

The Sun is in the sign Taurus from late April to late May. It is not standing in front of the constellation Taurus while it is there, and the gap is the interesting part.

The tropical zodiac is measured from the equinox, and the equinox has been sliding backwards against the stars for as long as anybody has kept records: roughly one degree every seventy-two years. So the Sun in the sign of the Bull currently stands against the stars of the Ram. You can check it from the other end: Aldebaran, the red eye of the constellation Taurus, now falls at 10 degrees of the sign Gemini.

Venus, the sign's ruler

Taurus is ruled by Venus, and Venus in a chart is taste: what you find beautiful, what you will pay for, what you keep.

Venus rules Libra too, and behaves quite differently in each. Libra's Venus wants agreement. Taurus's Venus wants the thing itself, in the hand, and is perfectly content to like it alone.

Taurus compatibility

Taurus with Aries · Taurus · Gemini · Cancer · Leo · Virgo · Libra · Scorpio · Sagittarius · Capricorn · Aquarius · Pisces.

A pairing of Sun signs is the coarsest version of compatibility. Two whole charts compared planet by planet is where the detail is.

Taurus also touches

money, food, touch, nature, comfort, possessions, music, stubbornness, endurance.

A question to sit with

What feels like enough to you, and are you letting yourself have it?