Decoding today’s radical Taurus Full Moon.
The Full moon takes place today, November 15, exactly at 24 degrees of Taurus, at 21:28 UT.
Today’s charged Supermoon comes to us on the heels of Saturn in Pisces stationing direct only hours prior — and only four days away from Pluto finally crossing the threshold of Aquarius. Pluto’s sign change is permanent this time, and will usher in the next two decades of radical transformation and confrontation with the Shadow, at an individual and collective level.
So far I’ve been unpacking these lunations with you by getting to the essence of the sign itself, with the intention of tapping into the lessons and strategies that the Moon invites us into every month. Today’s Full Moon, however, offers us huge plot twists as far as Taurus is concerned.
Taurus is described as peaceful, steady, calm; focused on the simple things in life. It’s also known to be concerned with the material realm, especially resources — “what we have” and “what we value” are some key questions with the sign of the Bull. Behind this grounded demeanor we see a desire to stabilize life-giving processes, with an eye on gradual, satisfying growth. Taurus wants to thrive in serenity and wants to create the rich, gentle environment that makes “thriving” the default setting.
The Aforementioned Plot Twist
Today’s Full Moon closely conjuncts Uranus retrograde — the ambassador of liberation. Most days, Uranus isn’t one for stability or slow growth.
Uranus kisses goodbye both the chains of oppression and the restraints required to fit in with conventional social norms. How that plays out, depends on our maturity and wisdom: are we burning bridges in reactionary, destructive fashion, or are we crafting a more authentic future? We decide. And sometimes, with Uranus, the line between those two is thin.
As the planet bridging matter (Saturn’s domain) and spirit (the realm of Neptune), Uranus also offers a paradigm shift, showing us how there’s a world of subtle energy and creative consciousness which can defy, or perhaps, stretch and expand, the laws of physics as we know them. Think of the wide spectrum of mind-bending phenomena from poltergeists to psychedelic experiences, UFO/UAP encounters to kundalini awakenings, energy healing to manifesting through the power of intention, and everything in between. As such, Uranus provides a vista of possibilities where Saturn’s model of the world offered only dead ends.
Let’s add to this wacky influence that, of course, the Sun opposes the Moon from Scorpio, not particularly known for its chill vibes. The final days of Scorpio season still pull us deeper into the undercurrent, the subtext, the truth hidden behind social veneer. On top of this, the Moon’s ruler, Venus, is out of bounds. Out of bounds planets express a level of freedom, intensity and unpredictability that doesn’t reflect their “usual self”, so to speak. Mercury is also out of bounds at the moment, echoing that same unconstraint. In other words, autonomy, agency and freedom — not just from restrictive influences, but from limiting beliefs too — are our guiding stars right now. (Who needs Taurean calm anyway?)
We do have access to the brakes, though. Saturn, intensified due to its station, reminds us to temper bids for liberation with compassion. To include others in our circle of care even as we name and cast off worn out chains.
Saturn welcomes ambitious goals, so long as we don’t expect to achieve them overnight. With Pisces as its animating principle, it asks: how do we impact hearts and inspire imaginations around us to open up to the ineffable? How do we offer grace, mercy, rest, to ourselves and others even when things are so damn hard?
Even if right now everything feels like too much, too charged, too uncertain, we can make tiny gestures that convey our loving reverence for life itself. Saturn rewards effort. Marrying that attitude of care with our drive for freedom of expression, creativity and ability to pull in future-forward elements from outside the confines of “the normal”: that’s the complex, yet uplifting path that beckons now.
How to get there, when there’s so much tension in the atmosphere? Let’s return to the Moon.
Ancient Wildness
Bringing this all back to Taurus and the Moon: with these wilder planetary influences at play, my mind goes to more primal sides of Taurus we can use to anchor us today. The Moon always points to what will nurture our deeper self, and right now, it’s not quite the solid, quiet, mild and status-quo upholding face of the Bull. Instead, we have to dig deeper into our ecological history to tap into Taurus’ roots in wild nature.
In our Western culture, we have some myths about wildness. In recent times, it’s something that’s become exciting and even fashionable to want to reclaim in personal development, in the style of Dr. Clarissa Pinkola-Estés’ book “Women who Run With Wolves”.
(Whether that’s a robust or a flimsy endeavor of course depends on the sincerity of the people involved, and no judgment on anyone for making any gestures of reconnection with the roots of who we are. That trend is in reaction to those very same underlying stories I’m looking at when writing this. )
In these old, implicit stories, wildness is made out to be the polar opposite of order and structure, of the high ideals of civilization.
We invoke those stories when we casually say “oh, that person’s wild”. We usually mean that they do what they feel like doing, in spite of other people’s unspoken expectations to the contrary. They may: ruffle feathers, foster chaos, upend situations and relationships. Wild doesn’t exactly inspire confidence.
When we say “that’s a wild animal”, their wildness stands in polar opposition to domestication. The wild animal won’t do what humans prefer, won’t allow us to impose upon them our own needs, to live under our power to use them and bestow care as we see fit. Domesticated animals are perceived to be under human ownership. The wild animal belongs to themself: their own agenda for life, their own web of relationships. Interesting that that self-belonging also evokes danger, unpredictability, fear: “they might attack”.
Wildness is closely tied together with instinct, something else we have interesting traditional views about. A classic cultural story is that letting our instincts rule us results, inevitably, in nightmare scenarios. Instinct would turn us into monsters, bloodthirsty, lust-obsessed, governed by the Id, nothing more than a loosely piled bundle of drives for instant gratification.
The assumption is that, deep down, we are all nothing but a tornado of selfish desire. The cautionary tale is that, unless we’re put under the control of a solid regime of “shoulds”, we will quickly devolve into that infernal, screaming, hungry nightmare.
Notice how closely wildness becomes associated with danger in our cultural training.
These are powerful stories. They are designed to make us stay away from that which is wild and instinctual, never exploring it further than that lurid “Keep Out” sign. They hold a crumb of truth which helps them stay current in our minds: yes, a person who consistently upends expectations can be so unpredictable as to be untrustworthy. Yes, wild animals attack if they feel threatened. Yes, our instincts can overpower reason.
But they are one hundred percent not the whole tale. These narratives make a strawman out of the big, complex picture of our (inner) animal realities.
For example, you know what’s a human instinct? Soothing someone who’s crying. Helping someone in pain. Laughing. Learning. Telling stories to make sense of things. Fart jokes: babies the world over seem to come with fart humor preinstalled!
The instincts we’ve demonized, to me, seem to mirror the extreme states of trauma reactions, which put us out of control in destructive ways. These are the fight, flight, and freeze states: we might become physically or verbally aggressive, or covertly act out our fear and dissociation through any number of obsessive, addictive, numbing activities. But that small segment of our instinctual behavior, which only gets expressed when we are repeatedly under stress with no better outlet, is not representative of the Venn diagram of human instinct. The drives to connect, learn, laugh, tend, repair and explore come equally pre-wired in us, and are in themselves neither chaotic, nor disorderly.
True, rules help us keep human groups humming along. But the smear campaign of instinct is more than just a PR strategy to uphold social rules. It keeps us divided and in constant tension within ourselves, upholding high levels of control within as well as policing others.
What if we don’t need that much control? My observation of wild nature, both within us and in the vast world all around, is this:
Wildness is self-organizing. Wildness is self-sensing.
Wild ecosystems are built with delicate balancing cycles and relationships, between seasons, between prey and predator, between growth and decay. Each individual connected in a network of impact, and ultimate contribution, to the whole. Each relationship attuning and responding to the conditions around them. This is the farthest thing from what the dying, authority-driven culture we’ve inherited calls “disorder”.
Indeed, that’s where Pluto is hitting us now, with a final bang at the last degree of Capricorn: by crumbling those life-denying ways in which our culture clings to overpowered hierarchies, top-down order, and control as a way of life.
During this Full Moon, then, I’d venture that the invitation is to take Taurus by the hand and go deeper than the Bull’s domesticated face of common sense and contentment.
To dig down to our instincts and our relationship to all that is natural and alive, where the archetype of Taurus first arose in Paleolithic times with our master teacher, the Aurochs.
To peer underneath, and beyond, what culture has taught us about the meaning of the natural drives that arise within us. To withhold judgment on the value of those drives while we get to know them: giving ourselves time and space to allow them to deliver their message. To trust that we, too, are self-organizing and self-sensing, and that the wisdom that arises from our instinctual self has something primal and ancient to offer us, something precious for right now, something that we couldn’t find anywhere else.
