It’s a Taurus New Moon. Can you feel it? The shift in rhythms, the transformation of sonic experience, bird song and summer vibes coming close, the transition of colors as they burst through the seam in the fabric of earthly existence… The air is warming the skin. Layers of clothing shed. Garlands of flowers transmuting into fruit, swelling with juice. Layers of awareness inviting to dance in the radiance of longer days. Sunlight shimmering on bodies of water and breathing trees. Can you feel it?

The earth is a lover right now, rolling in mud, shaking with rupture as bounty bubbles up through springs from within, and swimming in streams, softening skin, letting the muse flow in, and becoming mother, becoming nourishment, becoming more.

It’s a new moon in the sign of Taurus. A new cycle begins with this archetype that invites the pleasures of the body to guide our path, and leads us into a garden of abundance – the garden of our own inner life, as well as the one we cultivate collectively. 

Taurus is associated with fertility, with growth, with the earth’s bounty and beauty, and with physicality; with all the pleasures of being embodied. 

The new lunar cycle begins with this Venus ruled sign, that roots us in love, in irresistible beauty, in food, in eros, and in value. It teaches us about our inherent worthiness. 

She’s not about the race to nowhere of modern life. She’s not gonna add more stress to her schedule. She’s not gonna chase success. She’s gonna tend to herself. And to more than herself. She’s not the individualistic perspective of capitalism. She’s not greed infused growth. She’s self care and collective care and the marriage of both. 

The majority of this lunar cycle will take us through Gemini season, bathing us in muse, inviting us to think wide openly, to breathe in relationship, to consider how we communicate. The moon will take us from the pulse of the lover through a landscape of inspiration, into the arms of the mother, as Spring becomes Summer. The earth’s creative urge will speak through us. 

Can we listen? Can we take our time? 

What are you called to create?

What are you willing to commit to in the process?

What are you growing in the garden of your life?

What impact does it have on others, on the environment?

What ripples does it make?

We remember that growth is never without decay. 

What is growing in your life right now, that is rooted in soil made of that which has dissolved?

What needs to be dissolved for the growth to be nourishing for you and more than you?

What growth strategies feel unhealthy for your body, for other bodies, and for the body of the earth? 

What are you craving?

What new paths of growth can you carve – personally, collectively, and planetary? 

The moon is new, and it invites us to ask for new insights. Can we listen?

Allow new ways to emerge.

Taurus is the bull. The horns are crescent moon shaped, reminding us of the lunar phase that takes us from newness to fullness, back to nothingness, to begin again. Bulls are full of virility and vigor. They are symbols of fecundity and fertility, of primal power, of sexual strength. In many ancient cultures, the bull was associated with the Great Goddess. 

Astrology pairs the bull sign with the goddess planet Venus, inviting us into love and sensuality that land us in those spaces where our human sense of desiring aesthetics commingles with our animal needs to be ecstatically satisfied. 

Dionysus, god of wine and the vine, of ecstasy and debauchery, of the kind of sexual liberation that we find in the archetype of the Devil with his horns, is a fluid character, crossing gender and species. He is born a bull, and transitions into many other forms. His identity is liquidy, reminding us that even the big, strong, stubborn animal has the capacity to change. 

(I love Sophie Strand’s exploration of Dionysus. You can read about it in her book The Flowering Wand – Rewilding The Sacred Masculine. I love everything she writes!)

Barbara G. Walker writes that; “ Nearly every god of the ancient world was incarnate sooner or later in a bull.”

Siva, my beloved Hindu god of yoga, might not incarnate as a bull, but he rides one on the path that marries spirituality and house-holding. And the Hindu god of death, Yama, wears a bull head, weaving the aliveness of the bull and the cow into the inevitability of death. 

In Babylon, goddess Ishtar, The Star, and in Sumer, goddess Inanna, sent a bull to fight Gilgamesh, who was the patriarchal order coming in to replace the power of the goddess. Before that, the Sumerian king was titled “The Wild Bull.”

Semitic goddess, Ahserah, who was anthropomorphic, and occasionally showed up as a cow, had a bull as her consort. He was related to Helios, Titan god of the sun. She is not the only goddess married to a bull. The middle east was saturated in goddess-bull relationships.  

In Egypt, Osiris was worshiped in bull form. When he’s reborn he is a golden calf, born of Isis who takes the form of a golden cow. 

The Israelites wanted a bull god too, they wanted to be able to SEE their god. Moses went up to Mount Sinai to receive the Ten Commandments. Left without their leader for 40 days, they asked his brother, Aaron, to make a calf out of gold. They worshiped it with song and dance and food and offerings. God didn’t like that very much, so he sent Moses back down, and he got really mad and he burnt the golden calf to the ground.

Zeus turned himself into a bull and abducted the maiden Europa, carrying her to the island of Crete where they mated, and she became Europe – the land and the mother of the people. 

King Minos of Crete refuses to sacrifice a bull to the gods, which makes them very upset, so they send Poseidon of the sea to cast a spell over his wife, Pasiphae, daughter of Helios (the sun) and a sea nymph, Perse. Pasiphae is also the sister of the witch goddess Circe. She falls madly in lust with a bull, and has wild sex with the beast, and ends up pregnant with the monstrous bull creature, Minotaur. 

Minotaur is locked in a labyrinth, created by the genius Daedalus. Years later he is slayed by the so-called hero Theseus, who convinces the princess Ariadne, the Minotaur’s sister, to reveal the secret and place of her brother. He then sets sail and discards the princess of Crete on another island. 

Minoan culture –  where Dionysus was said to be worshiped and sacrificed in the form of the bull, and then become a swarm of bees, the renewal of life – was nature based, deeply rooted in soil, steeped in plant power, and anchored in animal wisdom. This story reveals, again, something about the ways that patriarchy has turned the wildness into the monstrous, and with that, gave itself permission to destroy it. 

So how do we receive the invitation of this bull of a new moon, and breathe into the cycle that it begins, the inspired possibilities of renewing our relationship with the ancient, the primal, the natural? 

Perhaps we are invited to weave a new self into being through re-relating to older versions of self? Perhaps the future is calling us to look at the past, to see the mistakes and the horrors, to be in discomfort, and to learn. And to look even further back, and allow what lives within our animal-plant self to inform and inspire how we create what comes next. 

Happy new moon, beauties! 

COMING SOON: Summer Solstice Somatic Ceremony – a mythopoetic journey, an embodied ritual, and a deep contemplative process that will inspire your creativity, nourish your heart, invigorate your mind, and bring you into your body as your transition from Spring to Summer. All the details are here. It’s gonna be amazing and I can’t wait to share this sacred space with you!

And check out this (free) Taurus New Moon video.

XOXO

Hagar