on taurus & scorpio: the axis of desire & control
part 2 of 6 in the zodiacal pair series
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Last month, I received a gorgeous question from someone in the astrology for writers Discord:
I’ve been really interested lately in what we can learn from polarities between signs and how working with the energy of a sign’s opposite can help us move toward healing. I’m thinking especially in terms of nodal placements but also generally. Could you talk through a little about what opposing signs can learn from each other? I have a good handle on Virgo-Pisces, Cap-Cancer, and Aries-Libra (tho would love to hear your thoughts), but Aqua-Leo, Scorpio-Taurus and esp esp Sag-Gemini are a little opaque to me still.
This question has inspired a series devoted to each of the six zodiacal pairs, because to explore the polarities/axes of the six zodiacal pairs is to understand the whole of human experience. Last month, we began this series with on aries & libra & also the nodes, which articulated Aries & Libra as The Axis of Positionality as well as my more academic/theoretical take on the nodes and why I’m not especially considering them for this series.
Before we dive into our second pair, Taurus & Scorpio, permit me to repeat myself, since some folks are new here, or haven’t read the prior installment:
There are 12 zodiac signs. Of these, there are 6 pairs of opposing signs, called “opposing” because they are 180* away from each other. The pairs always come in complementary elements (air and fire; earth and water), and they are always of the same modality (cardinal, fixed, mutable).
We each, all of us, have every sign in our birth chart. Personally, I find that the signs folks are most uncomfortable with, or critical of, are usually reflective of the part of their chart they are most uncomfortable with and critical of. Understanding the axis on which these signs reside deepens our understanding of not only the signs, but also of how the chart works together as a whole.
That said, let’s dive in.
Taurus & Scorpio: The Axis of Desire & Control
Earth & water; fixed (signs that come in the middle of, and so stabilize, seasons)
I’m gonna be honest: I struggled with this one. Taurus (the middle aka “fixed” sign of spring in the Northern Hemisphere) and Scorpio (the middle sign of autumn) are often associated with (re)birth and death, as well as physical & emotional security (two things that I also associate with one of the other water-earth combos, Cancer/Capricorn).
But in addition to the fact that I was looking for an axis that was hyper-specific to these signs, I also kept coming back to how Taurus is the fecund field where we plant our hopes for that which we desire most. And Scorpio — too often stereotyped as mysterious, sexy, and death-obsesssed — is, perhaps more than any other sign, about control.
Taurus is the lush wild that resists containment and nurtures our wants. Easy to associate Taurus with birth, honestly: it’s the season in the Northern Hemisphere when flowers are blooming, returning from their wintry sleep. Possibility is in the warm air. This is the time of spring cleaning: of discarding the old and making space for the new. But perhaps more specifically — about re-evaluating what we desire and how we want our material existence to reflect that desire.
And Taurus is profoundly materially oriented. Not in a shopaholic kind of way, but rather in a way that craves tactile, sensory experience. (That learns best through the sensory, too.) Think Taurus as gardener, Taurus as farmer, Taurus as fashion designer, Taurus as chef. This is the sign that remembers its favorite meals, that wants to scent-train their nose so as to better understand the unfolding layers of perfume and cologne, that wants to feel natural fibers against the skin — silk, for example. Here, we see, hear, touch, smell, feel the material reality of what we want. This is where we say, yes, I want to feel like that. I want to experience that, and know that it is good, without puritanical judgment.
There is a side of Taurus that can trend profoundly hedonistic: that wants to feel good, or to experience the richest variety of flavor possible, at any cost, with no limits (or budget). There’s a reason that the moon exalts in Taurus, where its craving for creature comforts are the most satisfied.
That word crave. It is what bridges us to Taurus’ opposite sign, Scorpio, whose core archetypal curiosities trend less material and experiential and more internal and emotional. I don’t want to say more spiritual, but there is certainly an ephemeral, Other-Than realm that Scorpio is more comfortable living in without the Taurean comforts. Scorpio seeks understanding, and more than anything, it quite literally martials its curiosity into control: of emotion, of information, of self.
Scorpio is the still reflecting pool where we learn to wrangle what we have harvested and strategize how best to deploy that which we have made manifest. If Aries is Mars’ warrior on the front lines asserting the eternal I, then Scorpio is the strategist in charge of the battle maps who is content to lose a battle so long as they win the war. Desire is unruly until Scorpio exerts the velvet glove in the iron fist, corralling the deepest obsession into submission.
There is a reason that the two cards of the tarot most often associated with Venus and Mars are The Empress and The Emperor. And within these archetypes, I interpret The Empress with Venus as expressed through Taurus — the material, the sensory, that which we are manifesting — and The Emperor as Mars expressed through Scorpio, where the control that comes with calm understanding enables great work.
This is, ultimately, the axis of desire and control: of building a trellis so that our vines might reach to the sky. Taurus and Scorpio teach us that growth for its own sake, with no strategy, is not growth at all.
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