Hello! Welcome to The Gleaming Feast where I heap devotions to the stars, planets, and plants onto your table.
Today, we’re looking at the threshold between Taurus and Gemini. I’ve written about half the zodiacal thresholds now. I’ve avoided this one because it’s personal. This is where most of my placements live. But the Sun moved from Taurus to Gemini about a week ago, and we’re doing it.
I like spending time with these aversions, these side-by-side signs. Most people have a handful of planets in two signs that can’t see each other but have proximity, like people on either side of the same wall. Planets pass through these places and I want to know what they experience. What is that change like? When we move through our annual profections, moving from zodiac sign to zodiac sign, we mimic this move. What is it like for us?
I don’t have to wonder for Taurus and Gemini. I live it. A bunch of my clients do too (like attracts like!). So I’m writing from my own experience here, more than usual, and relying on my practice. There’s also a cluster of fixed stars projected to this part of the zodiac and they want some attention.
But first—
my booking calendar is open
Before we eat the feast, a bit of business. My booking calendar for June is open now! I give general birth chart readings, year ahead readings, readings about the fixed stars, readings about the 5th house, readings about the 11th house. The list is long! You can peruse the readings menu and see what catches your fancy. I would love to sit with you this upcoming month. Early June sees one of the more benefic days of the year, and late June, Jupiter moves out of Cancer and into Leo. Things are shifting.
If you want to know what it’s like to get a reading with me, I have lots of testimonials you can read here. But here’s one from this month:
“My reading with Maeg was absolutely fascinating and extremely inspiring. Not only was Maeg extremely intelligent and knowledgeable about star lore myths, her compassionate and patient approach helped me learn more about my natal birth chart than I thought was possible after studying astrology for decades myself. She held tender space for my questions and sharing of my life experiences as they related to the mythic stories woven into my reading. Suddenly, certain planetary placements in my birth chart that perplexed me for decades made perfect sense.” — Carol B.
taurus-gemini threshold
Three types of looking.
1.
This looking requires a reflective surface. It must be deadly but never dead-on. This is a look that sublimates. It requires a metaphor. It has to come in sideways. It can only see by doubling an original image, by projecting, by mimicry but it strikes the real thing while looking at the pretender. It cannot come empty-handed. This looking requires tools.
2.
No tools are needed. This is a look that calcifies, petrifies all on its own. It renders all it sees a thing. By looking, a body is a statue. A body is a specimen. A body is a corpse. This is a look that protects itself to death and cannot do otherwise. It is a gaze that harms. Recognition is lethal and I wonder if the looker is lonely. It looks from shadow, from the lips of a craggy cave, spines of salty foam arching and collapsing against it.
3.
Look. This looking cuts away with a silver knife. It cuts the other ways of looking, expanding in a blue blazingly bright. Eyes have to adjust to these eyes. These are eyes that look right at you, at me. They are holes in heaven with eyes peering through. This looking will not turn you to stone. It will not cut off your head. It looks and knows, and keeps looking. Cold, cool, clear. It does not blink. And it has sisters and they are beautiful and it hurts to look but you will keep looking because they are so beautiful.
Perseus, Medusa, The Pleiades. These are star stories that cluster around the end of Taurus and the start of Gemini. If you want to keep track: Capulus 24° Taurus, Algol 26° Taurus, Pleiades 29° Taurus through 0° Gemini, and Mirfak 2° Gemini.
Perseus the hero, killing the gorgon to rescue his mother from a nasty man. Perseus, the dynasty-maker and rescuer of a princess. One of Athena’s boys. A monster-killer, chaos-wrangler. Perseus, outfitted by the gods with more divine counsel and magical items than I’ve ever seen.
Medusa, more famous now than her killer. The monstrous woman, the beheaded ghoul. A woman in the shape of a pile of corpses. Eroticized and castigated. The girl/the monster who lost her head and out of her sliced throat she gave birth. The girl/the monster who lost her body and it became medicine and red coral. Romanticized, defanged, refanged, a series of projection screens. What a gender-mess. Her stellar head with its blinking eye: a talisman, a shield, a warning.
Then the Pleiades and the brightest sister of them, Alcyone, with lore enough for their own library. Bird-women, blue dancers, match-strikers, wailing running women. Stellar ladies of light who gather around what’s coming, knife and lamp ready.
Taurus stops and Gemini starts with the Pleiades. Planets move from the dark murderous cavern of Medusa to turning all the lights on in heaven: the Pleiades’ stunning blue knowing, their stunning blue looking. This is how Gemini begins. Gemini knows. Taurus knows too but it knows in the dark. It knows with the body.
In the last part of Taurus, we find the bounds of Saturn and Mars, and the last Taurus decan is ruled by Saturn. This is Venus’s nighttime malefic sector. It is where we find Medusa and Perseus: violence and beauty are having a conversation. This is not an easy part of Taurus. The decanic spirits of this part of Taurus are the Litai, intermediary spirits who come when we pray, especially for making amends and repenting. The Litai follow after Ate, the spirits of ruin and folly.
We make mistakes because we did not know in advance, or because we knew and we hoped what we knew would not matter in the end. Or we knew but we wanted what we wanted, regardless of the consequences. Information is missing or rejected. After, all there is to do is appeal to the Litai.
Taurus is a sign of Venus, so it is a sign of desire. Slow going as it can be, it is a sign that wants. Its wanting supersedes its knowing. “What do you want?” is not an intellectual question. It is a question with an answer in the body. How often have you wanted something and not understood why? Or not wanted something but felt like you should want it? “Should” is an intellect word, not a body word. “Should” is not sensuous.
When a planet moves from the end of Taurus and into Gemini, it bites into the reddest apple and knows. This is the looking of revelation. The Pleiades look and know. They look and they are there with you. What can you not un-know now?
Taurus tracks the felt-knowing and felt-wanting of the body. Gemini explodes into words and numbers, into more possibilities than can be followed. Taurus: the pleasures and speed of what is concrete. Gemini: the pleasures and speed of what is intangible. Look.
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Get in your body, they say. Ground into your body. Listen to the wisdom of your body. Shut up, I want to yell. I get it. My body knows things. The body is more real and superior, or at least I need to act that way to compensate for my culture’s over-emphasis on logic and the cerebral. I get that my mind is its own problem. It wants to make sense of everything. It wants to look and know, to abstractify. It wants to intellectualize, analyze, to dissect and dissect it again until the frog organs on the table are pulp. I want to crack the code. Cracking the code is one of the ways I love. One of the ways I obsess. Let me be happy. If I listen to my body, I’ll have to know differently. I’ll have to feel the terror of looking at something that could turn me to stone. I’ll have to feel the horror of trying to find a thing by seeing its reflection first. Don’t take my thinking away from me.
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I resent that I ignore my body as a habit when my body is so often right.
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Me, to my body: “use your words.”
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Learning the physical language of heat and cold, of nausea and shiver, of aching palms and a squeezed heart — this has made me a better diviner. It’s made me a better listener to other languages. Even Gemini can get on board with that.
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Intellectualizing isn’t bad though. Sometimes we have to think about a feeling to feel it. Sometimes that’s the thing that opens it all up. How many times was I not sure how I felt until a friend said just the right phrase, and then I could feel it because I could see it? I remember a friend writing about how you don’t see the eyelets on your sneakers, those ring holes that the shoelaces go through, until you learn what they are called. You don’t identify a thing until you know its name. Sometimes I need to prepare the mind for what the body has to say by making a frame and language that’s close enough. That’s part of why we read fiction, isn’t it? To get more word-images for feelings.
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Trying to get my mind and body to listen to each other, and getting angry at Descartes again.
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Taurus to Gemini: would you stay still? would you pick a lane? this is exhausting. be present.
Gemini to Taurus: would you imagine more? this is boring. be clever. be nimble.
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Venus and Mercury, working together, according to ancient authors.
An anonymous writer in 379 A.D. on what the mixture of Venus and Mercury qualities confers upon a person. They will be:
“learned, philosophical, eloquent, creative, knowing, well-disposed, fond of the arts, clever, artistic, devoted to pleasure, surrounded by luxury, of good cheer; also sagacious, intelligent, always on target, likely to succeed, almost self-taught, and generally extolled in speeches for virtual or practical wisdom, zealous of virtues, clear and charming of speech, beloved and accommodating in disposition, serious, critical, and high-minded. But sometimes it also makes them promiscuous and fickle in their sexual pleasures.”
Firmicus Maternus says when Venus and Mercury are conjunct, they make people “handsome and agreeable” and “trained in speaking so that they always delight the ears of their hearers, or they are successful musicians and singers or famous poets.” Maternus adds they “are driven by depraved urges to bed with many women.”
According to Vettius Valens, the combination of Mercury and Venus makes people “sociable and gracious, gregarious and hedonistic, paying attention to education and sensibility, receiving honors and gifts.” Echoing Maternus, these two planets also “make men unsteady and fickle with respect to women, changeable in their agreements <with them>.”
Taurus and Gemini, Venus and Mercury: together, we could be of the body and the mind. Feel and know. Be flirty, witty, good-looking, charming, talented, artistic, flamboyant, perverted, and fickle! Could be fun.
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To live with Taurus and Gemini placements is wanting Venusian texture and beauty and good lighting and wonder right now and not wanting to talk about it but feel-sense it, not wanting to ruin it with words — and yet you find yourself saying an essay aloud anyway. It’s having too many ideas and wishing you could find what felt good. It’s trying to wrangle knowing into feeling, and feeling into knowing.
I’d say we’re torn between different kinds of looking. But we’re not torn.
We’re doing them all at once.
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references and resources
Here are some things I looked at and thought about when I was writing this post.
Anonymous of 379’s The Treatise on the Bright Fixed Stars, translated by Robert Schmidt
Austin Coppock’s 36 Faces: The History, Astrology and Magic of the Decans (2014)
Diana Rosenberg’s Secrets of the Ancients Skies, Volume 1 (2012)
Firmicus Maternus’s Ancient Astrology: Theory and Practice, translated by Jean Rhys Bram
Julia Kristeva’s The Severed Head (1998)
Kira Ryberg’s The Bounds Guidebook
Kira Ryberg’s The 36 Decans Guidebook
Vanessa Irena’s badass Perseus talisman and write-up. The talisman is out of stock but follow Vanessa’s Substack (add the usual) for brilliant, refreshing writing on magic and art and the stars.
Vettius Valens’ Anthologies, translated by Mark Riley (2006)
I’ve been watching a lot of Jujutsu Kaisen, so I was thinking about Gojo Satoru, who feels, among other things, pretty Pleiades-pilled (colors, eyes, his unlimited void domain)
for more zodiac thresholds
Or just go to the thresholds section of The Gleaming Feast for the set.
Oh I love this so much! It feels like that threshold, and also even the nature of the sign of Gemini being entirely held within the Taurus Stars. My natal Mars is at this threshold with Algol and oooff this all resonates so much!
This was such a lovely read. Thank you for sharing your words. I too am a Taurus/Gemini person (Sun/Venus in Taurus, Mercury/Jupiter in Gemini) and this was a delight to read and reflect upon. 💚