A Skeptical Taurus's Path to Laziness... And Evolutionary Astrology

In a recent post, Lee talked about how they came to be interested in evolutionary astrology. ”For the longest time, I thought of astrology as nothing more than a lot of horoscopesque hocus pocus made up to sell magazines to unfulfilled housewives,” they said. Then they stumbled on evolutionary astrology in the context of a past life reading, and they changed their mind. 

As someone who has been practicing astrology seriously for the better part of a decade, I feel like I should cringe at the injustice when I read harsh critiques of the discipline, but I don’t. I remember what my first real encounter with astrology was like, and I marvel that I ever came to take astrology seriously at all. 

I was working at Hot Topic over the summer between high school and college. Hot Topic has never been known for its reading material, but that summer, they stocked a copy of Born on a Rotten Day, a book that skewers the signs of the Zodiac. The store was so slow my manager was rocking out to Johnny Cash, so I grabbed a copy of the book, thinking I could read entries aloud and give us all a laugh. 

Naturally, I looked at my sun sign Taurus first, and that was when I learned the awful truth: Taurus is lazy. When I read that, I hit the ceiling. All my life, I’d been accused of being lazy. Since I take criticisms from people I respect to heart, I responded by working harder than ever. By the time I reached my last semester of high school, I was so focused on working hard to get the future I wanted, I was carrying around a copy of an LSAT study guide, four years before I could reasonably expect to take the test. Still, people accused me of being lazy.

In retrospect, it’s easy for me to understand how such a horrible misconception could follow me around. Taurus is a very visible sign in my chart. It is my sun sign, and it is in the part of my chart that is highly visible to people who don’t know me very well personally. When signs are visible in that way, they have the tendency to pick up people’s projections and assumptions about that sign. The people who accused me of being lazy weren’t really seeing me. They were caught up in stereotypes and resistance to looking at their own behavior. 

At the time, though, all I knew was that this unjust accusation was following me. I hoped that I’d be able to leave it behind in my small town, but if someone had bothered to write it in a book, I knew it was going to follow me around everywhere. So I bought the book. And carried it across the country. And glared at it from time to time. 

For ten years, I did my best to avoid astrology. Then I discovered a blogger who used astrology to inform her meditations on the full moon. In her writing, the Zodiac didn’t tell you who you were. It invited you to ask questions. I was enchanted by the idea that I could use the stars to help me systematically work through issues in every area of my life. 

After some searching, I stumbled on a copy of The Inner Sky by Steven Forrest, and I began to understand that the horrible image of Taurus painted in Born on a Rotten Day was actually the misunderstood outward manifestation of a very healthy Taurus. Taurus is a sign of healing. After the battles of Aries, Taurus is the place we come to lick our wounds. People with a lot of Taurus in their charts are people who have been through a lot—in this life or previous lives—and they have the tendency to become preoccupied with basic issues of security and survival. The obsession with being safe, and the relentless busyness that accompanies it, serves as a distraction from the need to acknowledge the horror of their own experiences, a shield from the pain of coming out of shock. But like Mark Jones says in The Soul Speaks: The Therapeutic Potential of Astrology, “to admit that one is shipwrecked is a crucial step towards healing,” and that acknowledgement is the first step toward healing for Taurus. The ability to sit quietly and simply enjoy a cup of coffee may look from the outside like doing nothing, but for a Taurus it’s a radical act of faith in the world’s ability to keep spinning for a few minutes without Taurus’s help.

Sixteen years after stumbling on Born on a Rotten Day, I am, perversely, taking its portrait of Taurus as advice, and I’m doing my best to embrace laziness as a virtue. I know myself well enough now to know that if I think I am being lazy, I am, actually, only two or three times more busy than I actually should be.  

This sort of mistake is common in popular astrology. In the case of Taurus, it seems that some astrologers see an archetype lying in bed, and they don’t stop to question how Taurus got there in the first place. There’s a very big difference between laziness and a well-deserved rest, and most Taurus people fall into the latter category. Evolutionary astrology, like all schools of thought, isn’t perfect, but its strength is that it sees human behavior as being part of a story, and it bothers to ask why people behave the way they do.

So, when I hear about someone having a difficult time with astrology, I cringe, but it’s not because I think astrology has gotten a bad rap. It’s because I remember how it felt the day astrology joined the mob and encouraged me in my worst, most anxious habits, and I silently hope for a future in which popular astrology does better.

This post was originally published on Aquarius Moon Journal on 7 March 2020.