The Hierophant & Taurus
At first glance, Pamela Colman Smith’s image of a Papal figure doesn’t register too much energy of Taurus to me, personally. Where is engagement with our inner sensuality, reaching out to feel into the physical world? Where are the elements of nature, of our inner animal or food or ways we acquire and grow nourishment? What in this image is grounding? Within me, it evokes a bit of fear around being grounded. When I see this image, my mind first goes more of a Sagittarian / Capricornian cusp energy - of the once more mystical, Piscean practice of Christianity in its early years (Jesus One Fish, Piscses Two Fish, anyone?) into an out of balance dogmatic, unhealthy Sagittarian energy reinforced by out of whack Capricornian control, dominance, patriarchy, and self-flagellating energies. Where is this Taurus overlay?!
For a moment let’s visit some very Taurean keywords and where they come from. “Ruled” by Venus, Taurus governs our inner felt experience and our journey in valuing it, which leads to us ultimately finding a sense of peace within ourselves. And in some way, we can also experience that which moves us inside, or in a sense spirit, coming from within us to bring something into physical form. Easy to see where we get those Taurean keywords of sensuality and stability, working with things in physical form, and from those by extension finances and money and the value of physical things. Of course when these get out of whack we get selfish expressions of hedonism, extreme materialism, greed, and rigidity.
So if Taurus rules values, what then do we do with values? One obvious way is through giving voice to them - the voice is another Taurus keyword, and by extension Taurus also rules the neck and the shoulders. We can see The Hierophant in a teacher role, passing on a heritage of values possibly through use of the voice. How else do we pass on values? Amanda Yates Garcia’s greatest gift to me astrologically has been her beautiful understanding of the sign of Taurus as a sign of the heritage arts - how we pass ourselves, and our collective sense of sense, on through physical form?
I’ll provide this example through lessons about Taurus I learned through my own Taurus Sun Υιαγια (Yiayia). She was my grandmother who immigrated to the United States at 24 years old in 1938, pregnant as she would later discover with twins (one of them my Dad - she herself was also a twin). She was bizarrely intuitive - even in rural Greece she felt out that Europe was about to through unbelievable hell (following World War II, Greece then went through a 5 year civil war) and decided that for her family it was best to leave. This was during Uranus’ transit of her Sun, which asked of this very traditional woman to make this absolutely enormous change.
But what did Υιαγια bring with her from Greece that so expressed the heritage arts, or traditions? In the landscape of my childhood of the 1980s and 1990s, she and her cousin made their own yogurt at home, adapting what they’d learned in the villages to life in this other land (how many people in the United States in this era were making their own yogurt?). She washed her own clothing by hand, even though she had a washing machine - watching her do this as a child, I realize she liked the kneading feeling and I imagine it soothed her. She never wore pants or learned to drive (perhaps some of that Taurean rigidity) but she made her own clothing, and with that knowledge her friends asked her to make dresses for them and Halloween costumes for their children (I got to be a donkey and blue bear as a little kid!) and she moved through the world, literally, on her own two feet. When my parents or my aunt would drive past a good patch of dandelions, she would ask us to pull over so she could collect them to make χορτα (khorta), or cooked greens (again, this is 1980-90s in a very urbanized area outside of Philadelphia, she had to really pick and choose where she could get these). She took the bus to the mall and sold her Greek pastries while I played in the indoor fountain. She performed the rituals to exorcise the influences of and protect me from the ματι (mati), the Evil Eye. Some Sundays she made the προσφερο (prosfero), the communion bread embedded with religious symbols and shared (or sorta shared, as it is in Eastern Orthodoxy) at the Greek Orthodox church we attended.
In summary - she deeply valued her own sensory experience, her heritage that she carried within herself as she moved from one world to another (imagine moving across the world before any kind of digital technologies or even local language skills - a little more like moving to another planet, right? ), and ultimately the expression of those inner and inherited values in physical form. And as you can see from her own example, inherited values have throughout history been passed down through religious forms. Some of these are beautiful, some not so beautiful, even within the same tradition (this continues to be an extremely confusing untangling process for me growing up Greek Orthodox).
In a sick culture, you can see where a Hierophant figure might arise, and the means by which they guide the metaphorical herd (cows, the glyph of Taurus, are after all herd animals) where to go and what to do. The Hierophant may reinforce what values were passed down without any re-evaluation of what is currently relevant or needed to keep the group/culture together.