20 April to 20 May · Fixed Earth · ruled by Venus
The tarot cards of Taurus
Fixed earth, and the sign that carries The Hierophant.
Taurus is fixed earth: holding, tending, and refusing to be hurried. The Hierophant is its trump, which reads oddly until you notice what both are actually about, which is transmission. The Hierophant passes something on intact. Taurus is the sign least interested in changing what already works.
The decans fall in the middle Pentacles, and they are the deck's hardest run on material life: the Five is exclusion and cold, the Six is charity with a power imbalance inside it, the Seven is waiting on something you planted. Taurus is not given an easy stretch of the deck, and the sign's reputation for comfort sits awkwardly beside it.
The trump
The Major Arcana card that carries the sign itself.
The three decans
Each sign covers thirty degrees, divided into three ten-degree decans. One numbered card each, and they run in order through the sign.
The court card
The figure who carries the sign. Court attributions vary more between traditions than any other part of this system, because the Golden Dawn courts straddle two signs rather than sitting inside one.
The other eleven signs
Where these attributions come from
The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, in the late nineteenth century. They mapped the whole deck onto the zodiac, the planets and the Hebrew alphabet, and the Rider-Waite-Smith deck was built on that system, which is why most modern decks still inherit it.
It is a system rather than a discovery. The fifteenth century Italian decks had no astrological scheme at all, and other traditions map the cards differently. Every attribution on this site is the Golden Dawn one, and where a card is disputed its own page says so.
Taurus in an actual chart
This page is about what the tarot tradition attaches to Taurus. The astrology itself, calculated from real ephemeris data rather than described, is on our sister site.
Taurus on Memento Astra