Taurus 5° (4° to 5°)
Sabian Symbol: A widow at an open grave
Symbol wording: Dane Rudhyar, An Astrological Mandala (1973)
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The Essence
- Every breath finishes with the air leaving us, and in the same way the money and standing we gather slip away over the years.
- Grasping at material things obstructs soul growth. Letting go at the moment something completes is what allows progress.
- Anyone committed to inner growth does better not to sink too long into sorrow, and the same caution applies to longing for the past.
- Nothing that lives escapes ending, so we have to learn to loosen our hold and turn our attention from what is over.
- Among the most painful parts of grief is the sense of powerlessness, and that sense is false.
- Reversing that feeling of helplessness opens the way to freedom and contentment.
- It is normal, and not unhealthy, to invest part of our identity in a few close people.
- Loss and grief can be transcended through the right attitude, becoming useful material rather than defeat.
- An ending is also a starting point, and whatever we cannot carry inside us was never ours in the first place.
- Each moment is gone the instant it arrives. Releasing experience fully and immediately is wisdom.
The Image
A widow at an open grave
The ground has been cut and the soil heaped to one side, and the coffin is lowered or about to be. Most of the mourners have stepped back, and one woman stands nearest the edge. She has lost her husband, and with him a whole arrangement of days: who cooks, who drives, whose side of the bed, whose name on the bills. We meet her at the last moment before the hole is filled.
Look at what the scene holds open. The grave is not yet closed, and that small detail matters, because it puts you in the interval between the loss and the settling of it. The body is still there, and so is the old life, but neither can be lived in any longer. In a few minutes earth will cover what was, and she will turn round and walk back to a house that has changed its meaning while she was out.
The word widow is itself a change of status. Yesterday she was a wife; today the world has a different word for her, and a different set of expectations that she did not choose and cannot yet read. People will lower their voices when she comes into a room, and forms will ask her to tick a new box. That is the outer side of what this degree describes: an identity that was shared has to be rebuilt as a single one, and the rebuilding starts whether or not she feels ready for it.
You may never have stood at a grave in this role, but you will know a version of the moment. You hand back the keys of the flat you lived in for ten years and walk down the stairs for the last time. You carry the last box out of the office after a redundancy, and your pass stops working at the barrier. You leave the final session with a therapist who saw you through a hard decade and step into a street that looks exactly as it did an hour ago. Something that organised your days has stopped, and the question now is which way you will face.
Jones gave this degree the keyword reorientation, and the word is exact. It does not say recovery, which suggests getting back what was lost, and it does not say acceptance, which can sound passive and finished. It says turning: your body and your attention swinging round from what lies in the ground towards the road home and whatever is waiting on it.
Taurus 5° is the fifth and final stage of the seventh five-fold sequence and phase 35 of the cycle. Fifth stages tend to gather up what the sequence has produced and close it, which is why this one has the feel of a reckoning.
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The Archetype
The archetype here is the survivor at the threshold. Every culture has some form of it: the mourner in black, the one who sits shiva, the widow who keeps the lamp lit. The survivor is the person who has to carry on after the shared life ends, and whose task is to decide what carrying on will look like.
There are two ways this archetype can go, and Jones described both for this degree. Lived well, the loss becomes the occasion for a remarkable composure: you meet disappointment and delay without being knocked off your feet, and each blow becomes part of a widening discovery of who you are. Lived poorly, the same loss becomes a long surrender to frustration, or a slow sliding into helplessness.
What separates those paths is rarely the size of the loss. We have all seen people survive terrible things with their warmth intact, and people undone by much smaller ones. The difference tends to lie in what happens to your sense of power. Grief brings a feeling that nothing you do matters, that life simply happens to you while you stand and watch. That feeling is understandable and, as the essence of this degree insists, untrue. You can still choose how you tend yourself, whom you let in, where you turn your eyes, and what you do with the next ordinary morning.
It is also worth saying plainly that tying part of yourself to a few close people is healthy. This degree is not asking you to love less so that you lose less. It is asking you to let the love continue in a new form once its old form is gone. A marriage can end at the graveside and still shape the widow's character for the rest of her life, in the way she laughs, the way she argues, the books she now reads for two. What she carries inside her stays with her, and what existed only in the shared arrangement goes into the ground.
Taurus is the sign of possession and stability, which makes this archetype especially sharp here, since the bull is built to hold on and to stay where the grass is good. This degree asks it to unclench its grip without losing its footing.
The Taoist Current
Three chapters of the Dao De Jing speak to the graveside. The first two were met earlier in this series, at Aries 16° and Aries 18°, and the last echoes the softness that Taurus 2° pointed to.
Chapter 30 is mostly about not using force in governing. Within it, the text observes that things which reach their peak begin to decline, and that whatever strains against the Dao will come to an early end. Grief has its own peak. When we try to force it, either by holding it at full intensity for years or by refusing to feel it at all, we are pushing against a natural curve that wants to rise and fall.
Chapter 40 is short. Returning is the movement of the Dao, and yielding is its way of working. Everything comes from being, and being comes from what is not. Read beside our image, it reminds us that loss is part of a circulation rather than a dead end. What disappears into the ground goes back into the movement that produced it.
Chapter 76 sets life against death in terms of texture. When we are born we are soft and supple; when we die we are stiff and hard. Living plants bend; dead ones snap. So stiffness keeps company with death, and softness with life. A tree that will not bend breaks in the wind. This is the practical teaching for the widow. If she hardens around her grief, she joins the stiffness of the grave. If she stays soft enough to cry, to be helped and to change, she remains with the living.
The Yi Jing Resonance
Two hexagrams form a pair at this degree, and they belong together in the sequence of the Yi Jing itself.
Hexagram 23, Bo (Splitting Apart) shows a mountain resting on the earth, with five broken lines pushing up under a single solid line at the top. Something is being worn away from below. The judgement advises against going anywhere; this is a time to let the process run and to stay quiet. The top line offers an image of a large fruit left uneaten, the seed that survives the collapse of everything around it. Aries 18° took up this figure earlier in the series.
Hexagram 24, Fu (Return) follows directly. Now the single solid line has moved to the bottom, under five broken lines, like thunder stirring inside the earth. The judgement speaks of going out and coming in without harm, of friends arriving, and of return coming on the seventh day. It belongs to the winter solstice, the darkest point at which light begins, quietly, to come back.
Read together, the pair describes the graveside and what follows it. First the old structure wears away, and we can do little except let it. Then, at the bottom of the descent, something new starts to move in us, often before we notice it. The widow is at the hinge between the two, and so are we whenever our own losses reach their lowest point and the first faint return begins.
The Philosophical Content
Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, a Swiss-American psychiatrist, published On Death and Dying in 1969. Her model of five stages, denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance, came from interviews with patients who were themselves dying, and only later was it widely applied to bereavement. Kübler-Ross herself said the stages were not a fixed sequence; people move back and forth, skip some and repeat others. Later research on bereavement, notably George Bonanno's work on resilience, found that many people grieve without passing through clear stages at all, and that steady functioning after a loss is common rather than a sign of denial.
What remains useful in her work for this degree is the basic insight that grief has movement. The widow at the grave is not stuck in one state forever, and neither are you when your own loss comes. Your feelings will shift, sometimes many times in a single afternoon, from numbness to fury to a sudden ordinary laugh at something on the radio. Reorientation does not mean reaching a final stage called acceptance and staying there as if it were a destination. It means finding your feet again while the feelings keep moving through you, and trusting that the movement itself is part of how you heal.
Seneca, the Roman Stoic, wrote several letters of consolation. In one he addressed Marcia, who had mourned her son for three years, and contrasted two women of the imperial house: Octavia, who never stopped mourning her son, and Livia, who grieved her son Drusus and then returned to life while keeping his memory warm. In his letters to Lucilius he admits that he himself wept beyond measure for his friend Annaeus Serenus, and he uses that admission to urge a grief that lets tears fall without letting them run on endlessly. He suggests that the memory of those we have lost can become a pleasant one rather than a wound.
Seneca's position is firm but not cold. He does not ask you to feel nothing, and he does not pretend that a philosopher is spared the pain he describes. He asks you to notice when mourning has become a habit that serves neither the dead nor the living, and to turn, deliberately, towards what you still have: friends, work, the people who depend on you, the person you are still becoming. That is reorientation in Stoic form. Put beside Kübler-Ross, it gives us a balanced picture in which grief is natural and moves on its own, while we also keep some say in how long we feed it and what we build from it once it has eased.
The Evolutionary Astrology Lens
Read evolutionarily, a planet at Taurus 5° points to a soul working through the relationship between love and possession, and learning how to let what has ended actually end.
Pluto shows the deepest pattern of attachment and loss. Where this degree is emphasised, it often points to earlier experiences of sudden or forced loss: a parent who died young, a home taken away, a bond cut before it was ready to close. A soul shaped by that can respond in two ways. It may hold on with great force to people and possessions, trying to make sure nothing is ever taken again. Or it may refuse closeness altogether, so that there is nothing to lose.
The South Node describes the familiar response. Here it can look like a life arranged around a past that will not be laid to rest, with anniversaries kept as wounds, rooms left as they were, old grievances carried like heirlooms. We all know how comforting a familiar sorrow can be, because at least it is ours, and because letting it go can feel like a second loss on top of the first. If you recognise this in yourself, you are not failing; you are repeating what once kept you safe.
The North Node points towards release. That is not forgetting, and it is not ceasing to love. It is letting the form of a relationship change when its outer conditions have changed, and turning your attention to what life is now offering you. It asks you to discover that you still have power after a loss, and to use it in small, steady, visible ways until your body believes it again.
Pluto's polarity point, the sign and house opposite natal Pluto, often names how this soul will learn release. With this degree in focus, it frequently involves finding identity in what can be carried inside rather than in what can be held in the hand.
The Buddhist Dimension
Anicca means impermanence. It is the first of the three marks of existence in early Buddhism, alongside suffering and not-self. Everything conditioned arises, changes and passes. The teaching is not meant as a gloomy fact to be endured. It is meant as an accurate description of experience, and seeing it clearly is supposed to loosen the grip that causes suffering. The widow at the grave is facing anicca in its most personal form, and we will all face it in ours.
Anattā means not-self. It is the observation that none of the parts we take for a self, the body, feelings, perceptions, mental formations and consciousness, is a fixed and lasting owner of our experience. In grief this teaching has a particular edge. Much of the pain of our losses is the pain of an identity we built around another person coming apart. Anattā suggests that this identity was always a process, not a solid thing, and that a new arrangement can form. Aries 16° and Aries 19° touched on these themes earlier in the series.
The tradition tells of Kisa Gotami, a young mother who carried her dead child from house to house seeking medicine. The Buddha asked her to bring a mustard seed from a household where no one had died. She found none, and in that search she understood that loss belongs to everyone. She buried her child and became a nun. The story does not deny her grief or tell you that yours is mistaken. It shows grief turning, through understanding, into a wider compassion for everyone who has stood where she stood, which in the end is all of us.
The Soul's Work
The work at this degree is to turn round at the right time, without hurrying and without staying at the graveside for years.
Start by naming what has ended. It may be a person, but it may also be a job, a home, a version of your body, a belief about how your life would go. Write it down plainly. Then write what you received from it that you still carry: a skill, a way of seeing, a kind of courage, a recipe, a habit of kindness. These are not consolation prizes. They are the part of what you lost that was always going to stay with you.
We tend to skip this step because it feels like bookkeeping in the middle of sorrow, yet it is how we learn what our losses leave behind in us.
Next, look for the place where you feel powerless. Grief often hides a sentence like nothing I do makes any difference now. Test that sentence in small ways. Cook one meal that you would have cooked before. Call one person who knew what you lost. Take one decision about the future, even a small one, like where to walk tomorrow. Each act is evidence against helplessness.
The throat and chest often carry grief in the body. If you notice tightness there, give it a sound. Hum, sigh on a long out-breath, or read aloud for a few minutes. In Chinese medicine grief is associated with the Lung, and the out-breath is the most direct way of working with it. Let the exhale be longer than the inhale, and notice what softens.
Finally, set a rhythm for remembering that does not swallow the present. A day each year, a photograph in a place where you can see it, a candle on a particular evening. This lets love keep its form while the days fill with new things. We honour our dead best by living well in the time we still have, and our rituals of memory work when they send us back into that time rather than away from it.
The earth goes back over what was, you turn towards the road, and the life ahead of you begins at the edge of the grave.
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Frequently Asked Questions
What is the Sabian Symbol for Taurus 5°?
The Sabian Symbol for Taurus 5° is A widow at an open grave, in the wording Dane Rudhyar gave it in An Astrological Mandala (1973). The image itself was channelled by Elsie Wheeler in 1925 and first recorded by Marc Edmund Jones. It is phase 35 of the 360-degree cycle, the fifth stage of the 7th five-fold sequence. Jones's keyword is reorientation.
What does Taurus 5° mean in a natal chart?
A planet at Taurus 5° shows where you are learning to let endings be endings. You may form strong attachments and feel loss intensely, and the task is to grieve fully and then turn towards what life offers next. The degree links growth to the moment of letting go, and asks you to recover your sense of power after a loss rather than settling into helplessness.
What is the keyword for Taurus 5°?
The keyword Marc Edmund Jones assigned is REORIENTATION. At its best it is a calm, resilient ability to absorb disappointment and delay and to keep discovering yourself through each setback. At its worst it turns into a long giving in to frustration, a gradual loss of competence and confidence that leaves you circling the old loss instead of facing the life that remains.
What is the shadow side of Taurus 5°?
The shadow is grief that becomes a residence instead of a passage. It can look like keeping rooms untouched for years, measuring every new relationship against the one that ended, or a fixed belief that nothing you do will matter now. It can also look like refusing to grieve at all. Both avoid the turn that this degree asks for.
How does Kübler-Ross's research on the stages of grief relate to this degree?
Kübler-Ross described denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance, drawing on interviews with dying patients, and she said the stages were not a fixed sequence. Later bereavement research found that many people grieve without clear stages. For this degree, her lasting contribution is that grief moves. Reorientation means regaining your footing while feelings shift, not reaching a final stage and staying put.
How does Seneca's Stoic philosophy of consolation apply here?
Seneca wrote consolations that allowed tears but warned against grief becoming a habit. To Marcia he contrasted Octavia, who mourned without end, with Livia, who grieved and returned to life. He admitted weeping too much for his friend Serenus. His advice suits this degree: feel the loss, then turn deliberately towards what remains, and let memory become warm rather than painful.
How does Pluto factor into the Evolutionary Astrology Lens at this degree?
Pluto shows the deep pattern of attachment and loss the soul is working to transform. Here it often points to earlier experiences of sudden or forced loss, which can lead to clinging or to avoiding closeness. The North Node calls for release, letting relationships change form when circumstances change, and Pluto's polarity point often names identity found in what can be carried within.
How does Taurus 5° complete the five-fold sequence that began at Taurus 1°?
The sequence opens at Taurus 1° with a clear stream coming down from the mountain, then meets a storm at Taurus 2°, a gentle climb onto blooming ground at Taurus 3°, and a promise at the end of the rainbow at Taurus 4°. Taurus 5° closes it at the graveside. What was received, tested and hoped for must finally be released, so that the next cycle can begin.
This interpretation draws on the 360 symbolic images channelled by Elsie Wheeler in 1925, as recorded and organised by Marc Edmund Jones and later developed by Dane Rudhyar in Astrological Mandala (1973), read here through the lens of depth psychology, Eastern philosophy, and evolutionary astrology.
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