Age
Age of Taurus
Also Known As Taurean Age · Age of the Bull
Cosmological Age
The Age of Taurus is the zodiacal age conventionally placed before the Age of Aries, its span estimated at roughly 4000 to 2000 BCE on the standard even division of the Great Year. Popular and esoteric astrological writing associates it with the bull cults of the early Bronze Age, including Egypt's Apis bull and the bull imagery of Minoan Crete, though the association is a later interpretive reading rather than a claim its own participants made about themselves.
Facts
Disputed
Proposed DatingNicholas Campion, a historian of astrology (A History of Western Astrology, Continuum, London, 2009), compared two competing methods for locating the boundaries of the zodiacal ages within the roughly 25,800 year precessional cycle. The method the atlas uses for its default date range divides that cycle into twelve equal shares of about 2,150 years each. The rival method Campion documents instead measures the actual, unequal angular width each zodiac constellation occupies along the ecliptic and sets the age boundary where the constellation itself begins or ends. Because the twelve constellations are not equal in width, the two methods place the edges of the Age of Taurus centuries apart, and Campion's survey of the astrological literature finds no consensus on which convention is correct, since the choice is a matter of definition rather than of evidence that could settle it. Proposed DatingOne of the twelve ages in the precession of the equinoxes, when the vernal equinox point lay within the constellation Taurus. On the even division of the roughly 25,800 year precessional cycle into twelve shares of about 2,150 years each, the dating this atlas records by default, the age runs from roughly 4000 BCE to 2000 BCE. Nicholas Campion's survey of the astrological literature finds no consensus on this dating, since a rival method that measures each constellation's actual, unequal angular width along the ecliptic instead of dividing the cycle evenly places the boundaries of this age at different centuries. 1 Identity
SymbolThe bull, read retrospectively onto Bronze Age bull cults including the Apis bull of Memphis and Minoan bull-leaping imagery 1 Attributions
TraditionWestern astrology and esoteric literature; the underlying precession is a measured astronomical phenomenon 1 Learn More
The Conventional Span and Its Basis
On the standard even division of the Great Year into twelve 2,150 year segments, the Age of Taurus is generally placed at approximately 4000 to 2000 BCE, immediately preceding the Age of Aries. This dating is a modern retrospective calculation rather than a period any Bronze Age society dated itself by; no contemporary Sumerian, Egyptian or Minoan text refers to living in an "age of the bull" in the sense the phrase carries in later astrological writing. Nicholas Campion's History of Western Astrology situates the zodiacal ages scheme itself as a later interpretive framework applied backward onto earlier bull-associated religious material, not as evidence that Bronze Age peoples held a precessional theory of history.
The proposed span nonetheless roughly overlaps genuine and well attested bull-centered religious practice: the Apis bull cult of Memphis, active from at least the Old Kingdom, the bull-leaping imagery excavated at the Minoan palace of Knossos on Crete, and the Bull of Heaven episode in the Sumerian and Akkadian Gilgamesh material. Whether that overlap reflects anything more than coincidence, given how common bull veneration was across the wider Bronze Age Near East regardless of any zodiacal scheme, is not something the astrological literature itself claims to have demonstrated.
Bull Cults Read Retrospectively
Writers working within the zodiacal ages framework have proposed that the eventual Biblical account of the Golden Calf, in which the Israelites fashion and worship a bull idol during the Exodus before Moses destroys it, reflects a symbolic transition away from an outgoing Age of Taurus toward the incoming Age of Aries, whose ram symbolism the same writers read into the Genesis story of the ram substituted for Isaac. This reading treats the episode as a memory, encoded in myth, of one zodiacal age giving way to the next, an interpretation associated with esoteric and popular astrological literature rather than with mainstream biblical scholarship, which explains the Golden Calf episode through other means entirely, chiefly as polemic against rival cultic practice.
The astronomical dating itself is also not settled even within the ages literature: because the twelve zodiac constellations do not occupy equal shares of the sky, a scheme that matches age boundaries to the constellations' actual extent rather than to an even 2,150 year division shifts the proposed start and end of the Age of Taurus by a few centuries in either direction. No consensus method exists for resolving this, and both the even-division and constellation-boundary approaches remain current in the literature.
Connections
Associated With
The Age of Taurus is named for the zodiac sign Taurus, the constellation the spring equinox point occupied during this segment of the Great Year.
Source A History of Western AstrologyNicholas Campion
Belongs to Tradition
Contained In
The Age of Taurus is one segment of the roughly 25,772 year precessional cycle called the Great Year.
Source A History of Western AstrologyNicholas Campion
Succeeded By
The Age of Aries is conventionally placed as following the Age of Taurus in the precessional sequence.
Source A History of Western AstrologyNicholas Campion
Sources
1. A History of Western Astrology
Essays About This Entity (1 essay)
Ages Argues With Itself Two Different Ways, Not One
Even division against constellation-boundary division; no method commands consensus
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