I want to write about the sign Taurus. Because a lot of Taureans have been in the news. It’s a bit of a ramble, and some of the Taureans I write about are long dead, and have nothing to do with the credit crunch. Still, if you want to get inside the Taurean personality, you might find this article useful.
As I discussed in earlier articles, two of 2008’s major players had Taurus as their star sign – Bernard Madoff and Richard Fuld. Madoff lost his clients billions and billions of dollars, through an elaborate Ponzi scheme. Fuld, as CEO of Lehman Brothers, saw his company file for Chapter 11 Bankruptcy protection, with disastrous results for employees and shareholders.
One of Madoff’s high profile victims was investment manager Rene-Thierry Magon de la Villehuchet, who apparently invested over a billion dollars of his clients’ money with Madoff. When he realised that he couldn’t get the money back, he committed suicide.
From what I can gather, de la Villehuchet was born on April 23 1943, making him another Taurus. He also had the Moon in Sagittarius, which suggests that he was a man who was on the look out for glamour and excitement, but who was also very honest.
In Indian astrology his Moon was in Scorpio rather than Sagittarius, and the Moon in Scorpio can be very unfortunate – especially when it’s far away from the other planets in the horoscope. This latter condition is called Kemadruma Yoga, and according to the Indian scriptures it creates misery and humiliation, and can also take away one’s wealth.
So perhaps Taureans financiers have to be careful? They can be too single-minded, and in an almost biblical way, they can turn money into a graven image, something that’s worshipped for its own sake.
Going back to an earlier era, and Italian banker Michele Sindona was a Taurus, born on May 8 1920. Coming from a poor Sicilian background, he had a fine academic brain, and after qualifying as a lawyer he laundered drug money for the Mafia. Moving into banking, he quickly made a name for himself, and by the early 1970s he was an extremely rich man, running a string of banks. But his empire was built on sand, and in 1974 it crashed. And twelve years later, while serving a prison sentence, he died of cyanide poisoning – it was probably murder rather than suicide. The Devil gives, the Devil takes.
As a point of interest, both de la Villehuchet and Sindona died in their 66th year, and both had Kemadruma Yoga. Though when it came to honesty and morality they were very different people.
What about the good? If you’re in England you’ll perhaps know that the country’s favourite politician is a Taurean called Vince Cable, the economics spokesman of the Liberal Democrat Party. Born twenty-three years after Michele Sindona, on May 9 1943, he has a PhD in economics, and he gave us early warning of disaster. In early 2008 he said:
We are in the nightmare scenario where banks can’t lend and people can’t borrow. The UK economy has been running on little else than the wide availability of cheap credit for several years. With lending now drying up, there is a real danger this will have a serious impact on growth in the economy.
Taureans who are in their element, and who are functioning at peak efficiency, will understand what’s obvious, even if few other people can see it. And a healthy Taurus will realise that both people and nations must live within their means. This type of Taurus recognises that money’s money, no more and no less. And if one worships money, one loses touch with it.
Another Taurus who has benefited from 2008 is long dead. That’s Karl Marx, the founder of Communism, who died in 1883. After several decades of being abused and ignored, Karl Marx’s reputation has received a major boost, and people are re-reading Das Kapital, his epic and virtually unreadable critique of capitalism.
As a Taurus, Karl Marx regarded economics as underpinning everything. Class, politics and religion, it is all underpinned by a network of exchange relationships, where goods, services and labour are swapped. And most importantly, Karl Marx saw capitalism as being in crisis – and that was in the middle of the Nineteenth Century. How much greater its crisis in 2008!
In practice, capitalism has a unique capacity for rescuing itself. In England, France and Germany, in the late Nineteenth Century, working conditions were improved, and wages increased. And people like Henry Ford recognised that if you look after your work force, the profits often take care of themselves.
Vladimir Lenin, another Taurus, who was Russia’s first Communist leader, tried to fix Marx’s theory. Capitalism, according to Lenin, was able to survive, and prevent its workers from rising up, through imperialism. Places like China and India were forced to buy goods from the West, through military and colonial coercion. As a result capitalists made extra profits, some of which they could use to keep their workers happy. Though in 2008 Lenin didn’t make much of a comeback.
Maybe Taureans should forget money and economics, and become more spiritual? That seems a good idea for 2009. The seven-figure bank accounts, the SUVs, the McMansions, the plasma televisions, will eventually go. They’ll be stolen, they’ll become worthless, they’ll be repossessed, they’ll become obsolete, their grasping owner will breathe his or her last. It’s time for Taureans to raise their sights, to a higher set of values, that won’t be eroded to nothing by time and fate.
However even here there’s a trap. It’s all very well getting spiritual, but if we get religious there could be problems. Taureans like things to be set in stone, and Taureans who sign up to a religion can become very dogmatic. God is is often brought down to earth, and recreated in Man’s image. The beast of materialism using religious dogma to shut out the divine.
Two of the most dogmatic popes of the modern era were Taureans. Pope Pius IX declared the doctrine of Papal Infallibility. This was the idea that once the pope had said something, in his role as pope, it was a hundred percent correct.
Pius IX died on February 7 1878, and just over a century later, on October 16 1878, we had another Taurean pope, Pope John Paul II. A man who was doctrinaire, who wouldn’t seriously consider the possibility of female priests, who vehemently opposed the use of condoms in Africa, in spite of the AIDS epidemic. Slavish obedience to religious dogma, not just the worship of money, can make Taureans lose sight of the big picture.
Oh… the Ayatollah Khomeini was also a Taurean… but I’m rambling. Happy New Year!
