New Moon in Taurus:
A Vengeful Heart
by April Elliott Kent

Marking another Mother's Day without my mom has made me think about her more than usual lately. My mother was born with the Sun in Taurus, with all the fine and noble traits of that sign - patience, stability, security. As a child, she had contracted polio and spent months in an iron lung; she would never again be as strong physically as she was emotionally. But with the Sun conjunct both Mars and Uranus, she was no couch potato; until she was hobbled by arthritis in her 50s, she was a force of nature, a bull in a china shop, rushing through life with energy, gusto, and charisma.

Mom loved westerns - adored Gary Cooper and Audie Murphy - and she loved the West, with its wide-open spaces and the freedom they represented, freedom to start over as someone new. Each summer, with Mom at the wheel of our station wagon, we drove back and forth across the flat prairies of Kansas, Oklahoma, and north Texas; between the scrub and enormous sky of New Mexico; through the painted desert and petrified forest of Arizona.

It was easy, on those trips, to imagine Mom as a frontier woman in one of the John Ford movies she loved, moving west with a wagon train, cooking breakfast over a campfire with a toddler on her hip. Then, when she was only 36 years old, my father died; it took the savage blow of his death to push her permanently into the open, inclusive arms of the West, where she could draw from its independent spirit and hope for a fresh start.

But the American West has never been just about puffy clouds and cowboys singing around a campfire. The Sabian Symbol for this New Moon, drawn from a darker folklore of the West, is frightening, repellent: "An Indian warrior riding fiercely with human scalps hanging at his belt." The scary Other, the representative of a vanquished people who refuse to stay vanquished, brandishes scalps dripping with blood, trophies of a vengeful heart. On the basis of that image, with no other context, no one could blame our pioneer ancestors for defending themselves against such a fearsome creature.

How would Mom have handled an Indian attack if she had been moving across country in a covered wagon in the 1800s? Would it have affected her feelings about the West, about people of color? I've thought about Mom as the furor has erupted over Arizona's new immigration enforcement law, SB1070. Having grown up in the cradle of the Ku Klux Klan, Mom knew all about tribal protectiveness. But bless her, with her Sun conjunct radical Uranus, she strenuously rejected the xenophobia that surrounded her. Mom was the friendliest person alive, but anyone who used racial epithets in her presence never dared do it twice.

I'm pretty sure Mom would not have been a fan of SB1070. Because there is, in the malignant spirit of this law, another element of the West's dark folklore, one that brings context to the Indian warrior in our Sabian Symbol: a history of racism. I live only 15 miles from the border myself; I know there are legitimate concerns about illegal immigration. I understand the frustration that underlies such a law. But because I live here, I also know that the powers conferred by a law like this one are likely to be abused - and not against people who look like me.

But it's all too easy to gang up on one state, one piece of legislation, when not even the best among us is immune from racism - especially when we feel threatened. Even my mother had a racial blind spot: she would never acknowledge the horror of Italian and Japanese Americans interred in U.S. camps during World War II, or of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. "You had to have been alive then to know what it was like, how frightened we were," she once told me, with a shudder. But isn't that the same kind of fear, leading to the scapegoating of an entire race of people, that got Germany into hot water? Wasn't that what we were supposed to be fighting against in World War II?

An impartial observer with a keen sense of irony might look at America and note that Anglo-Saxon Americans seem awfully angry and fearful about immigrants, while also noting that we're the ones who seem to have done a disproportionate amount of killing, enslaving, and imprisonment of nonwhite people. An impartial observer might even draw some conclusions about projection and guilt, and if she were of a philosophical bent, she might muse about karma.

Thunderheads are building to the east, and I hear the distant rumble of war whoops and battle cries, where vengeful hearts are bending justice toward the collection of Mexican scalps. This is not my mother's West, of open skies and open minds, the inclusive land of new beginnings, the refuge from suffocating bigotry. But then again, with such a bloody legacy, I suppose my Mother's West never really existed at all - not even in her own heart.

Taurus' best qualities are stability and security in one's self and one's place in the world. And bigotry, xenophobia, and unwillingness to share resources are the ugliest possible perversions of these traits. They make us insecure, ugly, and small, and they have no place in my West, in my America. But if morality and pride aren't enough to make a persuasive argument against them, then the Indian warrior with his belt full of bloody scalps will try it his way. Because if we can learn anything from this New Moon's bloody and vengeful Sabian Symbol (or for that matter, from history), it's that vanquished people don't usually go down without a fight - nor do they tend to stay vanquished forever.

© 2010 April Elliott Kent
All rights reserved