Decan Rulers: Mercury and VenusKeywords: Organising Resources, Planning and Preparation, Sustainable Growth
Tarot Correspondance: 5 of Pentacles
Allow me to explore for you some of the astrological threads of the New Moon in Taurus on 27th April, maybe we can even begin to weave some together by sharing and breathing life into them.
With this New Moon in Taurus, we are invited to transmute our worry into practical plans and connect with mother nature. We step into the Venusian garden where potential and work create beauty and peace of mind. This is a time supporting you for planting intentional seeds in your metaphorical garden that you intend to grow into material and tangible results, pleasing your senses or taste buds, to improve your view of your world.
The Taurus New Moon of April 27, 2025, marks the beginning of a fresh 28 day lunar cycle, a new 6 month cycle to the Full Moon in Taurus, and a new Lunar Gestational Family or Moon Family within the solid and sensual sign of Taurus. New Moons are times of seeding, going within, and intention-setting. As the Moon joins the Sun in the dark night sky, we turn inward to feel and intuit what desires and dreams are rising for us and asking to be brought into reality in the coming months.
This lunation invites you to step into the stillness of fixed earth and reflect on: What will you grow? What will you tend? And how can you begin that cultivation now, even in the shadows?
As the first New Moon after eclipse season, this lunation in Taurus initiates a quieter yet deeply significant cycle of intention-setting, resource management, and cultivation. The Moon is exalted in Taurus, making this a fertile time to align with nature’s rhythms and embody steady, grounded progress. But this New Moon is not without challenge. With tensions forming a T-square to Mars in Leo and Pluto in Aquarius, we are urged to confront how fear, scarcity, conflict and control may block our path to true abundance.
The Nature of New Moons
New Moons are thresholds, regular and familiar times of emptiness and potential. The Moon, dark and invisible, invites us inward. In Taurus, this new beginning takes root in the body, in the soil, and in what is slow, sensory, and sustaining. The Taurus Moon offers us the grace of stillness and the wisdom of natural cycles. What begins now can grow with steady care over the coming six months or longer.
Taurus: Fixed Earth, Yin, Venusian
Taurus is the domicile of Venus, feminine or Yin, fertile, grounded, stable, enduring, and receptive. Taurus honours beauty, sensuality, and peace, but also demands practicality and discernment. The Moon is exalted here, so our body, emotions, home and fluctuations in fortune are all naturally honoured here. As a fixed sign, it teaches us to build slowly and surely, fixed signs will sustain and persist. Taurus governs the natural rhythms of life, it favours enduring value over quick gain, and reminds us that pleasure and sustainability are not separate goals.
This is a good time to check in with your foundations: money, food, shelter, body, pleasures, and comforts. Are they supporting you? Where is there relaxation and peace? Where might there be complacency? What can be made more beautiful, more nourishing, more stable? What has been causing you to worry, and what practical steps can you take?
Taurus resists haste and favours the tried and true. This sign reminds us that quality takes time and that what truly nourishes is worth the wait, delayed gratification is the winner here.
Moon Family in Taurus
This New Moon begins a new Lunar Gestational Cycle or Moon Family, a pattern that unfolds over 27 months, punctuated by key lunation phases in the same degree range of the zodiac. These Moon Families mark developmental arcs, longer stories that build over time. They begin with a seed of intention or insight at the New Moon, find their first visibility nine months later, maybe asking for some adjustment or changes, reach full clarity and culmination after eighteen months, and resolve or integrate after twenty-seven months, when we then move into a time of release, reflection and preparation for the next cycle.
This method is introduced and outlined more fully by Dietrich Pessin in Lunar Shadows III.
For this Taurus Moon Family, the dates are:
* New Moon: April 27, 2025 – 7° Taurus
* First Quarter Moon: January 26, 2026 – 6° Taurus
* Full Moon: October 26, 2026 – 2° Taurus
* Last Quarter Moon: July 26, 2027 – 3° Taurus
This is a lunar storyline that unfolds slowly and organically, just like Taurus itself. Each stage offers a different energetic focus:
* New Moon (April 2025) – Plant the seed. Something begins quietly, perhaps even below the threshold of conscious awareness. Set your intention around Taurus themes: stability, material security, body care, long-term planning, and grounded pleasure.
* First Quarter (January 2026) – A challenge arises. You meet a turning point. This is the “crisis of action” phase, where tension drives development. You begin to see what will and won’t grow from your original seed and make the adjustments required for that tender new growth.
* Full Moon (October 2026) – Full visibility. The fruits of your efforts, for better or worse, are revealed. This is the phase of realisation, culmination, or confrontation with results. Truths can be fully seen now and understood.
* Last Quarter (July 2027) – Integration and release. You begin to close the chapter, distil the wisdom, and clear space for the next cycle.
Keep a journal or note on your calendar with each of these dates and track how your relationship to Taurus themes, money, food, pleasure, relaxation, planning, peace of mind, cultivation, self-worth, physical wellbeing and sustainability evolves.
Who Is Most Affected?
This Moon Family is especially significant for:
* Anyone with personal planets or angles between 1°–8° of Fixed signs (Taurus, Leo, Scorpio, Aquarius). You’ll feel the effects of this Moon Family most directly, maybe have a clearer more impactful story, especially if these degrees connect with your Ascendant, Sun, Moon, or Venus.
* Earth and Water signs, in general, may find this cycle resonates with their natural rhythms. Taurus works slowly but thoroughly, this is a gift to those willing to build something meaningful over time.
* People with planets in early degrees of Fixed signs may experience inner or outer tension due to this lunation’s square to Mars in Leo and Pluto in Aquarius. This can catalyse decisive action, especially if you’ve felt “stuck” in a comfort zone.
* Those who began new endeavours or experienced significant turning points in April 2022, during the last Solar Partial New Moon eclipse at a similar degree in Taurus (April 30, 2022 – Solar Eclipse at 10° Taurus), may see a related thread emerge, of course, this time not eclipsed, but it may be clarified, cultivated and developed.
* Those whose Profected Lord of the Year is Venus or the Moon.
This Moon Family invites you to cultivate something enduring through trial, revision, and recommitment. Each phase is an invitation to check in with your goals, your resources, and your long-term plans, to work intentionally with time, to take the long view, and to honour the slow accumulation of stability and wealth, whether financial, emotional, or spiritual.
For those without exact hits, the invitation still stands. Taurus asks us all: What do you value? What are you building? And how can you become more intentional with your time, money, energy, and care?
Decan of Taurus I: Planning for the Plow
This New Moon falls in the first decan of Taurus, ruled by Mercury and Venus. Here, the intelligence and bright ideas of Mercury meet the earthy artistry of Venus. This decan is often associated with the labour of preparation, an archetype described by Austin Coppock’s name for the decan, The Plow, and Kira Ryberg’s term, Planning.
The Plow evokes the agricultural metaphor of breaking ground in order to sow seeds. It exposes what has been hidden beneath in the dark earth. It is a place of effortful, often unseen labour that must be performed to bring about abundance in the longer term. Austin Coppock describes this as a decan where we must get our hands dirty, doing the hard, preparatory work even when conditions are imperfect. Here, worry can become a driving force that motivates long-term planning.
Kira Ryberg names this decan Planning, focusing on the mental and emotional preparation required to build something resilient. Her interpretation emphasises not only the labour of plowing the earth, but the anticipatory strategy that allows us to weather scarcity. It is a mental decan of preparedness, an energy of organising, budgeting, mapping outcomes, and preempting risk.
The Wild Way Oracle offers the card Cultivation for Taurus I. It features Mole, who knows that good harvests begin beneath the surface. Mole teaches that good cultivation begins underground: with thoughtfulness, foresight, and strategic effort before the first sprouts appear. Planning doesn’t mean controlling outcomes, it means organising resources, preparing the ground, and planting only what you’re willing to tend.
This card speaks of hidden work, preparation, and the rewards of thoughtful foresight. The wisdom of Mole is not flashy or fast, but enduring: "By thinking through all eventualities ahead of time, unnecessary worry can be alleviated and bountiful results are more likely."
We see the Mole who has emerged from his digging above the earth in a green field with daffodils. In his work, he appears to have found a key, which is balanced on his head. We understand that the key to good results and peace from worry is careful planning.
In this light, delayed gratification becomes a sacred practice. Planning ahead is not pessimism, it is a act of devotion to a future self, the key to sustainable growth.
The Wild Way gives us the keywords for this decan: Organising Resources, Planning and Preparation, Sustainable Growth
This lunation offers a moment to think ahead without panic or pressure. How can you use this time to alleviate unnecessary worry? Where can you invest your energy today to ensure bounty tomorrow?
If you’ve recently felt like you’ve broken a “spell” of stuckness, confusion, or scarcity (echoing the recent Full Moon’s themes), this is your moment to begin anew, with structure, not just inspiration. Especially as we feel Mars get his energy back from his long stay in Cancer.
Tarot: 5 of Pentacles
In the Tarot, Taurus I corresponds to the 5 of Pentacles, a card often associated with material hardship or spiritual desolation, also with the fears and expectations that create these states. We can allay those fears by making plans, taking practical action and this decan gives us the push we might need to leave the Venusian delights and turn our mind (Mercury) to the necessary details.
T. Susan Chang’s words deepen this reflection with a poetic meditation on the decan of Taurus I. Her invocation adds depth and nuance:
The Game of Worry, slow and cold.Anticipate what may unfold.Stark the air and bare the tree,Speak your hurt and take a knee…
…Within stone cold anxietyThere lies a dark and hidden key.
Have patience where you find delay.Persistent effort finds a way.Do not rush. Anticipate.And buy insurance while you wait.
…For worry is a plan you layIn order that you win, someday…
This poem captures the wisdom of Taurus I: that worry, when disciplined, can transmute into foresight. The 5 of Pentacles and this decan isn’t about loss, it’s about the fear of loss, and what we do with that fear. Planning is the antidote to panic. Persistence is the remedy to despair “in order that you win, someday!”
Worry, in this context, becomes a helpful tool which allows us to secure the future. We are reminded that anxiety contains wisdom when approached with the patience and resolve that a fixed sign offers. This poem echoes the gifts of Taurus I: anticipate, endure, and sow now for the harvest to come.
The Astrological Conversation: Intense T-Square with Mars and Pluto
The New Moon is in a T-square with Mars in Leo and Pluto in Aquarius, both square the lunation. Mars, still in its shadow and moving through the final degrees before reaching 6° Leo, reactivates the themes of the Libra Full Moon two weeks prior. Mars in Leo brings pride, passion, and the need to defend or assert our authentic identity.
Pluto in Aquarius demands collective transformation, often through upheaval. There may be pressure to transform how we hold power, safety, and structure. This configuration suggests a need to release outdated frameworks of control and allow something more authentic, and possibly even more vulnerable, to emerge.
The Mars square echoes the Mars T-square from the recent Libra Full Moon, suggesting that the Mars storyline is carrying over, maybe developing or returning to themes from when Mars first travelled these early degrees of Leo back in November and December 2024. If the Full Moon in Libra revealed a crisis of emotional or relational tension, this New Moon asks: how do you respond strategically? How do you channel pressure into preparation?
Tension isn’t always bad, it creates traction and moves us on with our lives in places we may have become stuck. It can inspire and ask us to take necessary action. With the fixed signs involved, change may feel resisted, but that resistance can also become a firm resolve. The New Moon is also co-present with the planet of Disruption Uranus, adding to the chances of the unexpected or sudden insights offering us a glimpse of liberation or inventiveness to inspire our action.
The New Moon has a whole sign sextile to its ruler Venus as she retraces her retrograde steps through the last degrees of Pisces. She is separating from Saturn, bringing a gravitas to the planets in Taurus and a maturity to her topics. As the exalted Moon grapples with the power and conflict challenges of Mars and Pluto, it seems fitting that Venus has more long term matters on her mind, wanting to bring Piscean dreams into reality through her Taurus plans. Have you got a long term dream that this time can support you to initiate?
Final Thoughts
This New Moon in Taurus I asks us to slow down with purpose, and to plan not only from fear, but from inner vision. In the stillness of fixed earth, the mind quiets enough to hear what the body and heart truly need. We are reminded that abundance doesn’t arrive overnight. It is cultivated, deliberately, patiently, and with devotion to the long view. This is not glamorous work, but it is sacred. The planning you do now, the small steps you take, the financial or emotional groundwork you lay, will echo into the future.
You don’t need to do everything now. You just need to start, take time to slow down, reflect and pause. Lay the foundations. Name your fears. Make your plan. Prepare the soil. Trust the process. Anticipate the cold, and you’ll know how to keep warm. Organise your resources, and you’ll be ready when the rain comes. The path ahead may be slow, but it is steady.
The rest will grow in its own time.
Travel well, friends
Sonia
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Chapters
00:00 Introduction to the Taurus New Moon
01:05 Setting Intentions and Cultivating Growth
03:24 Understanding the Lunar Cycle and Moon Families
05:49 The First Deccan of Taurus: Planning and Preparation
12:06 Navigating Challenges: Mars and Pluto's Influence
16:16 Long-Term Vision and Practical Steps
References:
AustinCoppock.com The Decans: Images and Applications
Dietrich Pessin Lunar Families III
KiraRyberg.com The 36 Decans
T Susan Chang Dreaming the Decans
The Wild Way Oracle deck by Nicola Allan @nicola_allan on Instagram & Twitter
