Ages

Age of Taurus

Also Known As Taurean Age

Cosmological Age

Citation Formats

General Reference

Divinity Atlas. "Age of Taurus." Accessed August 30, 2026. https://dev-divinity.interactiveatlas.org/ages/age-of-taurus.

APA Style

Divinity Atlas. (n.d.). Age of Taurus. Retrieved August 30, 2026, from https://dev-divinity.interactiveatlas.org/ages/age-of-taurus

BibTeX

@misc{divinityatlas-age-of-taurus,
  author = {Divinity Atlas},
  title = {Age of Taurus},
  year = {2026},
  url = {https://dev-divinity.interactiveatlas.org/ages/age-of-taurus},
  note = {Accessed August 30, 2026}
}

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 Dating

4000 BCE to 2000 BCE 1

Nicholas 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.

Attributions

Tradition

Western astrology and esoteric literature; the underlying precession is a measured astronomical phenomenon 1

Identity

Symbol

The bull, read retrospectively onto Bronze Age bull cults including the Apis bull of Memphis and Minoan bull-leaping imagery 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.

Cross-Tradition Connections