Taurus. ♉︎

The bull is a costume. Zeus, wanting Europa, princess of Tyre, became a white bull so mild that she draped it with flowers and climbed onto its back. The bull walked into the surf and swam, and did not stop until Crete. The continent she left took her name as she was carried away from it. Of all the zodiac’s animals, this one is a kidnapping in progress.

The sky, the poets noticed, holds only the bull’s forequarters: head, horns, the great shoulder. The rest is missing, and the mythographers supplied the reason: the hindquarters are underwater, mid-crossing. The constellation is not a portrait of a bull. It is a freeze-frame of the swim to Crete.

Babylon’s name for these stars was GU4.AN.NA, the Bull of Heaven: the monster Ishtar unleashed on Gilgamesh when he refused her, and Enkidu slew. The bull was already celestial in Mesopotamia a thousand years before Greece re-cast the beast as Zeus in disguise. The shape survived; only the crime changed.

Aldebaran, ‘the follower’, tails the Pleiades across every winter night, glaring orange from the bull’s eye. The V of the Hyades makes the face, the nearest open cluster to Earth; the Pleiades ride the shoulder. No other sign carries two of the sky’s great clusters, which is why the bull has been drawn on ceilings and cave walls longer than almost anything else.

Sources: MUL.APIN I · Epic of Gilgamesh VI · Catasterismi 14 · Ovid, Metamorphoses 2