Mars in Taurus

Notes on Movement, Melothesia, and Metabolism

Over the past few weeks, I’ve been working semi-obsessively on an astrology-based sports-betting model called Dioscuri that tests astrology against the absurd amount of sports data we have.

This is a full-circle moment for me, as one of the first adult things I got into as a kid was baseball statistics—something that I feel foreshadowed my interest in astrology, which could be considered humanity’s oldest and longest-running data science project. With Claude, I’ve been able to gather hundreds of thousands of data points and empirically backtest astrological theory. Do the charts actually predict winners? Maybe someday I’ll make a lot of money with this, but in the meantime, it’s teaching me a lot about astrology.

Many of the statistically significant findings are semi-paradoxical. In some sports, Jupiter, the “Greater Benefic,” acts as a confounding agent—players become overconfident, swing too hard, and perform worse. Hard aspects from Saturn (the “Greater Malefic”) act as a supportive, focusing factor for many (but not all) athletes. And most interestingly, the most robust finding of the model so far is that in golf, the traditional dignity scheme for Mars, wherein Mars is considered strong in Aries and Scorpio and weak in Taurus and Libra, is totally turned on its head. Across 18,135 rounds (the last ~15 years), players with Mars in detriment (Taurus or Libra) make the cut 4.4% more often and score better relative to the field with p < 0.0001—less than .01% probability that happens by chance. The inverse is also true: players with Mars in domicile (Aries or Scorpio) perform worse, 4.0% less likely to make the cut, with p < 0.0001.¹

The astrological interpretation is elegant: golf rewards patience, course management, and restrained aggression. It punishes overswinging and reckless aggression. Mars in detriment—the “weakened” Mars—actually describes a more measured, controlled relationship with drive and ambition. The “weaker” Mars wins on the golf course. The current world #1, Scottie Scheffler, has Mars in Taurus.

This is not what traditional astrology would lead us to expect. Mars in Taurus is usually considered a difficult placement—a planet away from its own comfortable terrain. In Aries and Scorpio, Mars can act in a manner similar to his own nature—direct, sharp, courageous, combative, decisive, and sometimes destructive. Mars likes heat, action, speed, incision, assertion. We see this in the pointy tip in Mars’ glyph: he wants to cut through. He wants the clean strike and decisive blow. Taurus, meanwhile, does not typically want to be hurried. A fixed earth sign, Taurus wants to feel the ground, to feel something substantial, to be fed, rested, and to move at the speed of trust. Taurus does not necessarily believe the first impulse—it believes what endures, what can be returned to. It’s a sign of the fundamentals and basics, of Venusian peaceful pleasure, rather than Martial combustion.

But maybe it makes sense that Mars in Taurus would be good at golf. Perhaps no other sport requires such a sense of touch, a good feel for the terrain, and the ability to tolerate delays, bad weather, bad terrain, and the boredom and subtlety of multiple 18-round days. No other sign demands such silence. Perhaps Taurus, which is connected to the throat and mouth in medical astrology and which Steven Forrest names “The Silent One,” thrives with the hushed crowd in which a cough could be heard. Perhaps golf is the perfect sport for a Mars that has been restrained, weighted, slowed, and forced to develop superhuman patience and touch.

The bull, after all, is not weak. The bull is actually an ancient and archetypal image of robust strength: neck, shoulders, horns, muscle, fertility, weight, and mass. This is not a sword, but the body as force, the body as something difficult to move. This is the Minotaur somewhere in the maze, with a muscular bulk and strength as dense as its body. Most of the time, the bull is not charging—it is grazing, chewing, conserving energy, and occupying space. This is Mars as a delayed force, stored power, capable of maintenance and momentum. Here, force is not only speed—it is also mass, rhythm, and pressure.

Mars in Taurus likes simple, repeatable, ordinary movement: long walks, slow runs, bike rides, strength training with volume rather than intensity, basic exercises like push-ups, sit-ups, pull-ups, and jump rope, or even carrying things, cleaning the house, gardening, fixing something, and the kind of manual labor that becomes a workout without needing to call itself exercise. Here, we want actions that are almost thoughtless—not because the body is absent, but because the body knows what to do. The point is not to make movement more complicated, but more habitual, more grounded, easier to say yes to. Not an elaborate training protocol, not the newest fitness system with wearables and spreadsheets, but something your grandma or grandpa might have done—or might still be able to do—and that still feels good for you.

Mars in Taurus is also movement, games, or sport as leisure—the kind of activities you would do while hanging out on a summer day: lawn games, playing catch with a football, frisbee, or baseball, shooting hoops, skipping stones, playing ping pong, putt-putt, pool, darts, or bowling. There might be competition, but not conquest—this is activity as a baseline. Watching sports can also be Taurus-coded in this way—not necessarily an ecstatic playoff spectacle—but maybe just minor league baseball with a beer and hot dog, the game as a place to sit, eat, talk, watch, and let the afternoon pass pleasantly.

Mars in Taurus appreciates action that is woven into life, rather than athletics as a heroic performance. The athletes who feel Taurus-like are not the flashiest ones, but the ones who do the dirty work: rebounders and defenders in basketball, linemen in football, catchers and first basemen in baseball, those who are hard to move, reliable, and make fewer mistakes. Greatness here is not innovation, but consistency. Tim Duncan, “The Big Fundamental,” who was the anchor of the Spurs through 5 championships and for nearly two decades, is a quintessential example of this—steady, reliable, incredibly quiet, and nearly impossible to dislodge from the basic task—and a Taurus Sun. The fundamentals are not glamorous, but they are what hold and sustain us through life’s vicissitudes. And so perhaps this is Mars in Taurus’ lesson—that we don’t become strong by constantly reinventing ourselves, but by slow repetition of what works.

In medical astrology, Taurus is connected with the neck, throat, jaw, mouth, tongue, teeth, and some of the symbolic territory around the thyroid and metabolism. It’s been interesting to watch these areas be given much more attention by popular culture over the past ~7 years, as Uranus has transited Taurus. These are places that respond well to regular care and attention, but also where the body can hold things for a very long time—mirroring Taurus themes of nourishment, accumulation, and stagnation. The jaw clenches. The teeth grind. The throat closes. The neck stiffens. The shoulders creep upward. The voice gets swallowed.

These are areas of slow, central functionality, but also places where anger, frustration, and unexpressed desire can be stored—some of the shadow sides of Mars, becoming expressed in the sign of his detriment. Perhaps this is how Mars in Taurus expresses anger—becoming immovable, saying, “I will not yield. I will not be rushed. I will make you feel the weight of my ‘No.’” Perhaps there is also deep wisdom about what we desire, or what we don’t, that is held within these parts of our body.

Tending to these parts of the body does not require heroism—actually, it can be savory, like a massage, even a self-massage of our neck and jaw. This is also the medicine of lymphatic drainage, gua sha, warm compresses, chewing gum, knocking on our teeth, running our tongue around our teeth or sticking it out, letting the neck hang in a forward fold, lying with the head tilted back over the side of the bed, and humming, singing, chanting, and sighing. None of these will produce magical results when done once, but like many simple things, they compound.

This capacity to stabilize, to simplify, to focus on the practical and essential — these are all important gifts of Taurus. But in the same way that any virtue can swing to two poles of vice, these comforting essentials can become our captivating pleasures, sedating rather than nourishing. Health-wise, Taurus often has a relation with stagnation, phlegm, dampness, heaviness, congealing, and accumulation. Things can become thick, the body can feel dull, sluggish, swollen, slow to start. Candida, mucus, and lymphatic sluggishness—in the gut or in the mouth, throat, and neck—all fit in here.

Hypothyroidism also belongs here—a lack of vital metabolic fire, a slow coldness. Of late, I’ve been appreciating and digesting elements of Ray Peat’s perspective—especially his assessment that most people today are hypothyroid. Even if it’s not clinical hyperthyroidism, how many of us are stuck in a cold, fatigued, inflamed, stressed, dull, and depleted state of being—not exactly sick, but not generating real vitality? Peat’s emphasis on sugar is fascinating here—rather than being seen as a factor of corruption, he sees glucose as a central fuel—something for the body to run on rather than cortisol. Fruit as a source of simple, stabilizing sucrose, providing a life-affirming sweetness, feels particularly Taurean to me.

So perhaps the weakened Mars was never weak—only slowed and weighted, asked to find his power somewhere other than speed. And perhaps that's the quiet correction Taurus offers: that strength is metabolic before it's muscular. Before it is force, it's fuel—vital, generative warmth that accumulates slowly. So much of what we call drive is really just adrenaline, run on credit, a body grinding against itself to keep moving. The bull offers another way: to be fed rather than forced, warm rather than wired, in no hurry because he doesn't need to be.

I hope you enjoyed this! Next up, Venus in Leo.

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Warmth,

Charlie

1. Glad to share the data with anyone interested!