Leo and Taurus Compatibility: Two Ways of Standing Still

Midspring and Midsummer, One Season Apart

Taurus is a spring sign and Leo a summer one, and each sits in the middle of its season. In the old seasonal grouping Taurus stands between Aries and Gemini and Leo between Cancer and Virgo, so a Taurus Sun falls from late April into May, when spring has stopped arriving and simply is, and a Leo Sun in late July and August, the warm months at their height. The tables call a sign's position in its season its modality, and the middle signs are the fixed ones.

Count from one to the other and the season changes on the way. Gemini, the last of spring, and Cancer, the first of summer, lie between them, so the square joining Taurus and Leo spans ninety degrees, a quarter of the circle and exactly one season's length. The year turns in the signs between them, and neither of the two was born at a threshold. South of the equator the table moves the pair into autumn and winter, and the arithmetic holds: two middles, one season apart.

Past that middle the two differ on every count: Leo is fire, a positive sign ruled by the Sun, and Taurus earth, a negative sign ruled by Venus. What the middle gives both of you is a talent for keeping. A Leo keeps faith with a person or a promise for years; a Taurus keeps a household running in the form it has found. What it rarely gives either of you is practice at the moment of change, and a square keeps asking for one.

A Finish Line and a Sunday Table

In August the Leo signs up for a first half marathon in October and mentions it once at dinner: the finish is around eleven, and a familiar face at the rope would be something. The Taurus answers at once and kindly. Sunday mornings are the long breakfast, market bread, the radio, the good jam, and all of it will be waiting when the runner gets home.

That is where both of them stop. The Leo does not ask again, because a second request would turn a wish into a plea. The Taurus does not reopen it, because the question was asked and answered and nobody said the answer was wrong.

On race day the Leo crosses the line at 10:52, among families holding signs with other people's names on them, and is home by half past twelve. The table is perfect, the eggs a little overdone from waiting. Asked how it went, the Leo says fine. The Taurus feels a chill in the room without knowing where it came from. Nothing more is said until spring.

In April, over the dishes, the Leo says the missing sentence: the finish was the only part that mattered, because of who might be standing there. The Taurus had never needed persuading, only the reason. The next October there is a thermos and a paper bag of market bread at the rope, and breakfast happens on a curb at a quarter past eleven.

Both kinds of holding were in that year. One looked like pride and was closer to hurt. The other looked like indifference and was a routine nobody had ever asked to travel.

The Price of Holding On

The Leo pays in warmth that gets no rise. Press a Taurus and the Taurus settles; the stronger the Leo's case, the calmer the reply, and calm can look like not caring. The pull is to make the matter one of standing: once something has been said in front of others, retreating feels like losing face, and a small disagreement acquires a principle it never had.

The Taurus pays by living with someone for whom small refusals carry large meanings. A no about a Sunday can be heard as a verdict on the person who asked, and the Taurus may not find that out for months. The pull here is to wait things out, and a quiet that is restful from the inside can feel, from across the room, like a door kept shut.

Underneath both sits the angle. Astrology counts the square among the hard aspects, the kind said to bring a challenge in which an adjustment has to be made before there is balance. In this pair the adjustment has no natural author. In a Taurus and Leo household the usual result is quiet: a disagreement settles into an arrangement, and years later a couple can find that a dozen small matters were decided by whoever held on longest.

Where the Stubbornness Actually Lives

The holding described so far may not come from the Sun at all. Mars carries the quarrel, how firmly a position is held and for how long; a Taurus with Mars in Aries may flare in a moment and be finished by dinner. The Moon describes what has to happen before a grievance can be put down, and a Leo with the Moon in Pisces may drop a point of pride the minute the other person looks hurt.

Venus counts twice here. It describes the kind of love each of you gives and the kind you can recognize, and it rules Taurus, while the ruler of Leo is the Sun itself. A contact between the Taurus's Venus and the Leo's Sun therefore joins the two rulers directly, affection in one chart meeting core identity in the other, and where it is close, a Sunday table and a finish line translate more easily.

Between the charts, your Suns make one square; the Leo's Moon and the Taurus's Mars make another angle, and several such contacts may run easier than the Suns do. How each Sun fares with every sign is on the pages for Leo compatibility and Taurus compatibility. Reading two birth charts against each other, the aspects one person's planets make to the other's, is the technique called synastry.

The Details That Settle It for the Two of You

The Moon changes sign every couple of days, so knowing the date you were born can still leave your Moon in doubt. The compatibility calculator needs the date and place of birth from both of you, with the time optional, then draws up both charts and overlays them to find the aspects your planets form with each other. With the time, the Moon's sign becomes certain, and so do the ascendant and the house positions, while Venus and Mars are usually placed correctly either way. For this pair the split is convenient: the Mars contacts can be read at once, and the Moon waits for the hour.