Taurus 29 and 30

Penultimate and ultimate degrees, pt 1

Many things attracted me to John Sandbach, first as an author, and then as a teacher and friend. To me it all seems to point back to his Taurus 29 sun, which sits just one degree ahead of mine in Taurus 30. Most conventional astrological approaches—especially what circulates as “sun sign astrology”—would find many similarities between us. To be sure, in certain ways we speak the same language and can peer into each other’s souls. 

Yet, though our suns are astrologically in tight conjunction and parallel declination, what I find so remarkable is how differently they seem to operate. Of course there are matters such as house position and planetary aspects to take into account, but I would argue that simply by virtue of degree, there is a stretch of infinity between our suns. When I ponder the sun as the gravitational center that organizes our ways of being, our two suns strike me as functioning in diametrically opposite ways.

John’s luminary clearly facilitates the creation of worlds upon worlds. When I first started reading The Circular Temple, I was so struck by the richness of the oracles for each degree. They recall the short stories of Jorge Luis Borges, who famously weaves together an integral universe and accompanying cosmology in his writing. I dare say that John’s works go a step further into infinity: each universe he creates opens onto others. The Circular Temple is what I am most familiar with, but the same is true of Soul Journey through the Tarot, and all of his other metaphysical, healing, and artistic practices.

I joke that in conversation my Mercury in Taurus is always scurrying to catch up to John’s Mercury in Gemini. But I wish I had a whole army of Mercuries to engage with his work so I could fall down the rabbit hole that turns into Borges’s proverbial garden of forking paths and take all those paths in parallel. It is exhilarating but also overwhelming. 

John and I talk fairly regularly, and I still feel like there are unfathomable worlds within him I will never know. Intriguingly, Ellias Lonsdale describes the energy of the 29 as the edge of infinity, and proposes that even the person with a bunch of 29s will never understand it because the 29 is always bursting forth into the limitlessness of creation in ways well beyond the personal.¹ John sometimes worries that much of his work remains impenetrable to most, but I hardly think it matters. The worlds he creates all live, breathe, and grow on their own. Those fortunate enough to stumble upon them are immeasurably enriched.

While an entire multiverse flows out of John’s central sun, I experience my own sun in an opposite dynamic, where all possibilities flow toward me, and I read which path lights up at any given moment. When I look back on my life, there is a definite turning point when I stopped swimming upstream and started opening to what life was bringing to me. All the very best things that come into my life feel like absolute revelations to whoever I thought I was the moment before. I don’t know whether it is more accurate to say “I constantly surprise myself” or “Life constantly surprises me.”

Retrospectively, the most painful parts of my life also appear like miracles. A “perfect storm” is no less perfect for being a storm. In the thick of a process it is hard to maintain such perspective, but every crisis fits in perfectly with obvious thematic threads in my biography. Because of recent trials, I am learning to trust more and more that if I hold fast to my Self and expand my awareness inside and out, life will show me where to go.

Sometimes I don’t get more than one or two steps at a time, but I take those moments to rest because when a runway opens before me, the whole Universe propels me forward. Every resource I need makes its way to me. And just as all doors open when I need them to, all doors shut very dramatically when the energy runs out and I’m apparently preparing to enter a new path. 

Ellias’s keyword for the 30 is free will, which he argues is something we don’t have, but can get, if we do the 30 the way it’s meant to be done, and let total existence take us where we are meant to go.² That is increasingly my experience of life, which is that events choose me, and I “can’t not” do them when I hear the call. Otherwise, I am largely doing nothing and being no one at all.

As we can see with Ellias’s keywords, degree astrology gives us profound insight into the idiosyncrasies of John’s sun and mine. And these get fleshed out further when we delve beyond the degree number into the exact degrees themselves. 

The title John gives to Taurus 29 is Playful Creativity, or Making Contact with Unseen Forces. Whether you know John personally, through his work, or merely from the description I give above, you will recognize the aptness of the degree. Limiting ourselves to just one example, the Chandra symbol is A man amuses himself by drawing strange shapes, which quite literally describes how John invites paint to play on a canvas surface. In fact, the entire Circular Temple degree set for Taurus 29 describes how a creative being such as John opens himself to the whispers of his muse, the elementals, and other forms of spirit guides.

The title for Taurus 30 is A Quest for Spiritual Nourishment, or Total Enjoyment of Any and All Riches, which certainly rings true for how provided for I feel when I manage to live not on the surface, but right in the center of the Earth. I see myself in all the degree symbols for Taurus 30, but the one I return to the most is the Chandra symbol: Snakes at rest on a rock in the sun. Each time I revisit this symbol it shapeshifts. Lately this degree feels very much as if the snakes are engaged in only one of two modes of being: either they are shedding their skin in an intense transformative process, or they are lying belly to belly with Mother Earth in deep repose. It is an extreme way of being that feels like every moment is All-or-Nothing. Any middle ground feels so inconsequential, so insubstantial—so unreal. 

After John and I chatted about our suns, I wondered if a similar dynamic existed between the 29th and 30th degrees of each sign. In four of my six charts,³ I have six planets and an asteroid in the 30th degree and a planet and two other points in the 29th, so I am very eager to continue this investigation into the vibration of the 29 and 30 in other signs.

1. Ellias Lonsdale, Degree Frequencies: The Great Return, teleclass recorded on Apr. 8, 2021.

2. Ibid.

3. Ellias has a method for generating six different astrological charts, one of which is the prenatal chart.