I read today that the glyph for Taurus is the same one used in medieval alchemy to indicate rock salt. It wasn’t far from that little factoid to the realization that the affinity between rock salt and Taurus goes way beyond the glyph.

The usual metaphor for Taurus is a strong, solid, solitary mountain:

“Persons born under this earthy, fixed sign are as strong, as steady as the enduring magnificence of a great mountain. Through the years, the mountain stands impervious to the onslaughts of weather, time, floods, droughts and fire, and remains – beckoning our respect and admiration. Its presence creates a beautiful picture, a landmark, a symbol of security for us to identify with, now and for years to come. Taurus individuals are a lot like that beautiful mountain. They seem to have a timeless quality, solid as the Rock of Gibraltar, apparently unchanged by the tide of human events, and unmoved by the pettiness of other mortals around them.” (Source)

The metaphor isn’t wrong. But the idea of rock salt has got my imagination spinning again.

Alan and I once visited the Devil’s Golf Course salt pan in Death Valley, California. I thought I’d been sufficiently awed by Niagara Falls in New York, by Dades Gorge in Morocco, by deep, dark caves hung with stalagmites and stalactites somewhere along the Oregon coast. But the awe of the beautiful, the powerful and the sodden paled in comparison to the utter desolation of the salt flats.

In gorges, falls and caves, you can see water at work in different ways. It blasts through rock, carves pathways into earth, pounds into cliffsides for millennia until it wears down the rough spots and smoothes them all out. Even glaciers, unhurried though they are, leave telltale signs of their work in the shapes of the mountains above them. You can see what they’ve done.

In a salt pan, though, the demands on imagination are legion. It appears to be utterly unmoved, unacted-upon. But of course, it is not.

A salt pan is an unfathomably desolate stretch of off-white land – but not actually land; covered land: land covered with sheets, rocks and grains of salt – patterned with low, imprecise ridges like uneven puzzle pieces. Unlike the slippery edge of a waterfall, you can walk on it (though you must be careful of mud floes underneath) and, unlike twisting caves, its wide-open-wideness allows you to see great distances without obstruction.

Unlike mountains, the largest of which are used more for beauty and pleasure than for industry (at least on the surface), salt pans are immediately practical and inescapably proletariat. While it’s literally true that their products require processing before they make it to table, it is tempting to claim that salt pans offer the opportunity for anyone to show up, shovel up a bucketful, and take it home for consumption. This salt-of-the-earth everyman characteristic rings truer to me of Taurus than the faraway reach and treacherous climb demanded by the mountains in the distance. As long as you demand little of Taurus, Taurus will demand little of you back.

Too, salt pans are horizontal, not vertical like mountains. Vertical is more fiery, less earthy; it suggests the up-and-down of droplets and flames, not the back-and-forth of earth and air. Earth only rises and falls in discomfort, when tension builds too high or the heaviness of water weighs it down. This may be true of Taurus in an imbalanced state, but in its balanced state the horizontal lines of salt must be considered. Taurus reaches wide, opens its arms for a gift or a morsel or a French-kiss – not for the dizzying heights of the mountain-climber, the cliff-dweller.

But perhaps the most compelling comparison comes through the birth story of the salt pan itself:

“A salt pan is formed where water pools. A salt pan would be a lake or a pond if it were located in a climate where the rate of water evaporation were not faster than the rate of water precipitation, i.e., if it were not in a desert. If the water is unable to drain into the ground, it remains on the surface until it evaporates, leaving behind whatever minerals were dissolved. Over thousands of years, the minerals (usually salts) accumulate on the surface.” (Source)

What strikes me here is the implication of passivity and patience. Unlike its zodiacal predecessor, Aries, Taurus is not hell-bent on seeking the quest of the solar hero. It is satisfied to a less obvious existence, a longer wait, a slower turn of its world. Yet it is fecund and sensual, and it brooks no intrusion on its sovereignty over its own potentate. So, again, the image of a mountain being imperceptibly shaped by its glaciers – while perhaps delightful to certain Scorpios – will not hold well with the Taurus.

Taurus has its own shape within it already, its own salt rocks, large and small, ready to give themselves up to the earth once time and patience have had their way. The passivity often attributed to Taurus may be a projection of more active signs’ impatience with the amount of time it takes for water to evaporate from the sea.

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