For over 2,000 years, ancient Greek people believed in Bugonia: the belief that bees could spontaneously generate from the decaying carcass of a bull. The “sweetness” of life was linked to the death of the bull’s brute force.
Taurus represents the bull—the heavy, material, physical reality of the earth. The bee represents the “particle of divine intelligence” (Frith Luton, Bees, Honey and the Hive: A Jungian Exploration of the Symbolism and Psychology, p. 63).
To get to the golden honey inside the hive, the strength of the bull must first be sacrificed or transformed. We are currently in a collective moment in the United States where the “Bull” of our old economic structures, which was built on power and the concentration of wealth, is rotting, and we are looking for the “Bees” —those that do the real work—to emerge.
Historian Heather Cox Richardson recently spoke about the “erasure” of the actual work that sustains us. Since the 1980s, we have stripped away the recognition of the nurses, grocery workers, and sanitation crews who keep the hive functioning. As she notes:
“That erasure of the actual work of a society strikes me as being one of the hallmarks of an economy getting to a really dangerous point because it means that you concentrate power among those people who are wearing the suits. At the same time they aren’t actually the people we need to support to keep society functioning in a healthy fashion.”
In the natal chart, the sixth house represents this “invisible” work. Positioned just below the western horizon, it is the place where the Sun’s light fades into the earth. It is traditionally the house of toil, illness, and “bad fortune,” because it is here that the ego must submit to the needs of the body and the collective. The “suits” avoid the sixth house; the “bees” thrive here.
But the sixth house is also the sacred laboratory of the humble. Luton describes the labor here as more than just drudgery—it is the “temple cleaning” that keeps the hive alive. When we honor the plumber or the grocery worker, we are honoring the very “cells” of the hive. This is where the “Divine Mind” manifests—not in a boardroom, but in the repetition of the necessary.
The Taurus glyph (♉︎) is a circle (the Sun) with a crescent Moon resting on top. It is a sign of “earthing” the heavens. C. G. Jung, who was born under a Taurus Moon, stayed grounded through his medical work and masonry at Bollingen. “It was essential for me to have a normal life in the real world as a counterpoise to that strange inner world…I have a medical diploma from a Swiss university, I have a wife and five children…these were the actualities which made demands upon me and proved to me again and again that I really existed” (CW 7, par. 32). It is no accident that Jung had Mercury and Venus in the sixth house of Cancer—the mind and the heart rooted in the house of ordinary sustaining work.
The bee’s dance is a circuambulation of the Self. By honoring real work, we rotate around a “numinous, life-giving and sustaining center” (Luton, p. 151). Our survival depends on our willingness to look at the “carcass” of our current system and welcome the humble, everyday tasks back into the temple. Only then can the bees return.
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Come see me in Chicago on June 25.
I would love to see you in person this summer. On Thursday, June 25 I’ll be at the Jung Institute of Chicago leading a six hour experiential seminar: Living Seasonally With Astrology.
Rather than a dry lecture, this will be an salon-style guided discussion, with props, music, and reflection time. We’ll use the archetypes of Gemini, Cancer, Leo, and Virgo as symbolic mirrors to explore the “living” quality of each season.
- Format: In-person only (no video, just presence).
- Registration: Look for the “Summer Intensive” Thursday session. CEs are available.
Click here for details and to register.
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Astrology consultations | Symbol & Soul Sessions (tarot, I Ching, book prescriptions for the soul).
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Monthly newsletter: Reading in Depth (exploring depth psychology books).
