Friday, 16 May – New Moon in Taurus 20:00 BST
Saturday, 16 May – Mercury conjunct Ceres
Sunday, 17 May – Mercury into Gemini
Sunday, 17 May – Mercury conjunct Uranus
Monday, 18 May – Mercury sextile Neptune
Monday, 18 May – Venus sextile Mars
Monday, 18 May – Mercury trine Pluto
Monday, 18 May – Mars into Taurus
Tuesday, 19 May – Sun sextile Saturn
Wednesday, 20 May – Sun into Gemini
Thursday, 21 May – Venus square Neptune
Thursday, 21 May – Sun conjunct Uranus
Thursday, 21 May – Mercury sextile Saturn
Saturday, 23 May – Sun sextile Neptune
Monday, 25 May – Mars square Pluto
Tuesday, 26 May – Sun trine Pluto
Thursday, 28 May – Venus square Saturn
Sunday, 31 May – Full Moon in Sagittarius 08:44 BST

April was intense, and the start of May continued that. This lunation offers a genuine breather — a moment of relative stillness before pressure begins to build again toward the end of May.

Pluto stationed retrograde earlier in May, concentrating pressure around questions of power and control — particularly where they operate through technology, social systems, and tribal influences. Pluto stations, which last a few weeks, amplify what has remained beneath the surface: dynamics that were once manageable or peripheral become unavoidable, and power structures reveal themselves more openly. Personal, inner truths also rise with greater force, particularly where energy and vitality is stalled or consumed over longer periods.

Pluto’s station was not the only intensifying force over the last few weeks. Mars first conjoined Saturn, creating a period of real compression — effort meeting resistance, frustration accumulating with nowhere to go, situations that felt like pushing against something that would not move.

When Mars then moved into square with Jupiter, that compression released — and because it had been held back, it released fast. Situations escalated, and many encountered circumstances where the restraint of the preceding weeks seemed to just dissolve. Perhaps the background build up was more than we realised. So with the release, a certainty emerged or the sense that things can no longer be contained.

This combination — Pluto surfacing what has been hidden, Mars-Saturn holding back, then Mars-Jupiter expanding everything rapidly — sits behind the deeper but simple question this Taurus New Moon is asking. What actually nourishes you right now? Yet the surrounding astrology makes it direct and pressing in a way that Taurus lunations rarely produce.

We are most likely to feel this if we have a strong emphasis in Taurus, Leo, Scorpio, or Aquarius. Fixed signs tend toward continuity and predictability, and the astrology surrounding this New Moon increases pressure on circumstances that have become rigid, exhausted, or materially unsustainable.

One pattern worth naming here is the tendency, under fixed sign pressure, to stay attached to a situation long after the original reasons for being in it have dissolved. The position, the role, the arrangement that offered us security can become something we cling to precisely because it is known and safe — even when it no longer reflects our actual capacity or newer needs.

Under fixed sign pressure, the thing we protect ourselves against —the fear, uncertainty, powerful destabilising emotions— have a way of arriving precisely through the guarding itself. The attempt to stay in a safe, known, contained, unexposed position— produces the very experience it was trying to prevent. Withdrawal, disengagement, refusal to act without sufficient preparation all result in making visible what we try to conceal. This New Moon makes that mechanism harder to avoid. We are being shown the truth of life, essentiallty. This New Moon makes that mechanism harder to look away from by making that dynamic more visible.

That same pressure is amplified by what is happening collectively. Uranus is preparing to leave Taurus and enter Gemini, beginning a new major transition that will gather pace over the coming years. The domains it moves through are: information systems, communication technologies, education, media, and the infrastructures through which people form and exchange opinion. All of this enters a much faster cycle of disruption and change, which is Uranus’ hallmark.

Competing narratives will multiply, and discernment will become increasingly important as certainty fragments even further. Against this backdrop, the body becomes a meaningful point of orientation. What is physically real, directly experienced, and materially true becomes more valuable precisely because so much else is accelerating and destabilising. Investing in the physical, like having an allotment plot, is helpful as it brings you back to life cycles we ignore at our peril.

Venus rules relationships and finances so they may express this quality. Searching for better conditions — a better role, a better situation, a different context. But the searching itself can become its own kind of avoidance: as long as the right circumstances are still being looked for somewhere out there, the actual circumstances in front of us never have to be fully entered.

Later in the month, Venus square Saturn on 28 May introduces a very different quality. The emotional and financial realities of a situation become harder to soften or sidestep. What is genuinely sustainable, what has run its course, and what was always more fantasy than foundation will become clearer, and that clarity tends to arrive in a way it can’t be avoided.

This path — Venus-Neptune into Venus-Saturn — the opposite of the Mars-Saturn, Mars-Jupiter, describes movement from longing into honest reckoning. For some, that reckoning will surface something uncomfortable: that the conditions they were waiting, wishing to improve were not, in fact, the obstacle.

After a long period of searching or waiting produces nothing, at a certain point the search simply exhausts itself, and we stop — because we no longer have the energy to keep looking in the same direction. That stopping, which can feel like defeat and then a descent into the underworld, sometimes turns out to be the actual turning point, the return. What we cannot find through thinking, effort and planning will emerge from a different place within us. This is one of the stranger things Taurus teaches: that receptivity is not passivity, and that feeling and surrender to present circumstances can open something that years of searching outward could not.

This is something the Taurus New Moon returns to again and again. Taurus is often associated with patience, and patience is genuinely one of its strengths. The impulse to wait becomes indefinite deferral, and the search for solid ground becomes a form of moving paralysis. We have to watch our tendency towards proper preparation, the right circumstances, or a situation that finally feels solid enough.

Of course it is not always experienced as avoidance; it often feels responsible, even prudent, wise. But underneath it is frequently the same thing: a reluctance to stay inside the actual, imperfect mess of a life. This mess of life is something we all avoid.

What this lunation tends to expose — sometimes gently, sometimes not — is that what was being looked for elsewhere was or is already present in the circumstances that felt least promising. The resources, the capacity, the answers — they were there in the disturbances, in the place we thought we’d never find it. The situation itself was the place to look for them. This is not to say that things always turn on their head… but it does mean that if we allow ourselves to be with feelings and intractability, we are giving it the opportunity to transform us and our lives.

There is a difference between patience and surrender, and this New Moon illuminates it. Patience still contains an orientation toward the future — a waiting for something to arrive. Surrender is when that orientation finally drops away, and attention returns fully to the present. That is the state in which things become receivable.

Helpfully, that acceleration of the Sun and Mercury into Gemini meets a counter-pressure as Mars enters Taurus (around the same day 21 May). Mars in Taurus builds slowly — frustration gathers beneath the surface, determination deepens, and once a limit is reached it becomes very difficult to move. This can support real endurance and commitment, but it also intensifies entrenched positions making things harder to shift.

The pressure reaches an acute point on and around 26 May when Mars squares Pluto. Control dynamics become more visible, buried anger moves closer to the surface, and situations involving accumulated resentment or force may reach turning points. This aspect often coincides with a moment of stark recognition — that something or someone has taken more than given, and that continuing in that guise is no longer possible.

All of this returns to the question this New Moon raises. What deserves your devotion? What actually strengthens your life, and what has been draining it? The Taurus impulse toward simplicity and sustainable living is not a retreat from complexity — it is a direct response to it, and perhaps one that becomes even more consequential as we move further into 2026. This is a time to contemplate deeply and open to the miraculous.

One thing worth noticing about what this New Moon makes possible is that when something genuinely right arrives, it tends to carry both at once. The practical considerations align — the income, timing, fitting with everything else already in motion — and the moment itself has an unmistakable, miraculous quality of having been placed there, orchestrated for us, so we can trust in life. Those two things arriving together is usually a reliable signal we can trust that next step. Perhaps its a new moon to open to this entering your life now…

How will this Taurus New Moon affect you