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Thirteen degrees and eleven minutes is roughly what the Moon covers in an average day. Today she is running closer to thirteen degrees and fifty-six, still in Taurus, sixteen degrees along it by the middle of the day UTC. Seventy percent of her face is lit.
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Swift in course is the term for that, and it is measured against nothing more mysterious than her own mean. Exceed it and she is swift. Fall short and she is slow in course. William Lilly, writing in seventeenth century London, set both in his table of accidental dignities, one as a fortitude and one as a debility, and the logic behind them was mechanical rather than symbolic. A quick planet was held to deliver its business quickly. A slow one dragged.
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Her rate varies because her path around the earth is not a circle. She is nearer than average this week, and nearness is speed. The Babylonians had tracked the variation long before anyone could explain it, and the astrologers who inherited their tables kept the figure as a thing to check before judging, not as an ornament.
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Taurus makes the reading interesting rather than simple. It is her exaltation, the sign the old tables raise her highest in, and it is also a fixed sign, slow and unbudging by temperament, so a swift Moon sitting in it is a small contradiction on the same line of the chart. On Lilly’s method the columns would show two marks in her favor and one against, since the light is still decreasing. Adding up the columns was the technique. It did not resolve to a single word.
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