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Twelve degrees and eleven minutes. That is how far the Moon travels over the next day, starting from three degrees of Sagittarius, which falls a full degree short of her thirteen degree average. She crossed in from Scorpio yesterday afternoon and sits now near the far end of her orbit, better than four hundred thousand kilometers out, and she moves accordingly. The tradition called this being slow in course.
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Strength was sorted into two kinds. Essential dignity is a matter of sign alone: domicile, exaltation, detriment, fall. Accidental dignity covers everything else about a planet’s situation, and speed was one of the entries on that list. Lilly’s table in Christian Astrology scored a planet swift in motion as a small strength and slow in motion as a small weakness, two points either way. Sagittarius gives the Moon no essential dignity at all, neither honor nor disgrace, which leaves her peregrine, a foreigner holding no office in the sign. So her motion is most of what there is to read here.
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The rule had a practical use. A slow Moon was held to bring matters on slowly, and anyone setting an hour for a departure, a message, or a purchase was told to check her motion first. Dorotheus of Sidon, writing in the first century, gave whole chapters to choosing moments by the Moon’s condition, and the Arabic astrologers who preserved his verses kept that material. Whether the rule held is a different question from whether it was used. It was used for a very long time.
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