Daily Motion

The fuller picture

The comparison is always with the planet itself. Saturn covers about two arcminutes a day on average and the Moon about thirteen degrees, so speed only means anything once it is measured against the planet's own mean motion. A Saturn running above his average is fast in the only sense that matters here, and a Moon at eleven and three-quarter degrees a day is slow even though she is still the quickest thing in the chart. Underneath that sits the direction of travel: a planet is moving forward, standing almost still at a station, or retrograde, and speed is read on top of whichever of those is true.

The doctrinal point is that speed reads as a rate, not as strength, and the practice we follow uses it that way in four separate chapters. Significators of wealth that are swift bring riches quickly, and slow ones bring them slowly, more so again when the slow planets also sit in fixed signs. A slow ruler of the first gives a slow journey. Either the querent's ruler or the Moon running swift is enough to conclude a short stay in prison. And in one marriage timing table speed is the tie-break on the unit itself: slow significators in fixed signs make the degrees between them count as years, swift ones make them count as months. A classical aphorism puts the negative half more sharply — a planet slow in motion draws the matter out until it is hardly performed at all.

Motion around a station has three states rather than two, and two of them mean opposite things. A planet about to turn retrograde is described as a healthy man losing his health, with hope of recovery still remaining. A planet already retrograde is a man infirm and unsettled. A planet at its second station, about to turn direct again, is a sick man mending. The attributions in that table are printed as unexpanded abbreviations, so we paraphrase the sense and do not name an authority for it. Our own engine is honest about a limit here: it detects a station from speed alone and cannot tell which way the turn is going, so a recovering significator and a declining one currently look the same to it.

The threshold is ours, and it is worth saying so plainly. No traditional source gives a numeric figure for swift or slow, so the practical band we use is ten per cent either side of the planet's own mean. Ten rather than something wider because the Moon's entire speed range is only about thirteen per cent from end to end, and a broader band would make the one planet whose speed matters most incapable of ever being called fast or slow. The Sun is left out on purpose: his motion varies by roughly three per cent, so the test could never fire on him. Lilly's own slow-planet rule is set far lower in our engine, below half of mean, and reads as a separate and stronger statement.