Mars in Taurus

Lilly 1659 lists Taurus as one of two signs where Mars receives detriment, a technical word for sitting opposite a sign the planet owns, here Scorpio. The term describes a position on the circle and nothing more. Taurus is the night house of Venus in Lilly's table, so Mars is a guest of the planet whose other house, Libra, supplies his second detriment.

Going by the order of a list whose symbols are blurred, Raphael's Guide of 1877 has one of its harshest entries here, a short, round-faced figure it calls ill-natured and conceited. Treat that as an 1877 manual's flat assertion about body and temper. Lilly is drier about it and simply awards Mars the last four degrees of the sign as his terms, a small allotment of degrees.

By the old qualities, Mars is hot and dry and Taurus is cold and dry, so they agree on one point and part on the other. Ptolemy calls the fixed signs those in which a season's character becomes firmly established, and a planet of sudden heat in such a sign is the puzzle a reader has to weigh. Modern popular astrology often speaks of slow-building, stubborn effort here, a reading that belongs to modern writers and has no source in these old texts.