Mercury in Taurus

Mercury, which Lilly 1659 says can cover a degree and forty minutes in a day at its swiftest, lands here in a sign that Alan Leo 1899 describes as slow and plodding. The pairing is a contrast of speeds before it is anything else.

Ptolemy (Ashmand's 1822 translation) reads Mercury for reason and lists the effects of fixed signs on the mind: firm, persistent, strict and hard to turn. Applied to Taurus, that yields a mind that grips what it has learned. Heindel 1918 says something close in his general account of the sign, where ideas arrive slowly and then stay.

Raphael's Guide of 1877 describes a talkative, ease-loving and improvident person. Lilly's tables attach two small claims, the first ten degrees of the sign as a face and degrees 9 to 15 as a term, so the entries change with the degree.