Vrishabha is the second rashi, the Vedic sign of the bull, corresponding to Taurus. In jyotisha it is ruled by Venus (Shukra), and it is the sign of the Moon's exaltation, the place where the Moon is held strongest. Its quality is fixed (sthira), and its element is earth (prithvi tattva). Jyotisha reads Vrishabha through Venus's steadiness and the bull's patience: endurance, sensual enjoyment, material stability, and a slow, unshakeable persistence. Because the Vedic zodiac is sidereal, Vrishabha is anchored to the fixed stars and runs about 24 degrees behind the tropical Taurus. The rulership by Venus and the Moon's exaltation here are dignities shared with Western astrology, drawn from the same older layer of the tradition; jyotisha builds its own extensive readings of house, aspect, and dasha on top of them.
Vrishabha's name is a direct translation of the Greek tauros, bull, carried into Sanskrit through the Yavanajataka, a versification of a Greek astrological text datable to roughly the second through fourth centuries CE; the twelve equal thirty-degree signs this name belongs to were themselves defined centuries earlier still, in Babylonian celestial divination of roughly the fifth or fourth century BCE, and have no origin in the older Vedic corpus, where no twelve-sign zodiac of any kind appears. The specific dignities jyotisha attaches to Vrishabha, Venus's rulership and the Moon's exaltation among them, belong to a later classical layer of the tradition, generally credited to compilations such as the Brihat Parashara Hora Shastra of roughly the seventh or eighth century CE, a text whose ascription to the sage Parashara is itself a later, pseudepigraphic attribution.
Sources Brihat Parashara Hora ShastraSage Parashara (attributed) with The Yavanajataka of SphujidhvajaDavid Pingree, Jyotihsastra: Astral and Mathematical LiteratureDavid Pingree