Horary astrology is all about rules. If you don’t follow them you will be lost.
You can just about get away with being a new age snowflake in natal astrology and say “I don’t live by rules, man, I trust my own intuition” and wing it with some nonsense about Mercury retrograde or Pluto in Aquarius, because you are dealing mainly in a world of subjective psychology.
But in horary, you are stuffed. If someone asks you will I get this job that I’ve just interviewed for, it’s either yes or no, and your answer will be proved right or wrong very soon.
You can’t get away with saying “it depends on your attitude and your receptivity to what the Universe wants for you”.
So you have to stick to the rules or you will get your answer to the question wrong, but even more importantly, you have to stick to the rulerships.
Every time I write about horary, I feel compelled to point out that it is a very different method to natal chart reading. It has strict rules that have to be followed and precepts that cannot apply to birthcharts.
So I will copy what I wrote about this in a previous article
“Many traditional astrologers get confused about this, particularly when it comes to the importance of rulerships.
Horary is strongly based on house rulerships.
A horary chart is not a birthchart for the person asking the question. Only one planet represents them.
Other planets will signify other people or other things involved in the question.
So if we want to answer that question we need to find out if there is a connection between the planet signifying them and the one standing for their question.
Houses are the simplest way to do this.
While Zodiac signs are a good description of personality, houses refer to areas of life. So if someone is asking a question about their career, it makes more sense to look at the 10th house (of career) than to try and work out which sign might be the most appropriate.
We can’t just simply look for planets in that house, because there are often empty houses (particularly back in the days when there were only the 7 known planets, rather than the 10 we currently use).
And given that the Sun, Mercury and Venus are more often than not in the same house, the chances are that most questions would have to be answered in the negative.
However, each house has a ruler, regardless of whether there’s any planets in it or not, so if we use the ruler to signify the question asked about, it is possible to answer all questions.
As the first house (Ascendant) is the one that covers the self and most personal concerns, its ruler is the one that is taken to signify the person asking the question.
So if the question is will I get this job and we find the ruler of the first house is applying to a trine with the ruler of the 10th house (career) we can say yes you will.
If they are asking whether they will survive the current plague that is going around and the ruler of the 1st is applying to an opposition with the ruler of the 8th house (death), we advise them to take out life insurance (also 8th).”
If you read any book on horary, the chances are the early chapters will include something that is called “Considerations Before Judgement”.
There are three main ones.
If 0-3 degrees or 27-20 degrees of a sign is rising in the chart of the question.
If the Moon is Void Of Course (having no more major aspects to make to any other planets before it leaves the sign it is in)
If Saturn is in the 7th house.
It is considered unwise to make a judgement on the question if any of those three factors are present.
But it’s important to realise that this is not a horary rule, it is a consideration.
Consideration is a word that is used less frequently today than it was in the days of horary practitioners like William Lilly (17th century).
So it maybe useful to look at the dictionary definition of the word.
A consideration is “a careful thought, typically over a period of time”, “a matter weighed or taken into account when formulating an opinion or plan”, “a fact or a motive taken into account in deciding something” and “thoughtfulness and sensitivity towards others”.
My feeling is that you should not be put off judging a horary because it has one, or even more than one of these factors. You just have to give them serious consideration and know that they are likely to affect any judgement that you do give.
If anything they are a warning, not to rush into judging the chart, because it’s likely that your first observations will be wrong or at least heading in the wrong direction.
So as soon as I encounter one of these, I stop and take stock.
In a previous article – Consider Ye Well, Never Rush Into Judgement I included a horary for a client that I had judged about whether his wife would get the job she had recently interviewed for.
The 28th degree of a sign was rising, but because the chart was favourable and it resonated strongly with her own, I told him that I thought they had already made a decision and she would be getting the job.
I was right in that they had already made the decision, but they had awarded it to someone else.
“The irony is that I very seldom judge a chart for a client straight away. I’m usually so busy that I put people on a waiting list. The only reason I judged this one so quickly was I had a spare half an hour and I knew that they would hear the result quite soon anyway.
If I had waited they would have got the result anyway and not needed an astrological interpretation.”
Which might be an interesting take on any horary with a late degree rising, because basically the answer to the question is already known.
In some cases the querent themselves is already cognisant of the answer, they are only going through the motions of asking a horary about it just to confirm this fact.
Either way, they will know very soon, so maybe it’s easier just to await the result of the situation rather than struggle to interpret the horary.
What about a question with an early degree rising?
As a rule this means that it’s too early to tell. There isn’t enough information available to make a clear judgement. The suggestion is that something else will come up very soon which will impact on the question, but at the time of asking, the querent is not aware of this.
So if you are approaching an early degree rising horary, you need to take this into account.
A few weeks ago, I received this question from a regular client. “I’m thinking about taking an astrology course and I wonder how beneficial it will be?”
My response was “It will be interesting to cast a horary about that question”
So the first thing that we notice is that 0.37 Taurus is rising. This in itself is very early, but we also have the Moon right at the beginning of Pisces (0.24).
My client has been a keen follower of astrology for many years but has not done a formal course in the subject, but I noted that she was very much in the early stages of deciding whether to apply to do something or not, which seemed to fit with the early degree theme.
I noted that in all other respects, the chart was a good fit for her. She has Taurus rising herself so having a horary with the Ascendant and its ruler Venus in the sign, seemed to be confirming something at least.
Also with Venus rising in its own sign, she would be in a very strong position in regard to any question asked at this moment.
Note that both the Moon and Venus have many beneficial conjunction and sextile aspects to make in their respective signs.
My view is that an astrology course could be either a 9th house or an 11th house thing, but as both rulers, Saturn and Neptune are in Pisces in the 11th house, it didn’t seem to matter too much.
The Moon and Venus would go on to make favourable aspects to both of them. The only difference would be one of timing.
If we took Venus’ sextile with Saturn we would see that there’s over 12 degrees to go, so taking one degree per month, if it was to happen, it would not be for a year.
If we took the Moon’s applying conjunction with Neptune as the key factor, it would not happen for over two years.
All of which seems to fit in with the early degree rising of the chart.
And it seems only natural that if such a course would take that long to start, there would be other things that would happen before then that could impact on the question.
My feeling was that the chart itself was pointing to the 11th house as the quesited, so I would be tempted to take Neptune as the ruler of the course.
Before either Venus or the Moon reached an aspect with Neptune, it would have to negotiate several other ones first, with the Sun, Saturn, Uranus and Jupiter.
So obviously there were a lot of things that would have to happen first before doing this course could possibly become a reality.
I was due to speak to my client a few days later so I messaged her to ask what kind of astrology course she was considering.
To my dismay, she came back with the blurb for a first year Hellenistic course, packed full of “interesting” stuff about the “history, philosophical and mystical roots of astrology”.
Regular readers will know why I have placed these points in inverted commas, so I won’t rehash all that again now.
While I am very keen to encourage anyone to study any aspect of astrology more intensively, I don’t believe that joining the 1970s cult of Whole Sign Houses and the Profectionist Racket would help them do that.
So looking at the above chart (with its early Ascendant and many aspects to be negotiated before perfection) in the light of this fresh knowledge, I thought that it was giving me the opportunity to steer my client onto a different kind of astrology course.
So when I spoke to her I was prepared to gently try and persuade her in another direction.
The first thing that she said was “I’ve changed my mind about doing that course and decided not to proceed with it”.
I was intrigued because up to that point, I hadn’t said anything about the course. So I asked her why she had changed her mind.
She said it was because she had just recently moved into a place on her own and as she was working from home anyway, she felt that spending large parts of her spare time also interacting purely online would not be good for her.
She felt that she needed to do something new but that it would be better if it was something that got her out of the house.
Which if you think about it fits the above chart very well.
The Moon has just moved into Pisces and is in the 10th house, which does describe a working environment that could be somewhat isolating.
Both possible rulers of the course, whether Saturn or Neptune, being in Pisces, could certainly reinforce that sense of being alone.
Buy the end of the consultation she was thinking more along the lines of doing a course in art, something that resonated more strongly with her, and doing it through local groups which would encourage her to get out and meet like minded people.
I believe this is much more suited to her significator Venus being in Taurus in the 1st house.
My experience is that there are grades of early or late rising degrees. Its even less safe to proceed with a judgement on 0-1 or 29-30 degree than it would be on 2-3 or 27-28 degrees.
With 0.37 Taurus rising there is so much that is unknown, that there is a chance that you will find out very soon something that makes the whole question redundant.
But that is ok too. Some questions just have to answer themselves over time.
But whatever it is, the horary chart will describe it as clearly as anything could do.
When it comes down to it, we should let astrology have a say about the whole subject of house systems.
In horary, if a chart has 0.00 of any sign rising, it would be considered unsafe to make a judgement, the inference being that there is a whole load of stuff that the querent is not aware of that would impact on the question.
As Whole Sign House system starts every chart with 0.00 rising, its practitioners are clearly operating in the dark.
If only they had a bit more consideration.
Posted 26 May 2024
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