Where the Freakin’ Freak Is My Freakin’ iPad? or How This Horary Worked
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| Father Time, Edmund Dulac |
Horary astrology is not something in which I have much expertise. It’s never really appealed to me, since I’ve always though of it as not so much about psychology and stories and the great sweep of history and more about practical problems, the minutiae of life – details, details.
It works like this. You ask me a question such as “Will I get this job?” and instead of looking at your natal chart, your solar return and your progressions as I might do, I simply cast a chart for the moment that I properly understand your question. Then comes the tricky bit, I read the chart and voila, the planets say, oui or non.
You can see how this could easily descend into a party trick.
Yet, in earlier times, astrologers made their bread and butter doing this kind of prognostication. Not so many people would have known the exact minute of their birth, but anyone could ask a question. William Lilly, the English Renaissance astrologer, explains exactly how it’s done in his book Christian Astrology. In particular, he explains how he located some stolen fish for a client. Most modern writing on horary astrology is at least partially based on Lilly, and he in turn had based his work on earlier writers, so there’s a strong tradition, and sometimes modern practitioners can be a bit dogmatic.
I have been meaning to try my hand at some horary in anticipation of the weekend workshop taking place here in Oxford next March with John Frawley. (I’ll have more on this shortly, but do come if you can.) And then elektrikgypsy over on the comments on the previous post made the point that horary astrology is possibly the simplest way to prove that astrology works. Prompted by this, I decided to find my iPad by casting a chart and dutifully trying out a couple of methods.
The iPad has been missing for weeks and it has been driving me nuts, so that makes this a good candidate for a horary. You can’t do this stuff on a whim. There has to be an element of need to know.
I know it is in the house. I cast this chart. And reader, I located my iPad using it. Here’s how.
Lost objects are ruled by the second house. I did have a moment of wondering if it should be the third house since the iPad is a means of communication. But Mars, the red planet, rules the second house in this chart, and my iPad is red (so that it’s harder to misplace).
So the location of Mars in the chart ought to tell me the location of my iPad in my house. My first instinct was to look in the attic. I did so briefly but it seemed pretty unlikely.
Then I thought I’d try Lilly’s rules by direction. These are quite complicated. Each sign has a direction: Cancer is north, Capricorn south and so on. Ditto for the houses. And ditto for elements. You have to take into account eight different possibilities and then pick the most repeated. This did not work, leading me as it did, to the bookshelf in the study. But according to some authors this method should only be used for lost objects outside the house anyway.
Now each house in a chart rules a different part of the home. The 10th house is the reception room, the public room, the office. Mars is in the 10th house, so theoretically it ought to have been in that study. But I still felt the chart was showing me that my iPad was upstairs. What is more in Cancer, it would be somewhere cosy, like a bed. Cancer is also a water sign. I began, at this point, to get a little confused, as has happened before when I’ve attempted horary, I felt I was beginning to have too much information, and being distracted by applying planets and numbers of degrees.
I went back to the chart and saw that Saturn was on the cusp of the second house: a delay. Then I picked up Frawley’s Horary Textbook and opened it at random on a passage where he explains that you need to be in a state of grace to be able to synthesise a horary chart. This is familiar territory for me, and I realised that instead of trying to dissect the chart as I have previously done with horaries, I needed to let the chart speak.
So I went to bed.
The next morning I woke up and knew that the iPad was buried in my daughter’s bunk bed, the highest place in the house below the attic, and cosy with quilts and stuffed animals. My daughter has her Moon at 9° Cancer. The bed is against the wall next to the bathroom.
I waited until everyone had gone out (Saturnian solitude) and retrieved the thing.
When I very first looked at the chart, the thought had crossed my mind that it could be there — that was my flash of intuition — but I dismissed the idea because I thought the 5th house, the child’s room, would be more strongly indicated. Of course, now that I look I see Saturn is the ruler of the 5th in this chart and there he was on the cusp of the second, telling me where to look.
Right, it’s on to the missing diamonds next.
Fascinating. & mindblogging. Well read. Especially the letting the chart speak …
Bravo – I enjoyed that 🙂
Ha! I love it! I’ve had the same attitude as you with horary, but I’m more inclined to give it a go now. Thanks for sharing. And I will try to make the second day of the workshop on my way back from London! 🙂
Wonderful 🙂
I just had a good laugh! Good to keep in mind, because when something is missing it drives me nuts too (and moving so often in the last few years means there are things you don’t see for a while….) Speaking of iPads, mine doesn’t like to leave comments in your blog!Does that happen to other readers? maybe there is a trick I haven’t figured out. It’s green btw 🙂
It does happen to other readers but I don’t know how you fix it.
This is great!
Basically you ended up intuiting where the ipad was, because in the end, in a strict sense, it was not the product of an astrological analysis. Good for you, but this does not work at all for the teaching of astrology, because you have not been able to discover through it what you were looking for, otherwise you could have explained your analysis and not say that you limited yourself to guess where the lost object was .