By Arcadia ·
Once the houses are chosen and the significators found, a horary reader still has four questions to settle. What is the Moon doing? How strong are the significators where they stand? If the matter comes about, when? And should this chart be judged at all? The tradition has a well-developed answer to each, though not equally reliable ones.
The Moon is in every horary judgement twice over.
It is co-significator of the questioner, always, whatever else it is doing and whatever sign is rising. And it is the general indicator of the flow of the matter: as the fastest body in the chart it reaches the next event first, so its next aspect shows what happens next regardless of who the significators are.
That is the single most useful line in a chart, and many practised readers look at it before anything else. The planet the Moon next meets says what the next development is made of: Mercury a message or a conversation, Mars a conflict or a decisive act, Saturn a delay, a refusal, or the involvement of an older person or an institution, Venus an agreement or a pleasant turn, Jupiter help, generosity or a person of standing. The Moon’s last separating aspect, read the same way, describes what has just happened and often shows what prompted the question.
The hard case is the Moon that meets nothing. When the Moon will perfect no aspect at all before it leaves the sign it is in, it is void of course, and the classical reading is the bluntest sentence in the craft: nothing will come of the matter.
That is worth reading precisely. It is not a no. A denied matter comes to a decision and the decision goes against; a void matter simply does not move, and is in the same state six months later. In practice a void-of-course chart is very often a sign that the question was asked too early, or that the situation the questioner is worried about is not actually developing.
Lilly allows exceptions: a void Moon in Taurus, Cancer, Sagittarius or Pisces (its exaltation, its own sign, and the two signs of Jupiter) is said to perform somewhat even without an aspect.
Because void of course is a claim about absence, it has to be established by checking. A claim that nothing will happen cannot be made by pointing at something; every classical aspect the Moon could make, to every planet, has to be checked from the moment of the question until the Moon leaves its sign. Only when none perfects is the Moon void.
Essential dignity is a planet’s standing in the part of the zodiac it occupies: how much of its own it has to work with there. In horary it describes the condition of the party a significator stands for. A well-dignified significator is a person or thing with resources, standing and a good claim; a debilitated one is someone acting from weakness.
There are five dignities, and Lilly gives each a score.
| Dignity | Meaning | Score |
|---|---|---|
| Domicile | the planet is in its own sign | +5 |
| Exaltation | a sign where tradition says it is honoured | +4 |
| Triplicity | rulership of the element, which changes between day and night charts | +3 |
| Term | one of five unequal stretches of each sign, in the Egyptian division | +2 |
| Face | one of the thirty-six ten-degree decans | +1 |
Against these are two debilities. Detriment, the sign opposite a planet’s own, scores minus five; fall, opposite its exaltation, minus four. A planet with none of the five dignities at all is peregrine, a stranger in that degree, which counts as minus five in its own right.
Lilly then adds accidental dignities and debilities: house position (angular strong, cadent weak), direct or retrograde motion, speed, freedom from or closeness to combustion by the Sun, and aspects from benefics and malefics. The whole system is older than it looks; Lilly systematised scores for material he inherited from the medieval authors.
The fine dignities are what a sign-level reading loses. A planet can be in its fall and still hold the term there, which is a genuinely mixed testimony and reads as someone out of their depth who nonetheless has one real advantage. A rule that only knew about domicile and exaltation could not see it.
The almuten of a degree is the planet with the largest total claim on it, counting the five dignities and ignoring the debilities. The question is who owns the degree, and being exiled somewhere does not stop a planet ruling it. Where two planets tie, some rule has to break the tie, such as preferring the planet with the stronger single dignity and then the slower planet. Whatever the rule, it should be stated; otherwise the answer changes depending on who is doing the counting.
The classical rule for timing is short. The number of degrees the aspect still has to travel to perfection is the number of units, and the size of the unit comes from the sign and house of the significator. Cardinal signs are quick, fixed signs slow, mutable signs in between; angular houses are quick, cadent houses slow. Cardinal and angular gives days, fixed and cadent gives years, and the rest fall between: weeks or months.
It is the weakest part of the craft, and pretending otherwise would be dishonest. The difficulties are not subtle. Authors give different tables, and the same chart times out differently under each. There is no mechanism behind the rule in the way there is behind an applying aspect; nothing explains why a degree should be a week rather than a month. And the rule has an obvious failure mode: a slow-moving pair can be forty degrees from an aspect that perfects in years, while a Moon three degrees from an aspect perfects tomorrow, and the same table is asked to cover both.
So the honest way to give a horary time is as a range, with the reasoning that produced it, and never as a calendar date. A date claims a precision the method cannot support, and it is the kind of claim that turns a craft into a fortune-telling machine. Used as a rough sense of scale (days rather than years, or the other way round) the rule earns its place. The way to learn how far it can be trusted is to write the estimate down and later write down when the thing actually happened.
Before judging a chart, the tradition asks whether the chart should be judged at all. The list of considerations goes back at least to Bonatti, and it is one of the more remarkable things in the literature: a discipline that builds in a signal for its own failure.
What the tradition does not do is agree about how binding any of this is. Lilly lists the considerations and then judges charts that fail them. Bonatti is stricter. Later writers are stricter still, or drop the list entirely. A reader who refuses to judge because the Ascendant stood at 2°50′ is settling an argument that has been open for eight hundred years.
The practical use of the list is not permission but attention. A chart that fails two considerations is a chart to judge carefully, write down carefully and check afterwards. In that sense the considerations, the record of outcomes and the honest statement of timing all serve the same end: keeping a confident-sounding tradition answerable to what actually happens.
How a horary question is assigned to a house, how the wheel is turned for other people's affairs, and how applying aspects, translation, collection, prohibition and refranation decide whether a matter comes about.
Horary astrology answers one question from a chart cast for the moment it was asked. Its method, its history from Dorotheus to William Lilly, and why it is the one branch of astrology that can be checked.
How annual profections name the lord of the year, how solar arc directions turn the whole chart, why the hard aspects and tight orbs matter, and how to read timing techniques side by side.
Classical natal astrology
For natal charts, planets in signs and houses, aspects, and essential dignities.
