Judging a Horary Chart: Houses, Significators and Perfection

A horary judgement runs in a fixed order. First the matter is given a house. Then the rulers of the relevant houses become the significators of the parties. Then the reader asks whether those significators come together before they part, and whether anything stands in the way. This article follows that order. The role of the Moon, the weighing of dignity, timing and the considerations before judgement are treated in a companion article.

Choosing the house

Before any calculation, the reader has to decide which house the matter belongs to. Everything after that decision is about the wrong thing if the decision was wrong, which makes it the largest single source of error in the craft.

The questioner is always the first house. The matter takes the house the tradition assigns it:

First: the questioner, their body and condition.
Second: money and movable possessions.
Third: siblings, neighbours, short journeys, letters and messages.
Fourth: home, land, the father in most authors, and the end of the matter.
Fifth: children, pleasure, courtship, pregnancy.
Sixth: illness, daily work, servants and employees, small animals.
Seventh: the partner, the open opponent, the other party to a contract.
Eighth: other people’s money, debts, inheritance, death.
Ninth: long journeys, foreign places, law, religion, higher learning.
Tenth: career, standing, authority, the mother in most authors.
Eleventh: hopes, friends, patrons.
Twelfth: hidden opposition, confinement, large animals, sorrows.

The hard cases

The difficulties are always the same ones. A job question can be the sixth or the tenth, and they are not the same question: the sixth is the work you do, the tenth is the position you hold. A relationship question can be the fifth or the seventh: pleasure and courtship are the fifth, a partnership is the seventh, and a question phrased as one is very often about the other. A question about money can be the second, the eighth or the eleventh depending on whose money it is: your own, the other party’s, or your employer’s.

The honest way through is to ask what you actually want to know rather than what you said, and to choose the house deliberately. A reader who lets the wording of a sentence choose the house is guessing at the most important step and hiding the guess.

Turning the wheel

When the question is about a third party, the wheel turns. The other person’s own first house is whichever house signifies them, and their affairs are counted from there.

Your brother is the third house. Your brother’s wife is the seventh from the third: count the third as one, and the seventh lands on the ninth. Your mother’s money is the second from the fourth (taking the fourth for the parent), which is the fifth. Your employer’s money is the second from the tenth, which is the eleventh, and that is why a question about a raise is read from the eleventh house.

The arithmetic is a sum that wraps round the circle: add the two house numbers, subtract one, and if the result passes twelve, take twelve away. The seventh from the tenth is the fourth, not the sixteenth.

Two rules for turning

Turning is powerful and it is easy to overuse. Two rules keep it honest.

First, only turn when the question is genuinely about the other person’s affair rather than about your relationship to it. “Will my brother reconcile with his wife?” is turned. “Am I going to be dragged into my brother’s divorce?” is not.

Second, do not turn twice in one question unless you have a very clear reason. Each turn puts another degree of separation between the chart and the questioner, and the tradition holds that a chart cannot speak clearly about a matter the questioner has no real part in.

The significators

Once the houses are chosen, the ruler of the sign on each cusp is the significator of that party. With Libra rising and Aries on the seventh cusp, Venus signifies the questioner and Mars the other party. The Moon is always co-significator of the questioner as well. Planets placed in a house also describe the matter, but the ruler of the cusp is the one whose movements decide it.

Applying and separating

An aspect that is three degrees from exact tells you nothing until you know which way it is moving.

If the faster planet is approaching the exact angle, the aspect is applying: it has yet to happen, and in horary it describes the future of the matter. If it has already passed exact, the aspect is separating: it happened, and it describes what is already over. The orb is identical in both cases. Every horary judgement depends on telling them apart, and a chart read without that distinction is a chart with the tense removed.

Speed matters

This is why speed has to be measured rather than assumed. The daily motion of each body should be taken from the ephemeris for the moment of the question. A planet near a station is barely moving and may be about to reverse; one just past a station is accelerating. Neither can be inferred from a table of average motions. Retrograde motion also matters in its own right: a retrograde significator is classically read as going back on something, returning, or acting against its usual nature.

Does the aspect perfect?

There is a second consequence, and it is the one that catches people out. An applying aspect does not necessarily complete. If the faster significator will leave its sign before the aspect reaches exact, the aspect never happens. So the useful test is not “is it applying?” but “does it perfect before either planet changes sign?”, and answering that needs both the positions and the speeds.

The arithmetic is simple: compare the degrees still to run, divided by the relative speed of the two planets, against the degrees each planet has left in its sign, divided by its own speed.

Perfection: does it come about

The core question of every horary judgement is whether the two significators come together before they part. If they do, the tradition says the matter comes about. There are four ways it can happen.

Direct aspect

A direct aspect is the plainest: the significators apply to one another and the aspect completes before either leaves its sign. The aspect need not be a friendly one. A perfecting square is still a perfection; it says the matter happens with friction, expense or argument, not that it fails. Reading a square as a no is one of the commonest beginner’s mistakes.

Translation of light

A faster planet separates from one significator and applies to the other, carrying the light between them. Somebody or something intervenes helpfully: an agent, a message, a friend who makes an introduction. The planet doing the translating often describes who or what that is.

Collection of light

Both significators apply to a third and slower planet, which gathers what neither can bring about alone. A figure of more weight than either party settles the matter, and on its own terms.

Mutual reception

Each significator sits in a sign the other rules. This is the weakest and the most disputed of the four. It shows willingness on both sides; whether it can produce an event by itself is argued over, and the safest reading is that it makes a difficult configuration work out better than it looks.

Three ways it fails

Against these stand three obstacles.

Prohibition: a third planet gets there first, perfecting an aspect with one of the significators before they meet each other, and takes the matter.
Refranation: a significator stations and turns back before the aspect closes. The offer is withdrawn.
Frustration: the faster significator leaves its sign before the aspect completes, and the thing is dropped unfinished. Lilly uses the word for a related case, where the slower significator perfects an aspect with a third planet before the faster one can reach it; the common feature is that the aspect is begun and not finished.

Where none of the four routes to perfection exists, the matter is classically denied: it does not come about, at least not in the form asked about. That is a different outcome from the void Moon, which says the matter does not move at all, and the distinction is one of the most useful things a reader can learn.