questions? try horary astrology
by Jill Kirby | 30 july, 1999
Have you ever had the experience of desperately looking for some lost or mislaid item, at your wit's end as to where else to search? This happened to me when my eldest daughter first decided to travel a few years ago, and asked me for the copy of her birth certificate in order to get her passport. "I thought I already gave it to you," said I. "No, Mom, you’ve got it," she replied with the certainty of a nineteen-going-on-twenty-year-old. The search was on.
I easily found the birth certificates for the other two daughters and myself, but my eldest daughter’s was conspicuous by its absence. So, I proceeded to search through all my files and drawers and anywhere else I could think.
In the end, I found myself standing in the middle of the debris, screaming, "Where is it?" I noted the time of my query because I know that Astrology can be used to answer a question for which there is a strong and urgent need to know. This branch of Astrology is known as Horary Astrology, and can give remarkably detailed answers, if correctly applied. It is not my particular area of Astrological expertise, but I had nothing to lose. I did however, have something to find.
"Horary astrology can be used to answer a question for which there is a strong and urgent need to know."
A Horary chart is read quite differently from a Natal horoscope, with very specific guidelines for interpretation. I got out all my Horary text books and set to work. Essentially, the Planets represent people and things, the Signs represent descriptive characteristics, as well as directions for location, and the Houses of the chart represent specific areas of concern - where the question lies and the answer is to be found.
I was asking to find the location of a document, the birth certificate. Documents are a Third House matter, so I looked at the Third House in the chart for my question and found that the sign Gemini was occupying that space. Gemini signifies communications of all kinds, anything spoken or written, and documents of any sort. This certainly fit. To locate the document in question, I had to look to the Planetary ruler of Gemini, which is Mercury.
According to Horary rules (which are very complex), the location of Mercury in this chart would tell me where to look for the birth certificate. Mercury was in Sagittarius, in the Ninth House, and retrograde (moving backward, from our earthbound perspective) at the time the question was posed. Ordinarily, in Astrology, a retrograde Mercury indicates delays and generally fouled-up communications. However, in Horary it also suggests that the document will return - it would be found! But where?
Being in the Ninth House meant it was needed for a long distance travel, but also that it was far away from the person asking the question - certainly not in my home. Sagittarius gives a direction of South-by-Southeast. My daughter was living in the Kitsilano area of Vancouver at the time, which is South-by-Southeast from my home at the time, which was in Gibsons. I thought I had given it to her, but she didn’t think so - could I actually be right for a change? What else could the chart tell me? It indicated that I had, at one time, had the document in question, but had given it to my eldest child, and that, although she had misplaced it, it would return or be found. The chart indicated that it would be found in a large upper room. My daughter was living in the upstairs apartment of an old Kitsilano house. Further, it indicated that the document was in a desk or file, either yellow or reddish-green in colour, by a wall or partition, at about middle height, in a Northwest part of the room.
Having read the chart, I decided I would not find the birth certificate in my house, so stopped looking and phoned my daughter. She, of course, was not home (Mercury was retrograde, after all), she seldom is - so I left a message on her machine saying that I believed she would find her birth certificate at her place.
My daughter called me shortly thereafter to say that she had found her birth certificate. Where was it? It was in her yellow file, which she kept on the middle shelf of a partitioned cupboard in the wardrobe, along the Northwest wall of her living room. Score one for Mom!
Any questions?
To contact her, check out her website at holisticarts.ca.
