The question
On March 21, I got a text from my friend, C. I happened to be in a Zoom call right then, so I just glanced at my phone. That was enough to tell me it was a missing items question about a geode.
Post-Zoom, I reread the text and began work on it. I cast the horary astrology chart for 8:27 PM, when I’d gotten the text and understood what C. was asking. I did a horary astrology chart for “Where is my geode?” on her behalf.
Geomancy: first attempt
Doing astrology while yawning is not productive—I was staring at the chart, but not making much sense out of it. Instead of doing something reasonable like go to bed, I switched over to geomancy, and cast a chart at 10:05 PM. C.’s text had been enough for me to work from for the horary chart, but it didn’t feel connected enough for geomancy, probably because I wasn’t asking her to roll the dice herself. So I did this chart in third-person: “Will C. find her geode, and if so, where is it?”
The first part of the question was easy to answer. The Judge is Conjunctio. John Michael Greer says, “It tends to be favorable or unfavorable depending on other figures and circumstances, but is reliably favorable in any question about recovering things lost or stolen.”1 That was straightforward and encouraging as all get-out.
The second part was harder. Greer’s method, as I said in “The missing amethyst,” involves assigning the lost item to one of the twelve houses in the chart and then interpreting the figure in that house to learn where the item is. Which meant I needed to know what the geode’s significance was to C. I asked: it was romantically meaningful, which sounded like the 5th house to me: the house of love and pleasure. The figure in the 5th house was Caput Draconis. Greer says, “Caput Draconis shows that the object…has not actually been lost at all.” This is when I glared at the chart—look, if the geode wasn’t missing, C. wouldn’t be asking me for help in finding it, now would she?—and went to bed.
Horary astrology, second attempt
The next morning, I got the happy news that C. had found the geode later that night. That took off any pressure to find it, plus it backed the validity of the geomancy chart, as the Judge had been correct.
The horary chart made more sense when I was fully awake. None of the considerations before judgment applied.2 As the querent, C. is represented by the planet ruling the sign of the Ascendant. The Ascendant is Libra, so her significator is Venus, in Taurus in the 8th house. Anthony Louis advises you to see if the chart fits its question by checking for things such as, “Does the Ascendant describe the querent and the situation?”3 While Libra doesn’t particularly describe or not describe C., Taurus is prominent in C.’s chart, and that’s where Venus is. C. had been searching the bathroom for the geode, and the 8th house is associated with bathrooms.
Mind you, ascertaining C.’s significator hadn’t been what was challenging me with this chart. I’d bogged down trying to figure out which planet represented the geode. There were three possibilities:
- The ruler of the 2nd house of movable goods. Scorpio is the sign on the 2nd house cusp, so this is Mars.
- The ruler of the 4th house of buried treasure. Capricorn on the 4th house cusp is ruled by Saturn.
- Venus, the natural ruler of pretty things and romantic tokens.
I chose Venus. Mars did not sound remotely like it described the geode. Geodes are rocks, so Saturn was a better fit, but honestly, Saturn isn’t “pretty” or “romantic.”
It is common practice to use different significators for the querent and the quesited. And that wasn’t impossible for this question. I could’ve used Mars or Saturn for the geode. Or I could’ve kept Venus as the significator for the geode and used the Moon or the almuten of the 1st house (Saturn) as the significator for C. (The Moon is in Aries, another sign that’s prominent in C.’s chart.) But I’ve found that having the same planet as the significator of both the querent and the quesited in a lost items chart is a strong sign that the item will be found. Symbolically, how can something bear to remain separated from itself? Mind you, this only works when it makes sense for the same planet to be a dual significator. I suspect the spirit of divination would consider it cheating if you always assigned the same planet to both querent and quesited no matter how poor the fit. In this particular chart, it felt less forced to use Venus for both than to choose another planet.
So there was Venus in Taurus in the 8th house, significator of both C. and the geode. I should learn to trust my intuition more, because looking at the chart, it hit me that the geode had still been in her pocket or on her person in some other place. And I didn’t say that because my common sense snapped that she’d been looking for the geode for hours and surely she’d have found it long before she asked me if it was that close to her. But defying common sense, logic, and possibly some laws of physics, the geode was indeed on her person. She’d found it during a trip to the bathroom, caught in her clothing. We have no nice, normal, mundane explanation for why she hadn’t found it earlier. By the way, C. and the geode were together in the bathroom—Venus in the 8th house—when she found it.
Geomancy again
I’d cast the horary chart with C. as the querent because I was taking it straight from the text she’d sent me. But the geomancy chart was a chart I cast asking about her; for that chart, I was the querent. This meant that I needed to turn the chart: figure out which house represented C. and then figure out where the geode was in relationship to her house. (Which I’d forgotten to do the previous night, and I’m totally blaming my drowsiness for that.) As my friend, C. was signified by the 11th house of friends and groups of people. The geode was represented by the fifth house from the 11th house which was the 3rd house. The figure in the 3rd house was Fortuna Minor. Greer: “Fortuna Minor shows that the object…has only been overlooked and will turn up promptly if the querent looks for it more carefully.”
😶
When looking at the correct figures for the question, the chart perfects—another indication that the geode would be found, not that that was necessary since the Judge was so clear. (But multiple indications are nifty!) Fortuna Minor passes to the 12th house—that is, it appears both in the 3rd house and the 12th house—conjuncting Acquisitio, the figure in the 11th house. (Acquisitio, a figure that literally means “gain,” represents C. Again, multiple indications are nifty!) If the significator of the quesited is the figure that passes to form the conjunction, this suggests that no effort by the querent is needed to make the goal come about. C. did work to find the geode, but that’s not what brought it to light; it fell out of her clothes and made itself known.
By the way, the geomancy chart was right even about having Caput Draconis in the 5th house. The 5th house represented my 5th-house possessions, and mine weren’t lost!
1Quotes from John Michael Greer are from The Art and Practice of Geomancy: Divination, Magic, and Earth Wisdom of the Renaissance, from p. 49 and p. 147.
2The considerations before judgment:
- Ascendant less than 3 degrees or more than 27 degrees
- Moon in the Via Combusta (15° Libra to 15° Scorpio
- Void-of-course Moon
- Moon in late degrees
- Saturn in the 7th house
3Anthony Louis, Horary Astrology Plain & Simple: Fast & Accurate Answers to Real World Questions, p. 12.