A missing geode

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 5^th house to me: the house of love and pleasure. The figure in the 5^th 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 8^th 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 2^nd house of movable goods. Scorpio is the sign on the 2^nd house cusp, so this is Mars.
• The ruler of the 4^th house of buried treasure. Capricorn on the 4^th 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 1^st 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 8^th 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 8^th 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 11^th house of friends and groups of people. The geode was represented by the fifth house from the 11^th house which was the 3^rd house. The figure in the 3^rd 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 12^th house—that is, it appears both in the 3^rd house and the 12^th house—conjuncting Acquisitio, the figure in the 11^th 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 5^th house. The 5th house represented my 5th-house possessions, and mine weren’t lost!

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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 7^th house

³Anthony Louis, Horary Astrology Plain & Simple: Fast & Accurate Answers to Real World Questions, p. 12.

The missing amethyst

Given the number of lost item posts I put on this blog, it is entirely possible that readers think I spend a great deal of time losing things and then trying to find them. No, but lost items are really good things to practice divination on. It’s never an abstract exercise—I want to find the item, so there’s an emotional tie to the question. Plus, lost item divinations are so wonderfully definite: either you find the item or you don’t, and if you do, either it’s where the divination said it would be or it isn’t.

What I’d lost this time was my Jupiter remedy. The topic of planetary remedies is bigger than I want to get into here, but my super-short definition is that they’re talismans used to strengthen the influence of a planet in your natal chart. I carry an amethyst in my pocket as a Jupiter remedy, and last Tuesday, I put my hand into that pocket and realized the amethyst wasn’t there. I looked for it off and on for the rest of the day at work, and when I didn’t find it, hoped I’d somehow left it at home. But I didn’t find it there either, and so I turned to divination.

While I don’t enjoy losing things (ack!), they do provide me with opportunities for divination practice. A few months ago, I took a class in geomancy. There are ways to use geomancy to find lost items, and since geomancy combines nicely with astrology and I’d be using horary astrology anyway to try to find this amethyst, it was a chance to practice both a new and an old(er) skill. This time, I also altered my standard question. Usually I ask, “Where is my [lost item]?” But I’ve been reading the sensible observation that it doesn’t really matter where the lost item is if you never find it, so this time I added that to the question. Yes, that puts two questions into one chart, but that shouldn’t be a problem.

Will I find my Jupiter remedy, and if so, where is it?

Geomancy

While there are multiple ways to use geomancy to find a lost item, I went with the one described by John Michael Greer in The Art and Practice of Geomancy: Divination, Magic, and Earth Wisdom of the Renaissance. I was more familiar with it, which mattered because I was in a hurry to get an idea of where the amethyst might be—I was about to leave for work, and wanted to know if I should bother to look for it there.

This method is fairly straightforward. From a list that he provides of the twelve houses and what kinds of items are associated with them, choose the house that corresponds with your lost item. Cast your geomancy chart and the figure that appears in that house will describe the item’s location. It seems to me, though, that there are an awful lot of things you could lose that aren’t on that list. Greer states that you should use the 4^th house for anything not listed. I’m guessing that comes from horary astrology, where the ruler of the 4^th house is often used as the significator for lost items. But I’m a librarian by trade: categorizing things is literally my job, so I decided to pick a house for my amethyst. While Greer only lists “wills and anything inherited” for possible lost items of the 8^th house, in his general description, he writes “Magic, performed by the querent, or on his or her behalf, belongs to this house.” That describes a planetary remedy, so I chose the 8^th house.

The figure in the 8^th house was Fortuna Major. Greer says: “[the item] is in a rugged or forested area, a government or military building, or some other inaccessible place.” I also checked the 4^th house, because, hey, I could be wrong. The figure there was Puella: “a bedroom, upstairs room, or attic, in a workshop or factory floor, or on the side of a hill.” Neither description was terribly specific, unfortunately. As for the first part of my question, about if I’d even find the amethyst, the Judge for the chart was Acquisitio. That figure usually means a positive answer, and meaning-wise, gain is literally the opposite of loss, so I was encouraged.

Horary astrology

First, the chart:

None of the considerations before judgment apply to this chart, so off we go. My significator is the ruler of the 1^st house, which is Mercury in Libra in the 2^nd house. The significator for the lost amethyst could be the ruler of the 2^nd house of movable possessions (Venus), the ruler of the 4^th house of buried treasure (Jupiter), or the planet that best describes the lost item, which I figured was Jupiter, since it’s a Jupiter remedy. Really, Jupiter sounded like the best choice.

In this chart, Jupiter is retrograde in Aquarius in the 6^th house. Although it’s way out of orb for a trine to Mercury as measured by degrees, I’ve been experimenting with whole sign aspects while studying Hellenistic astrology, and the two planets do form a trine by sign. I was happy to see that Jupiter was retrograde, because I remembered reading somewhere that that’s a good indication that your lost item will return to you. The trine between Jupiter and Mercury was also a good sign of its return. And while I didn’t take the time then to double-check with my books, I decided that Jupiter being in the 6^th house confirmed that the amethyst was at work somewhere.

Finding the item

I’d like to say that armed with this knowledge, I walked into my office and immediately located the missing amethyst. Ha. I kept an eye out for it throughout the day, but didn’t see it. Nor did any of my coworkers mention finding a pretty rock. I didn’t find it until just after lunch. I’d eaten in my office with the door closed, and as I was getting ready to clean up, I took back my mask which I’d hung from the door handle so I wouldn’t forget to put it on. I glanced down as I did…and there was the amethyst, on the floor under one leg of my desk, totally blocked from view from any angle except the one I just happened to be at for that moment. I still have no idea how it managed to work its way out of my pants pocket, fall on the floor, and somehow slip under that leg, all without my noticing.

Afterthoughts

Home again, with time to do research, I delved into the readings further. On the geomancy side of things, choosing the 8^th house and Fortuna Major worked. My office is in a government building, and while we’re open to the public, the building is more inaccessible than many. But Puella, the figure in the 4^th house, wasn’t wrong. Of all the location descriptions, “a workshop or factory floor” is the closest the list gets to the modern office, and it happens that our building is built into the side of a hill. I suppose the locations associated with each figure are derived from their general meanings. For instance, Fortuna Major means lasting good fortune that may begin with difficulty. Perhaps “difficulty” translates into a difficult-to-access place when reading a chart for location.

In the horary chart, like I said, Jupiter was retrograde in Aquarius in the 6^th house. Its house and retrogradation seem to have been more relevant to the amethyst’s location than its sign. The 6^th house is one of the cadent houses, and when a lost object’s significator is in a cadent house, the object is far from home and difficult to find. While the amethyst was practically underfoot whenever I was in my office, that office is miles from my home, which is where I was when I asked the questions. If the significator is in a cadent house, the object may be hidden behind or within something—hard to see—and because “cadent” means “falling,” the object may have fallen to its current location. The amethyst had almost certainly fallen out of my pocket, and it was hidden behind/under the desk leg, making it difficult to find even when I was only a couple of feet away from it. I’m glad I didn’t have to rely on Aquarius to tell me where it was. Maybe Aquarius meant the amethyst was near modern electronic equipment: my computer is on my desk, and the amethyst was under them. The air signs often signify that the item is up high, which definitely didn’t apply here. Okay, Anthony Louis says that it may be “near things related to the calves, shins, and ankles”—does the desk leg count? 😄

As for the question of whether I’d find the amethyst, John Frawley writes, “The strongest testimony of recovery [of a lost object] is an applying aspect between the object and the querent, or between the object and Lord 2 (if the object is signified by something else), showing it returning to the querent’s possession.” In this particular chart, because I was using whole-sign aspects, Jupiter was forming a trine to and retrograding back towards both Mercury (the querent) and Venus (Lord 2). Basically, everything worked, and I have my amethyst back, safe and sound.

We don’t talk about that: the “bad” houses in astrology

A system that describes the entirety of life will account for the parts that aren’t fun as well as the peaks of human existence. One way astrology does this is through the houses. Most of the houses cover matters that are neutral to pleasant, such as the self (1st house), pleasure and creativity (5th house), and hopes and goals (11th house). But there are three houses that cover “bad” topics: illness and inequality (6th house), death (8th house), and self-undoing and hidden enemies (12th house). It can be tempting to think of these three houses as being bad themselves. Admittedly, that doesn’t sound right. Lots of people have planets in these houses—does that mean they’re fated to be unhappy?¹ Isn’t it healthier to view all of life’s ups-and-downs with equanimity?² Aren’t labels like “good” and “bad” limiting? And perhaps there’s suspicion that this division into good and bad is another vestige of traditional astrology that is best left to fade away entirely.

Well, yes. And also no, because modern astrology isn’t totally divorced from its traditional roots. It has inherited some of the dread of the “bad” houses, although somewhere along the line the rationale behind them was generally forgotten. Which also means that the reason for some houses being “good” has also been generally forgotten.

Aspects, modern and traditional

Modern astrology sees the relationships between planets in terms of the aspects (angles) between them. There are five classic aspects used from traditional days to the present:

• The conjunction: 0°(neutral)
• The sextile: 60° (easy)
• The square: 90° (difficult)
• The trine: 120° (easy)
• The opposition: 180° (difficult)

Because they see aspects as based in geometry, modern astrologers may also use other aspects that they find meaningful, like the quincunx (150°), the quintile (72°, or ⅕ of a circle), the septile (51° 26’, or ⅐ of a circle), and so on. Because two planets are rarely in a perfect angle to each other, there’s some wiggle room with those measurements, called “orb.” Different aspects have different orbs, and generally the classic aspects have wider orbs, i.e. more wiggle room.

Confusingly, traditional astrology uses the same terms as in modern astrology, but based in a paradigm of vision rather than geometry. Much of the traditional astrological symbolism around light and vision didn’t really make it into modern astrology. For instance, orb wasn’t a property of an aspect, it was a property of a planet, and brighter planets like the Sun had larger orbs than dimmer planets like Saturn. That analogy of what is easy to see and what is harder to see has a lot to do with house meanings.

Lines of sight

Imagine someone standing in the 1st house, the house of self, the strongest house in the chart. Anything (any planet) in the 1st house with this person is easily seen by them because it’s right there (the conjunction: 0°). So the 1st house is a strong place for a planet to be. This 1st house person has a clear line of sight to the 7th house, directly across from them (the opposition: 180°). The 7th house is also a strong position for a planet to be in because it’s so clearly seen. It rules equal relations: the spouse, the close friend, the business partner, but also the nemesis and the open enemy. This person in the 1st house can also see the 4th and 10th houses, 90° away (the square), and again, these are also strong houses for planets to be in. Here is your private life, heritage, and home (4th house), and your public life, career, and reputation (10th house).

This 1st house person also has good lines of sight, although not quite as great, to the 5th and 9th houses (trine: 120°). The 3rd and 11th houses are also good (sextile: 60°).

Fine art!

Out of sight

That’s it for the classic aspects, but there are still four houses unaccounted for, and three of them are the supposedly “bad” houses: the 6th, the 8th, and the 12th. Because they don’t aspect the 1st house, these houses contain things that symbolically can’t be seen. Because the 1st house person can’t see these houses, they’re ignorant of what’s there, they don’t understand it, they can’t manage it. So consider the things associated with these houses in terms of ignorance, misunderstanding, and denial. They’re often things we’re not comfortable discussing and that we were taught it’s rude to ask about.

• 6th house: illness; situations of inequality, especially involving work
• 8th house: death, occult (literally means “hidden”), loss, fears and anxieties
• 12th house: secret enemies (if you knew who they were, they’d be in the 7th house of open enemies), self-undoing (think any psychological issue that’s interfering with your life but which you can’t see clearly)

And when you’re uneasy talking about something and you’ve picked up on a lot of messages telling you to not bring the matter up, it’s not long before it feels “bad.”

The 2nd house

Given what I just said about the houses that are out of sight and their connection to Things We Don’t Talk About, you may already have worked out how the 2nd house fits in with the other three. The 2nd house rules movable possessions, material comforts, wealth, and resources. At first glance, this is a desirable house, one of the “good” ones—who doesn’t want a good salary, a nest egg, to be out of debt? But consider: it’s often considered rude to ask how much money someone makes or what their net worth is. Pay gaps such as those between men and women or between people of different races may be associated both with the 2nd house and with the 6th; either way, they’re a point of contention. Many people aren’t comfortable managing their own money, or only for everyday expenses, while taxes and investments overwhelm them. Possessions themselves can be a sore spot: think of clutter and its big bad sibling, hoarding. How many people are reluctant to have people over because they’re ashamed of their messy homes? Modern psychological astrology acknowledges the monetary wealth part of this house, but often writers sound more comfortable assigning self-esteem and resource management to it. We may say that all [people] are created equal, but poverty definitely doesn’t have the cachet of wealth.

None of the above dictates that you must treat an astrological house as either good or bad. Certainly they vary from one chart to the next, and people can have negative experiences with apparently positive houses and vice versa. But it helps to know why a system is the way it is when figuring out how to work with it.

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¹ I hope not: I’ve got planets in all three of these houses.
² Good if you can manage it. Usually I can’t.

Inauguration 2021

Every now and then, my interest in mundane astrology flares up. I can pretty much guarantee that an inauguration will do it. Four years is a length of time I can wrap my mind around, and an inauguration chart doesn’t involve the amount of speculation that, say, the founding chart of the United States needs. Since the Twentieth Amendment sets the time and date for Inauguration Day at noon on January 20, you can look at the event chart ahead of time. This time around, I figured I’d write my thoughts down.

The chart overall

The planets¹ in the 2021 inauguration chart are packed into only four houses. Visually, the chart conveys focus, but also limitation. In many charts, some planets aren’t prominent and while interpreting them adds detail, they’re not usually crucial. With every planet in this chart in that grouping, none of them really fade into the background or hide out in dusty corners of the chart.

The elemental emphasis is on earth (green) and air (yellow), but there are only two planets in water (blue) and one in fire (red). This is a time for pragmatism and rationality. The country will be going into problem-solving mode, figuring things out and remaining detached and analytical in the face of crisis. It won’t be a good time to try new and exciting things that don’t look immediately useful. The national mood won’t be all that enthusiastic or optimistic, and people won’t have a lot of energy left over for frivolities (low fire). They’re likely to be feeling insecure, and may criticize what they see as clinginess, sensitivity, and dependency in others because it reminds them of their own vulnerabilities (low water).

I don’t have color-coding for the modalities, but there are six planets in fixed signs, which is above average. Once we decide what we’re going to do and commit to it, we’ll stick with it and give it our all, and given how much needs doing, that’s probably a good thing. But fixed energy is, well, fixed. It’s hard to get going, there’s a lot of resistance to changing course, and there’s inertia to spare. Plus, when there are a lot of planets in one modality, there aren’t many in the others. This chart is low on mutable energy. That suggests a general unwillingness to compromise as well as unwillingness to adapt to changing circumstances and attempting to make the world change instead. (And does this surprise anyone? Probably not. Just that swearing in Biden and Harris will not miraculously fix this.)

Multi-page post: scroll down for links to the other pages.

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Burning Mars retrograde

Once upon a time, it was mainly astrologers who kept an eye on Mercury retrograde, alerting their friends, families, and clients to back up their computers, postpone signing contracts, think twice before sending a critical email, and verify what they think they heard. Nowadays, Mercury retrograde has gone mainstream. Non-astrology-minded friends mention it on social media as easily as they talk about the full moon and the weather (“So weird at work today! Is Mercury retrograde or something?”).

As people have become more familiar with Mercury retrograde, other planetary retrogrades are starting to get some recognition. I admit I don’t pay that much attention to the retrograde periods of the planets from Jupiter on out. They spend months in retrograde, from about 4 months a year for Jupiter to nearly 6 months for Pluto. I figure, when a planet is retrograde that much of the time, their retrogrades feel almost as normal as their direct motion. However, their stationary periods—when they appear to slow down and stop before changing direction—are more noticeable, but that’s another post for another day.

That leaves Venus and Mars, which like Mercury, go retrograde for comparatively brief periods. They’re not as well-documented as Mercury, so it’s harder to look them up and get examples what their retrogrades are like. But looking at what the planet is associated with is a starting point. As Mars is retrograde as I write this, I’m focusing on it for now.

Planet	How often retrograde	How long retrograde
Mercury	3 times a year	About 3 weeks
Venus	Every 1½ years	About 6 weeks
Mars	Every 2 years	About 2-2½ months

The Lesser Malefic

At its core, Mars is about taking action. It shows how we go after what we want. It represents willpower, how we assert ourselves, and how we express our anger and aggress.¹ Its qualities are traditionally masculine: courage, initiative, violence, independence, brutality, conflict; the symbols for Mars and for male are the same: ♂. Not surprisingly, the planet named for the Roman god of war rules warfare. War is conflict on an international scale, but Mars rules smaller competitions as well: sports, political races, contests—those events where there are winners and losers, victory and defeat. (If you’re interested in compromise and the possibility of win-win scenarios, you’ve moved into Venus’s territory.) Mars also rules the people who participate in these activities: soldiers, the police, athletes, first responders, surgeons. Mars is not an utterly malignant force, but there are elements of pain and danger in many of its rulerships, qualities that earned it the epithet of the “Lesser Malefic” in traditional astrology. In a war, those elements are obvious, but they’re in Mars’s other rulerships as well. Sports often carry a risk of injury, sometimes of death. Even in a democracy, people may live and die by who wins a political contest, even in another country. Surgery—deliberately injuring someone in order to help them—saves lives, but patients die both on the operating table and afterwards.

So if Mercury retrograde has a reputation for misunderstandings, mistakes, travel plans gone awry, and glitches, what happens when Mars is retrograde? We get used to how a planet behaves when it’s in direct motion. By contrast, during its retrograde period, what that planet rules often feel unbalanced, unpredictable, and “off.” When a planet is retrograde, it’s physically closest to Earth, suggesting that it’s stronger than usual. While there’s nothing inherently wrong or bad about a planet’s retrograde period—it’s different, not broken—often the things that we experience and do during a retrograde don’t go the way we’d planned. With Mars, sometimes that can hurt, but it can also feel as though it has stalled out and there isn’t enough drive and focus for your usual activities.

During this retrograde, Mars is in Aries, one of the signs that it rules. This is a comfortable position for Mars. Signs shape how a planet expresses itself, but since Aries shares many characteristics with Mars, Mars gets to act almost as purely “Martian” as possible. So we have the planet of action, assertion, and brutality, strengthened both by being in a sign that reinforces its essential nature and its proximity to Earth, at the point in its cycle that can be discombobulating because we’re not used to it.

The 2020 wildfires

This year, Mars is retrograde from September 9 to November 13, 2020. As of this writing, we’re about two-thirds through this retrograde period. Thinking about what’s been in the news lately that seems particularly Mars-like, the wildfires out west come to mind. Yes, there have always been wildfires and the 2020 wildfire season started before Mars went retrograde. But the fires have been unusually widespread this year, even by modern standards. In early September, just as Mars went retrograde, the media was focused on how there were wildfires not only in California but also Oregon and Washington, even possibly threatening Portland, Oregon. This is when Mars would’ve appeared to have been slowing down, stopping, and then starting up again in reverse: that stationary retrograde period that can make a planet more noticeable.

Just to take one of the better-known wildfires as an example, the El Dorado fire has Mars symbolism in its origins. This fire was accidentally started during a gender reveal party. The Ascendant is in Scorpio, also ruled by Mars, a sign associated with secrets (such as the baby’s gender), and ruling the Ascendant makes a planet more prominent. The baby was apparently revealed to be a boy—again, Mars and “male” share a symbol.² The announcement involved setting off a pyrotechnic device of some kind, which ignited dry grass in the park where the party was held, starting the fire. Explosives are a Mars thing, even when they’re not meant to kill people. The party was on September 5. This was a few days before Mars turned retrograde, with it less than 1° away from its retrograde degree 28° ♈︎ 08′), in that crucial stationary retrograde period. The act of putting a fire out is called “firefighting,” and like explosives, fighting is a Mars thing. This particular fight, like many of the wildfires, has been challenging, but that’s in keeping with Mars retrograde.

El Dorado Fire event chart: September 5, 2020; Yucaipa, CA; 10:23 AM PDT.³

To the best of my knowledge, as of this writing, the El Dorado fire is still burning.

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Comments, sources

1. Yeah, that’s a verb. It’s obsolete, but I figured it would be fun to use. And it fits the sentence grammatically.
2. After Gender Reveal Celebration Sparks Fire, Some Say The Parties Have Gotten Out Of Hand – WBUR (September 9, 2020)
3. A pyrotechnic device at a gender reveal party sparked one of the California wildfires, burning over 8,600 acres – CNN (September 7, 2020)

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Credits

Fire photo by Little Visuals on Pexels.com. Mars symbol and retrograde symbol are in the public domain from Wikimedia Commons. I threw them all together.

Lost and gone forever

It is satisfying as all get-out to interpret a Lenormand reading and/or a horary chart that accurately describes the location of a lost item, and then find the item. But sometimes a lost item stays lost. So when you ask where a lost item is, are you asking only for a description of its location? Or are you also asking if you’ll find it, even if you don’t say that in so many words? A reading I did a few months ago suggests the latter.

My friend J. has a friend who had lost a set of keys to a home safe. J. asked me about the keys on her friend’s behalf. The Lenormand reading and the horary chart both gave meaningful answers, but as of this writing, the keys haven’t been found. And even if they do turn up someday, for all practical purposes, it’ll be too late. J’s friend was going to have new keys made. Once that was done, the original keys may as well stay lost.

The Lenormand reading

I took my “usual” approach to doing a lost items reading. (“Usual” meaning I’ve done this maybe three or four times now: so much experience!) I choose a card ahead of time as the significator of the lost item, shuffle the deck, look for it in the deck, and lay out the card before it, the significator itself, and the two cards after it. The one card before would show the past; it’s the equivalent of “When did you last see the keys?” The two cards afterwards should show the present/future location of the lost item. Choosing the significator was easy: lost keys cry out to be represented by 33-Key.

It never occurred to me that the Key might be the last card in the deck. Which it was.

Here’s that issue I was talking about. I’d asked where the keys were. The most straightforward reading of this was that the keys had no present or future location. (The past location, 20-Garden, which suggested they might’ve been in the garden or at a gathering, didn’t help any.) It was possible that the keys had been destroyed, and that would answer the explicit question Where can she find her missing safe keys?. But the keys only needed to be permanently lost, nothing as dramatic as utterly obliterated, if the reading was answering the implicit question Will she find her lost keys? No “future” for the keys: the answer is No.

I admit I didn’t trust my intuition. And I hadn’t realized that there were two questions involved; I was only thinking of the explicit one. Since it seemed unlikely that the keys had been destroyed, they should be somewhere, so I took the first two cards from the top of the deck to find out what that somewhere was. The first card was 23-Mice. One interpretation of the Mice is that the keys had been stolen; another was that they were permanently lost.

Eventually, I do figure these things out. Especially when the cards are practically hitting me over the head with an answer. 🙄

The second card was 34-Fish. It suggests the keys were near J’s friend’s financial materials, which makes sense given that they were the keys to one of her home safes. But as they do seem to be permanently lost, we’ll never know. The Mice may have been the absolute end of the reading (“Look,” the cards grumbled, “we told you they had no future, and then we told you—again—that they were lost. How much more of an answer do you need?!”), and it wouldn’t matter what the next card was.

The horary chart

To make this post easier to read, I’ve separated the Lenormand reading from the horary chart reading. But at the time, I was going back and forth between them, so I hadn’t reached that conclusion about the Lenormand reading before I’d started working on the horary chart.

“Where can [J’s friend] find her missing safe keys?”

Choosing the significator

This was one of the times I went with intuition when choosing the significator. I could have used derivative houses, but it was turning into a long chain. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, but the best I can say here is that it didn’t feel right. Mercury is the natural ruler of keys, and like choosing 33-Key in the Lenormand, it seemed much more reasonable to use it as the significator of these keys.

The considerations before judgment

First off, let’s see the general condition of the chart:

1. Radical Ascendant? Check.
2. Void-of-course Moon? Yes. Hmm.
3. Saturn in the 7th house and/or the ruler of the 7th house afflicted? Yes to the latter: Mars is the ruler, and isn’t comfortable in Taurus.
4. Moon in the Via Combusta? No.

Void-of-course means that the Moon (or a planet) will not make an exact aspect with any other planet before it moves into the next sign. It may still be in aspect to one or more planets, approaching and separating, but nothing else will match it exactly before it goes into the next sign. The tag line for the void-of-course Moon is “nothing will come of it.” Whether that’s helpful or not depends on the question asked. I wouldn’t say it’s all that encouraging in a lost items question, not unless you wanted the item to stay lost.

Among other things, the 7th house represents the astrologer who’s interpreting the horary chart. (That’s me.) Saturn in the 7th house or an afflicted ruler of the 7th suggests the astrologer will have problems with the chart or suffer a delay in understanding it. Or, in my case, be a bit oblivious to her own intuition.

And the chart says…

Mercury is at 29° 49′ Aries. That’s right at the end of Aries (each sign has 30º), and horary texts have explanations for significators that are right at the end of signs and what that means for lost items. But in this chart, Mercury is also void-of-course. See everything above about about the VOC Moon, and apply it to the keys themselves. Mercury isn’t connected to anything, symbolically, so the keys aren’t connected to anything or anyone, including J’s friend. They’re in a void somewhere, not to be found.

Conclusion

No keys. No future for them, according to the Lenormand reading. No ties between them and anything else according to the horary chart. It’s good to know that these readings can tell you if you’re ever going to find a lost item, but I wish the problem had had a happier answer.

Finding Mouse the Elder

Every now and then, my friend Suncat will send along a lost item question. I get to practice horary, and there’s always the hope that the answer will help Suncat find the missing item. Since she and her husband have two cats, often what’s missing is a cat toy. This was true this past summer, when Gray Princess lost a toy mouse. There are several toy mice in the household, but “Mouse the Elder,” an unusually durable toy, had earned his name by having lasted for decades. Looking around the house for MtE wasn’t working. Suncat reported that he’d last been seen in the living room, but that was weeks earlier, and he hadn’t been found. Meanwhile, Princess wanted her favorite toy back. It was time for divination.

So Suncat asked, “Where is Mouse the Elder?” and I cast the chart for the time when I received and understood the question.But I’d also heard that you can use Lenormand cards to look for lost items, and this seemed like a good time to try that. And since it’s faster for me to look over a few cards than to interpret a horary chart, I looked at the cards first.

The Lenormand reading

I didn’t have much experience at using the Lenormand this way, so I kept things simple. I decided to choose a card to represent MtE, then find the card in the deck and read a few cards around it to see what was going on. At least choosing the significator was easy: when you’re looking for a toy mouse called Mouse the Elder, what better card could there be than 23-Mice? When I found the Mice in the deck, I laid it out along with the card before it and the two cards that followed it.The Child “jumped out” at me as a card to pay attention to. Generally, the pictures on Lenormand cards aren’t all that meaningful in themselves. They’re mainly there to identify the card. But in this deck, 13-Child shows a child playing with a toy—in most of my decks, the Child is simply a picture of a child. This felt significant. I looked up the Child in Caitlín Matthews’s book, the only one I know of that talks about using the Lenormand to find lost items, and read, “your child has it; used for play; in a new place you’ve not looked yet!” (emphasis mine).

Since Child + Mouse was an accurate description of MtE—a toy (Child) mouse (Mice)—I hoped that the next two cards, the Book and the Coffin, would be an accurate description of its situation. Quoting again from Matthews:

• 26-Book: in the library, school, or training place; in a book or folder
• 8-Coffin: in a box, drawer, or cupboard; forgotten and left behind

Putting those together, I thought that MtE had been left in a box, drawer, or cupboard near Suncat’s books. By extension, that could mean an enclosed space, like between two groups of books or something like that, the sort of place a cat could knock a toy into and not be able to retrieve it. And it was likely that Princess had forgotten where MtE was and left it behind.

The horary chart

So, was the chart going to support the Lenormand reading or give a different answer entirely?

Where is Mouse the Elder?

The considerations before judgment weren’t significant, so I moved on to finding the significators, the most important one being the one for Mouse the Elder:

1. Suncat asked the question, so her significator is the ruler of the 1st house: Mercury.
2. The 6th house is associated with small animals. Aquarius is on the cusp, so Saturn is Princess’s significator.
3. Mouse the Elder is a possession, and possessions are associated with the 2nd house. If I were looking for something Suncat had lost, I’d look at the ruler of the 2nd house. But MtE is Princess’s toy, not Suncat’s, so we need to look at Princess’s 2nd house. Having just said that Princess is represented by the ruler of the 6th house, it’s like the 6th house is Princess’s 1st house. So the 7th house is like her 2nd house. Pisces is on the cusp of the 7th house, so Jupiter represents Mouse the Elder.

Does the significator fit? On its own, Jupiter seems a bit grandiose for a decades-old cat toy. But Suncat had told me that MtE was of better quality than many modern cat toys, larger and plumper than your run-of-the-mill toy mouse. And Jupiter is in Virgo, the sign of its detriment. Being in detriment suggests that the planet isn’t at its best. I figured, after years of kitty love, MtE was probably starting to look a little worn, even if generally it was a sturdy toy. (And although I’m using 23-Mice to represent MtE because, well, mice, the usual meaning of this card is slow destruction and deterioration; the illustration often shows mice gnawing on something.)

Incidentally, there’s another possible significator for MtE: Venus, the natural ruler of toys. In this chart, Venus conjuncts Jupiter, so it’s also in Virgo and the 1st house. Venus is in fall in Virgo, so like Jupiter, it’s not at its best. Basically, it’s pretty much the same interpretation whether you use Jupiter or Venus. Cool.

So whether the significator is Jupiter or Venus, Virgo and the 1st house should describe where MtE is. Virgo indicates that the lost object may be “inside something like a pocket or container…closets, desks, cabinets, where things are filed and stored, home offices, studies…” (Anthony Louis). Which sounds like what the Lenormand reading is saying: MtE was inside something. Virgo is an earth sign, which suggests that MtE is on the ground or near the floor. The 1st house is an angular house, which traditionally means that the object should be easy to find. (I’ve wondered about that—if the object is so easy to find, why hasn’t it been found already?) The 1st house also suggests that the lost object is where the querent spends the most time. I wasn’t sure if that meant Suncat or Princess in this case.

Success!

A shipping box had been left in the living room for the cats to play with, and Mouse the Elder was inside it. The box was close to a bookcase. So there were the Lenormand elements: the toy mouse inside a box near books. As for the horary chart, MtE was inside something near where things are filed and stored (books), and the box was on the ground. I don’t know if either Suncat or Princess spends most of their time in the living room, but Suncat said that she’d only ever seen Princess playing with MtE in the living room, so that’s where she started her search.

Of course, the most important bit is that Princess has her favorite toy back. 😀 But I’m also fascinated with how both the Lenormand and horary answered the question.

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References:

• The Complete Lenormand Oracle Handbook by Caitlín Matthews
• Horary Astrology Plain & Simple: Fast & Accurate Answers to Real World Questions by Anthony Lewis

20/20 hindsight: a horary about a missing ring

Earlier this week, I misplaced the ring I’d been wearing. (SPOILER: I found it two days later.) I looked in all the obvious places and didn’t find it, so I cast a horary chart. I still didn’t find the ring. There was no indication that the chart was incorrect, but it can be mighty difficult to interpret one correctly. As it turned out, this chart was correct, but I’m not sure I’d have ever figured it out if I hadn’t found the ring and was able to work my way back to the chart interpretation.

Where is my silver Celtic trinity knot ring?

The considerations before judgment

The first step was to review the considerations before judgment and see if the chart was even likely to work. The Ascendant is neither in the first three degrees nor the last three degrees of its sign, so it was neither too early nor too late to do anything. The Moon is not in the Via Combusta (the span of the zodiac between 15° Libra and 15° Scorpio), nor is it void-of-course.

The fourth consideration is if Saturn is in the 7th house, or the cusp of the 7th house or its ruler is afflicted which would show that your astrologer (the professional you’re consulting, represented by the 7th house) will have difficulty answering the question. I’m asking my own question, so the consideration is if Saturn is in the 1st house or if the Ascendant or its ruler are afflicted. Saturn isn’t there, and the Ascendant looks fine. However, Mars, ruler of the 1st, is close to (conjunct) Saturn and squares Neptune. The former suggests blockages, the latter, confusion. And obviously I was having trouble interpreting this chart. Hmm.

But generally, there’s nothing in the considerations before judgment that say that the chart is a dud. So on to interpreting it!

Identifying the significator

The next step was to figure out which planet symbolized the ring. The usual suspects are the ruler of the 2nd house (movable possessions) or the ruler of the 4th house (buried treasure). But neither of these felt right. The ruler of the 2nd house is Jupiter. Now if my ring had been expensive and/or ornate, I would’ve gone with Jupiter, but this was a simple silver band with a knotwork design. It wasn’t expensive, and it didn’t have large stones or really intricate metalwork or anything that sounded as grand as Jupiter. The ruler of the 4th house is Saturn. I’ve never had a lost item horary chart where the ruler of the 4th house was the correct significator, perhaps because none of the items were really buried treasure. In this case, even if Saturn had been ruler of the 2nd house, I’d have hesitated to use it because Saturn doesn’t describe this ring. It’s not a burden or an obligation, it’s not ugly, it’s not made out of lead (!)—there’s nothing Saturnian about it.

There were two other options: Venus and the Moon. Venus is the natural ruler of jewelry. The Moon is the secondary ruler of lost items. I chose Venus, and this is where I went wrong. Since the Moon is the secondary significator of lost items in all lost item charts, I overlooked the fact that if it was the best planet to describe my ring, then it was probably the main significator in this chart. Or to put it another way, I’d gotten used to thinking of it as the option of last resort, if absolutely nothing else described the lost item at all, and since Venus did, albeit in a general way, I went with Venus. In practice, this wasn’t all that much different than if I’d gone with Jupiter. Both planets are in Virgo. Venus is in the 10th house, within 5° of the 11th house cusp, which could count as being in the 11th house; Jupiter was squarely in the 11th house. Briefly, from this I got that the ring would be in my home office (10th house) or guest room (11th house), which are the same room in my apartment. In Virgo, the ring would be close to or on the floor, or perhaps it had fallen into a box or drawer (entirely possible, given the state of my home office). And of course, it wasn’t.

The Moon did the best job of describing the ring, so it was the proper significator. It’s a silver ring, and the Moon rules silver. It has a trinity knot design, and the Moon has several associations with threes, such as its three visible phases (waxing, full, waning) and the Triple Goddess. This is still a general description, but it’s more specific than Venus’s rulership of all jewelry.

The Moon is in Aquarius in the 4th house. When you’re assigning chart houses to areas of a home, the 4th house represents the cellar or the basement. The Moon conjuncts the 4th house cusp, suggesting that the ring is close to the door. Aquarius is an air sign, which shows that the missing object is “high up, maybe on a shelf or hook.”* The last aspect the Moon had made was to Saturn, which is not only the ruler of the 4th house, but also of the 3rd house of neighbors. Because the contact between the Moon and Saturn had already happened before I asked the question, and the planets were separating from each other, a neighbor had already found the ring.

Finding the ring

Where was the ring? This apartment building doesn’t have a true basement (4th house), but the ground floor is two-thirds below ground level. The laundry room is the only room on the ground floor that I have access to, and I’d done laundry that morning. The ring was in the laundry room, hanging from a pushpin (Aquarius) on a bulletin board that’s just inside the laundry room by the door (Moon conjunct the 4th house cusp). A neighbor (Saturn) must have found it and pinned it up there. The previous aspect between the Moon and Saturn had been a flowing, easy aspect. Had it been a difficult aspect, it could have meant the neighbor had kept the ring. But then, I’d have never found it and we’d never know for certain.

Okay, even if I couldn’t find the ring by using the chart, it would have been nice—and less stressful!—to have known that I’d find it eventually.** Horary charts can tell you this, but technically, I’d asked where the ring was, not if I’d find it, so it wasn’t as strongly indicated in the chart. The best indicator I have, which I only learned after I’d found the ring, is Frawley’s observation that if the item’s significator conjuncts an angle, that increases the chances that you’ll get it back. And like I said, the Moon conjuncts the IC, one of the angles of the chart.

The ring is back, and there was a happy ending. And it was a learning experience. Here’s hoping I’ll have more success with future charts!

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*John Frawley, The Horary Textbook (revised edition), p.174.

**I found the ring after a friend suggested checking the laundry room again, and it finally occurred to me to look at the bulletin board since other small items have been pinned there in the past.

Wanting the best of both

Okay, I admit it: I cannot commit myself to taking either an exclusively traditional or an exclusively modern approach to astrology and divination. Each has strengths that the other doesn’t.

Modern (psychological)

In both astrology and tarot, this is what I first learned. I love how this approach cuts straight to the heart of a psychological issue and lays it out in a way that I can understand consciously. While I could figure out something through intuition and feeling alone, understanding it intellectually—which is what the modern interpretations are good for—is how I can share what I’ve learned with others, take notes on it, or whatever.

I also like the hopeful outlook. Traditional astrology, especially, is often criticized for a fatalistic attitude. I disagree with that depiction, but it’s clear that the modern way of interpretation stresses the human capacity to change what we don’t like, be it a personality quirk or an unhappy job situation. The outcome card in a tarot reading is rarely seen as a conclusion fixed in stone. The natal chart is seen as a map of human potential.

Traditional

So why do I even bother with a traditional approach? Because it validates my feelings and it’s practical.

I usually do a reading because something in my life isn’t working. Not surprisingly, the reading won’t be all roses and rainbows: I’ll get the scarier cards or the I Ching lines will describe scenarios of chaos. Now maybe the outcome will be positive and maybe it won’t, but here’s the important point: the reading is saying, Yes, you’re right. The situation sucks. No matter how grim the reading, it helps to know that my perceptions were on target. Yes, I just said that I appreciated the optimism of the modern approach. But that does me more good with the outcome and with what I can do in the future. For an assessment of the past and present, if something is wrong, I don’t want to be told This is a learning experience. It’s like saying that my negative feelings are wrong and should be denied.

Astrology? The situation is even worse. Look, there are parts of my chart that just don’t work as well for me as other parts—and this is normal for everyone’s chart. I’m tired of modern interpretations that depict difficult configurations in a rosy glow (more of those “learning experiences” that build character) while implying that positive ones will handicap you because they don’t challenge you. No, a difficult chart is not an excuse for poor behavior in whatever form that might take. But the first step to working with a problem is acknowledging that there is, in fact, a problem.

Because the traditional approach is usually focused on the everyday world, it’s wonderfully practical. Not that psychological insight isn’t useful. But when I understand a lost items horary chart enough to find the item, well, I can get it back. The I Ching reading that gives me advice on getting through a difficult conversation with my supervisor has been a good use of my time. The astrological reading that tells me which areas of my life may prove problematic has given me a timely heads-up.

Both!

I figure pursuing either a modern or traditional approach exclusively must let people learn their chosen method faster. They’re probably learning it more thoroughly as well. But every time I think I should just choose one, I remember all the good things that the other can do. We’re lucky enough to live in a world where there are resources for both—I’m not going to waste the opportunity.

Z is for zodiac

Having started the Pagan Blog Project with “A is for astrology,” I finish it off with a post on the zodiac. Really, what else could be more appropriate?

Along with the planets and the houses, the twelve signs of the zodiac are a basic component of Western astrology. The word “zodiac” comes from the Greek ζῳδιακός (zōidiakos), meaning “circle of animals.” Only eight* of the twelve signs are animals, though: Aries (ram), Taurus (bull), Cancer (crab), Leo (lion), Scorpio (scorpion), Sagittarius (centaur), Capricorn (goat or sea-goat), and Pisces (fishes). That leaves three human signs (Gemini, Virgo, Aquarius) and an inanimate object (Libra: scales). Unlike the Western zodiac, the Chinese zodiac (Chinese: 生肖, Shēngxiào) is composed of twelve animals. Calling it the Chinese “zodiac” is a translation of convenience for us Westerners, though. Shēngxiào comes from words meaning “year of birth” and “appearance,” and has nothing to do with either circles or animals.

The clockface on the Torre dell’Orologio in the Piazza San Marco, Venice.

You’ll note, by the way, that I’ve been talking about the signs of the zodiac, not the constellations. It’s easy to think they mean the same thing since they have the same names. The constellations are what we’ve been taught they were: groupings of stars. The twelve zodiacal constellations are the ones that lie on the ecliptic, which is the apparent path of the sun through the sky. As we’ve just seen, most of the twelve represent animals, the ecliptic is a circle: voila! A circle of animals. Since the constellations vary in size, the amount of the ecliptic each constellation takes up varies as well. The signs are more of an abstract concept: the division of the ecliptic into twelve equal segments.

Just to complicate things further, even excluding the Chinese zodiac, there are still two zodiacs: the tropical and the sidereal. The starting point for both is 0º Aries; the difference is in where that point is said to be.  In the tropical zodiac, 0º Aries is the sun’s position at the moment of the spring equinox in the northern hemisphere. In the sidereal zodiac, 0º Aries is the beginning of the constellation of Aries. The two systems coordinated about 1,700 years ago, but since the tropical zodiac moves slightly each year in relationship to the constellations via the precession of the equinoxes, they’re now about 24º off. While many people think that their Sun sign is the constellation the sun was in when they were born, most Western astrologers use the tropical zodiac. As a rough approximation, unless you were born in the last week that the sun was in your Sun sign, your sidereal Sun sign is probably the one before the one you’re used to. Most people born in tropical Aries are sidereal Pisces. Two-thirds of tropical Virgos are sidereal Leos. Vedic astrologers use the sidereal zodiac, but my understanding is that Vedic astrology is different enough from Western astrology that this doesn’t change things as much as it sounds like it would.

Every few years, someone realizes that the constellation of Ophiuchus the Serpent-Bearer crosses the ecliptic as well and announces that there’s a thirteenth sign of the zodiac. The media goes wild: Oh, here are all these astrologers claiming that the stars and planets determine your fate, but they don’t even know how many signs there are, and hey baby, are you an Ophiuchus? Yes, using the constellation boundaries set by the International Astronomical Union in 1930, Ophiuchus crosses the ecliptic. But since the signs of the zodiac are twelve equal sections of 30º each, which do have the names of twelve constellations but are not constellations themselves, Ophiuchus is irrelevant.

Yes, but what do the signs actually do in astrology? Like adjectives and adverbs in language, signs modify the planets and houses. For instance, by itself, Mars shows how you get angry. Mars in talkative, communicative Gemini expresses anger with cutting words, a verbal slice-n-dice. Mars in Scorpio, a quieter, emotional sign, holds grudges and may not act for a long time. A more involved astrological interpretation will use the signs to determine where in a chart the planets have the most influence. Without the planets and houses, the signs are simply a coordinate system and a collection of personality traits. With them, they are astrology.

(Done! Made it all the way through the Pagan Blog Project! Yay!)

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*A centaur is half human though, so we may be down to 7½ animals.

Photo: Marcelo Teson [CC-BY-2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)%5D, via Wikimedia Commons