← Encyclopedia of Astrology · lesson 228/235
Horary astrology
What it is
Horary astrology is the astrology of questions. Instead of a chart for a birth, the astrologer casts a chart for the moment a question is sincerely put — "Will I get the job?", "Where is my ring?", "Will they come back?" — for the place where it is asked, and reads that chart for the answer to that one question and nothing else. The name comes from the Latin hora, "hour": the chart belongs to the hour of asking.
Behind it is the same idea as any natal chart: a beginning carries the quality of the sky at its moment. In horary the thing that begins is the question itself — the moment a matter has become pressing enough to be asked out loud.
How a question is judged
The method, at its plainest, has four steps.
- Is the chart fit to judge? Before anything else the astrologer checks the considerations before judgement — whether the chart is "radical". An Ascendant in its first or last degrees, or a void-of-course Moon, warns that the question may be premature, already settled, or that nothing will come of it.
- Who is who. The person asking, the querent, is given the First House, its ruler and the Moon. The thing asked about, the quesited, is given the house that matches it: a partner the Seventh House, a job or promotion the Tenth House, money or a lost possession the Second House. When the question concerns someone else, the chart is turned: a mother's illness is read from the sixth house counted from the tenth.
- Will it happen? The answer is read from whether the two significators come together. An applying aspect between them that becomes exact — what the tradition calls perfection — inclines toward yes; separating significators toward a chance already passed. A third planet can bring them together by translation or collection of light, or stop the meeting: a planet that turns retrograde before the aspect is exact (refranation), or a swifter planet that gets there first (prohibition).
- How it will go. The condition of each significator — its essential dignity and accidental dignity, any reception between them — describes the quality of the outcome and the attitudes of the people in it.
Timing comes from the number of degrees still to travel before perfection, translated into days, weeks or months according to the sign and house of the faster planet: moveable signs and angular houses argue quick, fixed signs and cadent houses slow.
In the tradition
Questions were already put to the sky in late antiquity, and the craft was worked out in detail by Persian and Arabic astrologers such as Māshā'allāh and Sahl ibn Bishr, then carried into Latin Europe by writers like Guido Bonatti in the thirteenth century. Its best-known English voice is William Lilly, whose Christian Astrology (1647) gives the rules and dozens of worked charts — the ship that will or will not come home, the stolen fish, the lover who will or will not marry. Horary declined with the rest of traditional astrology in the eighteenth century and returned strongly from the 1980s, largely through astrologers reading Lilly again.
Practitioners differ on how strictly to apply the old rules, how wide the orbs should be, and whether the modern outer planets have a place in a horary chart. Most agree on one thing: horary rewards a real question, asked once, by someone who wants to know.
How to read it
A horary chart is read as a description of the situation as it stands and where it is heading, not a decree. A "no" is often more useful than it sounds: it may show that the matter has already turned, or that something else stands in the way. Many astrologers treat the judgement as a clear picture to decide by rather than an instruction.
In a reading here
A horary reading here starts by working out which house the question belongs to, and shows it in plain words so it can be confirmed or changed before anything is spent. It also checks whether the moment is fit to judge, and if not, suggests the next moment that would be. The judgement weighs each testimony, looks ahead in the real sky to see whether the promised aspect perfects or is broken first, gives a timing in the tradition's terms, and shows how the answer would read if the question belonged to a neighbouring house. A question about something lost also gets the traditional rules for where it may lie.