Horary 0036: Would the House Be a Good Place for Us to Live?
Overview
The querent asked only, “Would the house be a good place for us to live?” with no additional context.
This being a perfectly valid horary question, I answered it as asked: yes. But the answer was complex. The overall reception was good enough, but the essential dignity of the home was poor, and there were multiple other warning signs.
It would turn out that the querent was consulting the Oracle with a purified form of the question because they were having doubts about making the deal — it would be their first time buying a home — and so they wanted to ask with as little up-front information as possible “so as not to bias the read with [their] own skepticism.”
The querent’s aim was successful here. The chart contained a classical consideration before judgment — Saturn in the 7th — that indicates a problem for the astrologer with the question. Having an abundance of faith in my clients — perhaps owed to inexperience — I did not hesitate to judge the chart (would it have been a better outcome for my client if I had? I don’t think so), but it was such a clear consideration within the scope of the question that I delineated it first. It turned out to perfectly describe a show-stopping problem with the situation.
The querent did not end up going through with the house purchase, so we will never know if the house would be “a good place for [them] to live.” However, each of the complications I delineated in that chart turned out to be true and were the reasons the client did not go through with the deal.
Given that the client’s aim for hiring astrological services here was successful, and the conditions were described highly accurately in the chart, I asked them if they were comfortable with me ruling this judgment correct. They agreed without reservation.
I congratulate my client on an excellent use of astrology to get out of a jam. The chart itself is also a beauty and worth analyzing fully.
Judgment
Not even knowing whether this was a rental or purchase, I began my delineation with Saturn, lord of the 7th in the 7th, as the “seller or landlord.” I described them as “somewhat attached to the place” — having just separated an awfully malefic-looking trine with a fallen Mars, lord of the 4th, signifying the house itself — and “the most powerful actor in this situation,” being the only angular planet. I also noted that the separating Mars/Saturn trine could indicate that “they have identified or recently repaired [a] problem with the house,” which I addressed next.
Noting the signs of Saturn and Mars, the debilitation by fall of Mars in Cancer, as well as the IC in Scorpio (the house cusp that gives signification of the house itself to Mars), I stated that “the element of water seems to be a highly significant factor in this question, and the condition of the house is somewhat debilitated because of it.”
I noted that despite its fall, Mars has minor dignity by term and triplicity and was in the 11th, a good house. I offered a “bonus prediction” that the 11th house placement meant the house could be a “a fun place to have friends over.”
I then turned my attention to the querent’s own significators. The main one, the Sun (ruler of the ascendant), is well dignified by exaltation in Aries, but the fire/water combination gave me some pause, and its accidental position in the 8th house gave me much more. I noted the significance of the 8th house as 2nd from the 7th — the owner/landlord’s money — and suggested that this looked like it indicated “expenses,” the querent being situated in the place governing that topic.
Moving to the Moon as the secondary significator of the querent, I noted that it was well dignified by domicile in Cancer and co-present with Mars, significator of the house, but that it was imminently leaving its domicile for Leo — another fire sign — and losing dignity. I further observed that the Moon was in the 12th house — and signifies the 12th house — indicating “some angst or worry for you about this.”
All of the above proved accurate and factored into the querent’s decision. However, having gotten what I called the “trouble spots” out of the way, I then answered the question as asked thusly: “Overall, the affinities between you and the house are good, so while there may be some issues with the house (as there always are), it will be a good fit for you.”
I justified this answer using receptions; the Sun (the querent) is well dignified in Aries with strong reception for Mars (the house), and the Moon is about to leave the fall of Mars and thus increase its reception for the house (in exchange for its own loss of dignity). I judged this to mean “the issues are repairable,” noting that it will cost the Moon some dignity, but that Mars, being early in Cancer, would have positive reception for the Moon for a long time as it slowly moved through that sign.
So even in answering the question as asked — which turned out to be hypothetical — about whether this house would be “a good place for [them] to live,” I made clear that it would take some work and not be ideal. But it turned out that I prioritized the delineations of this chart quite well, starting with the issues with the seller. The problems enumerated in my prelude turned out to be irreconcilable.
Outcome
The querent responded immediately to my judgment to confirm some of the observations. They described the seller as a developer “whose previous experience is in developing entire cities in his native country.” This development had been underway for almost 10 years, and the developer lives in one of the units, confirming the observation that he is “somewhat attached to the place” and enhancing the natural connotations of the slow-moving grind of Saturn.
The first indication of water-related issues — which was also an 8th house issue of the querent being in the house of the owner’s money — was that the resident would be responsible for roof/exterior maintenance.
The querent indicated they were “very curious about the water aspect” and listed some other concerns, including lack of light and a small garage, which I found to be a good indication of Mars (the house) in its fall. They also said the unit would have a non-private outdoor patio, which I spotted as the actual outcome of the “bonus prediction” about Mars in the 11th having a social connotation, though with a nice fallen-Mars prick on the finger about the loss of privacy. The querent planned to solve this problem by planting a container garden barrier, clearly a water-intensive solution.
The querent also stated that there are issues with pricing the units, and that there might be trouble negotiating a fair price because he had lost money on other units. I hadn’t delineated this, but the price would be signified by Venus, lord of the 10th, conjunct disruptive Uranus and falling from the midheaven. As I wrote in response, “If the question had cued me into the matter of price, I definitely would have said ‘looks like it’s in for some turbulence.’”
They also provided some nice surprises. The development “uses the foundation and facade of a historic church,” a delightfully radical description of Mars as lord of the 4th (home) and the 9th (church).
Two weeks later, the querent wrote again to inform me that “this saga is over.” They bid low, itemizing a bunch of costs to address various conditions, and the owner came back with a counter-offer higher than the asking price for what felt like stingy (Saturnian) reasons. This 8th-house owner’s-money issue was enough to abandon the deal.
They then listed a bunch more problems they had identified, including:
“Water damage in two locations (one was handwaved away as an open window, the other one, in the closet on the other side of the shower, remained mysterious)”
“The HVAC wasn’t zoned, and there was evidence even in march that the 3rd floor was hard to keep cool”’
“The tiles in the shower were enormous for that faux luxe look, one near the floor had cracked, and the ones above it were buckled — so we were going to have to think about dying every time we took a shower”
While it took me a minute to process, since my initial reaction was, “Oh no, I was wrong,” I then realized that I had delineated this situation with a fairly astonishing level of precision and specificity. I responded to ask whether the querent was comfortable with me ruling the chart correct, and they said yes.
I noted that if they had asked “Will we move into this house?” at the same time, with the same chart, I would have said, “Almost certainly not.” In their response, the querent wrote:
“Before touching that, I needed to know if I felt ok overriding my emotional dismissal in favor of just plain old pros and cons logical thinking. What you said aligned with our thoughts and observations, and I agree with you that overall the house would have been fine to live in.”
Analysis
This chart was worth going into such depth about because it beautifully illustrates the hardest part of horary: that sometimes the question as asked is not the real question. While I could have done a few things differently — something I would only have known how to do with more experience — the needs of the client were well served by the astrology. The information I provided enabled my client to make a wise choice.
We got through it together.
I feel that this horary demonstrates the supposed origins of interrogational astrology in the practice of “consultation charts,” in which the astrologer would cast a chart for the time and place of a session — presumably an elaborate natal chart analysis — in order to assess what was on the querent’s mind and what they were bringing to the situation. This is probably where those considerations before judgment come from, indications that something is up with the reason this querent is coming to an astrologer.
Saturn was in the 7th in this chart, and there was indeed an issue with the question as asked. But together, my client and I also bore out my approach to the considerations before judgment, which is that they should indeed give the astrologer pause, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t perfectly radical descriptions of the situation, as this Saturn in the 7th most certainly was.
Rather than meaning “this chart cannot be used,” Saturn in the 7th here meant, “There is a problem with the owner of this house that will prevent the question as asked from coming to pass.” While I did not answer the wrong question and say, “Actually, you won’t even buy this house,” I did answer the question the querent wanted answered with enough information that they could bring about this outcome themself.
