Reflections on 150 Horary Charts as a Working Astrologer
The horary chart I count as 0001 was cast on February 28, 2023, so that’s how long I’ve been an astrologer in any kind of professional sense. Astrology has never been — and I sincerely doubt it ever will be — my full-time vocation. Astrology is one spiritual supplement of many to my professional goals, so sometimes I don’t even remember to include it in the list of things I Do™ in the “What do you do?” sense. Nevertheless, a bit over a year in, I just received my 150th horary question, and I reflexively began reflecting on that, so here are some thoughts about Being an Astrologer at 150 horary charts.
Horary astrology is the method of answering questions using the chart of the moment. The astrologer casts the chart for their own location at the time they receive the question, orients themself in the local sky, tunes their point of view into the question and the querent who has brought it to them, and applies the fundamentals of traditional astrology to judge a definitive answer.
Horary has a reputation as a highly technical branch, but I think that’s just because there’s no way to get something as specific as an answer to a question out of an astrology chart without techniques. To me, astrological technique does not vary between branches much at all, it just has to be applied differently. When you’re telling someone about their own life, as you do when delineating a nativity, you have much more to go on, such as the person in front of you and their reactions to the things you say and clarifying questions you ask. That requires human “soft skills” to do well. In horary, you can get more context from a querent if you need it to judge the chart, but that doesn’t actually get you any closer to answering a question about something that hasn’t happened yet. Prediction in all branches of astrology requires rigorous application of technique. It’s just that horary is a branch of astrology that is only ever concerned with things that haven’t happened yet.
Horary is not the only kind of astrology I practice or even offer professionally. It’s not even my favorite kind to practice (that would be elections). However, it is in some sense the purest expression of not just how but why I practice astrology, which is why it’s the kind I trained to do professionally first. That’s because I find astrology to be grounded in the fundamental human capacity to know the Divine from our own perspectives — the capacity referred to succinctly as “divination” — and, as Geoffrey Cornelius wrote, horary is the barest form of astrological divination, contemplating the meaning of moments not distant from the situation in spacetime but right here, at the astrologer’s chair at the moment of receiving a question.
In other words, horary astrology is divination upon the sky right over the astrologer’s head. It is the astronomically advanced version of what is probably the oldest mode of celestial omen-watching there is: looking up at the sky and divining what it means. Looking at the sky is the heart of my daily practice, and somehow — I actually cannot fathom how — that practice is not treated with the primacy I feel it deserves in the world of practicing astrologers. I published a free 100+-page guide to rooting technical astrology into astronomical observation because it matters so much to me. And horary is the form of technical astrology that applies skywatching most directly. The chart is just a visual aid for locating the planetary significators.
My predictive accuracy rate with horary has consistently surprised me, staying between 75% and 85%. It has never moved outside that range after the first few charts. Of the 150 charts I’ve judged at press time, 85 have come back definitively, 66 correct, 19 incorrect. The number of unresolved charts means we don’t know what my true accuracy rate is, but more than half have come back so far. Someday, maybe I’ll figure out a way to score those, but for now they’re simply omitted from the accuracy stats. If querents give me permission, I publish detailed write-ups of my resolved charts, and I report my real-time accuracy as a batting average on my Astrology page. This part of the practice is very important to me. Professional divination outside of coherent cultural containers is such a fraught prospect, and to me a diviner has an obligation to disclose what makes them trustworthy in the marketplace. Admitting fallibility is table stakes; I would never trust an astrologer who didn’t do that. But I try to go beyond that by demonstrating my approach and technique, and the feedback I get suggests that my write-ups are at least as meaningful to people — especially students of astrology — as the actual judgments are to their querents. I try to practice with integrity by sharing my wonder and learning with everyone, including the querents, and I feel good about the querents this approach has brought in. They have been incredibly understanding when I have erred.
And yet, this is just the beginning of the significance of engaging with me, specifically, on a horary question, and it is so clear to me by now that vastly more is going on here than simply making accurate observations and judgments of their meaning. I’m not saying — nor am I not-saying — that the validity of horary astrology cannot be assessed scientifically, but I am definitely saying that what’s going on here is about more than just whether or not physics can detect space-beams from the planets controlling what happens on Earth. If you’re going to get at this scientifically, you’re going to have to understand all of reality first. Because you don’t get the (seemingly!) fixed point of reference of the time on someone’s birth certificate in order to ground all the divination here. If the querent hesitates for five minutes before ordering a horary, the chart for their question could be completely different. What “causes” that to happen?” What “chooses” the moment when a horary is cast? The complex chains of interrelated will and fate are terrifying to contemplate. All I can say about it at this point is, the horary astrologer gets the charts they need when they need them, and that need is determined the way all spiritual lessons in life are determined. That is, what the astrology practitioner needs is not always to get it right. Sometimes they need to take a long hard look at why they got it wrong.
The flip side of horary being a purely divinatory form of astrology is that the astrologer is inextricable from the chart. The Moment of Astrology is all about this; you can’t just compute upon disembodied astrological charts and produce good predictive results. My ability to do well in horary prediction is determined by factors that are so subjective. For instance, there is conventional wisdom in the horary tradition that one should not cast charts for oneself, and a lot of contemporary online astrologers dismiss it. I don’t. Even when I have gotten them right, horaries about my own life have messed me up, and when I’ve gotten them wrong, it almost seemed like a punishment for doing something improper, entangling myself with the karma too much.
Entanglements with the karma of others are even more confounding. There are certainly some cases of outright bias in my practice — of wanting good things for my friends who ask me questions and letting that cloud my judgment, for example — but my sense is that the underlying dynamics are much more subtle than this. This inaccuracy is caused by some kind of interference from entanglements, and its effects are just as pronounced with people who aren’t my friends but rather are people with whom I have some degree of online parasocial cording in one direction or another. My only bias in terms of the situation I’m judging astrologically is wanting to do a good job in front of them, which is always my bias. But whatever attachments I have with or around them cloud the result anyway.
It’s no wonder that many of the celebrated horary astrologers in history were deeply religious people. Some authors insist one must sit in meditation, pray, fast, the whole works before judging a chart, to make sure the transmission comes in clean. I don’t always do that. I usually do something devotional, but sometimes I don’t. I have not always adequately cleared out my field of entanglements even on a basic energy hygiene level before judging charts. But I’ve become more rigorous about it over time because the most obvious factor in whether I get a chart right or not has always been whether I’ve got my soul in working order at the time.
My take is that God just gives it to you if you’re dialed in and denies it from you if you aren’t. But when God gives it to you, it’s so obvious that that’s what happened — that it isn’t a coin flip. My accuracy rate is 25%–35% better than a coin flip, first of all. But that doesn’t even begin to describe the immensity of how horary astrology works in practice. When you’re in it, and you see it unfolding, you realize that the chance of correctly predicting someone will be offered a job in 10 months isn’t 50/50. It’s infinity to one. It’s incalculable.
