Considerations Before Judgment
The considerations before judgment are a controversial list of chart conditions William Lilly warned about in horary astrology. Some examples:
The ascendant is too early in the sign.
The ascendant is too late in the sign.
The Moon is too late in its sign.
The Moon is void-of-course (another controversial condition I don’t need to write about because I hold by the Shuly Rose definition).
The 7th house or its ruler is afflicted.
The ascendant ruler is combust.
Saturn is on the ascendant or descendant.
By and large, they’re intuitive things any experienced astrologer would notice anyway. But the list seems fairly cargo-culty in terms of how SERIOUS they are, mumbo-jumbo-y, especially post-Lilly, though he himself is fairly obscure about why they’re such a big deal. Probably one of those games of telephone through the ages. They were written down as considerations, and the sheer act of transmission through centuries made them into Unerring Doctrine.
Anyway, many people assume the appearance of a consideration in a chart simply means, “Bum chart, no go.”
John Frawley, my teacher’s teacher, basically discards them as artifacts of a time when chart calculations and ascendant times could not be reliably computed. This seems like weak scholarship to me, especially since lots of them are unaffected by that. But he’s clearly right that immediately throwing out charts because of them is silly. Lilly scholars such as Sue Ward are preoccupied with the fact that Lilly has charts he judged in his notes that exhibit some of the considerations, but he judged them anyway. So what are they for?
I have found horary charts to have a tractable number of ways in. Starting points. And you have to look at them all, see what they lead to, and then decide which (if any) is the radical judgment. At press time, I’ve judged 42 charts now, and several times textbook considerations have immediately narrowed down my ways into the chart, sometimes by showing which one ISN’T it, and other times by being like, “Don’t use the ascendant. Use the SECOND house.”
Once or twice, Saturn on an angle has clearly meant “don’t judge this chart” in cases where I was clearly being frivolous with the sacred art of astrological divination, and I knew it immediately and closed the app.
And, once, I judged a chart with an early ascendant, suppressing all kinds of weird feelings about it, and got it absolutely, ridiculously wrong.
Basically, I think the considerations are spiritual attunements to the language of horary, and they are signs to use your HEART rather than your MIND for a second.
In other words… consider them… before you render judgment.
It’s right there in the name.
