Horary 0007: Where Are My Keys?
Overview
The querent was searching for their keys, which had been missing for a week.
Judgment
I assigned the querent Venus, ruler of the ascendant, and the keys Mars, ruler of the 2nd house. I saw Venus applying sextile to Mars and immediately judged the querent would find the keys.
I described the object’s 9th-house position in the two standard inside-the-house ways: a stairwell/landing/on-the-way-upstairs place, or a prayer/meditation/learning space. Adding the significations of the sign of Gemini, I mentioned that it could be high up or by a window — since it’s an air sign — or that it could be in a place associated with technology.
Outcome
The querent did indeed find the keys, but they were in the couch in the living room. The querent reported that their partner found the keys. They admitted that this couch could be considered a “learning place,” and that the keys were “high up” in that they were above the floor, but the querent’s initial inclination was that the judgment was not correct because it did not describe the place well.
I agreed I did not describe it well, and I was perfectly willing to count it as a loss if that is what the querent decided. But I made the case that the judgment’s primary and most confident assertion — that the keys would be found — was correct, and I shared some better delineations that 62 more charts of experience would have helped me offer back on chart #7. The querent agreed to let this be judged correct given the caveats I will provide below.
Analysis
The main thing I missed is the textbook delineation that a lost object in a “double-bodied” sign like Gemini is likely to be stuck between things like couch cushions. That would have helped.
More subtle, though, were the indications to look at the chart from the spouse’s point of view. I see two factors that would have led me to turn the chart now, with 62 more charts under my belt.
The first is that Mars, significator of the object, also rules the descendant and thus could signify a spouse. That wouldn’t do it all by itself, but then the querent’s significator being smack dab on the descendant like that and making contact with the descendant ruler definitely turns my head.
From that point of view, the querent’s keys are in the 3rd-from-the-7th, and so I could have described a 3rd-house place. In that case, rather than putting it in lofty spiritual or technological terms, I would have described a place of familiarity and communication.
I could even have done that just from a passage in John Frawley’s textbook that the 9th house could be seen as an upstairs version of the 3rd house, a delineation that I would prove correct in a later chart. It wasn’t upstairs in this case, but rather the chart should have been turned upside down to the spouse’s point of view.
It’s a dirty one, I’ll admit it. But hopefully I have shown that I am willing to be wrong when I’m wrong. In this case, I felt strongly that I was right, though I had done a somewhat poor job. I still would have taken the L if the querent hadn’t bought my argument, but thankfully they did. This was not a paid chart, but I am nevertheless grateful they came to me as a budding horary astrologer when they lost their keys. Without this early practice, I never would have gotten better at this.
