Horary 0063: Should We Go Into Business Together?
Overview
The querent was renting a yoga studio on an hourly basis to host their own aikido classes. The owner of the studio was not running the business well. The querent had conceived an idea for a new model that would displace the current owner, taking her on as a sort of partner tenant and improving their overall prospects. The querent thought this proposal might provide relief to the current owner because of their dire financial straits, but the querent found the owner hard to read and asked for a horary judgment on whether this would be a good business relationship.
I judged only one detail of the chart incorrectly, but it resulted in a wrong prediction of the outcome. I spent too much effort on the “business” part, and in doing so I misunderstood a critical element of the “relationship” part.
Judgment
I gave the querent Mercury, the ascendant ruler, and the current owner Jupiter, the descendant ruler, setting it up as a 1st house/7th house negotiation horary. My mistake was in giving the Moon to the profits from the business (2nd from the 10th) as though the business were already a going concern, rather than letting it play its default role as a secondary significator of the querent. I judged the rest of the chart using the Moon to signify the profits from the business.
I noted Jupiter and Mercury co-present in Taurus, sharing affinity for Venus by domicile and the Moon by exaltation. I delineated this as substantial agreement with one another. Venus rules the 2nd house of the querent’s money — and it makes sense that both of them like that, given that one wants to keep it and the other wants to keep taking it — but she also rules the 9th, where Mercury and Jupiter are co-present, the 9th house ruler being a nice significator of a place of spiritual practice, i.e. a yoga/aikido studio. They are both literally co-present in one space, but they also both like the space.
Having delineated the Moon as the profits from the (notional) business (2nd from the 10th), I interpreted Mercury and Jupiter exalting the Moon as agreement that the querent and the owner would also like to make money together from the new plan.
I pointed out the difference between Jupiter and Mercury in this chart, which is that Jupiter has already descended into the 8th house, showing the current owner preoccupied with her own finances. I did not take this further, but I did point it out as one of the trouble spots.
I then turned my attention to Venus’ recent ingress into Leo and co-presence with Mars. Mars, as 8th house ruler, signifies the current owner’s finances, and a conjunction between Mars and Venus — 2nd house ruler, the querent’s finances — would have been a solid indication of them making a deal. That isn’t how it works out, though.
I described the remarkable astrology of this summer, as Venus would approach Mars closer and closer but stop and turn retrograde, letting Mars get away. For some reason, I delineated this as “this idea [taking] a while to pan out,” rather than it never happening, and I supported it by a completely irrelevant delineation of their shared affinity for the Sun, their “community network,” which seemed like a way of saying “your local people want this to work out, so it will.” This was a bad move, too, but since Venus’ next aspect was in fact with Jupiter — the current owner’s significator — I used this as a description of a deal being struck. A deal of some kind was struck, so this was still a little bit right. Delineating the Moon correctly would have led me to understand this better.
I then looked ahead for Mercury to see how things would pan out for the querent. The upcoming Gemini ingress showed an improvement in fortunes, which I reported, though again, if I had understood the Moon thing, I would have seen this as Mercury leaving the shared space of Taurus for Mercury’s own space and doing so for the better.
I saved the Moon for last, since I had already decided this deal was going to happen, and thus the Moon would signify not the querent but the profits from the business as ruler of the 2nd from the 10th. I noted her angularity in the 4th house as a condition of high activity but her position in Capricorn as a considerable debility by essential dignity. Not only is the Moon in her exile, she is in the fall of Jupiter. (This is where I fumbled the whole chart, right here.)
I delineated this as it being “a hard go for the business” due to the current owner’s financial troubles. The Moon is also applying to Saturn, who rules the 6th house of toil but also the 5th house of creativity. I noted Saturn’s favor of Jupiter from Pisces, and I interpreted this as meaning, “It’ll be a grind, but it will be a creative one, and with effort, it looks like it will work out.”
Outcome
The querent initially wrote back to say this judgment was “a really accurate description of the problem” that “provides some good insights” on why the current owner was behaving the way they were. They decided to move forward.
Weeks later, the querent wrote again to let me know things did not work out at all. The original owner responded in a way the querent did not like and presented a different, much more constrained arrangement, which the querent described as a “short term win for me in some ways,” but their clear takeaway was that the current owner is not a good collaborator, and they should not work together.
Analysis
I mistreated the Moon here. I should have left the 11th house out of it and let her signify the querent as usual. In that case, I never would have bothered trying to make her application to Saturn look like a good sign, either.
Mercury ruling the 1st and the 10th should have been a clue that this proposed business does not yet exist except as the querent’s idea, and thus this should have been judged as a simple dealmaking horary, taking the 1st house and the Moon as the querent, the 2nd house as the querent’s money, the 7th house as the current owner, and the 8th house as their money.
If I had done that, I would have seen the reception between the Moon (the querent) and Jupiter (the current owner) for the intense personality clash it actually shows. Jupiter exalts the Moon from Taurus, which is not always a positive regard. If the reception is mutual in some significant way, exaltation can be beautiful, but otherwise it can simply describe someone looming far too large in someone else’s consciousness. Meanwhile, the Moon is in Jupiter’s fall, opposing the place of Jupiter’s exaltation, meaning the querent and the quesited feel exactly opposite about each other. The querent looms too large in the current owner’s view, and the current owner is low and unimpressive in the querent’s view. People in such a situation clearly should not work together.
Moreover, the Moon in her own exile in Capricorn should be taken as a sign that this proposal is too much of a stretch for it to succeed. Her position in the 4th house could also be delineated as a preference for privacy, for the querent to turn inward and abandon the plan rather than outward with this new venture.
Understanding the Moon properly puts a very different spin on the fact that Venus (the querent’s finances) and Mars (the current owner’s finances) never meet. The Venus/Jupiter contact that happens instead represents the short-term deal that was struck, which is just the landlord taking the querent’s rent money again. If they had reached financial alignment, that would have looked differently, but the painful astrology of summer 2023 instead tells the story of them drawing close but never meeting.
Sorry, Moon. I promise to listen to you more. My apologies to my client, also. I suppose there was no downside to proposing this plan and seeing what happened, but I regret getting your hopes up for its success. As always, I have the utmost gratitude for my clients for allowing me to practice this art, and to share my results for the benefit of the art itself, even when I am wrong.
