Horary 0111: Where Are the Clothes?
Overview
The querent was missing a bunch of clothes they believed had been packed and stored together, but they were unable to find them in their expected places. They had stored this stuff at their mother’s apartment at one point and listed a fairly bewildering variety of possible rooms it could be in, as well as a nearby storage space they were unable to check at the time.
Judgment
I assigned the clothes Saturn as ruler of the 2nd house, and I noted that Saturn was present in the house but in a different sign than the cusp. I delineated this for the querent as meaning the clothes were in their proper place but that there is more to the story.
I described Saturn’s retrograde motion as a radical description of the querent’s search taking a long time and revisiting the same places. I offered the possibility that the sign of Pisces could indicate wet places or places with faucets or water lines. I also gave the indication of double-bodied signs — common in lost object horaries — of the object being between two things. I also gave Saturn’s natural signification of a box or container.
I described the 2nd house in more detail for the querent, as its meaning in a lost object horary can be a bit complicated because of its importance. I described the kitchen or pantry as its most basic signification, “the place of the household’s most essential material supplies.” I also described it in terms of being “next to” or “adjoining” the 1st house, “a storage place connected to the entrance” like a coatroom or mudroom.
I told them to try their luck with these descriptions and report back.
Outcome
The querent eventually asked their sibling about the clothes, and the sibling recalled that a box of the querent’s belongings was stored in a storage room that is “literally, but also metaphorically” between their houses. The querent had already looked there and not found them, but this time they found them in a box sandwiched between other boxes. They reported no obvious connection to water.
Analysis
The querent and I agreed that this judgment was correct in substance: The clothes were in storage, in a box that was between other boxes, and in a storage place that was between two key places. The water sign delineation had confused them, and nothing I offered them prompted them to check that place again.
This caused me to instantly facepalm because there is an obvious indication of a sibling-related place, which I hadn’t mentioned because the descriptions they had sent me had not prompted me to consider it a likely possibility. In this case, the 2nd house was not simply a storage area adjoining the 1st house but rather one between the 1st house and the 3rd house, the sibling’s place.
The lesson of this chart for me is never to overlook a situation in which the quadrant house of the significator is different than its whole-sign house. This is not information to be tossed out; it’s one of the main benefits of using an additional house system besides whole-sign. As in the situation where the MC/IC are remote from the 10th/4th signs from the ascendant, a planet that’s in the 2nd by quadrant and the 3rd by whole-sign should be delineated as having mixed significations of both houses.
I even mentioned this condition to the querent, but what I didn’t do was list 3rd house significations that could have been mixed in with the 2nd house ones. If I had, it’s as likely as not that the very first one I gave would have been siblings. If not, I would have said neighbors first and siblings second. Had I simply said that word “siblings,” that could have been all the querent needed to go back and find the clothes right away.
All’s well that ends well, though. The querent found the clothes in storage thanks to their sibling anyway, and I learned I had begun to forget the importance of whole-sign house significations in charts of the moment!
