Horary 0160: Where Is the Serum?
Overview
The querent had misplaced a slim blue-black glass bottle of jasmine, cardamom, and damiana body serum. They had used it frequently a couple years ago, packed it up for their move to a new house, and hadn’t touched it since. The querent was sure the bottle had made the move; they had seen it once since, in a plastic bin of random stuff in their office they had put off unpacking. It had leaked, and they couldn’t remember if they cleaned it and put it away somewhere, set it aside to clean later, or thrown it out. Consequently, it could have been in pretty much any room in the house.
Judgment
I assigned the bottle to Mars, ruler of the 2nd house of the querent’s possession. The second house cusp falls in Scorpio, the water sign of the fixed modality associated with the dark side of Mars, which seemed beautifully descriptive of a blue-black bottle of spicy liquid. Mars is in Taurus in the 7th house, opposite Scorpio, indicating that the bottle is in the querent’s spouse’s belongings or domain. This also makes Mars ruled by Venus, as the Libra ascendant is, meaning the object is in the querent’s own domain as well.
I noted that the Moon cannot currently see Mars but is about to change signs, suddenly popping into view of Mars at the moment of the Full Moon. I took this as a sign of the querent suddenly finding the bottle.
Mars has just been contacted by Mercury, who rules the 9th and 11th houses and is near Venus, the querent’s significator. Looking at this trickster Mercury near this maternal Cancer Venus, I was inclined to turn the chart to see the Virgo 11th as 5th from the 7th, with Mercury therefore indicating their child (from the spouse’s perspective).
With Venus applying that sextile to Mars next, I judged that the querent would find the bottle in a domain related to their spouse for a reason having to do with their child.
Outcome
The querent quickly found the bottle in a bin of items hastily thrown together to get them out of their precocious little baby’s reach, which had been placed in a closet shared by both spouses.
Analysis
This was my first lost object chart since deciding — after a string of unresolved cases — to switch back to using Regiomontanus houses for lost-object horaries only, a choice which complicates my previous positions on house division. I had always been fond of the way Regiomontanus houses divide physical space in an obvious, easy-to-visualize way, despite using Placidus houses most of the time because they reckon the house cusps according to the passage of time, which is the same way I orient myself to where things are in the sky during the day. Placidus serves me well for most abstract questions, but when searching for a lost object — that is, using astrology to locate something in space — it seems more logical to use Regio houses for that, since they divide the sky as a 3D volume.
A sensible rationale is the most important factor in choosing a house system, but I wouldn’t feel confident in such a choice without a sign to validate it. This chart was that sign. The client found the bottle about 90 minutes after receiving my judgment.
