I have noticed a trend of asking “What is the house of …” in several forums, for example:
- What is the house for the ex-wife?
- What is the house of redundancy?
- What is the house of diets?
- What house rules secrets?
- What is the house of Mantras?
- What house rules jealously?
Notice that there is not anything wrong in asking this questions. Every one of these things are “ruled” by something in astrology, but not always by a house.
But taken as a whole, so many similar questions, I have grown worried that maybe there is an underline problem.
I think that these questions are proliferating over time because of three factors:
The first one is that horary astrologers are getting to addicted to assign every possible matter over the world to a house.
The second is the to discover what is the real matter asked about.
The final factor is language and the role of the astrologer.
Is there a house for everything ?
I think that astrologers are getting addicted to the idea that you can assign every thing to a house. What is the house of computers, and cell phones, and cotton candy, and nails, and ribs, and my poodle´s tail?
The problem probably raises because, when we are students, we learn horary in the very simple scheme of “well, see the lord of first house. Now look for the ruler of the house you want, let´s say it´s a lover, than it is house 7”. Yes, this is true in 85% of the time, but it is not always, so I think that astrologers should be prepared to give up of this “crutch” over time.
If in 85% of the time we are worried about the ruler of a house, what do we look for in the other 15% ? Generally we are looking for essencial significations. For instance, if I am looking for a lost object, generally I will look for the ruler of 2nd house, or the 4th house. But if I am looking for a very specific object, generally the essencial signification is more important. E.g., if I am looking for a really old object, saturn, or if I am looking for my rifle, mars, etc.
Another familiar example that horary astrologers seem to have a hard time to teach their students is in the problem of the lover, or ex-wife. I am the querent, so I get the first house. S/he is the 7th house ruler. But the lover/husband-wife, what house does s/he get? We can´t give him/her the 7th from the 7th, because it would go back to the first !
This is a clear example that not everything should be seen through the eyes of “houses”. The damn husband that ruins our dreams of dating her can be seen as bad, bad Saturn. Our wives´s lover can be seen as young mars conjunct her planet.
If s/he is leaving the partner and coming to show us a little love, we will probably a separation with a planet (no matter what house it rules) and an application to our significator. So, many times, we will not look for significators a priori, we will wait to the chart to tell us what it want us to know.
So, there is no reason for you to look for a house “to rule diets”. You want to loose weight, so maybe your significator is getting out of a sign of water (need, gluttony) and going for a sign of air (light, intellectual, thin). Maybe is separating from Jupiter (candy tooth) and going to Saturn (bulimic supermodel).
What is the real matter ?
As I wrote in a different post, the more important problem in horary astrology is that clients usually don´t tell the whole true, or don´t know exactly what to ask. So, in many ocasions we have a problem of what is the real and true matter of the question, the “radix” of the question. It is like a play, where we need to see what are the main actors from the supporting cast.
Let´s use the example above of a lover. Husband thinks that the wife was a lover, the question, “does my wife have a lover?” can mean so many different things…
1 – husband is afraid she will leave him. She may or may not have a lover and still leave him ! Look for separations between the significators of husband and wife, independent of evidence of lovers.
2- husband is focused only on the matter of treason. Some astrologers would rid the querent completely out of the picture, and give the ascendant house to the wife (the “main actor” in the question), seeing if she is doing anything suspicious.
In the same way, many, many times, when astrologers are asking “what is the house of…” I have this feeling that the real radix question is not being asked. For example, in the “what is the house of the secrets?” question, what the astrologer really wanted was how to know if a person was a secret enemy. In the question about envy, what the person really wanted was to locate her secret enemies (who are obviously in the 12th). Notice that a secret enemy doesn´t have to, necessarily, envy of us! There are many reasons why people are secret enemies, for example, the simple love of treachery! There is a whole lot of assumptions that are unnecessary when you assume that your enemies are “envy” of you.
In the case of Mantras, I would have to ask, why are you asking? Do you care about the material results of the mantra, like luck? Or the spiritual doors you want to open with them? If the mantras are the mean to an end, what is the end? For instance, if querent is doing mantras to get more money, sometimes the question “will I get more money?” would be more important than the mantra´s one: people can get money from different ways and sources and reasons, magic being only one of them. Or maybe the person has had several headaches and is thinking, “hey, maybe this mantra stuff is doing something wrong to me!”, that would be a completely different case, because we want to look at the condition of the mantra in relationship to you.
In this particular case, one should be aware of the danger of the question ending up being too metaphysic “are mantras useful for relieving my karma?”. I always decline this kind of horaries. Astrologers should never use horary to answer metaphysic questions. Even because you will never know if your answer was right or wrong, and astrologers should always have the burden of potential failure! Astrologers need accountability! After all, without mistakes there is no learning.
Language and the role of astrologers
The final factor that sometimes makes me worried is the problem of Language. Clients, almost 99% of the time, are not astrologers. So they don´t know and they don´t need to know the astrological language. Neither they need to understand our techniques, how they work, or their requirements. So it is obvious that we are the ones that will have to translate their questions into astrology.
The most general mistake that I see is trying to get too literal with the question, as discussed above, not trying to find the “root” question. A very common version of this mistake are the questions of “Will I receive an email/phone call/letter from X?”
It seems very simple and straightforward to look for a contact between the ruler of the third house (email/phone call) and the first house (querent). In practice, I don´t remember a single horary where the answer was given by this aspect. Why ? Because what the person is really asking if there will be any contact between querent and quesited (generally a 7th house contact). Generally this means that the contact is the root of the question, not the way the contact will occur. Maybe there will be no phone call, but a real live contact will be enough!
So if we translate the words as they were spoken, we will get the wrong answer! We should listen for what the heart says, even if their words shout exactly the opposite.
Note: at least one time an astrologer argued with me that their querent really wanted to know only about the email, and not about any other form of contact with the person. That the querent´s question was “just that”. My answer is that, if that is true, the astrologers should raise his/her fees. Many astrologers say that we don´t have the right to judge querents questions. Of course we have, or god wouldn´t give us a head to put weight on the shoulders. But is a wonder how many important questions suddenly disappears as the astrologers start to collect a fair fee.
So, I think that many times astrologers are not concentrating in their role of translation, of adapting the real world to astrological language. For example, in natal astrology we see people often doing the exact opposite… trying to bend astrology to fit their concepts, words and ideology!
Example: “Oh, my ex-boyfriend is very jealous, what is the house of jealously”. They are trying to fit a believe, a concept that is not from astrology, and make the astrology fit this bed of Procrustes. Jealously may seem like a pretty innocent example, but I have seen things like “how do we see Bipolarity/ADD?”.
Well, a concept like Bipolar depression is NOT originally from the universe that astrology was born and raised. Is a technical term, that doesn´t need to be mirrored in the astrological reality! As the multiple “diseases” that are “discovered” each and every day. Unless you want to create your own “asteroid of bipolarity”, there will be no fast and easy equivalence between concepts found on astrology with the concepts used in other fields that are completely alien to it, like sociology, medicine and psychology!
We should be aware that the astrological language exists for more than two thousand years. Traditional astrologers are well aware of the dangers of trying to “bend” the language to fit ones preconceptions of the world. This is a danger that has to be avoided in our horaries for a very simple reason: this are the kind of horaries that the feedback usually starts with
“Oh, I thought that it was a yes, but…”
Again, my ramblings are not mean to be criticism against the ones who asked these questions. Every honest question should have the right to be asked! In reality, this article should be read as advice to the ones that answer those questions, as things that one should keep in mind, before addressing the question: that these questions usually are not as simple as they sound.
PS:
I promised a full study on the inauguration charts of the Presidents of U.S. A preliminary study will be published in Nehran´s magazine, in march. When the electronic magazine get published, I will put a note over here.
Episthemologie 
You’re quite right, Yuzuru. People ask “what is the house of this or that” as if they’re going to find the constellation of Losing Those Last 5 Kilos or of He Loves You Best spread across the sky. Great article.