Horary rule #1: One question at a time

I didn’t mean it to happen… but I broke one of my most important rules of horary a couple of days ago. Namely…

DO NOT ACCEPT QUESTIONS ON MULTIPLE TOPICS FROM ONE QUERENT AT THE SAME TIME.

I was asking friends for seed questions for a small project I’m helping a colleague with, and when one person emailed me back with not one but TWO juicy questions (is my marriage in trouble? and when will my big career break come?), I thought, “Oh, I should really tell her to send these in separate emails.” But I didn’t, and now I’m wondering if I need to reject one question or ask her to resend or what.

What’s so bad about accepting multiple questions at once? Say you’re reading an email from a querent, and you read both (or all) of her questions within a few seconds. Then what you’ve got is one single chart for that place and time, and you’ll be stuck trying to answer two (or several) separate questions from the same chart. It’s not impossible, but it can get complicated.

Also, when the querent has multiple concerns, it can mean that they need to go back and think some more before asking. Horary astrology works on the premise that the question and its answer arise from the same moment. The more important the question is to you, and the more you really hone in on what you need to know before you ask, the better the results will be. John Frawley in The Horary Textbook remarks, “The asking of many unrelated questions suggests that none of them is the real issue. It is better to ask the querent to reflect on what is most important and then ask that.”

This doesn’t prevent querents from asking two related questions at once – for instance, “Will I get the job? Will it pay well?” or “Should I go out with X? Will he get along with my kids?” But getting a laundry list of questions is the red flag that tells you, the astrologer, to ask the querent to take some more time and focus on what they need to know.

In the end, I may attempt to read both the marriage and the career questions from the one chart I have. As I said: not impossible, just complicated. If the querent had sent the questions in separate emails, at least I could have read them at separate times, thus giving each one its own unique chart. That’s the wondrous thing about horary astrology: the chart is for the moment the astrologer understands what’s being asked. It may look like I’m imposing some free will on the situation and somehow “choosing” the chart for each question; but I find that the system works.

So now I’ll have to go see how the chart looks. I glanced at it on Friday and there’s an early degree rising. That’s one of those old-fashioned “strictures against judgment” that suggests the question is somehow premature. Maybe I can use that as my excuse to ask her to resend both, separately.