Location Analysis

The fuller picture

A mislaid thing is signified by the ruler of the second house, which is where the querent's moveable goods live, and a theft question starts from the same place. Once you have that planet you have three layers to read off it, and it helps to keep them separate because each one answers a different question. The house it sits in gives a bearing and a rough distance. The sign it sits in gives the character of the place. The planet itself gives the immediate surroundings — what sort of thing the object is lying next to.

Direction is anchored on the angles. The Ascendant is east, the fourth house north, the seventh west, the tenth south, and the houses in between take the bearings between those. The same wheel runs on the signs, from Aries in the east round to Capricorn in the south. The shorthand most people meet first is elemental — fire east, earth south, air west, water north — and it is the same scheme read at the level of the sign group rather than the individual sign, which is why the two agree at the corners and can differ by a step in between.

Place and height come from the element. Fire is warm and dry and near heat: hearths, radiators, kitchens, workshops. Earth is low and solid: cellars, floors, the bottoms of cupboards, under the furniture. Air is high and open: upper rooms, shelves, the tops of wardrobes, anywhere above eye level. Water is cold and damp: sinks, baths, laundries, wells. Height tends to follow the same grouping, with earth at ground level, water lower still, and air well above it. The planet then picks the room out of that description — Mercury towards desks, papers, bags and drawers; Venus towards clothes, bedrooms and soft furnishings; Saturn towards the dark, forgotten, neglected corner.

Now the caveat, and on this page it is substantial. This is the one subject in this glossary where the practice the rest of the pages are built on declines to help. The astrologer whose doctrine grounds most of this material agrees that the misplaced thing belongs to the second house, then quotes an older objection to troubling the heavens over a lost glove and refers the reader elsewhere. So the direction, place and height tables above rest on general tradition and on our own implementation of it, not on a source read closely and checked for this project. The house-and-sign direction wheel we do have from him was drawn up for a different question entirely — where in the world someone should go in order to prosper — and we are borrowing the machinery rather than citing a rule about lost keys. Read the output as a shortlist of places to search. It is not a finding.

Two general rules reverse for this kind of question, and both look like mistakes until you notice which question is being asked. A void of course Moon is normally discouraging, because it says nothing will happen — but for a lost object nothing happening is the good news, so a void Moon is read as the thing sitting where it was left, findable without much effort. The Moon's phase flips the same way: a waning Moon is read as the object drawing closer to being found rather than as a matter running down. And the Moon's last completed aspect gets a specific job here, naming whatever displaced the thing in the first place — the nature of the planet she came off, and the house it occupies, describe the person or the event that moved it.