Quesited

The fuller picture

Every horary question has two halves: somebody asks, and something is asked about. The second half is the quesited — a person, an object, an outcome, a state of affairs, anything the question is actually pointed at. It gets one planet to speak for it, and that planet is found by a lookup rather than by judgement: settle which house governs the matter, read the sign sitting on that house's cusp, and take the planet that rules the sign. The mechanics of that step belong to the significator; what belongs here is the decision underneath it. Everything the chart goes on to say about the matter rests on which house you chose, and you're choosing it before any astrology happens.

Most of the time the choice is routine. Money is the second, a career the tenth, a marriage the seventh, study the ninth, a lost object the second, a large animal the twelfth. The mistakes are routine too, and they cluster. By far the commonest in our own records is a question about somebody else answered out of the asker's own first house — and nothing in the chart will tell you it's happened, because a chart read from the wrong house still produces a clean, confident, entirely irrelevant answer.

That's where turning comes in. When the quesited belongs to a third party, the house standing for that person becomes their own first house and the topic is counted from there. Several familiar meanings are already the result of that count: the eighth is a partner's money because it's the second house from the seventh. One caution about depth, which is ours rather than the tradition's — a relationship you can already name has a house of its own, so a friend is the eleventh outright, and deriving on top of a bond you can name is what manufactures duplicate rulers. Two turns is the practical ceiling.

Once the house is settled, the quesited is weighed on exactly the same terms as the person asking: essential dignity and debility first, then accidental fortitude and debility, and only then the contact between the two. Three actors, each weighed twice, before a single aspect is looked at. The quesited's half is often the more informative one. In one worked chart the planet standing for a prospective employee is peregrine in a cadent house, read as somebody ill-equipped for the work — and the querent hired him anyway, and it went badly. Where the same planet turns out to rule both sides of the question, that identity is itself the evidence of connection; the case is treated on the querent page.

One more thing, because it changes what you're looking for. Not every quesited is a yes-or-no. When the question asks what, where or who, the quesited's ruler is read descriptively — its sign, its house, its condition, what it resembles — instead of being tested for contact with the asker's ruler, and there's no yes to give. The quesited needn't be a person or an object either. In one worked chart a hope is assigned the eleventh house and then delineated as though it were a person: retrograde in its own domicile, hemmed in by its surroundings, and heading for a quiet disappointment.