Horary Astrology: History, Method and William Lilly

Horary astrology is the branch of astrology that answers a specific question by casting a chart for the moment the question is asked or received. Developed by Arabic-speaking astrologers in the eighth and ninth centuries and practised throughout medieval and early modern Europe, it reached its classic English form in William Lilly's Christian Astrology (1647), and it has been revived since the 1980s as one of the most divinatory forms of astrology.

What Horary Astrology Is§

Most astrology begins with a birth: a natal chart is cast for the moment and place someone was born and read as a map of temperament and life. Horary astrology begins with a question. Will the lost ring be found? Will the ship arrive? Is the patient's illness dangerous? Should I accept this offer? The astrologer erects a chart for the time at which the question is understood, usually at the place where the astrologer is, and reads the answer from the relationships between the planets that represent the people and things involved.

The method belongs to a wider family the Greeks called katarchic astrology, the astrology of beginnings. Hellenistic writers, notably Dorotheus of Sidon in the first century CE, gave rules for choosing the right moment to begin an action and for judging the outcome of something from the moment it began. Horary extends this logic: the moment a question is born is treated as the beginning of the matter, and its chart as a picture of how the matter will unfold. The wider history of charts and their uses is surveyed in our guide to horoscopes.

The Arabic Interrogations and Medieval Practice§

The full technique of questions was a creation of the astrologers of the early Abbasid caliphate. Māshāʾallāh ibn Atharī (d. c. 815), a Jewish astrologer from Basra who helped choose the time for the foundation of Baghdad in 762, and the slightly later Sahl ibn Bishr (ninth century) wrote treatises of "questions" that taught how to judge everything from theft and illness to marriages and journeys. Al-Kindī and later authors added their own collections. These works combined Greek, Persian and Indian material within the scheme of the twelve houses; the broader context is described in our history of Islamic occult sciences.

In the twelfth century, translators in Spain and southern France rendered these texts into Latin. A large compilation called the Book of the Nine Judges (Liber novem iudicum) arranged the opinions of several Arabic authorities question by question. In the thirteenth century the Italian astrologer Guido Bonatti, adviser to Ghibelline lords, wrote the Liber astronomiae, whose sections on questions and its 146 "considerations" became a standard manual. Medieval practitioners used horary especially for medicine, alongside charts cast for the moment someone fell ill, and the method coexisted with geomancy, which used an astrological house chart to answer the same kinds of questions without any astronomical calculation.

How a Horary Chart Is Judged§

Significators§

In the classical method the person asking, the querent, is shown by the ascendant and its ruling planet, with the Moon as a co-significator. The thing asked about, the quesited, is shown by the house that governs it and that house's ruler: the second house for money and movable goods, the seventh for a partner or an opponent, the sixth for illness, the tenth for office and honour, and so on. If the question is about another person, the chart is "turned" so that the relevant house serves as that person's ascendant.

Perfection and its obstacles§

The answer depends on whether the significators "perfect," that is, come together. The simplest case is an applying aspect: the faster planet moves towards an exact aspect with the slower before either changes sign. A planet can also bring the two together by "translation of light," passing from one to the other, or by "collection of light," when a heavier planet receives aspects from both. Prohibition, when a third planet interrupts, and refranation, when a planet turns retrograde before the aspect completes, signal that the matter will fail. The essential and accidental dignities of the planets, inherited from Ptolemy and the Arabic authors and discussed in our article on the Tetrabiblos, describe whether the people and things involved are strong or weak.

Considerations before judgement§

Lilly and his medieval sources also gave cautions that might make a chart unfit to judge. An ascendant in the very first or last degrees of a sign could show that the question was asked too early or too late. A Moon "void of course," making no further aspect before leaving her sign, often meant that nothing would come of the matter. Saturn in the seventh house was said to warn that the astrologer's own judgement would be impaired. These rules reflect a concern, found throughout the literature, that a question must be sincere and "radical," that is, properly rooted in the moment.

William Lilly and Christian Astrology§

William Lilly was born in 1602 in Diseworth, Leicestershire, came to London in 1620 as a servant, and learned astrology in the early 1630s. During the Civil War he sided with Parliament and became the most famous astrologer in England, publishing a widely read annual almanac, Merlini Anglici Ephemeris, and pamphlets of political prophecy. His Monarchy or No Monarchy in England (1651) included symbolic pictures, one of which was later read as foretelling a great fire in London; in 1666 he was called before a committee of the House of Commons investigating the Great Fire and assured them he had no foreknowledge of its causes.

Christian Astrology (1647) was the first comprehensive textbook of astrology written in English. Its title declared that astrology was compatible with Christian belief at a time when the art was attacked from pulpits. Its first book explains the planets, signs and houses; the second, by far the longest, is devoted to "the resolution of all manner of questions and demands"; the third treats nativities. Lilly illustrated the horary section with charts from his own practice, including a well-known case of fish stolen from him, which he says he recovered by following the chart. His surviving casebooks, preserved with the papers of his friend and patron Elias Ashmole, show thousands of clients consulting him about illness, theft, love, lawsuits and the fate of absent relatives.

Lilly was the last great figure of a tradition that had been learned and widespread. Contemporaries such as Simon Forman and Richard Napier, whose own casebooks record tens of thousands of consultations, used similar methods in medical practice. Keith Thomas's Religion and the Decline of Magic used this material to show how ordinary people in early modern England turned to astrologers for practical guidance.

Decline and Modern Revival§

After 1700, horary astrology lost its standing among the educated, as did astrology generally, though almanacs kept a popular market alive. The Victorian revival of astrology, and Alan Leo's reshaping of it around character analysis at the start of the twentieth century, gave little place to horary. It survived in a simplified form in some twentieth-century manuals, such as those of the American astrologer Ivy Goldstein-Jacobson.

The modern revival began when the English astrologer Olivia Barclay (1919–2001) obtained a copy of Christian Astrology and in 1985 sponsored a facsimile reprint. Her teaching, her book Horary Astrology Rediscovered (1990) and a qualifying course for horary practitioners created a new generation of students working from Lilly's own rules. Writers such as John Frawley later published detailed textbooks in the same traditional spirit, and translations of the medieval Latin and Arabic sources have made the older material more accessible.

Horary as Divination§

Horary has always raised a philosophical problem. Ptolemy had explained astrology as a physical influence of the heavens, but it is hard to see how the moment a question is asked could cause its answer. Medieval writers sometimes appealed to the soul's sympathy with the heavens. In The Moment of Astrology (1994) Geoffrey Cornelius argued that horary practice shows astrology to be fundamentally a form of divination, like the reading of omens, rather than a science of causes, and that the astrologer's own participation is part of the process. The argument has been influential among astrologers who see their art in symbolic rather than causal terms, and it connects horary to the wider history of divination.

Critics of astrology point out that the same objections apply to horary as to other forms: controlled tests have not shown that astrological judgements predict outcomes better than chance. Historians, for their part, treat horary as valuable evidence of how people in the past framed their uncertainties, from the stolen cow to the sick child.

Frequently asked questions§

What is a horary question?§

It is a specific question, such as where a lost object is or whether a plan will succeed, put to an astrologer, who casts a chart for the moment the question is received. The answer is read from the planets representing the querent and the matter asked about.

Who was William Lilly?§

William Lilly (1602–1681) was an English astrologer and almanac writer, prominent on the Parliamentary side during the Civil War. His Christian Astrology (1647) was the first full astrology textbook in English and remains the main classical source for horary astrology.

How is horary different from natal astrology?§

Natal astrology interprets a chart for a person's birth and covers the whole life. Horary interprets a chart for the moment of a question and addresses only that matter, using rules of significators and perfection developed by medieval Arabic and Latin authors.

What does "void of course" mean in horary astrology?§

The Moon is void of course when she makes no further major aspect to another planet before leaving the sign she is in. In horary tradition this often indicates that nothing will come of the matter asked about.

Sources and further reading§

• Christian Astrology — William Lilly, 1647
• The Moment of Astrology — Geoffrey Cornelius, 1994
• Astrology and the Seventeenth-Century Mind: William Lilly and the Language of the Stars — Ann Geneva, 1995
• Horary Astrology Rediscovered — Olivia Barclay, 1990
• The Horary Textbook — John Frawley, 2005
• Religion and the Decline of Magic — Keith Thomas, 1971
• Medicine and Magic in Elizabethan London: Simon Forman, Astrologer, Alchemist, and Physician — Lauren Kassell, 2005