Querent

Definition

The querent is the person asking the question in a horary chart — a chart cast for the exact moment a question is put to the astrologer. You stand for four things at once: the rising sign, the first house, the planet that rules the first-house cusp (your significator, the planet that speaks for you), and the Moon, which co-signifies every querent. Working out who the true querent is comes before any other reading.

In Tradition

Arabic and medieval astrologers held that your significator and the Moon together carry the testimony of the person asking. Sahl ibn Bishr wrote that "the matter goes out according to the quantity of the concern of the questioner," and that a question is fit to judge only when it comes from someone "hoping, or under necessity, or sad." A question asked in earnest gives a readable chart; an idle or testing one does not.

In Practice

The astrologer first finds the rising sign and its ruler, and treats that planet as your significator — the planet that speaks for you — while reading the Moon as a second witness to your mood and circumstances. How that first-house ruler is doing — its sign, its dignity (its strength in the chart), the aspects it is moving toward, and whether anything is blocking it — describes your real ability to get what you are asking for. When you ask on behalf of someone else — a child, a partner, an employer, a friend — the astrologer turns the houses, rotating that person's house into the first position so its ruler becomes the working significator. Sahl insists each question be "accepted from its own heading," and that two separate matters never be folded into one chart.

Historical Origin

The querent–quesited pairing is foundational to the Arabic horary tradition, passed down through Sahl ibn Bishr (9th century), Masha'allah, and Bonatti's Liber Astronomiae (13th century), and set out for English readers in William Lilly's Christian Astrology (1647). Its Greek ancestor is the Hellenistic literature on questions, treated by Dorotheus of Sidon in the Carmen Astrologicum (1st century CE) and by later compilers.

Etymology

Origin: Latin. Meaning: From quaerens, present participle of quaerere, "to seek, to ask.".

Further Reading