Recently I experienced a five-day outage in home internet service that left me completely exasperated with my provider, a huge cable company. I must have called Customer Service a dozen times during those five days, often being routed halfway around the world to discuss the problem. By the last day I was practically in tears from the sheer frustration of it! Not to mention that a few times I had used a, shall we say, assertive tone of voice with the person on the other end of the line.
As I drove home from the coffee shop after one such call a question pressed itself into my head: “When will the cable come back on?!?” (I may have used an expletive in there, too.)
Let me say at the outset here that I got the prediction wrong. But as always, we can learn a lot from looking back at a horary chart once the outcome is known. Before telling you what actually happened, and if you’re trained in horary or have read The Horary Textbook, Revised Edition, take a shot at this question: July 15, 2014, 9:21 a.m. CDT Wauwatosa, WI; 7.15 Virgo Asc. The chart is below (click to enlarge).
How do we identify the significator of ‘my internet service’? The third house comes immediately to mind, of course. The thing is, I was still communicating, both by phone and internet—just not at home. It was my service at home that was the issue. So, is that first house? Or is the question essentially about the cable company, and therefore seventh house? Or something else?
I had two thoughts initially, and chose one of them. I reasoned that the key issue was communication ‘here’, at my location: first house. Lord 1, Mercury, is in a mute sign. Its movement out of mute Cancer into Leo might show when service is restored, with the appropriate unit of time being hours in this context. My prediction, then, was that service would be restored by around noon on July 16 (27 hours).
In reality my service was restored at 5:30 p.m. on that date: 32 hours. And by the way, it took two further calls to customer service before I finally found someone who got the job done. (Thank you, Jessica!!!)
Mercury must not be showing the change, then. What else could it be?
My other thought initially was to look at Lord 7, Jupiter, as the cable company. Jupiter’s exalted in Cancer--puffed up about itself, yet can't manage to fix a simple problem! Perhaps the change into Leo shows it coming down to size and finally restoring my service.
The problem with this is that this does not correlate with the reality, either. Jupiter is in the 30th degree of Cancer, less than a degree from the sign change. If my service had been restored in less than a day’s time, then maybe. Thirty-two hours is nearly a day and a half, so it doesn’t fit.
Is there anything else we can use to reach judgment? Someone very knowledgeable about these things suggested that L1’s upcoming conjunction with L3, Venus, by antiscion, could be giving the answer. Antiscion Mercury is 27.29 Gemini, heading to conjunct Venus at 26.23: a degree and a bit. And look: the conjunction takes Mercury back into essential dignity because Venus is in Mercury’s sign. Mercury is happy after the conjunction! I like this solution, because it shows the action of internet service (L3) returning to me (L1). Very nice!
And, by the way: You’ll have noticed Moon (emotional ‘me’) conjunct Earth-shaker Neptune, afflicting cusp 7. I was just a bit upset, a fact that was not lost on those customer service reps who tried to help.
Photo Credit: Dominic Scaglioni, 2013, cropped by me. Used under a Creative Commons license (Attribution). Source:
