A Horary Investigation: "Did Elsie Say 'Furtively'?"

Here is a useful little horary lesson in what to do when something in an old text makes the hair on the back of your astrologer’s neck stand up.

The published Marc Edmund Jones version of Gemini 2 reads:

Santa Claus filling stockings furtively.

I’ve spent enough time with Elsie Wheeler’s symbols by now to have developed a pretty good ear for her. And furtively bothered me immediately.

Elsie doesn’t generally editorialize. She gives us the picture. A man does something. A woman stands somewhere. There are children, animals, buildings, objects, weather, occupations, gestures. She reports what she sees with startling economy and leaves us to deal with it. She doesn’t normally lean over our shoulder and explain the psychological quality of the action.

Furtively does exactly that.

Santa Claus filling stockings is observable.

Santa Claus filling stockings furtively tells us how he is doing it. Secretly. Stealthily. Trying not to be observed. That single adverb begins interpreting the image before we’ve even had a chance to look at it.

My gut said: Elsie didn’t say that.

A gut feeling is a perfectly good reason to ask a horary question. It is not, however, the answer. So I cast the chart.

The question was:

Did Elsie Wheeler say “furtively”?

Asked August 11, 2026, at 8:02:36 AM in Calgary, Alberta

.

Baby horary astrologers: do this before you start chasing significators around the chart. It’s the astrological equivalent of checking whether you have flour before beginning a cake.

The Ascendant is 6°22′ Virgo. It is neither extremely early nor late, so there is no warning that the question has been asked before it can properly be known or after the business has effectively been decided.

The Moon is at 3°18′ Leo and is not void of course. She has business left to conduct in the sign. She isn’t combust, and she isn’t travelling through the Via Combusta.

Saturn is not in the 7th house, so we don’t have Lilly standing behind us coughing discreetly and suggesting that perhaps the astrologer is about to make an ass of herself.

The Ascendant ruler, Mercury at 3°06′ Leo, is under the Sun’s beams but not combust. That’s worth noticing in a question about a word buried inside a century-old chain of transcription, publication and reinterpretation. Something is difficult to see clearly. Fine. We already knew that, or we wouldn’t be asking the question.

Then I checked the planetary hour.

Solar Fire gives Tuesday as Mars’s day. At 8:02 AM we are in the planetary hour of the Sun; the Mercury hour doesn’t begin until 8:49 AM.

Virgo rises, so Mercury rules the Ascendant. The Sun as hour ruler does not give us the neat traditional agreement with the Ascendant ruler that would provide an additional stamp of radicality.

Does that mean we throw the chart out?

No.

The considerations before judgment are warnings and diagnostic information. They are not a row of land mines designed to prevent you from ever judging anything.

And there is a rather wonderful piece of descriptive radicality elsewhere: the planetary day is ruled by Mars.

Keep Mars in mind. He is about to become extremely relevant.

The chart is fit to judge.

Now we assign significators according to the question actually asked.

Elsie Wheeler is the other person, so she belongs to the 7th house.

The 7th cusp is 6°22′ Pisces.

Therefore, Elsie is Jupiter, at 9°17′ Leo.

We are not asking what Jones thought Elsie meant. We are not asking what Rudhyar thought the symbol meant. We are asking whether a particular word came out of Elsie Wheeler.

So we need her words.

Words, speech and utterances belong to the 3rd house. But these are not my words. They are Elsie’s words.

Turn the chart.

Elsie is the 7th. Her 3rd house is the third house counted from the 7th, which brings us to the radical 9th house.

The radical 9th cusp is 22°47′ Aries.

Therefore, Elsie’s words are ruled by Mars at 0°09′ Cancer.

And now we can ask the chart the question we actually came here to answer:

Does Elsie meet her words?

No.

Jupiter does not apply to Mars.

Mars does not apply to Jupiter.

There is no perfection between the significator of Elsie Wheeler and the significator of the utterance attributed to her.

Then we check the Moon, because the Moon can sometimes rescue an apparently disconnected pair of significators by carrying or translating light between them.

She doesn’t.

The Moon does not carry Mars to Jupiter.

This is important because it keeps the judgment beautifully simple. We do not need to rummage through seventeen minor testimonies until we find one willing to tell us what we hoped to hear.

Elsie is Jupiter.

Elsie’s words are Mars.

They do not meet.

The Moon does not bring them together.

For a question asking, “Did these words belong to this woman?” that lack of connection is extremely eloquent.

Mars, ruler of Elsie’s turned 3rd, has only just entered Cancer.

Mars is in fall in Cancer.

So the planet representing the purported utterance is debilitated. The words as presented to us are not in good condition.

That doesn’t independently prove that somebody inserted the specific word furtively. Horary does not hand us a notarized transcript from 1925. But when the question is whether this particular wording faithfully belongs to Elsie, we have her significator disconnected from the significator of her words, no lunar translation repairing that separation, and the ruler of those words itself in fall.

That’s plenty.

There are other delicious things in the chart. Mercury, the natural significator of words, writing and transcription, is almost exactly conjunct the Moon—3°06′ and 3°18′ Leo—and Mercury is parallel the Midheaven within three minutes of declination. In a question about the provenance of a single published word, Mercury has apparently arrived wearing a sandwich board.

But this is precisely where a beginning horary astrologer needs some discipline.

Mercury is interesting. Mercury is not the judgment.

The judgment comes first from the houses assigned by the question. If the primary significators answer clearly, believe them before turning the chart upside down looking for something fancier.

My gut told me Elsie Wheeler did not say furtively because it doesn’t sound like the way she delivers these images. That intuition prompted the question.

The horary then had to stand independently of my intuition.

And it did.

No. I do not believe “furtively” belongs to Elsie Wheeler’s original utterance.

That means I’m provisionally stripping it off.

What remains is wonderfully bare:

Santa Claus filling stockings.

And notice what happens when we do that.

We no longer know Santa is sneaking. We don’t know whether he is trying to avoid being seen. We don’t know whether the recipients are asleep. We don’t know that the stockings belong to children.

And we certainly don’t have Rudhyar’s fireplace yet. He will eventually provide one, along with “spiritual blessings,” “celestial Powers,” clairvoyance, the collective psyche, the superconscious and INNOCENCE.

Elsie, meanwhile, appears to have given us Santa Claus filling some stockings.

This is why the wording matters so bloody much.

One added adverb can infect a symbol downstream for a hundred years. Jones’s furtively tells subsequent readers that secrecy is intrinsic to the image. Rudhyar accepts the premise, moves the word prominently into his version, adds a fireplace, and develops his interpretation accordingly.

Remove the questionable word, and we have to look again.

That, baby horary astrologers, is one of the great uses of horary. It does not save us from doing historical research, and it certainly does not give us permission to rewrite history whenever our gut gets itchy. It gives us a disciplined way to interrogate a precise question when the surviving evidence leaves something unresolved.

My gut raised its hand.

The chart made it show its work.

And this time, the little bugger was right.