How To Beat Time By John Frawley, Poland John Frawley is the editor of The Astrologer's Apprentice magazine, and tutor of the Apprenticeship Courses in Horary, Electional and Traditional Natal Astrology. John's first book, The Real Astrology, was awarded the Spica Award for International Astrology Book of the Year in 2001. His follow up book, Real Astrology Applied, Sports Astrology & The Horary Textbook are now available. For details of John's work, publications, appearances and courses, visit his website at http://www.johnfrawley.com.
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client entered the workshop one day, gorgeously arrayed and carrying a plump chicken for payment. "What I would like to know," he asked, as I sat him down in our consulting room, "is, will I die?"
I had barely finished rubbing my hands together with glee in order to set the chart when, to my disappointment, I woke up. For it is ever the reality of horary that clients want not just predictions, but timed predictions. There, alas, is the rub. Finding the event itself is usually the easy bit; the timing is more difficult, as a close reading of William Lilly makes plain. We see him over and again fumbling towards a plausible answer, with the aid either of inside information or a querent sat before him so suggestions can be bounced back and forth until a feasible result is hammered out. The spectacular answer, where the timing announces itself in trumpet tones of indisputable clarity, does occur; but more often than not, the exact timing of a specific event in horary is hedged around with cautions and probabilities. This is both salutary and inevitable. On the one hand it keeps the burgeoning egos of journeyman astrologers in check; on the other, as when we look at time we are looking at the very stuff of which our astrology is made - looking, as it were, not so much at the face of the clock, where the events that mark time are displayed, but into the workings of the clock itself - the fathoming of time is bound to be harder than the mere tracking of events. The conclusions about the nature of time to which the practice of an accurate, verifiable astrology directs us are not the least of the benefits of directing our attention to the celestial science. Two key works to which I might direct the curious reader are 'Plato's Myth of Er', at the end of his Republic, and Iain Mackenzie's The Anachronism of Time (Norwich, 1994), which is hard work, but which, with a tight logic, clarifies the concepts with which we must work. But we direct our attention here away from our prison bars to the more immediately practical purpose of finding the answer in the chart. 124