Where in the World Are My Car Keys?

It was Tuesday afternoon, and a friend texted me that she had been helping her ex-husband search for his car keys off and on for the past 24 hours, to no avail. This was a fairly desperate moment for the ex-husband. Months earlier, he had bought a very sporty used car, but had since lost two of the three copies of the computerized key that makes it run. This latest disappearance on Monday left him keyless, effectively carless, and very unhappy. Hence the fruitless search that led my friend to text me on Tuesday: would I please use a horary chart to help them find the key?

A bit of background on their situation is important to this story. My friend and her ex have lived together with their daughter in a slightly unorthodox arrangement since the husband split up with his second wife about a year ago. He pays my friend a modest rent and lives downstairs in the furnished basement. The space also doubles as the office where he works remotely, and as a music studio where his band practices. While tidiness is an abiding issue, the arrangement has worked reasonably well. These details may seem unnecessary, but they will make more sense to our story in a few minutes, don't worry.

Ultimately, I did draw up a horary chart for the lost key, and offered suggestions for where to look that lead directly to the recovery of not one, not two, but all three copies of the missing key in three separate locations both inside the house and on the property. I would like to use this article to look closely at the chart and how it hints at where to find those keys. At the same time, I would also like to share the process of approaching this question, that involved equal parts astrological insight, common sense, and tenacious searching that each played an essential part in this truly amazing outcome. I hope to demonstrate that this combination can simplify our use of astrology to find lost things by narrowing the universe of astrological variables and focusing on what is most practical.

The Process

When something is lost, the astrological insights that can contribute to a recovery are fairly straight-forward. The horary chart can help us:

• Determine whether the lost object is in our home, on our property, or farther away

• Describe the basic place where we should begin the search

• Establish a meridian line defined by compas directions to focus our search

• Provide further tell-tale signs of where along that meridian we should look

The reality is, if we know basically where to look, the only really essential part of this formula is establishing the meridian line for where to search. This narrows our efforts from EVERYWHERE to this strip running from here to there. Common sense can make all the difference here. If the chart seems to suggest that the lost object is far from home when you know well that you just used it yesterday and haven't left the house since--nor has anyone else--then it's time to reinterpret any suggestions that it is far off. We will see in this instance, that indicators suggesting the keys were far away actually meant that the object would take extra time and effort to find.

In the same way, as we run through the various significators in their zodiacal signs, we need to pay attention to the manifestations that are most likely in the place where we are looking. We should be constantly asking ourselves, "Assuming that the object is in this general vicinity, what evidence of the key significators to I see here--in this place?" Use common sense. If we allow ourselves to assume that anything is possible, the sheer volume of possible hints from the significators is likely to become overwhelming. Work with what you have and interpret the chart through the lens of the space you are in, not through the lens of all existence. Ultimately, if it's not there, and you have determined it is not there, you can reassess your initial assumptions on where to begin your search.

It may take time to be certain that you have exhausted that space--as this story will demonstrate. The most challenging thing about helping someone find a lost object with horary astrology is the tendency of clients to grow impatient and give up long before the astrologer runs out of suggestions for where to look next. Other times, people conclude they have already scoured the target area so extensively that the lost object couldn't possibly be there when, in fact, it is. They're just not seeing it.

I once insisted a client look for a lost diamond earring--worth thousands of dollars--under the driver's side seat of her car. Each day for three days she told me she had looked again, and again, and again--there was no way the earring could be under the seat. On day four, she was sitting in the back of her car staring at the floor under the driver's side seat and saw a sudden glint from something in the rail that held the seat to the car--it was the earring. It had fallen under the seat and inside the metal rail, so she had missed it in her repeated searches for three days prior. There is simply no substitute for patient, focused effort. If your client expects a miracle, you have some expectation management to do before you begin this process.

The Usual Suspects--Five Significators of Lost Objects

Alright, so back to the ex-husband's missing car keys. I did not use the time of my friend's text message to construct the chart. Instead, I asked her to call me when she had a moment to explain the context of how the keys were lost, where they had been seen last, etc. On the call, she explained that the ex-husband had driven the car to their house the same day that the key went missing, and he hadn't gone anywhere since. Common sense dictated that the key was almost certainly in the house or on the property.

Next I decided which houses I would use as my significators for the question. The first thing we need to get right in any horary chart are the relevant significators. If we aren't sure what significators we will use, then we don't really understand the question sufficiently and should hold off on marking the time of the question. This is why I always ask prospective horary clients to call me to discuss their question. This affords the opportunity to ask questions and clarify the situation sufficient to do the analysis.

In this case, the querent--the person calling me--was my friend. The Ascendent of the chart would correspond to her. The ex-husband would be the seventh house, regardless of their divorce. However, it was not her keys that were lost, but her ex-husband's. She was calling on his behalf, and in the chart, he is represented by the seventh house, regardless of their divorce. While the second house and its ruler are the primary significators of lost objects, in this chart, we would be looking at the eighth house, that is the ex-husband's second house, or second from the seventh. With this sorted in my own head, I felt I understood the question, checked the time, and cast the chart for Washington, DC, where I had received her call.

Here is the chart:

Gemini is on the cusp of the seventh house, making Mercury the ex-husband's significator. Leo is on the cusp of the eighth, so the Sun is the primary significator of the keys. Note that the Moon is in the eighth house, an immediate suggestion that this chart is radical. Since the Moon is co-significator of both the question and the querent, it's location here in the eighth suggests that yes, this is a question about an object belonging to the ex-husband of the querent, my friend.

Note as well that Mercury is retrograde (Rx), and applies to a conjunction with the Sun within three degrees. The ex-husband, ruled by Mercury, is going back over his tracks to find his keys, ruled by the Sun. This close applying conjunction between the two key significators of this question is a strong suggestion that he will ultimately find the keys successfully. This conjunction will occur in the ninth house, which is the ex-husband's third house, that is the third from the seventh. This can suggest places containing office and mailing supplies, books, television, radio, and music equipment. We will see that this is precisely the kind of things that surrounded the keys when they were found in the house.

At the same time, the third house can also corresponds to modes of transport, including automobiles. This struck me as significant in the search for a car key, so one of the first things I suggested was that the key might be lost somewhere in the car. I should add that the last conjunction of the Moon prior to the question being posed was with Mars, a planet that can refer to engines and machinery. This seemed to reinforce the notion of looking in the car. Unfortunately, while it was possible there was a spare key hidden somewhere in the car, the doors of the car were locked and they couldn't look there. This wasn't going to be that easy.

Alongside the second house ruler, there are four additional significators for a lost object in the system I learned from my horary astrology mentor, Alphee Lavoie. The Moon is the most important, as the co-significator of any horary question. Here it is doubly so, since it is located in the ex-husband's second house, and any planet in a house serves as a co-significator of that house alongside its cusp ruler. A third significator for lost objects is the Lot of Fortune, and a fourth is its ruler. In this chart the Lot would be in Scorpio in the tenth house, ruled by Pluto in the Ascendent. Finally in Alphee's system, Venus serves as the general significator of all second house objects. In this chart, Venus is with the Sun in Virgo in the ninth house.

The angularity of these five significators offer us an immediate sense of where to begin our search, and of how difficult the search is liable to be. Two significators, the Lot of Fortune and its ruler, Pluto, are in angular houses, while a third, the Moon, is in the succedent eighth house. This suggests the missing key may be either in the house (angular), or on the property outside the house, perhaps in the immediate neighborhood (succedent). In fact, the three keys were distributed inside the house and on the property. Planets in cadent houses can suggest that the missing object is either far away, or will be difficult to find. In this instance, the Sun and Venus are both in the cadent ninth house, but common sense virtually ruled out the missing key being far away. Pluto seems to reinforce the notion of the key being hard to find, as it is intercepted AND Rx, a strong indication of a well-hidden object. So here, the cadent planets likely suggest a more arduous search, not that the key was far away.

The Scene of the Crime--Describing the Search Area

Since both common sense and two angular significators suggest that we start our search in the house, we need to know on what floor, and if possible what room to begin. Here is where the signs of those five significators can describe the general environment surrounding the lost key. This process of interrogating all five significators can get a bit overwhelming if you get too caught up in the details. You're looking more for a consistent theme that corresponds with the reality of the space you are in and the things you can see.

Let's start with Pluto in Capricorn, as it echoes the notion of the key being very much out of the way that we have already seen from the two cadent significators. Alphee Lavoie's book Lose This Book...and Find It With Horary is a must-have for this whole process, but especially for the sign analysis. Alphee's book describes indoor areas ruled by Capricorn being dark places that are hard to reach, in a basement, disorderly room, rooms with leather or plastic accessories or furnishings, or a room with old worn furniture. This more or less describes the finished basement where the ex-husband lives in my friend's house. It allows for the prospect that the key was more likely downstairs where his lives, rather than upstairs where my friend and their daughter reside.

The Sun and Venus in Virgo inside a house correspond in Alphee's descriptions to closets, cabinets, bookcases, a study, an exercise room, a room used as an office in the home, a rented room in a home, and a sick person's room. Much of this should ring bells based on my description of their home. Recall that the ex-husband was renting the downstairs room, and he regularly worked remotely from there as well. The room was also filled with cabinets, closets, and shelves. So attention to these areas in that basement room seems advisable.

The Moon in Leo according to Alphee is a sun porch, playroom, den, living room, wine cellar, room where children spend time playing, room or place lacking orderliness, place where the father spends time, place where gold-plated articles are kept, room or places belonging to your children, room with expensive furnishings, a toy chest, main hallway, fireplace, furnace room, oven or stove. There's a lot here, but a few things jump out. The ex-husband's room is obviously a place where the father spends time, and we've mentioned the tidiness issue. However, this is also where his daughter and her friends hang out for sleepovers--Dad sleeps upstairs those nights. Downstairs is also where the furnace is. All of this at the least seems to reiterate that we should be looking in the ex-husband's room for the key.

The last significator, the Lot of Fortune, is in Scorpio. Alphee describes Scorpio interiors as a bathroom, toilet, next to water pipes, in a dirty part of the house where rubbish or junk is kept, a part of the house where it gets rotted or mildewed, as well as a room or desk where unpaid bills are kept, in an empty room, washroom, medicine cabinet, secret drawer or chest, or simply "in a hiding place." There is a bathroom in the downstairs level, so the prospect of the key being near the toilet, medicine cabinet, or near water pipes is possible here. More generally, this reiterates the notion of the keys being well hidden and difficult to find, possibly in dirty, cluttered areas.

Reviewing the suggestions of these significators, it seems nearly certain that the chart is pointing at the area downstairs where the ex-husband lives, which of course was the most likely place to lose the keys anyway. It would seem to suggest we look in cabinets, shelves, drawers, boxes, or other hiding places, possibly where there is clutter or dirtiness. We might also look around the bathroom area, perhaps near the furnace.

Getting Our Bearings--Local Space and the Elements

Now that we are fairly confident what area of the house we should look in, we want some literal directions on precisely where to focus our search in that room. We do that with two techniques, 1) a local space chart, and 2) a look at the sign of the primary significator of the keys--in this case, the Sun. First the local space chart:

Note that the local space chart puts the the Sun, ruler of the ex-husband's second house and primary significator of the missing car key, at roughly southwest on the compass. This means that we want to begin our search in the middle of the finished basement room, face southwest, and we look for the kinds of things that appear in the sign descriptions above along a meridian line that runs from the southwest to the northeast. This would include especially shelves, cabinets, boxes and other out of the way places that might be dirty or cluttered and might hide a key.

Our second technique, since the Sun is in an earth sign--Virgo--is to look particularly at the area where that southwest--northeast meridian line approaches the south wall of the room. These are the areas where we would want to search with particular diligence, particularly in dirty, cluttered areas, on shelves, in cabinets, around toilets or furnaces, and the like. The room will define which of these significators show up in along the designated meridian and in proximity with the relevant wall of the space.

Finding the Keys--All Three of Them!

We really don't need more than the detail we have to find the keys--indeed, arguably we didn't even need all of the details I have laid out here. The truth is that once I told them the meridian line to focus on, they virtually ignored everything else I offered by way of nuance. The ex-husband made up in diligence what he neglected in nuance. In fact, while it is possible to extract even more insights from the chart in the way of aspects to

the primary significator of the lost object, or from the last aspect of the Moon before it exits its sign, this really is the point where patience and diligence is the client's best friend. The best that astrology can to is focus the client's search. If they are willing to put in the time, with the guidance of astrology, they will likely find the object if it is there.

The sheer volume of clutter in the room, even along the well-defined directional meridian, made the search challenging, but within a couple of hours, they had located TWO of the three lost keys. One of them turned up on a cluttered countertop along the southwest--northeast meridian, behind some plastic bins containing office supplies and next to a shelf containing record albums. Both of these were consistent with the location of the Sun in the ex-husband's third--the ninth house of the chart--and its connections with office supplies and music equipment not to mention our overall focus on shelves, cabinets, and hidden spaces.

He used this key to open the car, where he found the hidden spare key, just as the chart had suggested at the outset of the search. Ironically, however, NEITHER was the set of keys that prompted this whole exercise. That third car key was still missing, part of a key ring with a number of other keys on it.

Discovery of these first two keys inspired a continued hunt for the third key area along the directional meridian for several more days. On Sunday, five days after we first laid out the initial parameters of the search, they triumphantly recovered that last set of keys, once again along the southwest--northeast meridian in the basement room. The keys were in a square cardboard postal box, buried under some bubble wrap, the remainder of a delivery he had recently received from Amazon.

The cardboard box was part of a collection of clutter on top of an armoire in a corner of the room where the south wall--suggested by the primary significator in an earth sign--meets the west wall.

Over the previous days, they had searched in among the objects on top of this armoire, but never looked inside this box. On Sunday, they determined to leave no stone unturned on the directional meridian and began going through the clutter more systematically. The keys turned up in the box where the ex-husband must have absentmindedly dropped them earlier in the week. It was only their conviction that the keys had to be somewhere along the line described by the chart that prompted the renewed search in the same place. Rather than turn the house upside-down, they focused their search where the astrology suggested--and in the end found all three lost car keys.

Conclusion--Stick to the Process

This was admittedly a fairly easy case. Although it took nearly a week to find the third set of keys, common sense strongly suggested the keys were either in the house or on the property, and the clients were highly motivated to find them. For those reasons, the chance of their recovery was comparatively high. At the same time, they did not find the keys because they spent five days tearing the house apart. They found them because they spent five days looking where the astrology suggested they would be. The focus of the search was almost entirely on the designated meridian, ignoring the nuances suggested by the signs of the significators.

In retrospect, a more focused presentation of those nuances with a focus on the where the designated meridian from the local space chart engaged the south wall of the room would have led them directly to the armoire in the corner, and the box where the keys were hidden. In this instance, however, this additional insight wasn't needed to find the keys. Instead, the combination of common sense, determination, and key astrological indicators were decisive, and they offer a useful process for future searches of this kind. While the horary chart contains an almost endless amount of information about the object, the circumstances of its loss, its location, the chances of finding it, and a wide range of other considerations, few of these nuances are really essential. A handful of clues, a solid starting place, and an accurate meridian line are all the astrological insights that a determined searcher requires.

The process I outlined at the start of this article works well in general for finding lost objects. On the basis of common sense and the angularity of the five significators, establish whether the lost object is at home, on the property/in the neighborhood, or far away, and what the chances are of recovery. Always start the search in the home if even one significator is angular, and expand your search from there, using the repeated themes echoed through the signs of the five significators to direct your search. Determine a meridian line for your search using a local space chart, and if inside, use the element of the primary significator's sign to suggest a side of the room. Then reflect on which of the significators turn up along the meridian or on that wall of the room.

Finally--keep looking. These three keys took five days of searching to locate. The diamond earring I mentioned earlier took four days to notice. Both searches were looking in the exact same locations over and over that entire time. There is no substitute for patience, trust, and effort.

Good luck!