Starting A New Website With Electional Astrology

Recently a friend asked me a question about which electional chart is more important when you are starting a new website.  The question is essentially whether the chart for the idea of the website is more important, or whether it is the registering of the domain or the launch of the website itself.

The question is important because this is sort of new territory that electional astrologers are dealing with, and there isn’t a lot written about it in some of the ancient texts and manuals.  While the principles of electional astrology can be applied to just about any endeavor, when you are selecting a new electional chart it is important to really think about what the specific moment of importance is so that you can select the most auspicious chart possible and then really focus your attention on that one moment.

Here is the original question:

How important is the time of the idea chart as opposed to the time of actually purchasing chart or even when someone would launch a website or even get ones license. Which is most important? They all seem to have some relevance I would think.

I always thought of this as similar to the issue of conception versus birth. The conception of an idea versus the actual birth of it. All are relevant and perhaps symbolically important, but if you are trying to pick a specific chart to focus on as the basis of your election then I would go with the actual launch of the website itself.

Ptolemy has an interesting discussion on the issue of conception versus birth which has influenced my thoughts on this matter quite a bit.  In book 3, chapter 2 of the Tetrabiblos (chapter 1 in Robbins’ edition) he talks about conception being the beginning or foundation of the material body, but birth being the the inception of the full potentiality of the native.  That is to say, the potentiality of the native cannot be realized until after birth, thus the birth chart itself is the most symbolically important if you are trying to study the events that occur after birth.

Within the context of an electional chart for a website this means that the conception of a website is the exact moment in which your register the domain itself.  This is a symbolically important gesture which usually precedes the actual launch of the website, and often times the website’s domain name represents the seeds or blueprint of what the website will later become.

The real moment of importance from an electional standpoint is the actual launch of the website itself though, when files have been uploaded to the server and the website actually ‘goes live’.   Even the wording of this common phrase about a website “going live” betrays both the symbolic and literal importance of this moment from the perspective of the overall history of a website.  It is the actual ‘birth’ of the website, at which point it truly begins to manifest its potentiality, and it will either succeed or fail based on its own merits as well as its circumstances.

This is sort of uncharted territory for electional astrologers, but usually when I have clients or friends who are trying to elect a time to launch a new website this is the philosophical or theoretical approach that I take.  If possible, elect a chart for both the purchase of the domain and the launch of the website, although if you have to make a choice between the two then simply focus on electing an excellent chart for the moment that the website itself “goes live”.