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Home » history and philosophy of astrology

Starting A New Website With Electional Astrology

Posted by on November 20, 2008 at 5:31 pm7 Comments

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”.

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About Chris Brennan

Chris is a practicing astrologer from Denver, Colorado, USA. He is the former President of the Association for Young Astrologers, as well as the former Research Director of the National Council for Geocosmic Research. He offers personal consultations and teaches online classes through his website at www.ChrisBrennanAstrologer.com.




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7 Comments »

  • Hi Chris

    really enjoying getting to know this site, and thought you might be interested in a lateral angle on the astrology of setting up a new website – which I did, calling it “Writing from the Twelfth House”, in May 2008. Having been an astrologer since the 1980s(obtained my Diploma at the Centre for Psychological Astrology in London directed by Liz Greene, by commuting by plane from Scotland 1995-98)I was concerned to get the best possible time for launching my site.

    So, as you do, I duly did some astrological agonising. By late May, I was still not convinced I’d selected the right time and thought I might have to wait until September. I began our second meeting by trying to explain this astro-problem to my young and very able web person, Susan Elena. “No worries!” said she. “You’re launched – since I did your Home Page on the 19th.” She knows no astrology and I was traumatised by this(I do exaggerate slightly – bit of a drama queen, me….)cheerfully ignorant premptive strike on my carefully incubating angst.

    On returning home, still twitching, I put up a chart for her unpremeditated launch date and time. It was as good as it could possibly have been – and fitted my own chart beautifully. I had great fun transforming from dinosaur to cyber-babe, and the site is already collecting far more visits and favourable comments than I could possibly have wished for in its first six months.

    As we say in Scotland – “What’s for ye’ll no go by ye!!” If you need a translation of this, do get back to me. And if you have time, check out my site. I shall certainly return to yours. It’s great. Cheers Anne

  • […] is for any election that you are working on.  While figuring out precisely what this moment is can sometimes be difficult in certain contexts, there is almost always a predominant moment of importance in the process of starting any new […]

  • V K Shridhar says:

    Hi Chris,

    I, perhaps the other readers also, would like to know the electional chart of this website.

    It shall be a pleasure to know from you the logic of selection of the moment, you selected for uploaded to the server.

    Incedently in Indian Electional astrology, ” Vasist Samhita”
    was written many centuries B.C.

    .. V K Shridhar

  • V K Shridhar says:

    Hi Chris,

    We are waiting for your reply.

    Kindly do tell us the exact time you picked up for uploading this website – so that readers may like to examine your logic expressed in the article. Thanks.

    … V K Shridhar

  • Chris Brennan says:

    I didn’t use an electional chart for the most recent incarnation of this blog because I lost the original domain that I had and I needed to create a new one as soon as possible. I do have the inceptional chart for when I bought the domain, uploaded the files to the FTP server, and launched the new blog though:

    July 24, 2008 @ 11:54 AM in Byers, Colorado, US.

    You can see the first post after that here: http://horoscopicastrologyblog.com/2008/07/24/apotelesmaticscom-moved-to-horoscopicastrologyblogcom/

    I have a number of other sites that I have done elections for though. For example, I registered the domain politicalastrologyblog.com on October 20, 2008 at 7:10 AM in Byers, Colorado, and then the blog was officially launched on January 5, 2009 at 12:24 PM in Byers, Colorado. Here is the chart and first post on that blog:

    http://politicalastrologyblog.com/2009/01/05/political-astrology-blog-goes-live/

  • whall says:

    One thing that I think would be popular is an online service where customers would answer a few questions and then the site would spit out dates that seem beneficial based on the questions asked.

    For example, I want to launch a website in the next week or so. Ideally, I could go to a site, give start and end times, specify a few factors, and then it would give me dates in order of some weight system.

    By “factors” I mean generic things like a dropdown containing items like “wedding”, “launch website”, “start project”, “start business”, “travel abroad”, “start school”, “invest money” or anything that might have some clear planets/houses/signs attributes.

    Or maybe instead of a dropdown, the verbs/symbols are listed and the user puts them in order of importance to them (communication, family, resources, love, travel, job, friends, home, siblings, kids, self, investments, etc) and then that becomes the weighting factor. IE, if communication/technology (in the website example) is weighted high by the user, then the results would look for benefic dates on those and stay away from detrimental transits.

    Do you know if any software already does something like this?

  • Chris Brennan says:

    That would be cool. I think that the drop-down option would be more doable from a programming standpoint.

    I don’t know of anything like that at the moment, no. Most of the astrology software currently on the market either looks like it was programmed in 1995, or it actually was programmed in 1995 and just hasn’t been updated much.

    The only thing that might come close is some Indian software called Kala, although I haven’t tried it myself, so I don’t know: http://www.vedic-astrology.net/Kala/Kala-Software.asp