The Art of Timing

© 2010 by Joann Hampar
Guest Blogger
All Rights Reserved

This article has been adapted from the book, Electional Astrology: The Art of Timing, by Joann Hampar, Llewellyn Publications, 2005.

Electional astrology is the art of timing, and its purpose is to give you the advantage by selecting the most appropriate time to achieve a successful outcome. The date and time selected are intended to strengthen the planets and the houses associated with the subject of the election. The Moon carries the most weight in electional astrology. She should always be strong, free from difficult aspects, and favorably aligned with the planets ruling the election matter. Many of the rules used in Electional Astrology have their foundation in horary astrology, the counterpart to this work. Horary astrology is the art of answering a question by analysis of a chart drawn for the precise moment when the question is asked. But unlike horary, which answers after the fact, electional astrology approaches the matter beforehand and elects an appropriate time to achieve a desired outcome. Though the rules are the same, they are applied differently. The election chart itself is drawn for the place where the event will occur at a certain time in the future.

Electional astrology approaches matters beforehand and elects an appropriate time to achieve a desired outcome.

At its best, an election chart will make use of the most beneficial planetary alignments on any given day. An election to submit a manuscript for publication, for example, would feature a strong Mercury and Jupiter, the planets ruling writing and publishing. There are four points to consider when evaluating a planet’s strength: its position by sign, its position by house, its alignment with the other planets, and its momentum (retrograde or direct).

Which House Rules the Election?

The person initiating the action is always ruled by the 1st house, and the matter under consideration will fall into one of the twelve houses. To work with electional astrology, it is first necessary to identify which of the houses rules the main theme of the election. Although the planets are important, the house ruling the electional matter is the primary consideration. Once the matter has been placed into the appropriate house, we want to arrange the planets to enhance that house.

Selecting the appropriate house is a rather straightforward matter. The main topic of the election will determine which house applies. However, it becomes a bit more complicated when three or more houses are involved. In that case, we want easy applying aspects between the house rulers, to bring the matter to a successful conclusion.

In a marriage election, the focus is on strengthening the 7th house. In a business election, the focus is on the 10th house, and in an election to buy property, the 4th house is important. Multiple houses are considered in an election to purchase a home. In such an election, one would consider the 4th house as the primary house because it represents the home. However, the relationship between the 1st and 7th houses is equally important because they represent the buyer and seller. The 2nd and 8th houses show their finances. To reach an agreement, we need easy aspects between the rulers of the 1st and 7th houses. Moreover, if the home is to become the property of the buyer, we want to see easy aspects between the rulers of the 1st, 2nd, and 4th houses as well.

The following section will help you identify where to place the matter. It is always important to connect the rulers of the houses involved by way of positive applying aspects.

1st House: the person initiating the election; one’s appearance, physical body, physical health; one’s carriage, coordination, facial features; one’s character, disposition, demeanor, opinion; the impression one makes; one's mannerisms, personality, and temperament.

It is always important to strengthen the 1st-house ruler and to achieve a favorable applying aspect between that planet and the planet ruling the house of the election. If there is no contact between these planets, no action will occur. The Moon can always be used as a co-ruler of the 1st-house person, and her applying aspects bring the parties together. The 1st house is considered in every election and given special attention in matters pertaining to any personal or physical subject, such as cosmetic surgery, a physical regimen, improving one’s appearance, or self-promotion.

2nd House: one’s money, assets, earnings, and earning capacity; personal finances; material possessions such as jewelry or stocks; one’s spending habits, purchasing power, personal debts, personal resources, financial prospects, and financial affairs in general.

The 2nd house is considered in matters pertaining to buying and selling and whenever money changes hands. Since this is the house of your own personal resources, it is important to strengthen this house when making an investment or purchasing anything for gain, such as stocks, fine jewelry, antiques, or collectibles. Strengthen the 2nd house to increase your earning capacity, improve your credit rating, eliminate personal debt, or borrow money.

Touching Earth – The 40th Earth Day Celebration

A few years ago, I wrote the following prayer celebrating Earth. A triple Earth in my own astrological make-up, I have spent the majority of my working life on the Earth-to-Sky interface. For over 20 years, I worked for a government agency dedicated to waste reduction and recycling. By night, I did astrology. (Earth does have a satellite that makes “moonlighting” seem natural.)

As we approach the 40th anniversary of Earth Day, I celebrate that green ideas have come so far, even if we still have far to go. Mostly, I bless the Earth and everyone on it.



Touching Earth

Flesh
embodied soul
temple of the Living Creator

Let me embrace my humanness
both its ugliness
and painful beauty.
It holds my glorious essence.

Let me touch earth often
      gardening
      landscaping
      digging dirt from under my nails


knowing better

my body
its needs
and inner workings

moving it often:

     walking
     dancing
     making love

the human form
is no more celebrated
than when hands touch themselves
praying

activating the circuit
between earth and air
body and spirit

Let me know the honor
the unique opportunity
of being made flesh
to dwell amongst us

Let me hold holy
the four elements that comprise us:
earth, air, fire, and water

All sacred, yet none more profound
than the one who bears the name
of the planet on which we are privileged to walk.

--Joyce Mason

© 2010

www.joycemason.com

~~~

Photo Credit: Earth | © Ewa Mazur | Dreamstime.com

Don’t forget the gift with purchase of Chiron and Wholeness: A Primer through April 30!

Chiron in Pisces: Integration and Integrity

© 2010 by Joyce Mason

Healing is bringing mercy and awareness
into that which we have held

in judgment and fear.

 ~Stephen Levine

In its 50-year orbit, Chiron changes signs from Aquarius to Pisces on April 20, 2010 where it will remain, except for a temporary retrograde back to Aquarius, until February 18, 2019. What news can we expect in Chiron’s realm of wounding, healing and wholeness?

First, let’s pause for perspective. Because of Chiron’s extremely elliptical orbit, it takes roughly 30 years to pass from Aquarius through Taurus. By comparison, it takes a mere eight years to transit from Leo through Scorpio. [1] Imagining this division in a “natural” chart with 0 Aries Rising, the Chiron signs have very uneven slices of the zodiac pie. [2] Some look like a dieter’s sliver—others, a birthday-sized indulgence. Pisces gets a healthy hunk of pie at nearly nine years in the sign, one of the longer visits by Chiron. Soon you’ll see why this is probably a good omen.

The last time Chiron was in Pisces was from late March 1960 through January 1969. [3] This is the cycle many of us reading these words were alive to remember. We’ll consult history for some hints about what to expect in the current cycle. [4] For people with Chiron in Pisces, it’s “your time.” You'll experience a major life transit, your Chiron Return, during the next nine years. Now to introduce you!

If You Have Chiron in Pisces

Chiron in Pisces has absorbed the full evolution of the Chiron signs. Your wound is a loss of individuality or your unique Self. Yet Chiron asks us to become all that we are, not just for ourselves, but to contribute our unique gift to help others.

Your link to Chiron is your compassionate kindness, but you retain the shadow of the wild centaurs. You want ecstatic unity, but unfortunately, you can be sucked into undertow of Neptune’s murky waters. Neptune, Pisces’ ruler, also can lure you into substances and addictions that go with his realm: alcohol, drugs, sex, and a desire to avoid life’s harsher realities. Your wound may come from an overly spiritual upbringing where you had ecstatic, mystical experiences that were a bit advanced for your tender years and neurological system. Wounds could be caused by parents, siblings, or other family members with bad boundaries—invading your personal space (privacy) or your physical space (incest).

When Chiron is in Pisces, expect the issue of setting healthy boundaries to be up big time. My Boundaries 101 post was also excerpted on Donna Cunningham’s Sky Writer,where tips from the trenches and depth insights on the subject are still being shared. Visit these posts, especially the comments, for more on this issue. Look for a Boundaries 102 follow-up post in the near future.

Boundary issues light up the part of the Chiron myth where the wild centaurs think anything and everybody is theirs for the taking—and somehow, you have been taken. In my article, High Signs 3: Living on the Upside of the Zodiac, I talk about the sign of Pisces’ need for devotion and a willingness to come back from the ecstatic state to bring the Oneness experienced down to earth for others to share. When you are willing to be that “rainbow bridge,” you have mastered the Fish swimming in opposite directions. You see yourself coming and going!

To bring heaven to earth in this ecstatic way, Chiron in Pisces make great musicians, “speaking” the universal language that unites the world. You can be a dancer whose movements teach others the path to ecstasy, a gifted psychic, or a poet. If it involves bringing that sense of bliss to earth, it’s for you. Spiritual leadership, artistic talent, facility with dreams and other tools of psychological exploration are other possible vocations. Chiron in Pisces knows the heaven side of bringing heaven to earth. You know your gifts are solid when you begin, figuratively, to buy round-trip tickets from earth to sky and back.


History Lessons

I reviewed the headlines for the last Chiron in Pisces cycle, year by year, and the themes were stunning. They include racial integration in society and music—suddenly, white people singing and listening to traditionally black music—and the integration of other polarities, such as male/female in the feminist movement. Racial integration and feminism both came of age during the ‘60s. Here’s a Chiron in Pisces giggle: Beach and surf music also dominated, a tribute to the Fish water sign! Another amusing, Chironic if not Piscean symbol: The Ford Mustang was the most popular car of the era, merging a driver’s wits and “top half” with a horse-named vehicle underneath. The Mustang allowed people in the ‘60s to become a sort of modern centaur, half-human and half-mechanical horse. Since mustangs are wild horses, even the wild centaurs of Chiron’s mythology are represented in the era’s favorite choice of wheels. I consider the American love of Mustangs to be a precursor of the centaur planet’s discovery in the next decade.

The Astrobabble Quiz

What’s Your AQ – Astrobabble Quotient?

© 2010
by Joyce Mason
All Rights Reserved
 
April is National Humor Month. Of course, if you’re a regular reader of The Radical Virgo, you know that every month is humor month here. Witness Quotes for the Signs and Auntie Joyce’s Astro-Aphorisms, not to mention my general inability to pass up a good pun, no matter how serious the subject.

Donna Cunningham, on her fabulous blog Sky Writer, notes that the astrologically-inclined like quizzes. She is also an expert on the Tower of Astrobabble. English for Astrologers—No Astrologese, Please will give you a direct experience of what it’s like to be on the receiving end of such gibberish, clueless about a single word that's being spoken to you. I remembered Donna’s talk on this topic at a United Astrology Congress (UAC) in the ‘90s. That memory and her report about our astro-quizzical nature gave birth to the following self-test. Be painfully honest!

One point for each YES answer unless otherwise noted:

1. You have changed your name to Celestial, Starr, Venus or some other astro-inspired moniker. (2 points)

2. You cannot introduce yourself by name alone. It goes something like, “Hi, I’m Athena—double Aries part of a four-planet stellium, Grand Water Trine including Mars, Venus, and Uranus, Cap Rising … in my second Saturn Return.”

3. At astrology conferences, you can’t give it a rest, even at lunch or dinner. You throw out verbal chart details for people to project on the planetarium of their minds till they’re dizzy. By dessert, they’re nauseous with Information Indigestion.

4. You have the chutzpah to use words like quincunx and rectification in front of strangers you’ve never met, people who are highly unlikely to speak in star tongues. They're probably wondering if some of your lingo refers to other body parts. (3 points)

5. You refuse to talk to, much less have relationships with, people who don’t know their exact birth time. (3 points)

6. You don’t just go to Internet Movie Data Base (IMDB) to look up the stars in every movie you see; you go to Astro Data Bank to look up their charts. Then you talk about it to everyone you meet, as if they cared.

7. When friends have a baby, you can’t resist giving them your two-cents’ worth on the kid’s future, even if your information was (a) not requested, (b) they’re not particularly believers, (c) astrology might be against their religion, and/or (d) the kid’s a Scorpio and you don’t use filters to tell them what they’ve got in store. So what if you contained yourself enough not to say “my condolences.” (6 points.)

8. You don’t leave home during Mercury Retrograde, you blab about it for weeks before and afterwards to strangers on street corners, and you send all your friends the Murky Retro dates with your annual holiday letter so they’re prepared for the New Year.

9. You have never forgiven the State of New York (or wherever you were born) for not recording birth times—or your mother for not writing it down to the second in your baby book. If she’s still alive, you still remind her—often. (2 points.)

10. Your answering machine message includes the daily planetary positions. When Aunt Tillie calls, she thinks you’re “talking dirty” and in some kind of sex code with those positions, numbers, and funny words. She’s heard of that book, Men Are from Mars and Women Are from Venus! That’s why she hangs up without leaving a message,


Your AQ Score

0-2: You are a great astrological ambassador. You don’t pollute the air with a lot of astrobabble. You make star talk just intriguing enough that newbies are curious about learning the language of astrology.

3-6: You could afford to learn some empathy. Visit a neighborhood or country that speaks a language other than English or whatever’s your usual. Do not take a translation phrase book with you. And don’t be a wuss. You must, at minimum, ask directions, haggle at a market, and make small talk at a coffee shop.

7-9: You’re broaching the realm of giving astrology and astrologers a bad name. Go wash your mouth out with soap and start learning to translate all this crap into something John or Jane Q. Public can comprehend.

10-20: You ought to be ashamed of yourself. You make us look terrible! You are obsessed, possessed, and need to go to AA—Astroholics Anonymous. They offer a 12-Step program—and don’t even think about how that that parallels the 12 signs and houses, much less talk about it.

PS ~ See you at the next AA meeting!

~~~

Photo Credit: All Talk - Sign Series |© Mediaonela | Dreamstime.com 
Slightly astrologized by the author

Don’t forget the gift with purchase of Chiron and Wholeness: A Primer through April 30!

Auntie Joyce’s Astro-Aphorisms #2

© 2010 by Joyce Mason

Dear Radical Readers,

I wrote the first astro-aphorisms under the hair dryer at the beauty salon. I wasn’t sure I had another round in me. To find out, I replicated the conditions of the original experiment—opened up a few bottles of nail polish and hair color to scent the air with chemical thought provokers. Back home, it was hard to type with a hand-held dryer in one hand (it almost melted my earrings), but here are the results. I hope at least one of these gets a giggle out of you. It’ll be a home run if you laugh your aphorism off!


Your own Missed Manners,
Auntie Joyce

~~~

Aries: Easier done than said.

Taurus: Here today, here tomorrow.

Gemini: East is East, and West is West, and never the twin shall meet.

Cancer: Always cut the cords.

Leo: There’s nothing but you under the Sun.

Virgo: Words worth a thousand pictures …

Cultural Dictionary


aphorism [(af-uh-riz-uhm)]


A concise and often witty statement of wisdom or opinion, such as “Children should be seen and not heard,” or “People who live in glass houses shouldn't throw stones.”

Libra: Flattery will get you everywhere.

Scorpio: Possession is 10/10ths of the law.

Sagittarius: When in Rome, do the Romans.

Capricorn: You pay for what you get.

Aquarius: Beware of geeks bearing gifts.

Pisces: Deceiving can be an appearance.

~~~

Photo Credit: HAIR SALON © Diego.cerv... Dreamstime.com

Want more Auntie's Aphorisms? Read #1 and #3