Someone recently asked me about what sort of things I usually try to pay attention to when using electional astrology in order to elect an auspicious date to begin a venture, and I thought that it would be a good idea to share some of those tips here for people who are interested in the subject. Electional astrology is a branch of astrology that is used to select an auspicious time in the future to begin a specific venture or undertaking. That is to say, it is the proactive attempt to choose a specific planetary alignment or chart that will be the most conducive to whatever it is that you want to initiate in the future, for example such as the start of a journey, the beginning of a marriage, or the founding of a building.The retroactive application of astrological principles in order to study something that has already started at some point in the past is usually referred to as inceptional astrology, although this too involves studying an astrological chart that is set for the ‘inception’ or beginning of that venture. Originally in Hellenistic astrology both of these approaches fell under the category of katarchic astrology, from the Greek word katarche (καταρχή), the astrology of beginnings. There aren’t at lot of good contemporary manuals on electional astrology out there at the moment, so sometimes information about what to look for in a decent election can be hard to come by. Hopefully you will find these tips useful. First I want to make a few remarks though. Two Approaches to Electional Astrology. The way I see it, there are basically two ways of going about doing electional astrology.

The first approach is to take the basic rules that astrologers use in order to gauge the strength or weakness of certain parts of the chart, and then to invert them so that you are using the rules to select a specific moment in the future in which a chart set for that moment in time would be considered especially strong or auspicious.This approach to electional astrology relies more on traditional astrological notions about what it means for a planet to be strong or weak, dignified or debilitated, and auspicious or inauspicious. The underlying implication is that when a planet is well-placed, the areas of life associated with that planet or that part of the chart will run more smoothly. This is a notion that virtually all forms of ‘traditional’ astrology take for granted. The second approach to electional astrology is to select a chart in the future that best reflects the nature of whatever venture or undertaking you are planning to begin at that time. This approach dispenses with the traditional notion of primarily ensuring that all of the planets are stronger or more dignified in the electional chart, and instead attempts to simply find a chart where the symbolism of the planetary placements are the most evocative or congruent with what you are trying to begin at that time. Now, sometimes these two approaches can be mutually exclusive, since what is favorable in one approach is not necessarily as favorable in the other, although ideally a decent electional chart will incorporate elements from both approaches. In this list of tips we will primarily be dealing with the first approach, which focuses on selecting auspicious placements, although it is important to keep the second approach in mind as well. With these preliminary remarks out of the way, let’s get to the top 10 tips for choosing an auspicious electional chart.