My #1 Nightmare: We’re getting married on Saturday! Is that a good time?

What can I possibly say? 

Here, we are entering the realm of electional astrology – the art of choosing the right time to take an action. Astrologically, time weaves an ever-shifting labyrinth of red lights and green lights, but the lights are more often red than green. Bottom line, the odds are long against the happy couple who chose Saturday for their wedding having randomly picked an astrologically encouraging moment. I don’t want to lie to them, but I don’t want to scare them with the truth either. Ever the artful dodger in situations such as that one, I’ll often simply say that I haven’t looked into it, which is generally the reality – I’m not a walking ephemeris. Then I quickly dance away into a fogbank of congratulations and well-wishing.

There are deeper waters here. Let’s say that this couple had actually chosen a totally rotten time to get married – Venus is retrograde in Aries in the 12th house squaring Saturn while the Moon is heading for a final opposition to Uranus in the 7th house. Does this mean that their marriage is doomed? Astrologers who say that kind of thing are simply revealing their inexperience. A lot of factors go into a happy marriage. Some are indeed astrological, and some are in the more obvious categories of love, maturity, and basic sanity. My main point is simple: those virtues can defeat a dreadful wedding-day chart. 

Going further – and limiting ourselves strictly to purely astrological factors – a good wedding chart is only one piece of the whole picture. In my experience, the actual synastry between the two charts dwarfs it in importance. I’d rather marry someone under the Wedding Chart from Hell than, for example, to marry someone with whom my chart made no significant aspects. 

Still, nowadays to make a relationship work, you want as much wind at your back as possible. Electing a good time for a wedding or commitment ceremony is definitely a significant factor. I don’t mean to dismiss its importance. I just want to keep perspective. Astrology always works and a tough wedding chart, even if the marriage holds, will realistically often manifest as some kind of misfortune lying ahead – they lived happily ever after, but their house burned down and the stray cat they took in was pregnant with quintuplets. 

RONALD REAGAN

Ronald Reagan briefly got himself into a world of trouble when it became public that he was consulting an astrologer. Back in those days, the media viewed him as unnaturally lucky, often getting away with various behaviors that normally would have gotten a president into trouble, at least back then. In fact, a prime example of his famous luck was the way the astrology “scandal” never really stuck to him. 

The media definitely saw the pattern, but their “explanation” was that he was “the Teflon president” – that “nothing would stick to him,” in other words. 

Which of course is no explanation at all. That’s just a metaphor. 

I believe that the truth is that his “Teflon” was actually his constant use of electional astrology. His astrologers, Joan Quigley and Caroll Righter, used it to time many of his most consequential decisions. He chose, for one compelling illustration, to be inaugurated as the governor of California at ten minutes past midnight. What politician would choose such a weird time if left to their own devices?  

My point is that anyone who’s skeptical about the effectiveness of electional astrology needs only to look at Reagan’s political career for evidence that it works.

IT’S NOT MECHANICAL

Reagan’s success notwithstanding, as evolutionary astrologers, we always reject the old-fashioned, inaccurate, disempowering notion that we are all marionettes and the planets have us by our strings. Every astrological configuration represents a developmental path that can potentially be navigated well and skillfully. When angels contemplate charts, I seriously doubt that their first thoughts center on whether the charts are “lucky” or “unlucky” –  they’re thinking about purposefulness and meaning. The practical point here is that even a challenging electional chart can be navigated with skill. 

If I were to sit down seriously with that couple I mentioned after they tied the knot, I would speak with them about the meaning of that difficult wedding chart. I would suggest the best ways to work with it. I would assume that any negative potentials built into it could be mitigated with conscious effort and choice.

To more fatalistic astrologers, all that might just sound like a philosophical whitewash, so let me prove it to you. Some of what follows is abridged from chapter four of The Book of the Moon. And in this case, it’s not about a wedding. It’s about flying to the Moon – literally.

APOLLO 11

The Apollo 11 mission, in which humans landed on the Moon for the first time, was launched from Cape Canaveral, Florida, on July 16, 1969 at 9:32 in the morning.  The chart shows the Moon in mid-Leo, heading for a final square to Neptune – that’s a hard aspect, suggesting a negative outcome. (The last major aspect the Moon makes before leaving the sign it currently occupies is a major factor in electional astrology – perhaps the most important one of all.) 

Obviously, the Apollo mission was a success, but a purely mechanical perspective on the chart might have suggested the opposite outcome – that those astronauts should have wound up “lost in space,” Neptune-fashion. 

As Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin began their descent to the lunar surface, they quickly saw that they were passing over the prescribed lunar landmarks four seconds ahead of schedule. At those speeds, that four second error was a very big deal. It meant that they would land miles west of where they intended – on uncertain, dangerous, boulder-strewn terrain, far beyond the smooth plain for which they were aiming. 

On top of that problem, while still over a mile above the lunar surface, the navigation and guidance computers started sending out alarms. Remember, these computers were on about the level of the earliest 1980s consumer computers – barely functional by today’s standards, in other words. If any of you are old enough to remember the Commodore 64 or the TRS 80, you are not far off. The alarms meant that the machines were overloading and that certain critical calculations had to be postponed. 

Postponed? You’ve got to be kidding! They were one mile above the surface of the Moon and running low on fuel!

Later it was discovered that some of this problem stemmed from how the astronauts had been trained. 

Oops. 

Can you feel Neptune’s hand in all of this?

The lunar lander was still heading down, riding a column of flame. With the computers gone crazy and a frighteningly rocky landing zone looming ahead, Neil Armstrong improvised. He took over from the computers and just flew that fragile machine down by the seat of his pants. With his partner, Buzz Aldrin, calling out numbers – their speed and their altitude – and their fuel running out, Armstrong brought the Eagle safely to rest on the surface of the Moon. 

When he shut down the engine, they were miles from their targeted landing place and they had only twenty-five seconds of fuel left.

But they made it! 

You can easily feel the fingerprint of the Moon squaring Neptune in that story. Without the cool heroism of those two courageous men, Apollo 11 would have come to a tragic end. It very, very nearly did. It’s an exciting tale, but to me the point it proves is that we are not inert ingredients in the astrological formula. Armstrong and Aldrin were definitely up against a Neptune square. That astrological prediction was 100% accurate. It easily could have killed them, but it didn’t. Instead they made a conscious response to the challenge. And, just like these two cool-headed heroes – and just like our hypothetical couple with the terrible wedding chart – so can you. 

Still, why add any bumps to the road when they can be avoided? The conscious use of electional astrology eases our passage through this world. In a sense, it’s a form of magic. It can’t change your karma – some things simply need to happen and cannot be avoided. And, no surprise, you can elect the perfect time to enter a big fat lottery and still not win it. (In using electional astrology for buying lottery tickets, my feeling is that you probably improve the odds of winning considerably, perhaps turning a hundred million to one into a far more favorable million-to-one shot.) 

But of course, even at a million-to-one, you’re still very probably driving your ten-year-old Hyundai at the end of the week.

LIVING WITH IT

 I use electional astrology all the time myself, at least when it comes to important decisions and commitments. I would never, for example, start writing a book without choosing an encouraging time. I also always try to book airline flights under a good Moon – and there’s a useful, practical point buried deep in that comment . . .

Astrology is all about beginnings, birth being the most obvious illustration of the principle. When it comes to using electional astrology in setting up my travel schedule, the pivotal question becomes when does a trip actually start? For me, the moment of commitment to the trip – when the die is cast, so to speak – is not when the plane takes off, but rather the moment when I actually book the tickets. That’s when I have actually set the wheel turning to go. Getting on the plane is just one of the later inevitable dominoes falling. 

In an ideal world, on a trip every step of the way would be elected – flight times, when you leave the house, when the plane is scheduled to depart, and so forth. But that soon gets crazy, as if you were electing when to have a shower or when to start cooking your dinner. 

My practical advice is always to choose the earliest moment. Look for the true beginning of anything you are going to elect. Look for when you’ve relinquished control and basically said to yourself “I am really doing this.” It could be the moment you push Send on an email or when you drop an important letter in a mailbox. It could be when you sign a document. Or it could be when you step up to the altar with your beloved. Those are the most critical moments – and the ones to choose astrologically. 

Again, everything in astrology is about beginnings. When Kobe Bryant was born on August 23, 1978, no one could foresee what that seed would sprout into. Back then, he wasn’t even very tall! That’s the mystery and the power of astrology at work – it’s the idea that everything is contained in that mysterious seed – the magic moment when something begins, whether it’s a book, a marriage, or a basketball player. 

TECHNICALLY SPEAKING . . . 

Electional astrology is an exacting technical process. My purpose in writing this little essay isn’t really to explain all the nuances of how it is practiced. It’s too complicated for that. Career questions, for one example, need to take in any planets in the 10th house, plus the ruler of Midheaven and those planets need to harmonize with the ruler of the Ascendant. Applying aspects – ones approaching exactitude – work differently than separating ones. The Moon plays an outsized role. It’s all way too much to cover here. 

If you’d like to learn more about my approach, go to forrestastrology.com and enter Electional Astrology in the Search bar. You’ll find a 2 hour 50 minute audio presentation of the technical side of the process. You can also learn a lot about it in The Book of the Moon. 

By the way, when I speak of “my approach,” the only thing that is really unusual about it is what I’ve covered in this essay. Otherwise it’s pretty conventional. The only thing that really makes it different is that, as always, I try to leave room for freedom, choice, and imagination in  the process. Otherwise I’m working pretty much within the standard boundaries of the modern electional tradition. 

Of course, like everything else in astrology, there are many different approaches and schools of thought, many going back for centuries. Search the subject on Amazon and you’ll find enough books to keep you busy for years. 

Once again, never lose sight of your own power. You can work with any chart. But using electional astrology is like living in harmony with the cosmic flow. Why have the wind blowing in your face when you can have it at your back? 

That’s really what it is all about.

Listen to the podcast version

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