What is It about Elections?
What is it about elections that drives so many clients crazy! I just had an electional client demand a refund because I didn't write in my e-mail, "Dear [Name of Client]" and end the e-mail with "Sincerely yours" This, and my boilerplate electional disclaimer was simply unacceptable!!!!
Yes, indeedy! This certainly strikes me as bizarre since I am fairly old fashioned in my e-mails and do tend to write full sentences, capitalize and use commas and periods. I am accustomed to getting e-mails in "texting" style with no caps, no punctuation and all lower case, but it usually doesn't send me into a rage.
No, it just must be something about elections. I think I am going to do a video about elections, but it's going to be tough, I'd estimate that I have problems with electional customers or they have problems with me about 50-70% of the time. For horary or natal the problems are perhaps 5% of the time, so it's not just me with Mars in Leo.
Let me see if I can identify some of the problems:
(1) Excessively high expectations of the results of an election
Many clients have the expectation that if they can just find the exact, perfect election that anything can be accomplished. Certainly much of modern advertising and indeed the modern ego based outlook does buy into the idea that you can have anything you want and in fact have a constitutional right to whatever you want. The idea of Fate is downright upsetting to moderns.
But in traditional astrology we recognize that an election, a choice of time for an activity, is perhaps the lowest and least powerful cycle of fate in operation. If we chose a good time for money, we must also consider money in our natal chart, our personal life time fate. We need to consider the fate of our family, and our social standing. Lilly says that if the son of a king and the son of a peasant have the same birth chart, that the son of the king becomes a king, but the son of a peasant becomes a big man in his neighborhood. We need to consider the fate of the economy, an otherwise great election during the Great Depression, wouldn't do as well as a similar election in a bull market. We also need to consider the fate of our country and the world as a whole. I've often thought that if you had a good natal chart and good election in Poland in 1939 you get to be a refugee rather than being dead!
So in traditional astrology Fate exists and we operate within the limits that it sets at various levels. Electional astrology is like gardening, if we wisely chose within the options presented to us, we can reap our harvest. We cannot overthrow Fate, just play the cards that have been dealt us well.
This makes sense. If I have the greatest election of the century, will I as a 5'6" 50 year old be able to play professional basketball? If I have a great election will I be elected President of the US? No matter how good the election, these are impossible for me, given my situation.
(2) NO ELECTION IS PERFECT!
The next problem is that electional customers feel that having paid, they have a right to, if not a perfect election, then an election with no problem areas.
This is like asking for a whole day with no problems. Even on the best day of my life there were moments of unhappiness and difficulty. No matter what time you chose there will be some astrological problems with it. It simply is impossible to avoid all problems. The secret of electional is minimizing the problems as much as possible. It is always possible to find the best election over any given date and time range, while this election may not be that great, it does have the inestimable advantage of avoiding the really terrible times.
Still many electional customers are unhappy that there are problems in their election, not realizing that this is inevitable.
(3) Modern versus Traditional Astrology
Most electional clients know a little bit about modern natal astrology, thus are an excellent example of a little knowledge being a dangerous thing since I use traditional electional astrological techniques.
Even in traditional there are significant differences between natal and electional astrology, for example the difference in use of separating and applying aspects, or the fact that in natal astrology the whole chart is significant while in electional only particular factors are relevant.
Furthermore, there really isn't any established standard modern electional technique, every modern astrologer who does electional seems to do it differently.
This leads to many misunderstandings and unhappy customers. What they consider to be a problem, may not be in traditional astrology and what they consider to be vital, also may not be in traditional methodology.
So it is not really surprising that there are lots of problems with electional customers. It's really not their fault that they don't understand the process and have unreasonable expectations, it's just a continuing problem that I need to keep working on. Still it may be unsolvable, we shall see.
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