The best day to travel: electing the start of a journey

Electional astrology for travel: a window, not a lucky date

The best day to travel, by astrology, is not a date printed in an almanac but a moment you choose: the time you set out, elected so that the sky of the departure suits a journey. Electional astrology, al-ikhtiyārāt, “the choices”, treated setting out on the road as a beginning like a marriage or a founding, and an auspicious day to travel was one whose Moon, hours and angles agreed with the matter of the journey. The best day to travel as per astrology, and the best time to travel within it, is found by a search, not looked up in a table. Canopy keeps one purpose for it, Travel & Journeys, al-Safar, for trips, vacations, pilgrimages and the start of a move to a new place.

No day suits every traveler. The rising sign changes about every two hours and the Moon changes sign every two or three days, so the real question is which window, inside the dates you can leave and for the place you leave from, carries the fewest faults and the most help. The election times the setting out, not the booking of a ticket. It improves the conditions of a beginning; it does not promise how the journey goes.

Much of what is sold as travel astrology is a different art. Astrocartography and relocation charts draw lines across a map to show where a person’s planets would fall on the angles: they ask where. An election asks when. Canopy draws no travel maps, planetary lines or relocation charts; it searches the dates you set for the moments to depart from where you are. It also follows the Arabic tradition, not the Hindu panchang: if you were looking for a travel muhurat, the guide to muhurat explains what Canopy does and does not compute.

What makes an auspicious day to travel

The tradition read a journey through three houses. The first house and its lord stand for the traveler. The third, which Canopy’s House Ruler Analysis describes as “Travel, siblings, and messages”, is the road and the short trip; the ninth, “Long journeys, law, and learning”, is the far country. In whole-sign houses, which Canopy uses, each is a whole sign counted from the rising sign of the chosen moment, and the search weighs the lord of each by its dignity and its place, marking it down when it is retrograde or combust. When the lord of the Ascendant, the traveler, is no stronger than the lord of the third, the house of the road, the window is held back from the highest scores, and Why this time? says so.

Two planets signify the journey: the Moon, the swiftest of the planets and the general signifier of beginnings, and Mercury, whose hour the old astrologers linked to travel and swift dealings. Canopy weighs both by sign, counting a significator strong in its own sign or exaltation and weak in its detriment or fall; Mercury is strongest in Gemini and Virgo and weakest in Sagittarius and Pisces. A combust Mercury counts against a window, and a Moon applying closely to Mercury counts for more than one separating from him.

The Moon’s sign carries the travel search’s sharpest rule. The moveable signs, Aries, Cancer, Libra and Capricorn, count in a window’s favor; the fixed signs, Taurus, Leo, Scorpio and Aquarius, rule it out; the mutable signs, Gemini, Virgo, Sagittarius and Pisces, are neutral. The reasoning is the old one about the qualities of the signs: the moveable signs suit what should start and move quickly, the fixed ones what is meant to stay where it is. Canopy’s rule is drawn from Sahl ibn Bishr. It reshapes the Moon’s own dignities, too: Taurus, her exaltation, is refused her, Cancer, her own sign, is favored on both counts, and in Capricorn, her detriment, the weakness is set against the sign’s favor. A proposal follows the same rule of the moveable signs; a wedding wants the opposite, a Moon that holds.

Then the hour. Canopy’s travel search favors the hours of the Moon, Mercury, the Sun, Jupiter and Venus, and counts those of Saturn and Mars against a window; the guide to what each hour was used for gives the Moon’s own hour to journeys and messages. Each hour is weighed twice, once for its planet’s nature and once for its fitness for a journey, and both rows can show under Why this time?. An hour lord that is retrograde or combust takes something back. The search scores the hour, not the weekday, so a lunar hour on a Saturday counts in full.

When not to travel, by astrology

Some faults close a window outright. In a Travel & Journeys search a window is set aside, and never reaches the results, when any of these holds:

• Mercury is retrograde. A retrograde significator was read as a matter that stalls and turns back, a rule drawn from Sahl and the Picatrix, so while Mercury is retrograde, about three weeks at a time, three or four times a year, the travel search finds no window at all;
• the Moon is in a fixed sign: Taurus, Leo, Scorpio or Aquarius;
• Mars or Saturn stands in the seventh whole-sign house, the house of the place you are going to: the sources’ own refusal for a journey, read as calamity at the destination;
• Algol, the star this purpose names to be avoided, is on an angle. Within a degree of the Ascendant or the Midheaven it rules the window out, as any malefic star does; on the Descendant it counts against the window, and rules it out when the Moon or Mercury is with the star.

Other placements are weighed, not refused, and these too are the journey’s own. Saturn in the third, ninth, tenth or fourth house counts against a window under the note “storms at sea”, and Mars in the third or ninth under “robbers on the road”. The words belong to caravans and sailing ships, but the search applies them to any journey, and when a window carries one, the caution is named under Why this time?. Mars and Saturn are feared on the road and refused at the destination.

The faults that strike any window

Beyond its own rules, the travel search shares the refusals Canopy applies to every purpose. A window is set aside when the Moon is combust, void of course, in the via combusta from 19° Libra to 15° Scorpio, or joined to the South Node; when Mars or Saturn is within 3° of the Ascendant, or a malefic fixed star sits within a degree of the Ascendant or Midheaven; or when the lord of the Ascendant is burned by the Sun. For a journey the burnt path matters most in Libra, a favored sign only until its nineteenth degree. A Moon merely under the Sun’s beams, or waning and slow, is let in with a caution, the second marked as a delay; the electional astrology guide sets out how Canopy reads an election in full.

Lunar mansions for setting out

The Moon’s lunar mansion counts as well. In Canopy’s travel search twelve of the twenty-eight count in a window’s favor and five heavily against it. These are scores, not refusals, so a window in a low mansion can still pass on a strong sky, well down the list. The lists are this search’s own and not a verdict on the mansions in general: al-Ṣarfa, which the mansions guide reads for voyages, and al-Iklīl, read there for the safety of mariners, both count against a journey here.

The Moon-sign rule decides which of these a traveler can actually meet. Counting the mansions in equal stretches of 12°51′ from 0° Aries, al-Zubra lies wholly in Leo, so a travel search never reaches it; al-Thurayyā counts only in the last degrees of Aries, al-Haqʿa only in the first degrees of Gemini, and Saʿd al-Suʿūd only in the last degrees of Capricorn. Of the five against, al-Dabarān lies wholly in Taurus and al-Iklīl wholly inside the burnt path, so neither ever comes up; al-Ṭarf in Cancer, al-Ṣarfa in early Virgo and al-Shawla in early Sagittarius are the three a journey can meet. The freest of the favored are al-Sharaṭān and al-Nathra, at the start of Aries and of Cancer, where sign and mansion both help.

The general reading of each station is under what each mansion favors, and the same guide shows tonight’s mansion.

How to find the best time to travel in Canopy

In the app, open Elections, choose Events, and under “What are you electing for?” pick Travel & Journeys, which sits alone under the Travel heading. Set From and To: the range opens on the next three months and runs to 183 days, about six months. Canopy’s own advice for this purpose is to set the Location to the place you leave from and time the departure, because the rising sign and the hours are worked out for that place; if you are planning from somewhere else, change it on the Location card. Then tap Find Best Moments.

The results list the windows that score 50% or more, for one, three or six months, sorted by Soonest or Best Quality. Each card gives the time, the score, the Ascendant, the Midheaven and the ruler of the hour, the first factors in its favor and, once your birth data is entered, a line on how the moment falls in your chart. Open a window for Election Details: its exact time, House Ruler Analysis for the first, third and ninth houses, and Why this time?, which lists the factors that raised or lowered the score, the storms-at-sea and robbers-on-the-road cautions among them. Save to Calendar keeps the window, and Set Reminder tells you before it opens.

If nothing survives the rules, the list reads “No window favors your chart in this stretch”: widen the range, or move it past a Mercury retrograde. For a move to a new home, the travel search times the setting out; moving in is a separate beginning, timed with Property & Real Estate and its own rules, which the guide to buying a house sets out.

Your chart and the journey

Windows are ranked on the election chart alone. Once your birth data is entered, your nativity is added as a small, bounded adjustment, capped at ten points either way, so it can lift a window or lower it but cannot turn a poor sky into a good one. The travel search’s own natal factor is the ninth house: a window whose Ascendant rises in the sign of your natal ninth, the house of long journeys, counts in its favor, named under Relationship to Your Natal as the journey channel. Your Chart at Election Time draws the window’s peak moment around your chart, your natal planets inside and the moment’s outside.

Canopy weighs each window against one nativity, yours. It does not compare charts, so for a family or a group it times the departure rather than each traveler, and it does not move your chart to the destination.

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