Activities Signified

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

An activity entry records how the electional astrological tradition assigns significance for a specific everyday undertaking, bathing, traveling, teaching or fighting among them, to a governing planet or planets, a signifying house and, frequently, a set of favorable zodiac signs, following the logic of electional practice, timing an action for a favorable moment, rather than natal astrology's separate project of reading a birth chart.

An entry records an activity's documented significators as a specific classical or medieval source states them, Guido Bonatti's own thirteenth century treatise among the tradition's foundational statements of the system, and keeps that documented assignment distinct from a natal reading of the same planet or house, since electional practice asks when to begin an action rather than what a person is like.

An entry also records where an activity's own documented tradition places it within the electional literature's broader lists, bathing grouped with cutting the hair, taking medicine and letting blood as bodily care activities timed together, for instance, since electional sources characteristically group related undertakings under a shared house and a shared logic rather than treating each activity as an isolated case.

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

Electional astrology's practice of assigning an everyday activity to a governing planet and house has a documented history reaching back, like the comparable practice of assigning family relationships, to Hellenistic astrology, and Chris Brennan's survey traces how the broader Hellenistic system of planetary significations, a planet's rulership extended from a birth chart's own topics to the timing of a specific undertaking, provided the theoretical basis later electional writers such as Bonatti drew on and expanded centuries afterward.

That documented history matters for how an entry is written, because the specific planet or house assigned to an activity is not an independent medieval invention but traces to an older, documented set of planetary significations, and Brennan's survey records where a later medieval electional writer's own list of activities and their significators preserves that earlier Hellenistic logic and where it introduces its own later refinement.

An entry draws on this documented history for the origin of the electional significator system generally, keeping it distinct from any one later handbook's own specific working list of activities, which applies the inherited logic to a particular author's own period and practice.