Zodiacal Releasing, Firdaria and the Decennials

Traditional astrology divides a life into periods and hands each period to a ruler, a “time lord”. The idea is that a life is not lived in one manner from start to finish: different planets, or different signs, hold the time in turn, and the character of each stretch follows the condition of whoever holds it in the natal chart. This article describes four of the classical systems. One divides time by sign; three divide it by planet.

Zodiacal releasing

Vettius Valens, writing in the second century, describes in his Anthology a way of dividing a life that has no real parallel in later astrology. Time is released from a lot, normally the Lot of Spirit, sometimes the Lot of Fortune. The sign the lot falls in holds first, for as many years as its ruler’s lesser years; then the next sign in zodiacal order holds for its own; and so on. A life comes out divided into chapters of very unequal length: eight years under a sign of Venus, thirty under Aquarius.

Chapters and paragraphs

The same series then runs inside each chapter with the unit changed from years to months, which gives the second level, the paragraphs; and inside those again, which gives something close to weeks. A chapter always opens with a paragraph of its own sign, so the beginning of a chapter states its theme twice.

Three numbers

Three numbers make the technique what it is.

1. The periods are the planets’ lesser years: Saturn 30, Moon 25, Mercury 20, Sun 19, Mars 15, Jupiter 12, Venus 8. But Capricorn is given 27 rather than Saturn’s 30, so a full circuit of the twelve signs comes to 211 rather than 214.
2. The year is not the solar year. It is a schematic year of 360 days, which makes each level exactly a twelfth of the one above and makes the chapters run slightly ahead of the calendar. A twenty-five-year chapter covers a little under twenty-five years of real time.
3. The circuit: 211 months is about seventeen and a half years, so only the six longest chapters are long enough for their paragraphs to come full circle.

The loosing of the bond

When the paragraphs do come full circle, something happens that Valens treats as the turning point of the chapter. The series does not simply start again from the sign it began in. It jumps to the opposite sign and carries on in order from there. This is the loosing of the bond, and it usually falls where a chapter changes direction: the same story, told from the other side.

Peak periods

The other thing to watch is the peak. Wherever a released period lands in a sign angular to the Lot of Fortune (the first, fourth, seventh or tenth sign counted from it), the tradition reads a period of visibility and consequence. Those four signs are exactly the ones that share Fortune’s modality, so a chart has four of them and no more, and they arrive in a rhythm particular to that chart. The tenth from Fortune is usually read as the strongest of the four.

What it does not do

It is worth being plain about what the technique does not do. It gives no events and no reasons. It says which chapter is running, how long it has left, and whether the current paragraph is one of the loud ones. The content comes from the rest of the chart: the ruler of the released sign, the planets in it, and their condition.

Dividing time by planet

Zodiacal releasing divides a life by sign. Three older and simpler systems divide it by planet instead, and they disagree with one another often enough to be worth reading together.

The firdaria

The firdaria came into astrology from Persia, and reached the Arabic and later Latin traditions through authors such as Abu Ma’shar in the ninth century. Seventy-five years are shared out in fixed lengths that owe nothing to the chart: the Sun ten years, Venus eight, Mercury thirteen, the Moon nine, Saturn eleven, Jupiter twelve, Mars seven, then the North Node three and the South Node two.

The only thing a chart contributes is its sect. The sequence is the Chaldean order, the planets by the size of their sphere, read as a cycle beginning at the light of the sect: from the Sun in a day chart, from the Moon in a night one. Each planetary period then splits into seven equal sub-periods, a seventh apiece, running in the same order from that period’s own lord. The node periods take no sub-lords; they run whole.

The position of the nodes

There is one open disagreement. Abu Ma’shar puts the two nodes at the end of the sequence, closing the cycle. Guido Bonatti, working from partial Latin translations that reached Europe before the book that spells the technique out, puts them after Mars. In a day chart that is the same thing, because Mars already ends the run there. In a night chart it moves a person’s node years by decades. Robert Zoller defended Bonatti’s arrangement on the strength of practice. Both are in use, and it is worth knowing which a given reading follows.

The decennials

The decennials are older and Greek: Valens describes them in the fifth book of the Anthology. Here every planet gets an equal period of a hundred and twenty-nine months, ten years and nine months on the schematic calendar the Hellenistic techniques count in. What is unequal is the order, and it is the chart’s own: after the starting planet, the sequence follows the planets by their actual longitude, in zodiacal order, wrapping at the end of the circle. No two charts share a sequence unless they share an arrangement of the sky.

Why 129

The number 129 is not arbitrary either. It is the sum of the seven planets’ lesser years: Saturn 30, Moon 25, Mercury 20, Sun 19, Mars 15, Jupiter 12, Venus 8. That is why the sub-periods of a decennial, each running for its own lord’s lesser years counted as months, fill the period exactly. Nothing is left over and nothing is cut short. Of the nested time-lord systems, it is the one that comes out even.

The starting planet

Valens starts the sequence from the predominator, and identifying that properly is a doctrine in its own right: whether each luminary is well placed, in an operative house, visible, with a fallback to the planet rising after the Ascendant. A simplified practice starts from the light of the sect, which is what the predominator comes to in the ordinary case. It is worth knowing that a chart whose sect light is badly placed would run a different sequence under the full rule.

Ptolemy’s seven ages of man

Ptolemy’s seven ages, from the tenth chapter of the fourth book of the Tetrabiblos, are the simplest of the three and the same for everyone. Life is divided among the planets in the order of their spheres outward from the Earth:

• the Moon takes the first four years, infancy;
• Mercury the next ten, childhood and schooling;
• Venus the next eight, youth;
• the Sun the next nineteen, the prime of life;
• Mars the next fifteen;
• Jupiter the next twelve;
• and Saturn everything after sixty-eight.

The lengths are not quite the lesser years. The Moon’s four and Mercury’s ten are their own numbers, but they close on a pattern: Saturn’s thirty times the Moon’s four, Jupiter’s twelve times Mercury’s ten, and Mars’ fifteen times Venus’ eight all come to a hundred and twenty, which is the Sun’s greater years and the outer bound of a life in the scheme.

Reading them together

None of the three planetary systems predicts an event. What they offer is a question worth asking of any other technique: which planet’s manner is this stretch of life being lived in, and does more than one system say the same thing? Where the firdar, the decennial and the age all name one planet, the chart is saying something loudly. Where they name three, that is worth knowing too.

The same principle runs through all traditional timing. Zodiacal releasing sets the chapter; the planetary periods say whose manner the time is lived in; annual profections name the subject of the year; and transits, directions and solar arcs mark the moments when something within those frames comes to a head.