Zodiacal Releasing
The most striking timing technique to survive from Hellenistic astrology: a life divided into chapters, each with a start date you can check against your own history.
Read inside a cast chart: you will find it in the Predictive panel, once a natal chart is cast.
What you get
- Releasing from the Lot of Fortune, the Lot of Spirit, or both
- Three nested levels of period, from decades down to weeks
- Peak periods identified — the chapters that carry the most weight
- Loosing-of-the-bonds dates, where the sequence jumps rather than continues
- A timeline you can read backwards against events that already happened
How it works
Releasing begins from a Lot — Fortune for the body, circumstance and livelihood; Spirit for action, career and what you deliberately set out to do. The sign of that Lot starts the sequence, and each sign hands on to the next, held for a number of years set by its ruler's minor years: Mars 15, Venus 8, Mercury 20, Moon 25, Sun 19, Jupiter 12, Saturn 30.
Each major period subdivides the same way, and again, giving three levels at once — a decade, a year within it, and a shorter run within that. The interesting moments are where the levels agree.
Two features make it testable. Peak periods are the signs in aspect to the Lot, and tend to coincide with the chapters people describe as consequential. Loosing of the bonds happens when the sequence reaches the sign opposite the Lot and jumps instead of continuing — often a genuine discontinuity, a change of direction rather than a development of the last one.
Because every period has a hard date, this is a technique you can falsify against your own life before you trust it forwards. That is the honest way to use it.
Vettius Valens, Anthology Book IV.