Zodiacal
Releasing

Zodiacal releasing is a time-lord technique from Book IV of the Anthology of Vettius Valens, an astrologer working in the second century CE. It starts at birth in the sign of a lot, usually the Lot of Fortune or the Lot of Spirit, and moves through the signs in order. Each sign rules for the minor years of its planet: 15 for Mars's Aries and Scorpio, 8 for Venus's Taurus and Libra, 20 for Mercury's Gemini and Virgo, 25 for the Moon's Cancer, 19 for the Sun's Leo, 12 for Jupiter's Sagittarius and Pisces, and 30, Saturn's minor years, for Aquarius. Capricorn is the one exception, with 27.

Each of those general periods divides into sub-periods that run through the signs again, starting from the same sign, with the same numbers now counted in months. Those divide again, and again, giving four levels: years, months, roughly weeks and roughly days. When a period ends, whatever sub-period is running is cut off and the next sign takes over at every level.

The English name comes from Robert Schmidt's translation of Book IV for Project Hindsight in the 1990s. Chris Brennan's Hellenistic Astrology: The Study of Fate and Fortune (2017) set out the version most practitioners now use, including the peak periods counted from Fortune that give this page its title.

Both lots measure the distance between the Sun and the Moon and lay it off from the Ascendant, in opposite directions, and the two swap formulas when the chart is nocturnal. Brennan's rule of thumb is to release from Fortune for the body, health and circumstances, and from Spirit for the mind and your own actions, which most people read as career.

The Part of Fortune calculator explains the day and night formulas, and why Ptolemy and Valens disagree about reversing them, in more detail.

What happens when you press the button. Ephemeris files and time zones are common to all our tools and described on the methodology page.

1. Birth moment. Your clock time becomes Universal Time through the IANA time zone database.
2. Lots. The Swiss Ephemeris gives the true Ascendant and the Sun and Moon at full precision. The Sun's place relative to the horizon decides day or night, and the formulas above give both lots.
3. Level 1. The first period starts at the moment of birth in the sign of the chosen lot and lasts that sign's years, each year 360 days. The signs follow in zodiacal order for 150 years.
4. Level 2. Each Level 1 period divides into sub-periods that start in its own sign, each sign lasting its number in 30-day months. The last one is cut off when the Level 1 period ends. After a full round of the twelve signs the next sub-period jumps to the opposite sign: the loosing of the bond.
5. Levels 3 and 4. The same rule again, with units of a twelfth of a month (2.5 days) and a twelfth of that (5 hours), for the Level 2 period running today, or on a date you enter, and the Level 3 period inside it.
6. Peaks. Every period at every level is labeled with its count from the Lot of Fortune's sign, and the 1st, 4th, 7th and 10th are flagged as peak periods, whichever lot you release.
7. Dates. Periods are compared with the current moment in Universal Time, and printed as dates in your birthplace's calendar; Level 3 and 4 periods also show the clock time they start.

The form can switch the year length to 365.25 days, a convention some programs use; the section on year length below shows what that changes.

With Valens's 360-day year, every level is a twelfth of the one above, so each sign keeps the same number all the way down.

The bottom row is one full round of the signs. At Level 1 it takes 211 years, longer than any life, so the first level never repeats a sign. At Level 2 the round takes 211 months, 17 years and 7 months of 360-day years, which is shorter than six of the twelve Level 1 periods.

When the sub-periods inside a period have gone through all twelve signs and time is left, they do not start the round again. The next sub-period jumps to the sign opposite the one the period started in, and the sequence continues from there until the period ends. Practitioners call this the loosing of the bond, and treat it as a major turning point inside the general period.

At Level 2 that needs a Level 1 period longer than 211 months, which only Gemini, Cancer, Leo, Virgo, Capricorn and Aquarius have (20, 25, 19, 20, 27 and 30 years). In those periods it comes 211 months, about 17 years and 4 months of calendar time, after the period starts. At Level 3 the same six signs loose the bond inside their Level 2 periods, after 527.5 days, and at Level 4 inside their Level 3 periods.

Valens judges some periods by where their sign falls from the Lot of Fortune. The signs angular to Fortune, its own sign and the 4th, 7th and 10th from it, are the ones Brennan calls peak periods: stretches when the matters of the lot being released are most active. He notes that Valens singles out Fortune's own sign and the 10th from it as eminent times when releasing from Spirit, and he stresses that peak does not mean pleasant.

The calculator counts from Fortune whichever lot you release, so releasing from Spirit shows when Spirit's periods reach the signs angular to Fortune. Each period is labeled with its place from Fortune, not only the peaks, so you can follow the whole sequence relative to it.

Valens counts the technique in 360-day years of twelve 30-day months, so every level is an exact twelfth of the one above. Brennan follows him, and this calculator does too by default. A 360-day year runs 5¼ days short of the calendar, so the periods come earlier and earlier compared with birthdays. Some programs use 365.25-day years instead; the form offers that as an option. For Steve Jobs's Level 1 periods from Fortune the two counts end:

The gap is 5.25 days for every year elapsed, so it passes a year after about 70 years. The lower levels move apart much faster in relative terms, because a gap of months is many Level 3 periods long. On his 25th birthday both counts put him in a Virgo Level 1 period and a Capricorn Level 2 period, though that Capricorn period began on May 24, 1978 in 360-day years and on September 25, 1978 in calendar years. Below that they part: Level 3 Virgo against Sagittarius, and Level 4 Virgo against Aquarius.

Steve Jobs's birth certificate gives 7:15 PM, February 24, 1955, in San Francisco (03:15 UTC on February 25, 1955). The Sun had set, so the chart is nocturnal: Fortune is the Ascendant plus the Sun minus the Moon, at 20°17′ Leo, and Spirit the Ascendant plus the Moon minus the Sun, at 24°17′ Libra. With Fortune in Leo, the peak signs are Leo, Scorpio, Aquarius and Taurus, the 10th from Fortune.

Level 1 from both lots

Ages are in calendar years. The Leo period from Fortune runs 19 years of 360 days, so it ends at age 18.73, on November 16, 1973, not on his 19th birthday. From Fortune, the angular Level 1 periods in this span are Leo (birth to 18.7) and Scorpio (46.3 to 61.1); from Spirit, the 4th from Fortune (Scorpio) comes much earlier, from 7.9 to 22.7.

Level 2 inside Fortune's Virgo period

Virgo has 20 years, 240 months, against a round of 211, so it is one of the periods that loose the bond. Its sub-periods:

The first twelve sub-periods go round the zodiac from Virgo to Leo. On March 17, 1991, instead of returning to Virgo, the sequence jumps to Pisces, the opposite sign, then runs Aries and Taurus, and Taurus is cut off when the Virgo period ends on August 3, 1993. The same thing happened earlier inside his Leo period, which jumped to Aquarius on June 24, 1972. From Spirit, the Capricorn period loosens to Cancer on December 23, 2006.

All four levels on his 25th birthday

Setting the date to February 24, 1980 at the birth time shows the chain from Fortune:

Times move by an hour where daylight saving starts or ends inside a period, because the periods are fixed lengths of real time and the clock is not. The Level 2 Capricorn period (27 months, 810 days) is long enough for a loosing of its own at Level 3: its weeks ran Capricorn to Sagittarius, and on November 3, 1979 jumped to Cancer instead of returning to Capricorn.

These are the technique's own dates, shown to illustrate the arithmetic; the page makes no claim about what any of them meant in his life. To check the API, the generator script rebuilt all 466 periods in the three requests (Fortune and Spirit in 360-day years, Fortune in calendar years) from the rule with its own code, and none differs by more than a second.

A period takes on the matters of its sign and of the sign's ruler, and how that ruler is placed in your chart counts for as much as the sign itself. The notes below are the signs' general themes, as tendencies for the length of a period.

• Vettius Valens, Anthology, Book IV (second century CE): the method, the sign years, the sub-periods and the loosing of the bond. Translated by Robert Schmidt for Project Hindsight in the 1990s.
• Chris Brennan, Hellenistic Astrology: The Study of Fate and Fortune (Amor Fati Publications, 2017): the reconstruction followed here, including the peak periods counted from Fortune.
• Chris Brennan, “Zodiacal Releasing: An Ancient Timing Technique”, The Astrology Podcast, episode 192 (2019): the 360-day year and 30-day month, the four levels, Fortune for the body and Spirit for actions, and peaks angular to Fortune.
• Our methodology page: the Swiss Ephemeris files deployed (1800–2399) and how time zones are handled.