On zodiacal releasing.

I am a great believer in simplicity, especially when it comes to astrology. I believe that the planets, houses, and zodiac signs are like a complete palette of colors. You don’t really NEED anything beyond those symbols. Every symbol you use beyond them adds to the potential for misinterpretation. If you add enough elements with unknown degrees of importance, you could make a chart say anything and lose sight of whatever message is really there.

Basic astrology tells us what's important. The seven traditional planets are the most important because we can see them. The benefics are “good” and the malefics are “bad.“ Period.

A chart is like a living being. It is there to transmit a certain message. That message is spelled out in bold using the palette of the seven traditional planets. Are there other stories told in any chart? Most definitely. But they are going to be subplots to the main story, which is spelled out by those seven planets. And those seven planets in all their interconnectedness will tell us a detailed story that takes significant time to decode and understand. There isn't room for much else.

So there's a whole branch of astrology that is not at all like what I've said above. In order to better understand the astrological tradition, it’s ideal to become familiar with all of it. This whole other branch of astrology makes up new invisible points in the sky to add to our astrological palette, usually places derived mathematically by adding and subtracting the degrees of various planets.

The best-known such invisible point in the sky, and probably the first known such thing of its kind, is the Lot of Fortune. The Lot of Fortune is represented in charts by an X inside a circle and is found by adding the degrees of Ascendant + Moon - Sun, for someone born during the day, and Ascendant + Sun - Moon for someone born at night. Equations like these always seem oddly arbitrary to me. Like, who said there should be equations and how do we know what they are? But somehow, there are equations and we somehow do know what they are (another overlap with physics).

But here’s the weird thing: the Lot of Fortune works. It exists and is a valid astrological thing. Why is it valid? This is actually a hugely significant question. In astrology, how can we tell what’s working and what isn’t? Or what’s real and what isn’t?

Part of me wants to say, “We know the Lot of Fortune is real because astrologers have been using it successfully for six hundred years!” And, yes, that’s part of it. But it’s not the whole story. I think the zodiac itself is pregnant with meaning to such a degree that any variable you add to the situation— anything you systematically do to it — is going to return a result that is still laden with meaning. That’s probably why the Lot of Fortune works, despite being the result of a seemingly arbitrary equation. It’s probably why a lot of things in astrology work. That and we make them work. Astrology is a language and we are co-creating it. The meaning-soaked zodiac can conform to and is enhanced by any sacred geometry imposed upon it.

So there is another kind of “astrology I don’t really do”* related to the Lot of Fortune called “zodiacal releasing.” Zodiacal releasing is a recently-rediscovered ancient technique in Hellenistic astrology. The best place to learn about some of these now-popular ancient techniques is astrologer Chris Brennan, author of Hellenistic Astrology and host of the Astrology Podcast, both great resources.

Zodiacal releasing starts with the Lot of Fortune (or one of the other Lots) and imagines it almost becoming like a new Ascendant and proceeding around the zodiac, activating different signs at different times — for instance, 20 years in one sign, 5 years in another. Chris Brennan likens this to chapters in the book of your life. Zodiacal releasing can also “drill down” and subdivide the larger chapters into smaller, paragraph-like chunks. The idea is that, with zodiacal releasing, you can know to some degree in advance what themes will be prominent and which chapters will be easy for you and which will be more challenging. (Of course, you can do the same thing with transits.)

The best way to try this is on yourself, essentially, because you know the events of your own life better than anyone else’s. For zodiacal releasing, Brennan tells us that the Lot of Fortune governs the body and health while the Lot of Spirit governs career success and life fulfillment. A third lot, the Lot of Eros, rules over one’s love life.

Let’s try mine with the Lot of Fortune. There are good online calculators that do all the heavy lifting for us. The main one I’ve been using is zodiacalreleasing.net.

In zodiacal releasing, The Lot of Fortune is supposed to govern the body. Other than giving birth to my son, my body has had one major event. In late 2019, I was diagnosed with a congenital heart defect, which was repaired the following year. Other than showing me to be in a “peak period” between 2020 and 2023, zodiacal releasing does not highlight this time. However, if you look at the transits for when the defect was discovered, Mars (my ruler in general but also the ruler of my health and wellness, because he rules my first and sixth houses) was transiting my first house, conjoined to Uranus and squaring Saturn. That shows an event involving multiple malefics happening to my body because it was all in the first house. It comes up in the transits, but nothing comes up through zodiacal releasing.

Astrology is supposed to be simple. Or maybe another way to put it is that astrology is already complicated enough. The neat thing ABOUT astrology is that it’s full of meaning and symbolism — like, really full. If you start applying variables to charts in systematic ways, more meaning will often be shown to you. But it’s also possible to just do a bunch of stuff and have it spit out possibly random dates to you. That being said, I encourage you to try entering your birth information at zodiacalreleasing.net and see what turns up for you.

* I do use multiple invisible points in the sky in my astrological work and I recommend others do as well. The Lunar Nodes, for instance, are essential and Black Moon Lilith is always on point. No pun intended.