Is the Biblical Jubilee an Astrological Time Lord System?

“And you shall count seven weeks of years, seven times seven years, so that the time of the seven weeks of years shall be to you forty-nine years. Then you shall send abroad the loud trumpet on the tenth day of the seventh month; on the day of atonement you shall send abroad the loud trumpet throughout all your land. And you shall hallow the fiftieth year, and proclaim liberty throughout the land to all its inhabitants; it shall be a jubilee for you, when each of you shall return to his property and each of you shall return to his family”

—(Leviticus 25, 8-10, Revised Standard Version).

The first time I heard the math involved in calculating a jubilee, I was immediately struck by how similar it is to ancient astrological time lord procedures like yearly profections or Zodiacal Releasing. 

The concept of the jubilee originates in Leviticus in the Hebrew bible: after counting 7 cycles of 7 years, a jubilee is celebrated in the 50th year, where all debts are forgiven and debt slaves are released from bondage. Through this ritual, all relationships of inequality created by debt are dissolved and the society is reset to a state of balance. While no organized religion or state still upholds the jubilee tradition in its purest form, the call for a jubilee has been taken up by debt abolitionists (like the Debt Collective’s project The Rolling Jubilee). 

One indicator that Leviticus is transmitting a time lord technique is that it doesn’t say to count 49 years and then declare a jubilee in the 50th, but specifically says to count 7 cycles of 7 years. Since there are 7 ancient planets (including the sun and moon) this timing technique draws clear parallels with other ancient chronocrator (i.e. time lord) methods in which one planet becomes the time lord for a period of time before handing off to the next planet, then beginning the cycle again once each planet and/or sign has been activated. Because the number of cycles is also 7, the jubilee technique seems to have nested layers of time, so that each 7 year cycle has a planetary lord, along with each year within that cycle. 

This structure closely resembles the nesting of monthly profections within yearly profections: every year is ruled by one planet in the natal chart, and then each month within that year is also ruled by a planet (beginning with the same initial lord). So if the yearly profection has come to the 2nd house, Pisces, ruled by Jupiter, Jupiter is the lord of the entire year, but then each month is ruled by a different planet, starting with Jupiter and cycling through all 12 signs of the zodiac, activating the planet that rules them. A similar structure exists in Zodiacal Releasing in which one sign (and one planet) is activated on the level of years, then another on months, another on weeks, and another on days (the math is based on the minor years of the planets in ZR rather than one year per planet like in profections). 

There is another striking parallel between Zodiacal Releasing and the jubilee: the Loosing of the Bond. In ZR, after you complete an entire cycle of the zodiac on one level of time (like months) while there is still time left in the cycle on a longer scale of time (like years), then instead of continuing on to the first sign and starting the cycle again, the “Loosing of the Bond” occurs, and the sequence jumps to the opposite sign in the zodiac. Robert Schmidt and Demetra George have both connected this Loosing of the Bond to an ancient Roman ritual of binding and unbinding statues to mark the beginning of Saturnalia, when social roles were reversed and debt servants and slaves were temporarily liberated and served by their masters. The ritual is very much like a temporary jubilee, and like the jubilee math in Leviticus, it's triggered once a full cycle has been completed. 

Rather than cycling through all 12 signs of the zodiac like profections or zodiacal releasing, the jubilee just goes through the 7 classical planets before beginning the next cycle. It’s clear that the biblical explanation for the 7 cycles of 7 years is tied to 7 days that it took YAHWEH to create the world. The astrological basis of the 7 day week may go unacknowledged in Jewish and Christian religion, but historians agree that it was adopted it from Mesopotamian culture; both Sumerian and Babylonian societies operated on a 7 day week, with 6 days of work and a day of rest. The number 7 was chosen because of the number of visible planets, which can be evenly divided into 4 periods of 7 days within a lunar month. So the week itself is already a time lord system in which we cycle through each of the 7 visible planets and then begin the cycle again. 

The apparently astrological character of the jubilee sharpens when we look more closely at the word jubilee itself. According to the Holy See: 

“The word "jubilee" is derived from the Hebrew word jobel, which means "ram's horn"; since it was precisely that horn which was used as a trumpet, whose sound indicated to everybody the beginning of the jubilee year. The book of Leviticus, in the code of holiness, is the source which tells us of the significance of the jubilee year, a year of liberation "par excellence," which is at the end of seven weeks of years, the fiftieth year.”

It strikes me as more than coincidence that the word jubilee itself means “ram’s horn” when the ram also marks the zodiacal new year at the spring equinox when Aries season begins. The jubilee is declared at the end of one time lord cycle and the beginning of the next, and it is literally announced by (and named for) a return to the first sign in the zodiac. Contemporary translators of the Hebrew Bible even use the phrase “ram’s horn” instead of the (misleading) translation “trumpet,” as Robert Alter does in his brilliant translation of The Five Books of Moses: 

“you shall count you seven sabbaths of years, seven years seven times, and the days of the seven sabbaths of years shall come to forty-nine years. And you shall send round a blasting ram’s horn”

Reconstructing the Jubilee Time Lord System 

So, how can we flesh out the skeleton of this Time Lord system that is preserved in the Hebrew Bible? Consider this an act of historical fiction, since we have absolutely no way of knowing how—or if—the years leading up to a jubilee were assigned to a particular planet. Still, the framework that we’re given is easy to fill in if we’re familiar with later time lord conventions. 

The basic premise is that each year of the 7 year period is assigned to one of the planets, and each of the 7 total cycles is also assigned to a different planet. Given the centrality of the ram to the name and ritual of the jubilee, I decided to begin with Mars. I’m going to go in the order of the days of the week, since that is the known basis for the jubilee’s 7x7 structure: 

CYCLE 1 

Level 1, Mars (7 years)

Level 2, Mars (1 year)

  Mercury (1 year)

  Jupiter (1 year)

  Venus (1 year)

  Saturn (1 year)

  Sun (1 year)

  Moon (1 year) 

CYCLE 2

Level 1, Mercury (7 years) 

Level 2, Mercury (1 year) 

  Jupiter (1 year)

  Venus (1 year)

  Saturn (1 year)

  Sun (1 year)

  Moon (1 year) 

  Mars (1 year)

CYCLE 3

Level 1, Jupiter (7 years)

Level 2, Jupiter (1 year)

  Venus (1 year)

  Saturn (1 year)

  Sun (1 year)

  Moon (1 year) 

  Mars (1 year)

  Mercury (1 year)

This order continues until we reach the 7th cycle

CYCLE 7 

Level 1, Moon (7 years)

Level 2, Moon (1 year)

  Mars (1 year)

  Mercury (1 year)

  Jupiter (1 year)

  Venus (1 year)

  Saturn (1 year)

  Sun (1 year)

JUBILEE! The ram’s horn is blown and the 50th year is celebrated as the jubilee year. The cycle then starts again at Mars.

LEVEL 1 Jubilee Time Lord by Age:

LEVEL 2 Jubilee Time Lord by Age:

I chose the order of planets according to the days of the week, but we could just as easily cycle through the planets in Chaldean order (according to speed). Or if we wanted to further personalize the system, we could begin with the planet that rules the ascendant of the person’s natal chart. However, starting with Mars and going in the order of the days of the week reveals some interesting correlations. For example, I notice that the years 28 - 34 are assigned to Saturn, and that age range encapsulates the years that people will begin and end their Saturn return, as well as the minor years of Saturn, 30. Find your own age on the circle and see if you feel like the planetary rulers of those ages match anything about your personal experience! 

As with other multi-tier time lord systems, the primary lord (level 1) sets the agenda for that period of time and the cooperating lord is tasked with actually carrying out that agenda according to their own nature and desires. The condition of those two planets in the natal chart (essential and accidental dignity) let us know if it will be a period of ease, challenge, or both, and what kinds of storylines are likely to take focus. I also suggest that we use the signs/houses that are ruled by the activated planets to help us interpret that period of time for the native. So if it’s a Saturn period on level one and a Venus period on level two, we would be evaluating the person’s natal Aquarius and Capricorn (and all the planets in the sign or that aspect the sign) for setting the agenda of that 7 year period, while we look at Taurus and Libra (and the planets present there or aspecting the sign) for clues as to how that agenda will be executed. This means that each year will actually be very different for each person, even if we begin at the same time lord for everyone. 

If I had to guess what kind of events are tied to the jubilee cycle as a time lord system, I think it might revolve around debt and interdependency—the literal relationships of debt we have, and also the shifting tension between obligation and restriction vs agency and freedom as it develops and changes throughout our lives. However, even though everyone will experience the jubilee at the 50th year, it doesn’t seem like we’re suddenly freed from our debts when the 7 cycles of 7 are completed; still it could certainly be taken as a time when we should absolve all of those who are in debt to us of their obligation! What a liberating action to take both for them and for ourselves.

Understanding the jubilee as a time lord system might also be help guide our reading of Loosing of the Bond moments in Zodiacal Releasing.Uncannily, my own Loosings of the Bond are very literally tied in to debt and its absolution: my first ever Loosing of the Bond on level 2 was in late April of 2014, about a week before I graduated from my masters program (in heaps of debt); my second ever Loosing of the Bond will happen in 2034, the year that my debt is supposed to be forgiven by the federal government. I wish I could promise that everyone's debt would be wiped out when they have a LOB, but I do feel treating the LOB as an iteration of the jubilee can be helpful for understanding the shifts, reversals, and culminations that we see at those moments.

I want to be clear that I’m not suggesting that the jubilee timing system I invented here was used for divination; horoscopic astrology doesn’t emerge until the Hellenistic period, and we have no evidence of personalized astral divination existing before that time. However, the jubilee isn’t truly about individuals, it’s about ritual timing for the collective, which is exactly how astrology was used across cultures before the individual turn in later Antiquity. 

The technique of the jubilee seems to preserve some of the logic of Babylonian astrologer-priests, an artifact left over after the planetary gods were stripped from the time lord system. And since the Hebrew Bible was likely first written down somewhere in the 5th century BCE, some four or five hundred years before Dorotheus transmits the earliest known time lord procedures, that means the jubilee is arguably our oldest extant source for the basic structure of symbolic astrological timing techniques as we know them.