The Lords of Time
Seasons have heartbeats, a systolic and diastolic influx of predictable and unpredictable circumstances, atmospheres, influences, people to love and people to hate. Each season is chained to its essence, but there’s a stacking that occurs, a pyramid built on a base made of time’s silt, new bricks placed on old, some gaps mortared clean shut while others left to serve as weep holes.
Charles Wallace Murry riding Gaudior in A Swiftly Tilting Planet, a book I now realize SHAPED me.
The seasons that have just passed through us were irrevocably timeless; hours dragged and flew, days smeared into nights, a year and change dead and gone and dealt with. I spent a lot of this past year trying to understand time. I read a lot of books and took a lot of classes. I tracked the planets; I watched what they inflicted upon my friends. At times I felt exactly like Gaudior in A Swiftly Tilting Planet, a unicorn gulping down silver starlight straight from the source, fueling his sacred task of restoring the music of the universe. Those moments kept me alive. The transcendence of impermanence.
Other times were more about toying with how much of it I could waste.
In astrology, there are Time Lords. Time Lords are planets that are triggered into action through timing techniques; when it’s a particular planet’s turn, it acts as the Lord of that specific time in a person’s life. For example, in annual profections, where a specific house in one’s chart is activated from one birthday to the next, the planet that rules the sign on the cusp of the profected house is that year’s Time Lord.
A Time Lord is crucial—planetary transits are in constant eternal motion. There are so many to keep track of, and ranking them in order of importance takes a deft hand. With a planetary Time Lord however, its transits are the ones to keep vigil over. That planet is the Lord, and its movements carry the weight of a Lord’s wishes and impulses. We’re all just members of its starlit court.
So yeah, I’ve been thinking about time, and free will, and how much control we have over our own lives. Some days I feel pretty close to some kind of answer, but surprisingly, the better days are the ones when I just let it go.
I imagine the planets as these colossal cosmic energetic force fields. When I think of them, I hear that low droning thrum of something blindly pushing its will forward with no illusions as to what humanity does or feels—what humanity itself even means. They are the mute Secret Service of the universe, the brute and brawn of a perfect goon squad. A half dead fly slamming into a window over and over again through sheer instinctual programming and a Sisyphean lack of agency.
(I don’t actually mean to abase the planets; they are wondrous and beautiful and so, so hard to understand. It’s just a creative reimagining. I feel bad about it now. I do see them as almost feral though, and in my opinion, ferality is underrated.)
Jupiter staring into the distance at Pisces, awaiting a taste of his impending Rumspringa.
At this point, I tend to defer to the Lord of Time.
To use my own chart as an example, on my last birthday I entered a fourth house profection year, where I have Pisces on the cusp, making Jupiter Lord of the Year. As a Sagittarius rising, Jupiter is also the ruler of my entire chart, making this a very important profection year. The chart ruler represents you; it gives clues as to where you belong, what lifts you up, and how to get there. Not only that, but since I have a Day chart, Jupiter is also the sect benefic—the luckiest planet in my chart. So already I am on high alert.
If you’ve been keeping track as I have, then you’ll know that Jupiter moved into Aquarius in late December, where it is copresent with Saturn. Saturn is strong in Aquarius, and Jupiter is not—tethered to Saturn’s leg, Jupiter is subject to his desires. And Saturn’s desires are much, much different than Jupiter’s.
I also have Jupiter and Saturn copresent (in the same sign and house) in my natal chart, so living life on the fumes of a steely yet jovial core is something I fully comprehend. And yet I’m watching out for this month, when Jupiter ingresses into Pisces, its watery domicile, on May 14th. It’s only staying a few months before it stalks back into Aquarius with its head down, but those months are going to feel halcyonic in comparison to the ones that came before, and I already feel very lucky to have such a benevolent Lord riding high on new freedom.
I think the point I am trying to make is that Time Lords create a relationship between you and a planet. We already have strong ties to our natal planets, but they are like family, in every way one can envision family to be. A Time Lord, however, is more like a transitory lover, someone you get to know intimately for a short while, getting so wrapped up you’re unable to think of anything else. You’re beholden to it; its movements become your own, its under-the-skin whispers the ones you listen for. And then you just…lose them for a while. Until the next time. Someone else now waits behind the curtain.
The Styx-Phlegyas, an etching by Gustave Doré, 1861.
Here, Phlegyas ferries Dante and Virgil across the River Styx.
A life playing out through the rhythms of astrology mirrors any form of spirituality—a natal chart is just a map, or rather the key to a map. Each transit, major and minor, inner planet and outer planet, good and bad, simply adds the next layer to the story you’ve been telling your whole life. Dab dab dab with a paintbrush, fill in the lines, and by the time the dimes are upon your eyelids you will understand the redundancy of an epilogue. There’s no need when you’re chugging back starlight straight from the source.