Your firdaria

What the firdaria are

The firdaria, from a Persian word for a period, were set out by astrologers writing in Arabic in the ninth century, Abu Ma’shar among them, and passed into Latin astrology in the Middle Ages. The seven planets and the two nodes share out seventy-five years. A day birth starts with the Sun for ten years, then Venus for eight, Mercury for thirteen, the Moon for nine, Saturn for eleven, Jupiter for twelve and Mars for seven, then the north node for three and the south node for two. A night birth starts with the Moon and runs the same planets in the same circle from there. After seventy-five years the sequence begins again.

How it is worked out on this page

The chart is a day chart when the Sun is above the horizon, in the seventh to twelfth houses, and a night chart otherwise, so the birth time decides which sequence applies; without one the page shows both. Each planetary period is cut into seven equal parts: the first belongs to the period’s own planet, and the rest to the planets that follow it in the Chaldean order, Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, the Sun, Venus, Mercury and the Moon. The nodal periods are not divided. Some authors put the nodes straight after Mars in a night chart; this page keeps them at the end of the seventy-five years in both sequences. Whole years run from birthday to birthday, and the dates of sub-periods are shared out evenly inside those years.

Reading the page, with an example

Take a day birth and the age of thirty. The Sun’s period runs from birth to ten, Venus’s from ten to eighteen and Mercury’s from eighteen to thirty-one, so thirty falls in the Mercury period. Its thirteen years are cut into seven parts of about a year and ten months, given in turn to Mercury, the Moon, Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, the Sun and Venus, and thirty falls in the last of them, the Venus sub-period, from about twenty-nine years and two months to thirty-one. For a night birth at the same age the Moon runs to nine, Saturn to twenty and Jupiter to thirty-two, so the period is Jupiter’s, and the sixth of its seven sub-periods, the Moon’s, is the one running. With birth details saved, the drawing outlines those two in gold, the list gives every period with its dates, and a second list gives the seven sub-periods of the one you are in.

Common confusions

Day and night here are about the Sun, not the clock. A birth at seven in the evening in a northern midsummer can be a day birth, because the Sun has not yet set, and one at seven in the morning in midwinter a night birth. Births within minutes of sunrise or sunset need an accurate time to settle the sequence. The firdaria are also easy to mix up with profections, which give each single year of life to a sign and its ruler in a twelve-year round; the firdaria give long, unequal stretches to the planets in a fixed order. The Chaldean order used for the sub-periods is the same one that sets the planetary hours, and the two nodes that close the sequence are explained under the nodes.

What it claims

The tradition reads the planet of a period, and of a sub-period inside it, as the one that colours that stretch of a life, in the way profections give each year a lord. That is a way of organising looking back over time, described here in the tradition’s own terms. It is not a forecast, and nothing on this page says what any period will bring.